JB0

Oh. Just an accurate representation of how often I shoot my mouth off?

To be fair to Kaifun(not that he's a great guy), there WEREN'T a lot of big high-profile venues. The Earth had been almost totally annihilated, and pop concerts weren't exactly high on the priority list next to repopulating the species and not choking to death on dust and noxious fumes. The entire human race had a count roughly equivalent to the city of San Jose. Just finding a place with enough population to justify a concert that wasn't ALSO totally sick of Minmay concerts was a heck of an accomplishment by itself. Hene why she wound up doing charity gigs at Stone City and such. You can only do so many shows in Macross City. Though Kaifun refused to set foot in Macross City, sooooo... her manager insisted on not visiting the single biggest venue on the planet. That can't be good. Vote for Kaifun!

As I understand it(padded as such because I can't read japanese, so my sources are rather... limited)... Overtechnology is a catch-all term for ANYTHING reverse-engineered from the ASS-1/Macross. While some tech (like airplanes and computers) may not be directly spawned from the ASS-1, it almost certainly was advanced by it(ultralight alloys, advanced power sources, room-temperature superconductors, more efficient semiconductors), making it an application of overtechnology even if we DID invent it here. So... pretty much everything except cold fusion is overtechnology. Macross uses "hot" fusion, as implied by the term thermonuclear reaction and the fact that the fuel is converted to plasma. There's some differences between fusion as we understand it now and an overtech thermonuclear reaction, though it seems to be related mainly to the methodology used to start and sustain the reaction. http://macross.anime.net/wiki/Overtechnology http://macross.anime.net/wiki/Thermonuclear_Reaction http://macross.anime.net/wiki/Reaction_Weapon adds another wrinkle to the fusion discussion, since it seems that the same term is used for multiple classes of weaponry. Gubaba: My post count is probably a bad thing. But none can question my passion for the franchise!

They discuss that in the show, actually. Kamjin may be a deranged, self-important, insubordinate, ally-killing lunatic, but he's not (completely) stupid. He makes sure his back is covered before he does anything. He obeys his orders to the letter, while completely ignoring the intent. Or he arranges it so there's a plausable excuse. Like that scene where he's ordered to fire across the Macross' bow. It's set up so it looks like the gunner just screwed up his aim. Then he has the poor guy killed in a "technical malfunction" so he can't confirm he was acting under orders. Everyone KNOWS what happened, but they can't PROVE anything. It's likely why he was left in charge of his forces, despite being enough of a problem to be pulled off combat duty. No one could PROVE anything, but everyone KNEW he was a loose cannon. So they stuck him on patrol duty to keep him out of trouble until Britai got stupid and called him in. Same situation applies here. Britai knows Kamjin will have a suspiciously convenient bout of communication interference if he leaves any room for doubt. He intentionally uses the most obnoxiously visible system at his disposal, to make absolutely sure there's no question about if he heard it or what it meant. And Kamjin curses Britai for throwing a wrench into his standard operating procedure before ordering the retreat.He's enjoying his little standoff, but he knows better to stick around in PROVABLE defiance of direct orders.

Honestly, I'm not sure. I haven't seen any Robotech in ages, so I barely remember the music(in fact, the intro is the ONLY music I can recall). I loved the opening last time I saw it. Of course, last time I saw it was also the FIRST time I noticed the cheesy 80s video editing effects(state of the art for the time, but they sure didn't age well). The intro music really strikes me as "Diet Star Wars." In fact, I've tried to hum it before and transitioned into the Star Wars theme. *hits YouTube for a refresher* Okay... I SORTA like it. The arrangement they use is bit too fake, but the underlying score is decent. I think a remix is in order. I keep laughing when I hear sound effects spliced over the music. And it's DEFINITELY Diet Star Wars. I like the Macross song too, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. "MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" is stupid, but fun. It makes me laugh. Maybe Robotech didn't fall too far from the source material after all? VISUALLY, the Macross intro is far superior, due in large part to the consistent theme. The Robotech intro, of course, is spliced from all three shows' intros, and suffers a bit from the incoherency. But the opening "filmstrip" on Robotech's intro is one of my favorite parts, dampened a bit by the fact that Macross also transitions from not-show to title sequence well.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3752...s_hironobu_.php Interview with the producer of Megaman 9. I thought it was an interesting read.

Deluxe is the smallest. Seriously. Then it's Voyager. Then Ultra. Then Leader(which is NOT limited to actual leader characters). Topped off with SUPREME!11111 Edit: My bad. Deluxe is SECOND smallest. Legend is smallest. Or maybe Mini-Con. but that's more a second line than a toy class.

Out? With that giant ball of thermonuclear cancer rays hanging in the sky? I DON'T THINK SO! Seriously, that stuff can kill you.

I'd still have to buy a region-free DVD player. And I WANT the BetaRay version!

But the 360 doesn't HAVE texture memory. Remember, it's a unified memory architecture. It's up to the programmer to decide what to do with it. And no other games have this issue. If it's the 360's fault, then we should see it in at least SOME other games. I'm more inclined to believe it's a Mass Effect bug. Perhaps a subtle and complex one, but...

You're a better latin speller than I am. Though.... Pachycephalosaurus is an interesting one to throw out after criticizing people for making big deals out of individual bones. Given it's only known by skulls(and in fact, most of that entire family)... I was always a fan of the ceratopsians. The whole family. I had dreams as a kid of bringing a protoceratops back and mowing lawns with it. Micheal Crichton ripped me off! Parasauralophus and stegosaurus were pretty sweet too.

It won't be your monitor. Modern PC monitors(as in, everything for over a decade) have a minimum refresh of 60Hz, which is what you need for TV material. If anything, the refresh rate is too high, but that doesn't usually cause that sort of problem. Without knowing exactly what's in your PC, the most likely issue is the CPU. It takes a LOT of power to process MPEG4, especially HD files. Actually, the main reason they're so big and heavy is that getting into space is hard work. They need a LOT of fuel. And strictly speaking, you don't need liquid oxygen, though it's what we usually use. The solid rocket boosters on the side of the space shuttle actually use a mixture of aluminum and aluminum perchlorate. In theory, you don't need ANY form of oxidizer, but the fuels that work well that way tend to be rather nasty stuff, so we don't use them in the quantities you'd need for a launch(the shuttle's maneuvering thrusters are powered by one such fuel). Anyways: Frontier BluRay. Me wants! ... But I can't really justify it right now, given I need a BluRay player. But that pencil board is AWESOME. And who WOULDN'T want a sheet of NyanNyan stickers?!?

It'd make more sense than people claiming that the 360 ran out of RAM because it can't delete stuff. Now pegging down WHICH changes, ummm, changed things... THAT would be interesting.

Awww, I shoulda kept up. I hadn't heard that Supersaurus wasn't considered it's own species anymore. Last I'd heard, Ultrasauros was a larger (and presumably older) Supersaurus, but Supersaurus was still it's own species. Guess that's what happens when you start identifying skeletons by 4 or 5 bones. Me like!

I think at this point we can all agree on one thing... They need to bring back Viper instad of Knight Rider.

Manufacture date of August 2006. I never had model issues like KingNor, though. Guess I should count my blessings.

I almost always had terrain issues, even though that's at the front of the load cycle. Random rocks off in the corner would've been nice, but when EVERY rock was a blurry mess... The most blatant map issues would be when the ship took off. It would be a mess of untextured or barely-textured polygons until literally one second before the takeoff cutscene ended. It would've been hilarious if it wasn't a regular occurrence in a high-end game from a major developer. Though certainly, putting "minor NPCs" ahead of party members was a poor call.

People keep saying that, and it keeps making no sense. If the 360 can't flush it's memory, there's no room to load anything. Period. End of story. Either someone's dumbed something down ENTIRELY too far, or this is random speculation that's become accepted fact. (Like PS1/2/XBox/Dreamcast/Gamecube/Whatever spinning disks backwards as a form of copy protection. Thank god THAT particular piece of fantruth doesn't get dragged out anymore). Especially given no other games have this issue, and Mass Effect had PLENTY of opportunity to load textures during the load screens. It's what load screens are FOR, and Mass Effect has some of the longest I've seen in a good while. Given the size and complexity of many of the maps, or lack thereof... I'm unsure what they're actually DOING during the load screen. I demand sources. Original, unabridged, programmer statements. Not some gaming blog's highly-misinterpreted summary of someone ELSE'S more-or-less-accurate summary of a THIRD person's speculation about what sort of problems Bioware MIGHT have had. Right now, all signs point to Bioware screwing up.

Cheeto might actually work better as a flame. But Sludge's alt-mode doesn't exist. The brontosaurus was an apatosaurus with the skull of a camarasaurus. You wouldn't want Hasbro to teach children bad science, would you? We're still recovering from the original series and IT'S regular abuses of reality. Fun fact: My browser's spell-check has brontosaurus in it, but not apatosaurus, which it would like to correct to tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus, or brontosaurus. I believe this was done to spite me.

Wow. Just... Wow.

I found an Animated Slag Snarl. Remember that flame-sword-breath thing no one could explain on Grimlock's box? I think it was on the wrong package. Admittedly, it's a little fidgety(okay, it's a LOT fidgety) but... the results speak for themselves. A guide tab would do wonders, and if I get up the courage, I may make some holes in the club for the beak to notch into. The blue coloring isn't on the toy, and is entirely the fault of me using a crappy camera and aggravated by me photographing with a flash. (Yes, I went outside and took the photo in the middle of the night. I hope you appreciate the mosquito bites I acquired.).

Makes me think of the NES game. Which is absurdly fun, even if I do wind up just sitting in GERWALK mode(fighter wasn't maneuverable enough for my tastes, and battroid's hitbox was too tall). And yes, Bangaioh makes me think Macross.

No. I'm bashing it because any game constructed in such a way that it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO PROGRESS if you die at the wrong point has fundamental design issues. Don't tell me it can't happen, because it HAS happened to me. Gradius 3, SNES version. There's a stage with a series of fast-scrolling tunnels. Die past the halfway point and you respawn in the tunnels. Which scroll faster than you can move. Meaning that no matter how good you are, or how many lives you have, you will have no choice but to watch as the wall creeps closer and closer, dying over and over, until you meet the continue screen. It is bull-dookie of the highest caliber. I DO admit to being heavily biased against pattern-memorization games. I prefer games that test reflexes and coordination over ones that test your ability to remember where everything's gonna be. I'll take a bullet-hell over a memorization game any day, and Gradius is among the worst of memorization games. (One of my favorite shooters is Mars Matrix, for what it's worth. I admit to never playing any of the Giga Wings, which might color my perceptions some. ) Sure it may only take one death to find out that maxing your speed is a bad idea, but... why do they offer excessive speed power-ups in the first place? Because it's a good way to generate a cheap death. That's the ONLY reason it's there. To punish you for your uninformed choices. And getting back your laser and options after a cheap death in the middle of a stage? Fat. Chance. By comparison, Defender is a bitch and a half of a game. But it's all about skill. There's no map to memorize. No boss pattern to learn. No forced scroll to herd you towards obstacles. No scarcity of powerups to ensure death will leave you ill-equipped for those obstacles. Just you, a laser gun, and an endless sea of targets. And it's infinitely better than Gradius, despite being 5 years younger(and I'm not conbvinced Gradius is any betteer than Konami's first side-sccroller, Scramble, released the year after Defender). Yes, I'm comparing to Gradius 1. 2, 3, 4, and Gaiden brought no real change to the formula. Well, except 3 offered more hostile maps(even Gradius fans concede that one's way over the top). I've acknowledged 5 is a hell of an improvement, though I still hold no great love for it. The fact is that Salamander WAS a Gradius upgrade. They scrapped the power-up bar and raised the base speed of the ship. I WONDER WHY? Then the same kind of obsessive freaks that keep JRPGs from evolving beyond "stand in a line and stab the air" got mad because it WASN'T JUST LIKE GRADIUS. And Konami LISTENED. It's the first example of the shooter market catering solely to the existing fanbase and ignoring new players, the birth of the "incest shooter." And it's that sort of behavior that led to the scrolling shooter being the gimmicky niche market it is today. I quite like shooters, and it's very sad to see them reduced to the pathetic state they're in now. So no, Gradius is NOT a good series. Wait, what?!?! I grew up on Defender. It doesn't GET older-school than that! Not as far as scrolling shooters are concerned. Just because you're blind to the major faults of a specific highly-overrated franchise is no reason to make blanket accusations.

Yes to Salamander, no to Gradius. Gradius sucks. Even Gradius 5, which has recoverable options and a higher minimum speed. The power-up system just needs so much refinement that no one's willing to do because it tampers with the formula. R-Type got speed right(eventually). Instead of making speed a one-way street dependent on how many power-ups you grabbed, make it adjustable on-the-fly. And I'm doing everyone else a dis-service by ignoring them. Rest assured, I'm aware that many other games had controllable speed(or one sane speed) well before R-Type Delta. Parsec(on the TI 99/4a) would be the first controllable speed I know of, though irem did it in Image Fight before most of the J-era developers thought of it. Though... even from the beginning R-Type's speed wasn't the death-trap that Gradius' was. You start survivable, and can't accelerate to uncontrollable. The fact that Konami never fixed this, and it took an outsider to realize something was wrong(Gradius 5 is developed by Treasure), is just sad.

I always thought that line was "I think it's time we blow this scene, get everybody the stuff together" Your's makes more sense.