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JB0

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Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    Pink Arcee is 27 MHz, Blue Arcee is 49 MHz. The only thing that's particularly compelling to me is Kickback. G1 Insecticon goodness always makes me weak.
  2. JB0
    In fairness, Kickstarter's been used that way a lot, and by some fairly respectable outfits. It is better than using it as a money-laundering machine or a pipe to siphon dollars out of the pockets of people who will never receive anything.
  3. JB0
    If they include the jetplane trailer, I'll buy it in half a heartbeat. ... Man, how ironic would it be to see a Micromaster homage as a friggin' Leader class? I wouldn't expect them to ever touch him again, but... they've done some pretty deep cuts recently that have surprised me. I mean, we got Top Spin and Twin Twist, the Monsterbots, and Fangry all as actual retail-release toys*. I didn't expect them to ever touch any of these characters again. Galaxy Optimus Prime was a surprise too, but as an Optibotimus it was less of one. I'm less skeptical of seeing characters like Octopunch and Waverider and Erector revisited these days. *Well, one of the monsterbots was retail, anyways...
  4. JB0
    They're gonna give us the Overload repaint we deserve, mark my words!
  5. JB0
    Thank you.
  6. JB0
    Cancelled, "rebooted", cancelled again. Both times before the first space fold. The second time was in the middle of an extended flashback to Roy's service in the Unification Wars. My impression(and if I'm wrong, someone please correct me) is that the biggest problem was that pretty much any job Mikimoto can get pays better than manga chapters. The First's publication was contingent upon there being dry spells in his illustration work, and he wound up with a LOT of illustration work available.
  7. JB0
    The revalation that the entire thing was a VR simulation, aliens never attacked Earth, and we're still a one-planet species.
  8. JB0
    Bankruptcy in the early 90s, were consumed by someone else in the aftermath. Apparently the founder of the company insisted on installing his son as his successor(and retained enough control to make it happen) and his son was... ill-suited for the task. He was fired after doing serious damage to the company through poor management, but they didn't have the stability needed to recover.
  9. JB0
    So HG CAN give the people what they want!
  10. JB0
    I'd give that credit to Blaster Master, really. As it is codified, the genre's defining trait is "progress gated by powerups won from bosses", and that was a large portion of what made Blaster Master special(the other half was very high production values, which, well... yeah, that's the part of the genre that's expected but never mentioned). If there were any justice, the genre would be called "Blaster Mashups". I do consider Super Metroid a transformational entry in the franchise, though. If Metroid was Alien, and Metroid 2 was The Terminator, Super Metroid is Judgement Day and Aliens all in one. It was a big-budget no-corners-cut action movie sequel to a smaller and less-polished horror production, and every entry since has owed far more to that action sequel than the entries that preceded it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and I quite enjoy Super Metroid. But it makes it hard to do something that harkens back to the series' roots, because everything(even the game's predecessors) are judged by how well they fill a Super Metroid-shaped hole. And that's totally fair. I am glad you enjoyed it as it is. I actually worked hard to separate my criticisms of the game into "fair critique of the game as a game" and "what in the everloving heck did they do to my beloved Return of Samus?!". It was very hard, because I DO love Return of Samus. I WANT to be hard on Samus Returns because of how it stands as a remake, but it isn't fair to just rag on everything about it. I spent a good bit of time when I had it trying to get into the mindset of "this isn't Metroid II, it is just some game" so I could be at least somewhat fair to it. And there ARE neat things in it. But on the whole, I didn't like it even if I pretended it was Blaster Master But I Lost My Car Keys, or Scurge 2(I was actually calling it Scurge 2 for a while). I've joked that Dread is both the title of the game and a description of my feelings. I REALLY wish that Mecury Steam wasn't the party in charge.
  11. JB0
    I am now imagining Macross II as a sequel to G Gundam, and you can't stop me!
  12. JB0
    Makes sense to me!
  13. JB0
    You mean you had the option to upgrade it into STEALTH AIRWOLF? Honestly, I assume they just added Airwolf parts to a pre-existing regular helicopter model to get the licensed product money easily.
  14. JB0
    That's the regular progress-gating thing. There's also the "too hot without Varia" rooms, which are full of red stuff. And the ones I saw before I quit were just placed randomly.
  15. JB0
    I had heard it didn't actually do very well. But I must've been wrong, since Nintendo let Mercury Steam do another one. Taking it as a standalone game, I think the map design is absolutely terrible, with each area being a sprawling mess with no rhyme or reason to why things are where they are, aside from things that are clearly there to ensure you have to come back later when you collect a new powerup on the other side of the planet. There shouldn't be two rooms of lava in the middle of a sandstone temple, it makes no friggin' SENSE. The melee counter mechanic wound up making getting around a chore since they made everything hyper-aggressive to create chances to counterattack, so you just wind up waiting for the inevitable attack so you can counter, since just running past isn't an option. I'm also still mad about the random firebug trap costing me a half-hour of gameplay to a unique mechanic that is absolutely not obvious. I have heard that Mercury Steam toned down the melee counter stuff significantly. I hope they have more thoughtful map design now, too. I've seen things I genuinely like about Dread. And as it isn't a remake of a game I hold dear, I'm less likely to get mad over story and presentation decisions. Not really a problem with the game as a game, but It was EXTREMELY obvious that they didn't want to include the spider ball by the way they immediately started slathering slime all over the walls to make sure you stayed on the right path. I wasn't actually SURPRISED by that, but I WAS disappointed that they kept it in while removing the singular thing that made it fun. As a Metroid II remake, well... Wall of text as I nerd out here. Top-level summary, it is less a remake of Metroid II and more a caricature of Metroid II. As I see it, there's three main story arcs going through the game, and Samus Returns misses all three of them. (In fairness, AM2R fumbled some as well. It was not the Metroid 2 Remake I wanted to see completed, though I respect DoctorM64 for seeing it through when everyone else gave up or just moved on, particularly as he actually had to learn how to program to make his game.) 1: There's a repeated theme in the text associated with all the games in the series that just a few metroids could wipe out all life on a planet. Metroid II is the only game to SHOW this, with non-metroid life becoming rarer and more durable the deeper into the game you get, and the final two areas featuring ONLY metroid life. Samus Returns drops all the enemies all over everything. Every non-metroid enemy in the game is scattered over every area OF the game. Thanks you YouTube, I know that even the hatching grounds around the queen's lair are teeming with life. (Incidentally, AM2R fumbles this subplot in a different and more subtle way, by including numerous non-metroid bosses that are actually far deadlier than the metroids themselves.) 2: The first metroid you encounter is just lounging around wherever. I mean, why wouldn't it? The 1200-pound grizzly bear sleeps wherever it wants, because nothing will mess with it. Through the course of the game, the metroids start nesting in more secluded and harder to access places. Little twisty tunnels in far corners, off behind hazardous terrain, and late-game in caves hundreds of feet up sheer cliff faces. To be blunt, they start nesting like prey. One of the two omegas is unique in that he spawns pressed against the far wall of his room and facing away from Samus, implying he was running away and fights because he was cornered. Samus' genocidal rampage has taught the metroids fear. It is a Terminator game where you play the killer robot. There's none of that in Samus Returns, just mazey pipes everywhere because Metroid is a game of mazey pipes. 3. SPEAKING ABOUT GENOCIDE... the manual makes no bones about the fact that Samus has taken on the task of rendering extinct a species that ain't doin' nothin' to no one, and couldn't leave the planet even if they wanted, to because someone else might decide to try and use them as weapons. The game is, to my eye, structured to make you uncomfortable with this. "Pipe enemies" don't spawn infinitely, as Samus burns out their nests(except for the one nest that the Gamma burns out before you get to it). Metroids hide from Samus, one even fleeing in terror. The keening wail of the queen metroid after you kill the last of the larvae. Hell, even the title screen soundtrack is destroyed by missile explosions and low health buzzers. Maybe the metroids DO need to die, but it is a somber undertaking, not a task one should find joy in. And in the end, Samus refuses to finish the job. She shows mercy on the last metroid. There's a redemption arc for our killer-for-hire. While Samus Returns attempts to sell that show of mercy, it is not thematically appropriate for the game Mercury Steam created. Their game is, in its entirety, a celebration of violence rather than a condemnation thereof. The little mini-cutscenes when you melee a metroid make me uncomfortable, but it is with the thought that someone could start off with Return of Samus and end up with "cutscenes of Samus pinning a metroid to the ground and cramming her gun into its mouth would be cool, and by cool I mean totally sweet".
  16. JB0
    Don't need a 3DS emulator to play Return of Samus, just Samus Returns. And Return of Samus is better anyways. AM2R is also better than Samus Returns. (I actually think Samus Returns is bad on its own merits, ignoring pedigree. That it is a terrible Metroid II remake that misses every possible point hurts more, though.) I've actually been messing with Metroid, FDS version lately(partially just out of curiosity). There's a neat touch I like. The save screen has a coarse game timer on it that displays hours of play, but the column is actually labelled "DAYS". Apparently even Samus Aran can't drop into an enemy fortress with no intel or reinforcements and wreck everything in sight in ninety minutes. Meanwhile, other historical excavation reveals there's a translation of the "choose your own adventure book" version of the original Metroid. Twinetroid (metroid-database.com) Aside from having familiar plot points from games that didn't yet exist, a remake of the escape pod scene in Alien, and Samus dueling a (human) pirate captain to the death in a swordfight... this entry of the franchise also answers the longest-standing question in franchise history: How in the HELL did that archeology team on SR-388 live long enough to get back to their ship, much less study the ruins, draw preliminary conclusions, and return with a sample metroid? Answer: The metroids were found in stasis. It was a very unpleasant, albeit brief, surprise when beta radiation resuscitated one in the lab. And it took an entire division of the Federation Army to deal with one metroid.
  17. JB0
    The Predator would probably leave the planet in search of worthy prey.
  18. JB0
    A Microbus Transformer. Just what we always needed.
  19. JB0
    Nah, she's the kind of character that trips and falls in the mud right as the hunter pulls the trigger, then turns the tables while he's figuring out where she went.
  20. JB0
    Heck yeah! A little disappointed the humanoid form isn't as cute as the tank, but... still fantastic.
  21. JB0
    I mean, it is no sillier than punching someone with an aircraft carrier on a jury-rigged mount.
  22. JB0
    I get the impression they were fairly well-routed by the time of the original series. Throwing away functional ships after rigging them up as mines smacks of desperation. I could be wrong, of course. The other obvious interpretation is that the meltrandi fleet in DYRL was a "reskinned" Supervision Army fleet, and the narrative conceit that the movie is a fiction that exists within the setting provides a good excuse for that reskinning to happen.
  23. JB0
    I'm very much in the same boat. On the one hand, it does save me a lot of money. But on the other... I want more cool robot toys!
  24. JB0
    That's sexy as hell... and would've beel drawn on-model even less frequently.
  25. JB0
    We can blame slavish cartoon accuracy for that one. It is the way Sunbow drew the toy(I hesitate to say "consistently" given the show in question). With the market trending towards "exactly like the cartoon or no sale", spending more to do him right will likely only be punished with reduced sales, as disappointing as it is.
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