JB0

The remaster was given to them by HG, who got it from Animeigo. So it's not only officially licensed, they got their source materials from HG. In fact, Animeigo did the hard part, the french company just retranslated and made a new package.

They haven't blocked importation of J DVDs. They have, in fact, made english-translated DVDs of that part of Macross they can get masters for readily available. In FACT, our SDF Macross DVDs are BETTER THAN JAPAN'S. How has free speech been violated? Other than HG's own boards, which last I heard, have dedicated Macross, MOSPEADA, and Southern Cross sections, where have they attempted to moderate speech in the slightest? Free speech is not license to pirate. Which is what undermining HG's alleged license would be: piracy(of the modern kind, of course, not the classical ARRR, MATEY! kind). Or are you also arguing that Disney's refusal to publish Song of the South on US DVD is in fact in violation of my freedom of speech rights? And if they'd covered their rears back in the 80s before they knew this was going to be a huge franchise, there wouldn't be any debate now. Arguably, it's not protecting Big West's rights. But that's dependent on Big West caring enough to make a case. Your twisting of free speech to include buying plastic toys is comical at best, and disgusting at worst. You're saying we need to write our congressmen and tell them they need to rewrite the copyright law to invalidate existing licenses because of a 20-year-old cartoon? Why not Macross? Are you guys getting your DYRL BluRay remasters and your 1/48 Yamatos? There is no court ruling. There IS a license, but no one knows what specifically it says(except the old FASA guys). The problem is no one actually affected cares enough to argue the point. WE are not affected, because WE are not trying to release Valk toys or licensed english DVDs. All it takes is ONE person pushing the issue to bring it to court. What legal battle? Cease and desist letters are cheap, and none have actually started a fight. Not even when they were demanding all infringing merchandise be shipped to HG headquarters(which is NOT part of US copyright law, in any way). More like doesn't care. Big West is being apathetic. Tatsunoko is very much on HG's side, as they're the ones benefiting financially(and as I understand it, Big West is a major shareholder in Tatsunoko nowadays anyway). Bandai has better things to do than fight Big West's legal battles for them. I can import my toys. I can import my DVDs. I can download subtitles for my DVDs. My enjoyment of the franchise is largely unaffected. And again, explain how this is an AMERICAN issue and not a GLOBAL issue. HG claims they purchased ALL rights outside Japan from Tatsunoko.

DVDs use MPEG2, at appropriate resolutions and refresh rates for their region's analog TV standards(some areas use PAL60 or NTSC50). As I understand things, most european TVs will take 60Hz signals, and the NTSC/PAL encoding is solely the DVD player's responsibility. And the cheap shitty Apex players I've had experience were capable of outputting either 50Hz PAL or 60Hz NTSC on any source disk. So if your player can read a region 1 disk, it SHOULD be able to output a usable signal. I make no guarantees, but... it's how I understand things to work. And if it doesn't... you can rip the MPEG streams to your PC and reformat them?

Robotech: Protoculture is a magic power source(later revealed to be a plant?). Macross: Protoculture is an ancient alien civilization, literally the first culture in the galaxy.

It never was welcome. HG's been throwing hissy fits for what, fifteen years now? Yup. You mean like they did when they localized VF-X2, then bailed out on the release at the very last minute, after taking out multi-page magazine ads and demo disk space? No one will ever convince me that the official story about Bandai suddenly realizing THAT late that the game wouldn't sell is true. I think HG threatend to sue, and they decided it wasn't worth fighting. It wouldn't matter if HG's claims are valid or not. The cost of duking it out in court isn't worth it when they can grab a game/anime that ISN'T mired in a quasi-legal fiasco. It is, admittedly, ALSO possible that the game was vetoed by SCEA. It wouldn't be the only title to disappear at the last minute. Megaman Battle & Chase had a similarly late death, though the story on that one is much clearer. Yup. I suspect B. That's the usual problem. Ummm... I don't recall this being a free speech issue. No one's ever said anything about banning Macross. Besides, what about copyright law? I don't recall free speech extending to reproductions of someone else's work without compensation. Admittedly, the US constitution does not contain copyright, but free speech is not an absolute "say, draw, or make anything you darn well please" rule. Tangentally, free speech NOT a constitutional right, or a first amendment right. It's a pre-existing right, presumably one of the ones that people are "endowed by their creator" with in the Declaration of Independence, and the first amendment merely ensures that the federal government does not infringe upon it. The entire bill of rights is carefully worded to make it PROTECT rights, not GRANT them(and in fact, dedicates an amendment to saying as much, albeit in legalese). A. The courts aren't involved. The only time they ever got to a point where anything happened was in the BattleTech case. And even that wound up settled out of court. Sadly, one of the terms of the settlement was that the Battletech guys couldn't talk about it. Given they're the only people to have SEEN HG's alleged license... (I recall one of the guys saying in a somewhat vague fashion that the license wasn't as concrete as HG made it out to be, but it wasn't a direct statement of what they actually had) B. HG's argument isn't that Macross merchandise is infringing on the Robotech brand. Their argument is that they own exclusive rights to the Macross franchise outside Japan, via their contract with Tatsunoko. Which is questionable at best, given Tatsunoko doesn't OWN rights to the Macross franchise, and almost certainly has no toy rights to anything. Even assuming HG's license says what they claim it does, imported merchandise falls into a gray area. I gather it's dependent, among other things, on volume imported. But HG has never approached it in a proper manner. ... If the chinese bootleggers were actually legitimately licensed to produce Transformers products twenty years ago, and no one was really sure what their license said anymore. Certainly not. In fact, you're supposed to buy the licensed region 1 SDF Macross DVDs from ADV for the low, low price of ... well, whatever they go for right now. And then you're supposed to write Big West and tell them to quit refusing to send vidoe files to their licensed US distributor! YEAH! It's all Big West's fault for not acknowledging HG's exclusive international distribution contract! Or at least, that's Harmony Gold's take on things. LEGALLY, until the license issue is resolved, the only people that can successfully acquire a license to produce Non-SDF Macross merchandise are operating in Japan and officially targeting the japanese market. As Big West doesn't seem willing to come over here and sue Harmony Gold, or start distributing anime themselves and waiting for Harmony Gold to sue them, it seems unlikely that the issue will be resolved any time soon. The closest anyone's come is ... was it Tokyopop that licensed Macross 7 Trash? They got a license from Big West. Then got a license from Harmony Gold. Then Big West pulled their license because they were paying license fees to HG. And HG deleted the announcement of the manga release off robotech.com. So... how exactly does the Macross market look in Europe? You got any Macross Zero DVDs yet? Frontier toys starting to clog the local Toys R Us? Yeah. This affects you too. HG claims INTERNATIONAL rights, remember? Not US rights.

It's like Xerox machines. The PROPER term for a VF is Variable Fighter, but the first model to do it right had it's name applied informally to the entire concept.

They damn well BETTER!

And Megatron didn't have one despite being a Classics 1 toy(and having an indent on teh scope/cannon to apply one in).

As I understood it, it was a faithful retelling of the TV series AND a faithful retelling of the movie. At the beginning, you selected if you were serving on the Prometheus or ARMD-01, and that selected your story arc. As well as difficulty(with the DYRL path being significantly mroe difficult). But this is hearsay, as I don't own the game.

Didn't he also say the PS2 game would be the "definitive version" of Space War 1? ... And then it had independent TV and movie storylines.

Works for me. I grabbed it last night. And SHAME for not mentioning that MAAAAC-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!! is one of the "filler" tunes! Click below if the URL isn't working for you. I'd upload the whole thing, but the RAR is 40+ MB. 18___M_H___Macross__Opening_.mp3

One more point in it's favor!

That makes me want to watch it more than anything else.

Which is even worse, because there's no reason for it to be anything other than infintely superior to the original. I can make arguments on the PS3->360 difficulties(even ignoring the optical disk and hard drive issues, there's a host of fundamental architecture differences to make it a serious pain in the rear). But PS2->XBox? No. The XBox has all the cards there.

I didn't say that. I said that picture isn't really interpretable as hinting at that. Personally, I don't think it's interpretable as ANYTHING without more context. And I tend to be annoyed by the attention poured onto retarded marketing antics like this more than anything else. Gets old seeing the random tehorizing about a power logo show up a bajillion times in 2 days.

What gives you that idea? The universal power logo on the right, used on darn near everything? I think that's closer to "New Metal Gear Game for Wii", honestly(and that's still WAY out there). The i and upside-down i look like the Wii i's. Honestly, there's no evidence there of ANYTHING other than "New Metal Gear game in the works."

You rang?

Pretty sure you're gonna have to deal with strange drivers. Anyways, I hate the keyboard. And the mouse. I'm a trackball man, and cry every time someone attempts to replace the keyboard and gets laughed out of the market by PC gamers.

There's also a plain one with a green gradient. Mine came with Virtua Fighter stickers. I laughed and threw them out. That Mad Catz one styld after the 2600 stick? By all counts, it sucked super monkey balls.

Awww, did I miss a stick VS pad war? Personally, I view it all as using the right tool for the right game. I tend towards sticks for action games. 'Cept for games designed around the pad layout, and games that need more than one directional control(switching between thumbstick and d-pad, or using both thumbsticks). A good pad beats the hell out of a bad stick, though. And most arcade machines have bad sticks. At least, the standard american black sticks. Japanese cabs seem to use fairly nice devices(not that I've had a lot of experience with them). As for what I grew up on... TI 99/4a joysticks. Horrid devices, and nothing like an arcade stick. If you ever use one, you'll understand. Then I got an SNES, and used the stock pads. THEN I got an NES and an Advantage stick. God, I love the Advantage. Not a masterpiece controller in terms of engineering, but the layout was just about perfect, right down to the quick-access turbo-fire toggles. I actually can't play my copy of Mars Matrix anymore. I used to have a servicable Dreamcast joystick. Now I have a crappy joystick that sticks. But I can't go back to playing with a pad. It drives me crazy when I try. Really need to grab some scrap controllers and some parts and build a quality multi-system stick.

As far as controllers go, I'd get a stick. Though that didn't work so well with Megaman 9. There's 2 control mappings, and neither works worth crap with my stick. Personally, I'd probably go with the PS3 version of Street Fighter, just for the free online play. As far as the unplayable library of Saturn games... Have you considered emulation? There's actually a viable Saturn emulator now, if you have a semirecent PC. http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~phantasy/ssf/

I thought MP3 player Soundwave was the official MP Soundwave. And I STILL say they should've made him use CompactFlash cards and included "dummy" CF cards that transformed into Laserbeak and Ravage.

PS3 isn't cracked, that I know of. And while PS3 games are region-free, it's emulation of the PS1 IS region-locked. For obvious reasons, Sony won't let you play any disk images you may have acquired through whatever means. Real disks or copy-protected, bought-from-Sony images only. You can play PS1 games on a "modded" PSP, though. The firmware includes a PS1 emulator, and the hacked firmwares unlock it so it works with more than purchased-from-Sony disk images.

Macross Zero ad of pure awesome. Don't forget Minmay and Misa. Misa sees Minmay shacking up with her boyfriend, after he ditches her on his day off to hang out with Minmay One city-destroying battle later, she invites Minmay along on her colony mission.

Honestly, I suspect the natural life expectancy of a zentradi is probably being determined by humanity. I don't think most of them were expected to live long in their normal lifestyle. Exsedol and Bodolza would be my bets for elderly zentradi, but... they don't seem to have published ages. I'd expect, but this is mostly just wild-ass guessing, that the rank-and-file battle officers have the shortest life expectancies, and that durability and life expectancy goes up as you rise through the castes and experience becomes a more valuable element, with archivists and fleet commanders having the longest lifespans. Britai also seems to have been worth saving instead of recloning. I doubt anyone would've expended that effort on Kamjin or the 3 spies. Especially not on Kamjin, as he seems to be, well, defective. This, of course, assumes the plate in the head is a result of injury, and not a cybernetic tactical data device or some such. Which seems fair for SDF-style characters, given Bodolza doesn't have one and he would have just as much, if not more, need for such a device. Either way, according to the show Britai's built tougher than the rank and file troops, which points towards the value of experience in his position... or just that they don't want commanders dropping dead from injuries in mid-battle. DYRL-style, we get a very different picture. The zentradi have numbers attached to their names that, as I understand it, show what iteration of the clone they are. And the fleet commanders are actually PART of their flagships, and Bad Things happen when they die, indicating that they're intended to last for a LOOOOONG time. And, of course, Bodol in DYRL is established as REALLY old. As to which style is right... Macross 7 has a DYRL-style Exsedol. And many SDF-style zentradi, including a Britai actor with an SDF-style faceplate. Frontier has generally DYRL-style zentradi. In conclusion... ???