JB0

Again, it's only because the TV does a lousy job upsampling. Any non-CRT display requires resampling hardware inside it to convert all incoming images to the display's native resolution. But they cheap out and use the minimum needed to generate a picture instead of the more expensive hardware needed to generate a GOOD picture. A TV with a good resampler inside it would deliver similar results. Possibly even better results. A HD CRT would deliver optimum results, as it would run at the DVD's native resolution, avoiding the need to resample the image to start with, while still benefiting from the higher build quality needed to make it an HD display. Strange... That's about right. Though the 600$ PS3 is still way too expensive for a game machine. Hell, the 500$ PS3 is too expensive, and it lacks HDMI output. Arguably, you'll get cleaner lines that way. Conventional animation is drawn at "infinite" resolution, so... I focused on DYRL and MacPlus because they were intended for theatrical viewing. There's generally a lot more detail on movies, because they wind up on a 200-foot perfectly-focused screen instead of a 20-50 inch poorly-focused TV. I assumed this was a "once HD movie disks go mainstream" discussion.

I admit that they were thrust into a situation they had no hope whatsoever of comprehending. But they brought back very little of any military value to the zentradi. What they DID bring back ultimately provoked rioting and mutiny through Britai's fleet, forcing him to arrange a cease-fire with the humans. So the group that benefitted from the spy mission was... the humans. While it WAS due to the fact that their society left them completely unequiped to comprehend the situation, they STILL failed in the worst possible way. They caused the defection of a 1200-ship fleet to the human side of the war, along with a highly-respected commander. And the knowledge gained from the defectors was what enabled humanity to defeat Bodolza's fleet. Their mission actually couldn't have been less of a failure if the Macross' crew had captured and imprisoned them, actively fed them bad information, and then contaminated them with a bioweapon before letting them "escape" to report back to their superiors. As is... Britai's fleet and Lap'Lamiz' fleet defect to the human side, increasing the size of our force by over 1200x. Kamjin's fleet defects from the zentradi side(I'd say good riddance, but they seemed to like him). An attack on Bodol's flagship, planned using knowledge gained from Britai and Exedol, destroys said flagship, resulting in the dissolution of the Bodol main fleet. Or what's left of it after the grand cannon goes off, the human-zentradi alliance opens fire during a massive psych-warfare attack, and the flagship explodes. They lost nearly 2 million vessels in that battle. A factory satellite is subsequently stolen, reducing the zentradi's already severely reduced capacity to replace lost equipment. All because of 3 spies. That's a pretty big screw-up. Again, I understand they were thrust into a situation they were completely incapable of comprehending. But they STILL failed dismally by any reasonable standard.

No problem, it's a confusing name. The PCEngine is a japanese game console that has no personal computerattributes whatsoever, in the generic or IBM PC sense of the term. It was released in the US as the TurboGrafx16. You CAN download things to play software for the PCEngine(or just about any other console, including machines you've never heard of, some with good reason) on your PC. They're called emulators. Magic Engine is considered the best PCEngine emu, but it's shareware, with a very short timer until you DO register it.

A. Or 480p. B. It's quite possible to make a player with digital out but NOT upsampling. In fact, such players exist, though they are not commonly marketed anymore. The "so-called up convert" is actually an upsampling of the image. They take the 720*480 of a standard DVD and resize it to the 1280*720 or 1920*1080 that HDTVs natively display. It's an ACTUAL upconvert, not a "so-called" one. As I said, the "advantage" is that the players typically use better resampling routines than the TVs. Which is painfully backwards, since the TV has to deal with all non-native sources, and the DVD player only has to deal with one. Are you actually USING all your HD component ports? A set of HD component inputs can take SD component signals just fine, so there's no reason to avoid using the HD component connectors on non-HD sources. Sadly, the guys at Best Buy THINK they know what they're saying, but they don't ACTUALLY know a lot more than the customers they're offering "advice" to. Prydef.

Well the punch up was from the first time they experenced a culture shock and when they only saw the miss macross show so that can't really be used as a good example. With the inital debreifing yes there was no military information, but that wasn't what the show wanted to focus on at the time, it was after the Zentradi experincing culture shocks and military data which we already knew about would have been a bit boring. They should have still introduced some evidence in the debriefing scene that the spies brought back important information, if they did. Failure to understand the society doesn't mitigate the fact that they screwed up badly. Thats Kamjin, Kaifun was that annoying passafist that was trying to get with minmei. DOH! I always get those 2 mixed up! WHY?!?!?! ... Show would've been a lot more interesting if something similar to Hikaru's nightmare in Phantasm had happened and Kaifun DID turn into a zentradi warrior.

Pretty good. Most PCEngine titles worth having never made it to America, so I can't really see that side of the Virtual Console taking off without new localization efforts. I haven't seen anything even remotely credible making the claim you can use original media for anything other than GameCube. Sort of. Think XBox Live Arcade. Copyright protection applies to everything, not just major franchises. And would get so many lawsuits dropped on them so fast that hypocrisy would be the least of their concerns(as if they ever cared about it to start with). It's all business. And they're getting permission from EVERYONE, not just the biggest labels. I guarantee that the owners of every game on the Virtual Console service are being paid for it. As you noted, though, games like the Macross series have more hands in the cookie jar. If Masaya's license has expired(doesn't Bandai have the Macross game license currently?), or only applied to PCEngine releases, a new agreement would have to be worked out, and it would become too expensive to release when they could do a title with only 1 payout instead.

The only diffrence between watching regular DVD on an upsampling player and with "native" output on a fixed-resolution HDTV is which end has the better upsampling hardware. Upsampling players aren't a magic bullet that makes things look better, just a compensation for the traditionally crappy resamplers in TVs. IIRC, DLP is a Texas Instruments technology. I've seen it advertised on awards shows such as the Oscars, Grammys and Emmys. 407322[/snapback] Yeah. Pretty neat tech, really.

I use microtorrent( http://utorrent.com/ ).

Nice! I've got a scan of the DYRL manual somewhere(I think, anyways), but I've never seen the 2036 one before.

Odds are actually pretty good that the original series would look WORSE with a new high-def master. Animeigo mentioned that when they were through restoring and cleaning up the masters they had access to they had to go back and artificially crap it up again, because it looked worse after they removed the film grain. The Animeigo master is progressive scan, which is really all the original series would benefit from. I wouldn't be surprised to see a BluRay/HD-DVD DYRL release in the future, maybe MacPlus and Zero too. But not SDF.

Did he? I've really got to watch that again sometime soon. Except they weren't GOOD spies, and didn't even grasp the seperation between civilian and military life. Look at what they brought back. Refrigerators, CD players, electronic Minmay dolls, tales of very skimpy female uniforms/advanced weaponry(and subsequently got into a fistfight in front of a superior officer over which it actually was)... but not one piece of military hardware or info came out in the initial debriefing. The only solid evidence they got anywhere NEAR an actual military facility is their escape regult, which was probably the same one Max, Misa, Kakizaki, and Hikaru escaped from the zentradi in, though that begs the question of how they were originally planning to return home. If I had to bet, they PLANNED to steal a VF or 3, but couldn't get anywhere near the hangers due to civilian/military seperation, so they settled for a captured regult in a poorly-protected warehouse on the edge of the military base. I don't recall Kaifun knowing the barrier would fry anything. As I recall, he was trying to destroy the Macross, figured the barrier would fail eventually and let him blast the ship, and nearly died when it exploded in an incredibly violent manner and decimated his entire assault force.

Post pics! Yah. The DSLite is smaller, but only relatively. The size is about the same as the original GBA. I've mucked with the DSLite demo units, and I think this is Nintendo's first decent d-pad since the N64 and GameBoy Color.

He was the groundskeeper. And you guys are forgetting where some of the best looks into the Acadamy come from... Deep Space Nine. Remember, Nog (the nephew of Quark, the Ferengi bartender) joined Starfleet. And from Deep Space Nine, you can kind of get the impression that it's one part military-style classroom studies, and one part field training. 407180[/snapback] Ah yeah... and they accidentally went to Roswell while ferrying Nog to his first day at the Academy.

The Starfleet Academy game was in 1997. It's long out of print, as are the games that came before it and most of the ones after it.

Mmm, 2036 and DYRL... BTW, the Saturn(that's NOT a Dreamcast game, as it clearly says on the spine) is finally somewhat decently emulated through SSF, though it requires a fairly good PC to run it. If you have a P4 over 3GHz or an Athlon 64 over 3000 model #, it should run fairly well. Personally, I've got a Sempron 3000, and I can run some games full speed but others stutter badly. http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/%7Ephantasy/ssf/files/index.html You can probably get the Duo fixed, though I don't know who to ask.

Yah. Region-coding is a pain in the ass. Doesn't really serve any copy-protection purposes, just makes life harder on everyone. Nightbat has the jist of it. It's there because typically movies make it to video in the US before they get theatrical releases in other nations. Also lets them alter pricing easily(check Japanese DVD prices, especially on anime. They get the fecal matter gouged out of them. I've heard the US Gundam DVD release lacked japanese audio specifically to prevent people from importing it and buying a regionless or region 1 player to watch it on). It's a bit of hardware and a bit of software. It's defeatable, but the method varies with your DVD-ROM and chosen software package.

Actually it was becuase of the sipes that they knew how it worked and not the botched shot on Earth. How would the spies know how the Daedalus Attack works? They didn't have access to military facilities, and were hidden away in the shelters with the rest of the civilians during battles.

The Macross PS2 game is made for crazy Japanese video game players who somehow managed to be perfect at a game and unlock everything! 406818[/snapback] Unlockables are generally hard to earn. They're a reward for skilled players, regardless of nationality. I hate the fact that so many modern games just roll over and GIVE you everything. I like my games to fight back.

Interesting you bring Cybertron up... look at Cybertron Megatron. There's a REASON I'm hoping that Classics Meggie gets a Galvatron repaint. Hasbro's current attitude is "Make Megatron brightly-colored and ugly, then once sales fall off make a Galvatron repaint that looks like what Meg should have been in the first place." I suspect he's unreal enough that they didn't have to do neon. I can't imagine that CA has varying color standards for varying realism levels, just because it'd be an enforcement nightmare. If they're selling him in CA, he's unreal enough that the neon wasn't needed at all. Pity Hasbro won't release a detailed list of what features were needed for what states. It'd be interesting reading. I would. Just out of spite. But then, there's a good reason I'm not in charge.

The timer kills it for me. Shooters should be about shooting stuff, not racing to collect tokens. I like the original DYRL game the best of the arcade trilogy. Plus gets excessively hostile too fast. My favorite is one of the console sidescrollers. FamiCom Macross, Super Famicom Scrambled Valkyrie, and PS/Saturn DYRL. Scrambled Valkyrie is probably the best overall, but I play the FamiCom game more often. HAHA! I should download that demo sometime. It really looked like a promising game, and it's a real shame GameTek never got it out the door.

I havent' found much officially definative explanations of what "Spiritia" is. We know it is the "type" of aliens that inhabit the EVIL series Bio-mecha, but not too much farther than that. I suspect I understand what it is "meant" to be from what I've gathered here and there, but I've been burned by Kawamori before on such matters. No, the aliens ATE spiritia.

It's Hound. I know so because this discussion about eyes has got the freaking Walker, Texas Ranger song in my head, and Hound is the only ranger-like character. Therefore, if it is "the eyes of a ranger", it must be Hound. If it isn't Hound, then I'm just insane.

Partially because I approach it as a game with Macross in it instead of Macross with a game in it. A lot of the faults are somewhat standard fare for video games. The biggie WAS the flight ceiling. Most of those levels were designed around a specific mode, just because standard video game design doesn't handle mixed-mode player characters well. The only notable exceptions I can think of were some of the boss battles. Graveyard(QRau shoots female sidekick down into a lake) especially was large enough for fighter combat while still being cluttered enough for effective GERWALK and battroid usage, and I usually use all 3 modes during that fight. It might've been handled better overall if they'd recruited Cavia, developers of Drakengard, Drakengard 2, and Bullet Witch(soon to be released in Japan). All 3 are mixed-mode gameplay, and while not directly comparable to Macross, they're a lot closer than anyone else has done. Bulet Witch especially from what I've seen. ... Except I don't think Cavia was even around back then. So never mind. I had fun with a few defensive missions. Just not most of them. The freaking Cat's Eyes can all go to hell. Zero the throttle, exclusively use boost for forward motion. It controls somewhat decently that way, and becomes a fairly fun vehicle. Was actually my favorite mode overall. Someday I might give Invasion a chance. I just haven't felt compelled to get it yet, especially with the bad reviews it landed. The REAL dog of the US games was the GBA title. I can't imagine Invasion being worse than that one, especially not if the same team worked on it as Battlecry.

Reasons Battlecry ruled: The 1J was the best plane. Millia's paint scheme was available, so you could fly a Millia 1J. You could fly a QRau in VS mode! Cel-shading yay! Free control of VF mode. One of the first decently fun 3D "Macross" games, and the only one that's readily available in the US. Reasons Battlecry sucked: Extremely low flight ceiling limited use of fighter mode in many stages. Very limited use of FAST packs outside of VS mode. GBP and QRau in VS mode only! No player-controllable destroids, even in VS mode. Way too many defensive missions. That QBerting "chase the shuttles through the canyons" mission(which would've been much more fun with a higher flight ceiling). Robotech. Things I shouldn't hold against Battlecry, but do: 1-shot kill cheat makes defensive missions VERY hard if you aren't careful(but very easy if you are). 1 stray bullet brings the stadium down on Minmay's head... even if it IS RT Minmay, it still fails the level. Minmay can't be killed unless you drop the stadium on her. Nor can any other "squishie."

Death metal.