JB0

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.

You missed my point. I dont want Macross to become an industrial spinoff machine, with not so good stuff every year; I just want us to have more than a few ovas every 5-7 years. 406302[/snapback] So somewhere between the 2. 'Kay.

Lovely. They can't even spell Spike's bloody surname correctly. 406279[/snapback] No one can.

True... Maybe we could keep the relaxed anime attitude but experience the Gundam merchandise whoring? AHEM! *holds up a picture of the YF-21 in combat with the X-1* Isamu never touched the Ghost. This post has been brought to you by General Galaxy Public Relations, a wholely-owned subsidiary of General Galaxy, Inc. All rights reserved. Macross Plus had pretty weak story-telling, actually. The mecha sequences were great, but the story was patchy. How about Macross Plus combat with SDF Macross storytelling? IMO, it's still the best-written entry in the franchise.

And Gundam got whored out more than a... ummm... thing that gets whored a lot. Does the world NEED two dozen diffrent sequels and spinoffs, most of which are remakes anyways? It's an entire industry all by itself. I rather like that Macross hasn't been pimped so hard. And that each new installment is actually new.

I love seeing fools and scum embarassed. If it were up to me, this, the PPPPPowerbook, and the like would get a sticky thread.

Actually, it WAS rendered solely by a more or less standard PS2 graphics chip. Said chip was also hooked to a solid gigabyte of RAM, though. So it's what the PS2 COULD render if it had massively more RAM and no serious bottlenecks in the system design. Which is so diffrent from an actual PS2 that it doesn't really count, but still... Don't forget "This is running on a real PS3!," followed almost immediatly by nVidia's "No it isn't, we haven't even finished designing the PS3 graphics chip, much less manufactured any." I'm sort of curious how much of the idiocy is really Kutaragi's call and how much is hoisted on him by higher-ups. The man can't be TOO bad, he hated the original PS controller(there's like a dozen diffrent prototypes of varying designs, most of which were made because Kutaragi was raising hell about the SNES+random bits controller they wanted to, and ultimately did, ship). He also designed the SNES sound hardware, just so Nintendo wouldn't use another crappy PSG like the FamiCom(Sony was actually somewhat annoyed when they found out he'd started a project without telling them. Especially since it was a project explicitly intended to be sold to another company, and to a company that hadn't even expressed interest on top of everything.). So either he's snapped in recent years, or he's just spewing whatever BS the guys above him pass down. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/con...ign_id=rss_tech Rummaging stuff up, and found this. He hates DRM, so that's one more plus on the guy. He's also got lousy people skills, which explains some of his problems. Also seems Sony's turning a profit outside the games division again, though it's still over a third of their profits.

I like how they're using the Wing Zero Custom for the product picture.

But that makes the cassette robots a guaranteed miss. The size change is pretty much a requirement. regardless. There's no good way to pack a robot AND a car in the same vehicle and still have room for a cabin. It's just less obvious when the robot and car are similar sizes. They probably WILL explain the size change, just to get it out of the way. As I understand it, they have an explanation currently(involving mass displacement into an alternate dimension), it's just never made it into the animation.

Probably not a signifigant diffrence. It'll really kick in in the next year or 2, as HD adoption becomes more common. I hate that everyone is knocking that PoS off. Used to be that no matter WHAT you wanted a controller to do, someone made it. Now all anyone makes is DualShocks and DualShocks with 6 face buttons. LIES! Seriously, it's got a lousy d-pad, and it's just uncomfortable to hold. If the d-pad is irrelevant, they need to get rid of it or at least swap it with the analog stick, since that's where it's most comfortable to put a thumb. If the d-pad IS relevant, they need to fix it. Ergonomics is pretty important in a gamepad. If it's uncomfortable to use, it's a bad design. It probably did succeed to some degree. It looked funny, sure. But once you thought about things, it was suspiciously similar to the GameCube pad, which is a far more comfortable device. No kidding. Large portions of current controller design can be traced directly to the NES. And the NES pad was a half-assed attempt at best. There was NO consideration for ergonomics or usability, just an attempt to make a game controller that looked like a Game&Watch. Select and start weren't even intended to be USED outside of the title screen. In fact, the FamiCom completely lacks those buttons on the 2nd-player controller(which is why only the first player can pause Super Mario Brothers, if you were wondering). The rest... is from the SNES, which while better planned than the NES controller was STILL just an attempt to upgrade a fundamentally flawed device. But Sony's just gluing bits onto the SNES pad. And MS is just emulating Sony this round because people were too busy whining about how the XBox1 pad wasn't a DualShock to play the games. The N64 controller is actually mildly confusing. It's not really obvious when you look at it. 'S another one of those bad design decisions.

The neon green wasn't needed, I'm pretty sure. I think that's just how the current Hasbro thinks Megatron should BE. *looks it up* It seems the current California laws require toy guns to be either ENTIRELY orange or green, or transparent. So I'm not sure if they can sell Megatron in California anyways. I'd have to find the full text of the law and try to work it out from there. It might be that ANY transparency covers things, in which case the green is probably redundant. The lack of a barrel could be due in part to New York law, which requires non-removable orange stripes down the length of a toy gun's barrel. Depending on how they define non-removable, that could mean they'd have to cast orange plastic strips into the barrel. The toy industry, understandably, wants the states to get together and standardize so they don't have to navigate the existing minefield of varying state laws, all of which stack on top of existing federal law.

*shudders*

And Atari and Sega. People generally laugh when I point it out because "Dude, you can't beat the Playstation!", but lately Sony's been doing EXACTLY what those who came before did right before their fall. Amen. They still don't believe it. Find a Resident Evil 4 PS2 review. Listen to them talk about the identical(maybe even improved) graphics. Then find some side-by-side screenshots and shudder at the massively reduced visual quality on the PS. It'll be signifigant. The Wii isn't nearly as beefy as the PS3 and XBox360. Of course, the advantage the PS3 and 360 have at standard definition is limited, and the Wii is SD only. It's once you move to higher resolutions that the Wii is really going to look bad next to the competition. Yah. I guarantee there's a lot of people that do or will have 360s and PS3s hooked to an old TV that only has composite inputs that'll be bragging about how much better they are than Wii owners because they have "HDTV graphics!111"

Support political incorrectness and protect future generations of children from dirty pacifist hippies! Buy toy guns!

Yah. That was why they moved to x86. PowerPC has been pretty crappy lately. IBM's failed to deliver higher speed parts and failed to lower the power consumption on their slower parts. So their desktop machines aren't where they were planning to be because the faster parts aren't out, and the laptops are even worse because the cooler parts aren't showing up. Whereas Intel's Core is faster AND cooler, so they can hae a laptop that stomps their current desktops. The PowerMacIntels are probably waiting for the next revision of the Core. There's supposed to be some major jumps in that one, and it's not very far off. ... Or they could just be waiting for more of the high-end apps to be x86-native. That's been a major gripe I've had with the way Linux is handled, and I AM computer-savvy. There's been way too little effort expended on user-friendliness for it to be the Windows killer it's supporters keep claiming it is/should be/will become.

Bumblebee and Megatron here.