JB0

I saw part of the original one-shot OVA. From what I've heard, it was all downhill from there. Seriously, you've heard something GOOD about Strike Witches?

I was too young, too. I was going more by how the show presented it than the official specs. The hero's plane was more or less the same as everyone else's plane... except that brown paint explodes.

If you didn't like it... why did you rewatch it? Personally, I dropped that one about the point their crazy scientist dude started declaring they could use a paint chip scrapped off the star mech to construct a detailed performance analysis of a completely unknown machine. If I'd CARED about anything, I probably would've laughed my rear off and moved on. But I just felt insulted at the complete idiocy of the entire thing. "Hey, guys.. check this out! Our 50-foot robots can make centuries-old conflicts wash up overnight as guerilla terrorist organizations decide we're too big a threat to them and ally with legitimate governments to stop us!" So yeah, I gave it about 5 episodes. Ugly robots, horrible writing, cliche and naive themes...

That's the great thing about being me. I only buy a few Transformers. Specifically, those I find to be awesome. Sure there's the occasional dud that looks good in photos but not on the shelf. Animated Slag*backspace*Snarl got by on nostalgia(G1 Slag was my favorite Transformer for quite a while, due in no small part to triceratops beign my favorite dinosaur at the time), and shelved later because he was just too stumpy. As an example. But for the most part, I think the toys I have were worth it, even if about half of them have been shuffled into the closet with G1 for lack of space. But I'm pretty selective. I've only got FOUR live-action movie toys(ignoring repaints from other lines, like Crasher.) And the best two of those weren't even movie characters(Wreckage and Arcee ver. 1) NONE of my G1 toys are on display. I can't pose them, and they just look too out of place. ... And Slag's chrome is all worn off and he won't stand up unaided anyways.

The slap was what did me in, really. And not JUST because Klan should know better than to be slapping mecha with only a fragile skintight space suit between her and the hard vacuum of space!

Honestly, I suspect he's pissed with anime in general and was using Frontier to vent. It's hardly the worst of the recent crop of shows, but it's what they were asking him to talk about, and giving him written permission to tear apart. The VF sniper rifle WAS kind of silly, though I'd argue it was a sympton of the real problem. All our relevant characters had their own custom machines. Not just paintjobs, full unique equipment loadouts. On special advance-issue prototypes, even! That's a slap in the face to the original series, which took great pains to avoid having a hero mech. Everyone had the same gear and the same plane. Sure Hikaru's 1J had a funny-looking head, but it wasn't any better or worse than Focker's 1S or everyone else's 1A. It went the same speed, fired the same gun, carried the same missiles... it was just another bird in the sky. I suppose I should just be glad the Frontier gang weren't all flying one-off mechs like in Gundam. There's still SOME vestige of the original series in there.

So you want an american movie, about an american character, that takes place in America, to speak proper british english? We don't make James Bond say ass when he gets over here. He's allowed to keep his arses. Anyways.... movie sounds awesome. And gives me a bit of a Mystery Men vibe.

I must've missed Max and Millia's knife fight and wedding in DYRL. Seriously, DYRL is a full-on remake. Not a reanimating with the old voice work. I don't want a(nother) remake. Or a reanimation with updated designs and modern aesthetics. What I'd LIKE to see(within the realm of technical possibility) is the entire original series reanimated with the ORIGINAL style and a consistently high level of detail and accuracy. And there's not a snowball's chance in hell of THAT happening.

It's about the same resolution as an SNES, and that looks decent blown up to 32". I think the XL will manage. More importantly, it's big enough that you can grip it easily. I'm glad Nintendo botched the DSi launch now. This is the first compelling reason I've seen to get a DSi, so I don't have one of the smaller units.

The destroids actually wound up being fairly useful to the Macross, since it never got to dock with the ARMDs and was very light on anti-mecha weaponry because of it. Every time you see that poor Defender get blown up(seriously, almost EVERY Destroid death is the SAME Destroid), it means they deployed Destroids and they were in combat with zentradi that made it past the Valkyries... Which means they were keeping the zentradi from tearing the Macross apart. Also means that it was a critical enough battle for the dimension-hopping Orguiss Valkyrie to step in and beef up the defenses, but... (amusing that a minor cameo got stuck in the most frequently-used chunk of animation after the title sequence) I doubt VF costs have dropped low enough to make them an economic alternative to destroids for planetary defense. Macross 7 and Frontier are both colony fleets. I wouldn't EXPECT them to carry combat destroids, actually. This is where the VF's modular nature really appeals. They can throw GBP packages on their VFs and convert them into cheap destroids. They get a lot of the armor benefit and weaponry benefit, without having to actually spend the mass and hanger space on full destroids. They can let the GBP VFs hold the surface while they retool their assembly lines to make some destroids for permanent surface defense. Zero... naval battles. I don't think they even brought a landing craft for a ground assault. Plus was mostly the two test-pilots beating each other up. And I don't think Sharon's puppets were in any shape to drive a car, much less a fighting robot. Though seeing some NeoSpartans come in and secure the pair of them after the accident(s) would've been awesome. Basically, we haven't seen a Macross where destroids would be expected to have any real role since SDFM/DYRL.

Sadly, I can't find it in me to give a crap. I still haven't watched Sighs, or End of Eight. As for the DVDs... 2 disks of Endless F'ing Eight. And more than likely, I'd have to RE-buy the old episodes too. I just don't care anymore. Congratulations, Kyoto Animation. You trolled us masterfully. I hope you achieved everything you wanted with this run.

And you shoot BLUE bullets instead of the RED bullets you shoot when you aren't armored up!

The eye-explodey bit was a bit much for me too. See, I'm torn. On the one hand, his body doesn't get graphically shattered in the OVA. Just immolated "offscreen." On the OTHER, it's a chump death. He goes out with STYLE in the movie. And the final shot of the YF-21 drifting in space is awesome. And Info High. Can't forget Info High.

That one's my fault. They canceled it one book after I picked it up. I'm not allowed to have nice things.

Looks to me like a standard Brownie that grabbed a missile rack and slung it under one arm. It fits the general theme of "anything that CAN fire a missile IS firing a missile" for that sequence. And makes me grin. I'd actually never noticed that one before. The funky Phalanxes always distract me.

And the second sentence... "Elite was released on 20 September 1984 for the BBC Microcomputer and was one of the first games to use 3D graphics." Because apparently saying "The first open-ended game you can do whatever you want in" is less impressive than "the first 3D game if you ignore all those games like Battlezone and Star Raiders that had been pouring out for 5 years when it hit shelves." Also: http://elecbyte.com/ MUGEN, the original absurdly mismatched crossover fighting game, is back after 7 years of nothing.

With a Seeker mold already in existence? I doubt it'll take that long. Let's see... Optimus Prime, Naked Ultra Magnus, Megatron, Grimlock, Starscream, Skywarp, Thundercracker... 7 already, and the seeker mold has 3 more repaints to go! I think they're kinda awesome, but grossly overpriced. The flash drives mainly, since they're almost PRACTICAL(I would TOTALLY buy Ravage if he made it out at something resembling a realistic price). Blaster shoulda been an MP3 player. And a better one than Soundwave was. With CompactFlash memory cards, so there's actually room to make "tape bots" out of dummy cards. He looks good, though. But as a USB hub, he'd probably be snared in wiring. The mice are failures. Incredibly ugly, and a wired peripheral that you aren't likely to want to remove from your PC(even if the USB cable DOES detach).

Oh. Maybe it is, then. The Guld VS. Ghost battle is INFINITELY better in the movie. And not JUST because it takes place with Information High playing the background.

No, but the point is that most, if not all, the animation made for the OVA was created with the intent of throwing it on the big screen later. So there's probably a lot of detail that wouldn't show up on TV(even ignoring the horrible encoding job Manga did on the DVDs, and the pathetic VHS rip of the movie). It'd be especially nice if the OVA-exclusive scenes were animated to the same level of detail(I may prefer the movie, but the OVA has some damn nice sequences).

There's also the big-screen effect. Macross Plus was animated with a movie in mind, and animation intended to be projected onto a 20-foot screen should have a tad more detail than anime intended to be broadcast to a 25-inch one, just because it's that much bigger so the detail will show quite readily.

When you think all of the above sounds perfectly rational and/or really cool.

Yup. The joy of container formats. You can stuff damn near anything in there. Upsampling doesn't improve the image. Assuming we're starting with a high-quality source... it depends greatly on compression settings. If you turn the compression up far enough(like YouTube does), all the resolution in the world won't help. I've seen some fansubs where one group's SD release looked massively better than another group's HD release because of that, too. Idiots think if you release it 1080p, it's automatically better, and they can crank the compression TO THE MAX!11 to save bandwidth. Ah. I haven't seen the Special Edition since the theatrical release, so I haven't really had a chance to compare them directly. Damned roaches! LIES! :'(

That has more to do with how the community USES the containers than any real restriction. While AVI does not support some features of MPEG-4 that MKV does, there is absolutely nothing preventing AVI from being larger or higher-quality than an MKV, either in general or when using an MPEG-4 codec. Actually, HD is being used as a buzzword with no real understanding of the term. Officially, for TV purposes, high-definition is anything with 720 or more lines of resolution. Regardless of source quality, compression level, or anything else. You mean "repaired the film degradation so it looked as good as it did when it was first released" This was a SECOND release. FIRST was the remaster, THEN was the Special Edition. And I have the unedited remaster tapes to prove it. HAN SHOT FIRST.

Mmmm, NGPC... Love mine too, though I'd love it more if it had another action button(giving it a Genesis-style ABC/Start layout). AB/Start gets crowded these days. Look at it this way... the NeoGeo Pocket and WonderSwan are the only reason we finally got rid of the old monochrome GameBoy. SNK and Bandai released their way-more-powerful systems in Japan. They knocked a bit out of Nintendo's monopoly. Nintendo released a quick color hack, SNK and Bandai released a quick color hack, Nintendo started developing the GBA(which I'm pretty sure was rushed as hell, and has a few very sloppy design elements). SNK brought their quick color hack to America, then went bankrupt. They never even had a chance to bring Biomotor Unitron 2 over. Then the GBA came out, and the portable monopoly began again. *sigh* At least Sony's done SOME lasting damage to the Nintendo stranglehold... Nitpick: It's a digital stick. You can even hear the microswitches clicking.

Seconded.