JB0

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.

I'm SO sorry! Don't own one, but... http://www.old-computers.com/museum/comput...?c=106&st=1 It was basically an Amiga 500 computer with a CD-ROM drive in a snazzy case. Floppy drive, keyboard, and mouse sold separately. So you really didn't get screwed too badly even though Commodore failed to support the machine. You got an Amiga PC to play with. ... Huh... interesting coincidence here... "The manager of the team promoting the CDTV was Nolan Bushnell, the man who founded Atari. By strange twist of fate, the man in charge of Atari at the time, was Jack Tramiel, the man who founded Commodore."

Hey, with an image like that in people's heads, what do you expect to happen? Seriously, those clouds are beautiful.

Apparently, a lot of companies had been burned with Sony's professional U-Matic format, and were leery about trusting them. JVC was seen as a "safer" partner. It also ran into a technical problem in that you can't fit as much tape in the smaller cassettes, so VHS had superior runtime. That probably made the difference in the consumer's eyes. According to Wikipedia, this was the BIG difference, since you could record a night of television(or a single football game) on a VHS tape, and you couldn't on Betamax. Beta which was designed for a 1-hour tape initially. VHS started with a 2-hour tape, and the 2x long-play mode was available at US launch, making it 1 hour VS 4 hours. I've heard the porn argument before, but I'm not sure how much that affected it. Certainly, the ability to buy movies probably made a bit of a difference, but I'm not sure if... other... programming was a major market force. Errr... The NeoGeo home system had fighting (and other) games that were IDENTICAL to their arcade counterparts, not superior ones. Seriously, it's the EXACT same ROMs in the home carts and the arcade carts. And the NeoGeo CD used the same hardware as the NeoGeo console/arcade boards(with the addition of a CD controller and data RAM), so I'm not sure where this "fraction of the colors" argument comes from. Maybe the TV encoder circuit, which fluctuated a LOT over SNK's manufacturing run(with wild variances in final image quality due to it), but that hits the cart-based system more. The disk-based one is more consistent, and from what I've read, generally has better TV out. Now, some of the later games DID have graphics alterations to fit within the system's RAM limit, but that's not all, or even most games, and the alterations weren't simple color reductions anyways(omitted background objects and reduced-detail character sprites). So.... [citation needed]? The 1x drive I don't dispute, though. It DEFINITELY hurt, given most of those games were written to run off ROM carts(load times weren't NEAR as painful on SegaCD and TurboCD, where they didn't have to copy several megabytes of data into RAM at once). And that was really enough to wreck the advantage of 50-buck arcade-perfect ports(with the home carts costing 200+ each due to the massive amounts of ROM in them, it's fairly obvious why the NeoGeo never caught on). The 3rd revision(2nd outside Japan), the CDZ, alleviated the issue somewhat with a better drive and large read cache. It was still 1x, but it generally loaded faster(and was misidentified as having a 2x drive in several places).

Not to mention that Sony's Beta patents were licensed to other companies for VHS. So even if they never sold a Beta player, they still made a killing. Yeah. DVDs use MPEG2 video compression. Laserdisks store a raw composite video signal. A poorly-mastered or over-crowded disk will be a mess of compression artifacts. But a properly-mastered DVD is better than Laserdisk, because it's not composite video. The audio difference isn't actually related to compression. As far as I know, it's because DVDs are mastered with more dynamic range than TV broadcasts. This is a good thing, believe it or not. It means there's more distance between the low parts of the soundtrack and the high parts. So your quiet parts are quiet and your loud parts are loud. Of course, having that range also means that everything isn't compressed up into the same volume level as the explosions, so yes, it IS quieter.

Honestly, I think arcades killed the arcades. For a long time after the home systems appeared, arcades were unarguably more powerful, and the home ports were heavily watered-down. But somewhere along the line, someone got the bright idea of making a standard arcade system board that you could swap games on. To save costs. Once they quit making new hardware for every game, the arcades quit staying ahead of the home systems. The Saturn came out, and it could do arcade-perfect versions of CPS2 and NeoGeo games(it needed a RAM cart for some of the later ones, but...). The PS1 could do arcade-perfect versions of smaller NeoGeo/CPS2 games, and only minor compromises for many of the larger ones. At that moment, the arcades were doomed. Capcom's CPS2 team actively sabotaging the CPS3 was probably the final nail in the coffin. Capcom abandoned CPS3 and moved to Sega's NAOMI board, which was... a Dreamcast with extra RAM. At that point, almost everyone's arcade hardware was a game console with extra RAM(and SNK kept using the NeoGeo). Arcade-perfect ports were a trivial effort. All that was left to distinguish an arcade game from a home game was controls and multi-screen displays. Thus the rise of the modern lightgun/racing game wasteland.

Ah, but FlexPlay works in a standard DVD player. It doesn't require you to buy a special player at a hundred-dollar premium. It doesn't have to phone home to work. There's nothing proprietary at all. It just degrades really fast once it's exposed to air. Coincidentally, they were pushing it heavily for preview and review copies when I first heard of it.

I can even tell you why! All other things being equal, longer cable runs and more connectors will only make things worse. It's logic. BUT... all other things are not equal in this case. Lot of Genesises... Genesii... MEGADRIVES had a poor NTSC encoder chip that generated a very crappy composite video signal(The older models with the headphone port usually had a good chip, later ones... not so much). The 32x, however, had a quite nice NTSC encoder. And due to the way the 32x worked, it had to take in raw unmangled RGB input from the Genesis so it could mask parts out and overlay it's own graphics. The 32x's TV encoder had to be active even if you weren't using the 32x hardware, since it didn't actually pass the composite video line through. So if you had a 32x hooked up, you essentially replaced your Genesis' TV encoder chip with a much nicer part as a side-effect. If people had known this, I think a the 10-buck final clearance 32x'es would've sold a lot better. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

Virtual Boy. ... Does it count if I got it on clearance?

Word. Oh yeah... It's a damn shame we didn't get to see THAT part of things.