JB0

Could be said about MOST of the gen1 Transformers, if you look at it objectively. But... what sort of Unicron WAS planned for the Gen1 release? I'm not familiar with it, and my curiosity is getting the better of me. 419624[/snapback] Green egg shaped body with head and thin limbs...think Dr. Robotnik crack baby w/Boss Borot-like arms from Mazinga Z and the Unicron head and horns from cartoon. It was bad. Be happy it never came out. In fact the armada one looks more g1 accurate than the cancelled g1 unicron ever did! LOL but its very true!! *laughs* Green? Seriously? They could've at least spent money on a paint job...

Could be said about MOST of the gen1 Transformers, if you look at it objectively. But... what sort of Unicron WAS planned for the Gen1 release? I'm not familiar with it, and my curiosity is getting the better of me.

Isn't in vehicle scale. Robots look like they'll be about even. And bot mode is what matters for a Transformer. 419108[/snapback] Bit shorter. tformers.com has a pic from a japanese hobby show last week. Screamer only looks "even" with the stand and him suspended in mid air. But if one were to remove the stand and make them stand side by side, screamer is a few inches shorter. 419147[/snapback] Ah, the stand... I forgot to account for that.

The grown up thing to do is probably to just let this go but having a degree in TV/film, my pride just doesn't seem to let me. At no time did I ever say DVD is NOT NTSC. DVD IS NTSC (in NTSC regions), but it still has better video than broadcast. And a component input as opposed to a composite input DOES improve the image quality, although yes, like you said, it is still NTSC. Wasn't aware you had any sort of background. Sorry. I was just saying that the quality diffrence ultimately boils down to how clean the source is. I'm not saying VHS didn't suck. Far from it. Just that HD is a huge step above DVD. And like I said, I can see the faults of DVD on smaller sets, and though I didn't mention it earlier, I can see the diffrence between low-res and high-res video clips on my PC's positively diminutive monitor, so I doubt claims that it's only visible on 50"+ displays. Again, I wasn't aware you had any sort of background. MOST people are totally unaware of how stuff works. They just know there's pictures and sound on the DVD, or at least data that can be turned into pictures and sound. I apologize for the unintended insult. I make pretty close to jack squat. Which sucks since I have several rather expensive interests. I HAVE emphasized several times that I think HD players are too expensive now. But I'm very excited about the prospect of them becoming realistically priced in the future. Mmmm... Sounds like me and games, actually. My tastes skew pretty far out from mainstream there, so the releases I'm genuinely excited about are few and far between and I like a lot of titles that the masses have deemed crap for the exact reasons the masses hated them. I actually value the content too. I just see no real reason to NOT improve the presentation. A few years has always been where I've predicted it'll start being genuinely interesting. Right now it's definitely overpriced and undersupported. And I figure it's about 2-3 years before the players become affordable, not where they really become mainstream. It took, coincidentally, about 5 years before DVD became the preferred media, despite having more obvious benefits to the average consumer(scene selection, smaller package, and no rewinding). I'll probably grab one once they hit an affordable price point(and get the format war out of the way, since I doubt coexistence is possible and I'd rather not rebuy everything later). I AM a technophile, after all. Just not a raging one.

Isn't in vehicle scale. Robots look like they'll be about even. And bot mode is what matters for a Transformer.

Given the format uses identical ranges and encoding, I suspect Japan uses broadcast frequencies that are less susceptible to interference. You can actually see this in effect on US sets. Channels 2-13 are in a totally diffrent band than everything else, and seem to be far stabler. good to see another sports fan on this forum.. You misunderstand me. But to be fair, I'm not quite sure what I meant myself. I think I was saying that movies were my main interest. I might've meant broadcast TV, but as I watch so little of it it doesn't make a lot of sense. I never said that DVD had more resolution, I just said DVD has better video quality. Just being wired gives it a better picture, and getting rid of interlacing helps a lot. But wired NTSC is still NTSC. Broadcast TV, (analog)cable TV, VHS, LaserDisk, DVD, and PS2 all use NTSC signals(at least, in NTSC regions). S-video and component video are still carrying NTSC signals, they just aren't as mixed. S-video carries the chroma and luma waveforms on seperate wires, component video carries both of the chroma waveforms on dedicated wires with the luma waveform on a third. well like i said, i'm just going off of hearsay, i haven't actually seen upconverted footage myself. however, when I watch a 480 NTSC DVD at full screen on my 1024x768 computer monitor it looks good enough for me, and 768 is more than 720HD and not a huge amount less than 1080HD. when i play back DVDs full screen on my 20" Apple monitor on my Powermac at work, it still looks good enough for me, and at 1200 horizontal lines, my Apple monitor has higher resolution than a 1080p HDTV. i think i would need an HDTV larger than 50" to really appreciate the difference and justify the purchase of an HD player even if it was $300, and i'd still need a much larger amount of films than are available for blu-ray or HD-DVD in the foreseeable future. I can see major faults in DVD on a 20" NTSC TV, as well as on my PC monitor(I think the last time I bothered I was running at 1280*960). Upsampling does nothing to replace missing data, it just trys to hide it. The available HD library is growing rapidly, and will likely grow faster once the price falls and it becomes a realistic option to non-AVphiles. By the time it becomes a serious option to most people, library won't be an issue. It's exponentially greater from where I sit. Massively higher resolution, with far better compression(image-quality-wise) on top of it. DVD's biggest fault as a medium for delivering standard-definition video is that it uses rather heavy MPEG compression, even after moving to dual-layer disks. Which, admittedly, was a requirement to fit a full movie on a disk the size of a CD using the technology available in the '90s, and was still a major step up from VHS. While a larger disk would have afforded higher image quality, it wasn't believed to be readily marketable(likely had as much due to retailer shelf space as it did consumer comfort and familiarity). Similarly, a better compression scheme would've required more power than was really feasable for a mass-market product. *shakes head* MPEG compression consists largely of taking a clean source and making a mess out of it(not really blurry, but it's a very destructive compression process). Most attempts at upsampling I've seen consist mainly of resampling the image then blurring it to hide the pixel edges. It's nowhere near the same as a source at the higher resolution, and in some cases it's actually massively inferior to the original image. So I'm anxiously awaiting the day the HD format wars are over and there's ONE format at REASONABLE prices.

Gah, please no! The "non-Anime Friend" episodes of Macross are far better animated than the talking-head cartoons we see today. 418967[/snapback] But what if they hired James Earl Jones to do all the voices?!?!?!

"SHWOOOO!!" BAHAHA!!!!

It can shoot mass out the bottom to counteract the weight, enabling it to fly at speeds that would otherwise stall it. We just don't know how long it can do this. And atmospheric density varies with altitude. Mar's air density at low altitudes(where the fighting in Bye-Bye Mars seemed to take place) is 10x that of the 30000-meter Earth altitude that the VF-1 is OFFICIALLY flyable in at high mach(but ONLY at high mach, unless thrusters are used to augment lift).

I think you're right. Really, I can't fault him for it. Can't expect the guy to keep churning out the same kind of stories over and over again, that'll get boring. People change over time, and as a result their work is going to change too. As for a direct continuation to the original series, it's never going to happen. Fans really need to accept that and move on. 418663[/snapback] People need to get over the fact that Kawamori isn't going to do Macross like Tomino did Gundam. He isn't the kind of guy who is going to pump out sequels every few years. Otherwise he might end up like Tomino, never ever want to see Macross again, and only use it to get money for another project. If we had Macross every few years, we would end up just like the Gundam kids; UC vs AU, My Gundam is more powerful than your Gundam, blah blah blah. 418739[/snapback] But Fighting Street G Macross could be kinda neat... in a disgusting abuse of the license kinda way...

Sheesh... How often are 16 owners of Steel Battalion on at the same time anyways?

It does very bad things to lift. As I understand it, lift's more or less a direct function of how much air is going over the wing. Hence why the U2 needs huge wings and the Blackbird needs huge speed. There's just not enough air for lift without special solutions. GERWALK should be less affected than fighter. Probably even see a performance boost. It benefits more from reduced drag and gravity. Doesn't hurt a lot from lost lift, unless I'm mistaken. Battroid is pretty much guaranteed a performance gain, because it doesn't rely on lift for ANYTHING. All it has is reduced drag and reduced gravity, which both benefit it(assuming the computer is programmed for environments other than space and Earth). Hmmm... I wonder if the head turret can be left down in fighter mode. It isn't good for aerodynamics, but there's a serious sensor advantage. Does anyone but me feel sorry for that one Defender? His explosion gets recycled so many diffrent times, and all anyone ever says about it is "Look! Orguss Valkyrie!" Good ol' willpower armor. Pr'ly explains why Britai could rip the Valk apart so easily, too. Hikaru was scared pretty effectively at that point. Was bad enough they spaced Britai and he came back, he re-entered with a 1-hit kill on Kakizaki, then launched immediatly into a brawl with Hikaru. Hikaru's hero defense was probably at negative by the time Britai threw him into the wall.

Thank you! That was where I thought it was, at least on the new model. I really had no idea where to look on the old one. So everyone agrees that adding the fuel tanks was a bad idea, if nothing else. Also a pity that both molds look like crap from behind.

Not really tests. They've actually started developing, then jumped to another engine mid-dev. Unreal Tournament was the last they jumped to. From there it's just been a mess of uncontrolled feature creep. Allegedly they've hacked UT up so badly while adding features that it's UT in name only and it's the equal of whatever the current game is, but... we'll see(maybe...). They have cash coming in from other stuff. Max Payne, while certainly not enough to keep a company afloat, is their's to some degree. I thought the sequel flopped because it was only really available to existing Steel Battalion players. It's generally a bad idea to target just a subdivision of the system base, especially as small a subdivision as "Steel Battalion owners."

Fair enough. I THINK I see the intake kibble. Between a lot of bad pictures and the fact that I'm not very familiar with airplanes, I've had a hard time pinning down exactly what part it is. Are the conformal tanks responsible for the rounded forearms too? That was one of the changes that bugged me. That'd improve the original a lot, and I'd probably agree about it being better.

Pretty much. The trailer is just the turtles hoping over rooftops. They land in an alley one at a time, and strike poses. Michealangelo falls in a trash dumpster, to the rest of the team's embarassment. Cops drive by and they dive into a manhole. But the important part is that it's turtles that got mutated, known ninjitsu, and are teenaged.

Depends who you ask. There's essentially only 2 formats worldwide. Many foreign nations use America's NTSC. Others, especially European ones, use PAL. France uses SECAM, which is a derivative of PAL that was changed with the goal of rendering PAL sets incompatible with french broadcasts and forcing manufacturers to make France-specific TVs. SECAM was also used in the USSR's border states, because it prevented soviet sets from watching evil capitalist european television. PAL is marginally better than NTSC in that it has more lines of resolution(576 VS 480). But it has less color depth also. Refresh rate varies with nation. Though PAL is commonly considerd to have a 50Hz refresh and NTSC to have a 60Hz refresh, both formats exist at both refresh rates. That's where I'm interested... Nope. DVD is constrained by the NTSC or PAL format, depending on region. It has no quality gains over the broadcast standard, except for the progressive scan option. The only notable thing is it's wired, so there's a lot less interference. I hate resampling on principle. And I have a strong suspicion that "blurry mess" is many people's idea of "good enough." Either way... the high cost of DVD wasn't worth it when it was at 600 bucks a player. Once prices fell below about 300, people became interested. That was about 2 years after they were introduced in the US. About 4 years after that, retailers were completely dropping VHS. That's the adoption pattern I expect for HD disks. After a while, prices will fall. Then people will become interested(HDTVs having become commonplace in the meantime. Their marketshare is currently growing rapidly). And then it'll take over. The fact that HD players are backwards-compatible with existing DVD libraries should help, though. If you bought a DVD player and had an extensive VHS collection, you had to give up your old movies or keep both players hooked up. Not a problem to me, but a lot of people dislike having multiple boxes hooked to their TV.

Not ALL people were fine with tailfins on the feet. My first thought when I saw the old mold was "What the HELL is all that crap on the sides of his legs?" It didn't blend nicely at all. I agree if they folded down onto something, it'd be a lot better. But they didn't fold up on the old version either. They just hung out into space from his legs instead of his hips.

And that's in docile General Aviation plane. Stalls in military fighters are often unrecoverable and kill pilots on a regular basis. And jet engines can actually stall as well, it's called a compressor stall. The blades in a jet turbine are just wings turned sideways and spinning in a circle, and just like normal wings under the right conditions they can stop producing lift cutting off air flow through the engine and shutting it down. I don't see any reason why the same thing couldn't happen to a Valkyrie's thermonuclear turbines. 418423[/snapback] The VF has internal reaction mass. If it's engine ceases to suck air, it can pump mass into it from the tanks. Doesn't use burning fuel like a conventional jet engine, so loss of air is of no consequence there either. In fact, it probably does that at high speeds anyways. At high mach, jet engines cease working right. And the Valk has no alternative that I know of besides blocking the intakes and using reaction mass.

I thought it was because the crap hanging off the legs looked worse than the crap hanging off the hips, personally.

i'll give ya that, but they royaly screwed up what could've been the best starfox game since starfox 64 :/ i still haven't finished it i'm so dissappointed in it :/ not even past the 3rd mission i think, and i even had more fun playing Starfox adventures... is that even possible?! but meh, rareware did a good job of the game, so i guess it is. I loved Assault, personally. Aside from the lack of branching. But then, I went straight from StarFox to StarFox Assault, so... Rare wasn't paying the bills anymore. They'd gotten in the habit of delaying games repeatedly, and were becoming as bad as 3D Realms of Duke Nukem Forever infamy. Look at Perfect Dark Zero for an example. That was supposed to be an N64 game. Then a 'Cube game. Then an XBox 1 game. MS FORCED them to push it out the door for the 360 launch. Kameo had exactly the same multi-delay dev cycle. Neither game was really ready for retail, after a half-decade in development. Heh. ... I'd buy it too is the sad part. And on-topic... Bandai's actually shown a lot of interest in the 360. They've released several games for it already. Of course, if the 360 doesn't start showing some movement in Japan, it'll probably amount to as much support as the XBox 1 got from them.

their engines won't stall. 418371[/snapback] Aviation stalling is a diffrent issue than automotive stalling, and has nothing to do with engines. If they quit getting enough airflow over the wings, they cease to get enough lift to stay airborne, gravity makes itself known, and they start falling like the large lumps of metal that they are.

Oh, hellz no! I enjoyed the Evil Dead trilogy; in fact, Evil Dead 2 is one of my all-time favorite comedies. But there's absolutely, positively no way I would ever watch this train-wreck. Whoever decided this should be done needs to be publicly flogged. Now that, on the other hand, I would go and see! 418244[/snapback] Flogging: It's good clean fun for the whole family!

Or shoot the damn Cat's Eye repeatedly in a futile protest of escort missions.

Especially if they stuck katanas into the hip holsters... NINJA!