JB0

Funny, when I was playing StarCraft I kept thinking "these guys have definately played Warhammer 40,000." 323133[/snapback] When I was playing Battlezone PC, I was thinking "These guys are actively trying to rip Starcraft off. But this is a lot more fun."

She kind of ... re-appropriated... Gamlin's VF-17 after he got her 1J blowed up.

Which is why you rarely see "faithful" video game movies. A faithful Legend of Zelda movie would go something like this... A young man dressed in green steps into a cave. We grant the cinematographers license to extend the cave transition, so we can see him walking through the cave as the opening credits roll, feeling his way along the rough cave walls with a dim torch to guide him. As the credits finish, he comes to the end of the tunnel, which opens into a large room. An elderly person hands the young man a sword, says "take this. It will help you on your way." and the Zelda logo comes on screen. ... Followed by 2 hours of meaningless hack&slash.

Speaking about MAW and folding wings, it might interest you to know that the XB-70, yes the plane that inspired or partly inspired the creator of macross to to make one of our most fav animes, has a folding wing design. Check it out: http://www.vectorsite.net/avxb70.html I'm thinking this concept also inspired that scene in macross zero where guld fly the yf-21 directly towards the missles. IIRC the wings folded downward similar to the xb-70. Yah. YF-21 had the angle-able wings. Too bad the XB-70 didn't have the flexi-surfaces too. The XB-70 inspired who to make which anime? 323008[/snapback] Not inspired to make teh show, rather the name of the star mech. Hint: XB70 Valkyrie.

http://www.anime.net/macross/mecha/united_.../vf1/index.html 322952[/snapback] Note that there's both a VF-1X AND a VF-X-1 on the VF-1 page. Don't get them mixed up. Just trying to head off confusion.

I would consider come entries in the Metal Gear series to be superior to most of what Hollywood turns out, and Konami deserves a lot of praise for maintaining the level of quality that they have.

0, not O. What did I say? Funny after all these years I thought it was O not 0 322899[/snapback] Common mistake. I only drag it out A. in good clean fun(see now. Well, it was funny to me, anyways...), or B. to annoy someone I have no respect for. Practice goes back to my first e-mail account. change I have a rather strong stubborn streak, so I wasn't going to be me#1245315 or whatever. And I sure wasn't changing my chosen name to bypass the issue. I pinned a 0 on the end so I could cut to the front of the line and skip ahead of me#1. ... And discovered names with a 0 on the end are rarely taken. So it's become a sort of dummy character for me. If my chosen name is taken, or too short(a common problem with JB. Stupid 3-character minimum name requirements... or is it stupid me for picking that as a regularly-used screen name?), I pin on a zero.

0, not O. Sure.... rationalize all you want.

Actually, if I recall, that was how the original Wright plane maneuvered.

If you ike Minmay's singing, watch it. Other than that, it's got some pretty visuals. There's nothing actually ADDED to the story beyond what we saw in the final episode of the TV series.

Both of which are fine systems. The VB in particular is a system that desreves far more respect than it gets. 322668[/snapback] Gimmicky doesn't mean horrid. But neither are genius. The VB hurt my eyes though. 322672[/snapback] I'm quite a fan of the VB. IMO it's early demise was one of gaming's great losses. Having said that, the screen DOES have a nasty refresh problem. It's an active display like a CRT instead of a passive one like an LCD. The pixels are directly created by light(in this case from LEDs, in a CRT's case from phosphors being struck by electrons. </tech-lesson>). Because of this, there's a "flicker" between frames. And the VB is at a 50Hz refresh, which any european can tell you sucks, even on a "slow" display like a TV screen. On a faster-responding display, you can usually see the flicker at 60Hz(the official minimum for flicker-free vision). The VB is one of those faster displays, as the LEDs used are only illuminating a given pixel for a fraction of the screen time(it uses a single column of LEDs and a vibrating mirror to change what part of the image they're pointed at, resulting in very brief pixel illuminations. CRT phosphors have a "sustain" so the brightness drops off relatively slowly, but VB pixels are instantly black when the mirror moves on.). The problem can be minimized by reducing the brightness, for reasons I don't know(I'm a techie. I know hardware, not biology.). But personal experience says it works. Another problem(not directly related to the tech used) was the depth of the display. Too deep of an image can cause headaches, which is why most of the software offers brightness AND depth controls. The VB is unique in that the display HAS to be adjusted for a comfortable play experience, whereas most other systems require little to no adjustment of the display. But when properly tuned it has the most immersive gameplay around, even if it is monochrome. It's one of the very few systems to ever offer true 3D graphics as opposed to a 3D illusion on a 2D display, and is the only one to create a totally immersive environment for it(the Jaguar 3D goggles never making it out as far as I know). The fact that it died so fast was very disappointing, as it never even got all of it's 1st-generation software out, much less the 2nd- and 3rd-gen stuff. Mario Clash, Vertical Force, and WarioLand are nice uses of the tech, but I don't really think any of them are system-sellers. Red Alarm, for all its praise, is a tech demo that is plagued with too many problems to be considered a finished game, IMO.

Both of which are fine systems. The VB in particular is a system that desreves far more respect than it gets.

You mean it's gonna be another Resident Evil knockoff?

HAHAHA! Because the Super Mario movie was AWESOME! Wait, that was Resident Evil... Or was it Tomb Raider? Mortal Kombat? Street Fighter? Wing Commander? ... Aw, hell... you'll watch it because you're a gullible sucker.

I'm curious. I doubt it'll live up to my expectations of a liquid-metal controller that reforms to fit your hands and the game, but I AM curious.

Actually, you CAN think about other things, provided you don't flip out like Guld did when Isamu interfered with his demonstration run. It's not clear if you HAVE to close your eyes or if Guld just thought it was a good idea. There's not really a good reason to keep them open either way, though. No real difficulty to cut the wires. True, true. Max DOES kick some serious ass in the VF22, though it's a woefully short sequence. ... I need to get around to watching the extra shows, just to see Millia get some ass-kicking in. Her VF22 time in the show proper was... disappointing.

They haven't made it out to be very impressive, really. Just a new idea. Most credible rumor right now is the pressure-sensitive handles, but it's still just rumor. I do think it'd be nice if they'd show the damn thing.

There weren't always ways around it. The SNES physically lacked the processing power to do a lot of fast action titles. It's a large part of why there's so few shooters on it. By the same token, you will never get high-quality sample-based sound out of a Genesis, or a 15-bit color pallete. The reason I used street fighter II as an example was because this was one of the games that really needed to recreate that depth of gameplay you had in the arcades or people would really complain. Given the limits of consoles, and the budget of the average kid who is a fan of the arcade version of the game, the consoles versions would have competed with the arcade versions for money had the conversions been accurate enough gameplay recreations of the better arcade versions of the game. Ya know, as a kid I didn't buy games. I talked my parents into doing it. And this was what mattered: people saw that gameplay was the focus first, and could tolerate the reduction in graphics and sounds if it meant the game PLAYED the same. You see, it no longer mattered now that neo geo as a hardware platform kicked the sega genesis or the snes's ass in all those technological areas and that they as little kids with little pocket change couldn't afford to have the system due to how expensive it was: because so long as the gameplay was accurate on a sh1ttier system we would be happy enough. A slight lower res sprite, a crappier choice of colours were cosmetic trivial things to important factors like: the game controlling perfectly, the combos working as they did, the collision detection being accurate etc... ie gameplay-related sh1t. You kind of missed the point. The gameplay on the NeoGeo was 100% accurate. Every move was timed exactly the same, every hit-box exactly the same, every trick, bug, and quirk identical. Because it used the EXACT same games. And the sprites were WAY lower-res, not slightly lower-res. Also, NeoGeo fighter ports always took a hit in the gameplay because you had to restrict the available playfield. SNK had an awesome scaling routine they used that allowed for large sprites when you were right next to each other, and everything got smaller as you scooted out further until you were on opposite edges of the playfield and reduced to flea-like sizes. Ports had to force it to a Street Fighter paradigm with a set viewing window, which drastically altered play. But yes, it WAS way too expensive. Only well-off adult gamers had the thing. Which goes back to my rude remarks about SNK's marketing team. But on Street Fighter... Genesis version. 3-button controller. Enough said. Ditto for Mortal Kombat. If you think very carefully about why the arcade industry has slowly died out over these past years you will see it is due to home consoles being more powerful and competing with them. Home consoles are less powerful again. But not terribly so for the most part. I do agree that riding a system as long as possible was one of the downfalls of the arcade industry, but it started going downhill well before the system boards. Now that the conversions of arcade games to the home are very close, and so long as they keep the crucual important gameplay intact (in a fighting game, slight changes may be big enough difference to tournment players) people disregard the platform they are playing that game on. Which is my point about previous generations: they were more gameplay conscious about the reasons for why they would buy something - not necessarily caring about the hardware itself. I disagree, having been involved in some fairly heated SNES VS Genesis debates. There were hardware loyalists then too. You just didn't see them venting on the internet. And this is why I believe next gen systems will fail to live up to the hype of the fanboys because they want high technology but to the rest, if there is very little difference in gameplay of games in the next gen, all it will do is fragment the industry more. The incentive to wanting a new system is to play a game you have never experienced before. That's funny, given how the industry has become increasingly reliant upon big-name sequels, and new game ideas are avoided like the plague by consumers. The incentive for most people isn't a new game. It's a new rehash of the same old game. The difference I wanted to make was that today if you have an increased level of detail in a game environment, automatically people think that this = a much much better game overall. (emphasis being on the cosmetic stuff) People then use that as a basis for thier argument that owning a high spec system means more fun. It may be true for certain genres, but I think we have reached a level where companies will try to one-up each other by only attacking thier competitor platform's tech specs, ignoring the quality of the content, the ideas behind those games, the depth of the games themselves, and whether they are actually any fun. But that's ALWAYS how it's been. I linked the Intellivision ad earlier. Mattel's ENTIRE campaign was screenshots of 1st-gen 2600 games VS latest-and-greatest INTV games. Fanboys join in and take sides and nobody cares about how good the game's gameplay is. (because they will never try it firsthand - they'd rather be part of a system war which divides the gamefans into platform loyalists rather than apreciators of the games) IMO, you're just hearing a lot more from the loyalists. They're the ones that talk about it mostly. The people that play everything just pay their cash and go about their business. This is why we saw the death of 2d gameplay because what happened was that these types of games do not display a system's 3d capabilities to the masses and wow the "platform loyalists". The platform loyalists prefer a game to sort of demonstrate what the system's hardware can do against the competition, (a pissing match) disregarding whether that game has been carefuly made and crafted with refinements that make a gameplay difference. (something that you can't actually "see", but something that is noticable and that you can "feel" after many hours of playing the game first hand) Actually, it has more to do with Sony's PS1 marketing techniques than it does fanboys equating penis length with hardware power. Sony drew a LOT of new people into the game market that, even if they didn't become hardware loyal, fervently believed that 3D = better, because it's what Sony used to convince them that they needed a PS. It's hard to sell a sprite-based game because they're viewed by most of the market as old and crappy. Sony's taken video games totally mainstream. Which means that they're now catering to the same idiots driving the movie, TV, and music industries. There is a difference, some people just won't admit it because nowadays games are just ported over from system to system. (not necessarily a bad thing, but can be annoying for those who want to see new content, with new ideas rather than a quick cashing in or a milking of a tired franchise through yearly sequels.) I DO dislike XCube2 games, mainly because they're fit to the lowest common denominator and don't take good advantage of ANY of the systems they're on. When you develop an exclusive title, you take advantage of the target system's strengths, and build the controls around that system's controller. And what I'm saying is an advancement in specs to a lot of game types or throwing money around isn't what is needed to necessarily make them better. It is a bit like watching a movie with very high production values and admiring the amount of effort that went in to the making of it, but realising that the movie really sucked still. It was an expensive turd. Then watching a movie which is very entertaining, was made cheaply, and one you'd watch over and over again and not get tired of it no matter when it was made or caring about the limits those people may have had in making it at the time. The quality is there despite the amount of money thrown behind it. I don't disagree with that. Just that the industry is running a lot diffrently than it used to.

If my memory is right, the answer's in the legs. That's the Macross as seen in Mac2.

You have the final conclusion. Hikaru picks Misa over Minmay, and our heroes successfully repel the assault of the Bodol fleet on humanity. 321890[/snapback] well, I watched the 36 episodes including DYRL and Macross Zero, but I wasn't happy with the 36th episode because it was an open ending, talk about a cut-off there. I don't see how it's an open ending, except in the sense that every show that doesn't kill everyone has an open ending. Correction: NEVER wanted to. He did DYRL, and said "this story is through." But by putting that in the continuity he could tell all the fans 100% definitively that he was never going to do anything with it again. Not just because he didn't want to, but because he killed them off. Was it mean and spiteful? Maybe. Does it get the point across? Definitely. Everyone dies eventually. If you keep begging for sequels, eventually you get death. Not really. The show ended on a positive note, laying out humanity's plans for the future. But it also ended with a definitive tying off of all remaining plot threads. It WAS. But people weren't happy with it, and didn't care that Kawamori was through with it, and kept annoying him for more. And no one kept nagging Kawamori for more Max and Millia. They let him just leave it alone until he wanted to do something more with the characters. Characters that actually had a lot more room for development due to their back-burner status during the original series. But even then, they weren't the stars of Macross 7. They were a side story, on the back burner again. ... I wanna see a series focus on the bridge bunnies. Actually, it was the love triangle between Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay.And Kawamori didn't cut it off, he finished it. ... He finished it three times, actually. Last battle of Space War 1, then they needed to extend the show for another season, so Hikaru starts screwign around with the whole Minmay thing and he finishes it again for the final episode, then they do a movie retelling of the story and he finishes it a THIRD time. All three end with Hikaru turning Minmay away for Misa. The love triangle was over. It was a line and a point, with no room for any further development. Fact is, a story revolving around a happy couple that just sits there being happy isn't really that interesting. And it REALLY stretches credibility to make Hikaru have ANOTHER change of heart and start pining after Minmay AGAIN. Anbd people wonder why I hate sequels...

I'll just be pulling parts of this post out. Parts of it just don't interest me, and others I don't feel like commenting on right now. Personally, I never cared for Street Fighter. Fasn't into fighting games in general in my youth, actually. But I've always had a soft spot for Samurai Shodown. It wasn't just the fighting games, though. AeroFighters and Metal Slug stick out as other "must-plays" of the NeoGeo library. Anyways... it was a FAR more sound concept as originally pitched. They wanted NeoGeos in Blockbuster, or something similar. You plunked a few bucks down , dragged home your arcade sticks and game deck, and enjoyed arcade-perfect gaming for the weekend. Beat the hell out of a 600$ game deck and 200$ carts. Also note that SNK lied about system specs in their ads. They ran the silly 24-bit ad campaing insisting that 24>16, and the SNES and GEnny were only 16. But they glossed over the fact that the NG used the EXACT SAME processor setup as the Genny. A 16-bit 68000 CPU and an 8-bit z80 sound processor. SNES had a 16-bit CPU and... I THINK the SPC700 sound processor was 8-bit, but I'm not sure. Yes. It IS all about the software in the end. I've got a bit of everything from a 2600 on up because of it. I intensely dislike Sony, but I've got a PS1 and PS2 both lying around simply because there were a lot of good games on both. http://www.atariage.com/forums/ AKA my haven from idiocy(no offense to anyone here). There's healthy discussion about everything up to and including the upcoming 3 systems. And a lot less "OMG MY MEGAHURTZ CAN BEAT UP UR POLLY COUNT!111" and "THE XBOX IS 256-BIT BECAUSE IT KICKS THE PS2'S ASS AND PS2 IS 128-BIT!111" (fun fact: XBox is a 32-bit machine, just like your standard IBM-compatible PC(unless you're running an Athlon 64). I've thought people get pretty irrational about sports and politics too, personally. I've heard of fistfights started over 2600 VS INTV. That was was a little before my time, but I've been interested in the history of the industry for some time, and I've picked a bunch up form people that WERE there. *nods* I have to say, even though they rode it WAY too long, I was sad to see SNK retire the NeoGeo last year. Was the last dedicated sprite hardware on the market, and having it axed was the end of an era. Yah. The entire industry moves in cycles. Even in terms of retorgaming. I guarantee you, a decade from now people will moan about how there's no good games anymore and the PS1 was so great the same way they moan about the SNES/Genesis now. Pr'ly done in software. The Genesis video chipset only provides for 2 background layers. But if you have the power available, you can re-draw it on the fly, to create an arbitrary # of "virtual backgrounds" on your 2 real backgrounds. And it's easy to do on the Genny due to the raw CPU power available. Most impressive example I've seen is Metal Storm on the NES, which has three independent background layers running at once on a underpowered system with only one hardware layer. ... Or you can just fake it by scrolling diffrent parts of the screen at diffrent speeds to create the ILLUSION of diffrent layers. The train scene in Ninja Gaiden... 2, I think... does this. There's only one layer, but it's animated in such a way that it looks like multiple layers scroling in parallax. there are probably various ways to cheat the effect of having more depth in the backgrounds of games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scroll but me != a games programmer I don't care how it works, so long as it looked pretty and gave a pseudo 3d effect it was enough. I'm not a programmer either, really. But I've picked up my share of trivia, along with 4 other people's. And multiple background layers was more common on the SNES because it was easier to do. Sure Sega had the power, but Nintendo had a hardware interface for it, so you didn't have to write a software routine. Nah. There was a lot of vehement sparring about which system was technically superior, too. Sadly, I took part in it, and I knew very little of what I was talking about. Truth is it just depended on what you were doing. Blast processing was VERY clever. It was a way to explain to people that had no clue what a CPU or megahertz was that the Genesis' 68000 could run rings around the 65816 of the SNES when they were clocked the same, and the Genny chip was clocked faster anyways. Fancy marketing buzzword for a very valid advantage.

You have the final conclusion. Hikaru picks Misa over Minmay, and our heroes successfully repel the assault of the Bodol fleet on humanity.

I got mine long time ago....just like Ico... 321835[/snapback] Then you're not one of the guilty.

Don't forget the neogeo ads complete with specs showing the superiority of the beast in graphics and sound and how it brought the arcade home. Ahhh the days of fighting over crappy system capabilities and minute crap instead of focusing on the games. Brings back memories.. Well, they had to do SOMETHING. Marketing took a system that was inteded as a reantal and made it for sale, and it was priced WAY over the competition. Having said that, it I Strue that you get what you pay for. The NeoGeo was damned impresssive hardware, and unlike everyone else that claimed arcade quality, it actually WAS(identical hardware save the BIOS, and used the exact same software. They didn't even burn new ROMs, just stuck them on a new board). Ummm.... the genesis only had 2 background layers. And 1 had to be used for the game field. So there was only 1 parallax layer. The SNES, by comparison, had a max of 4 layers(which varied with mode, down to NO background layers for any screen region in graphics mode 7 unless you count the 3D object), for 3 parallax layers. Flickering was a graphics chipset problem, actually. I forget the exact cause, though. Slowdown, though, was the CPU, and one of the SNES' great handicaps. It had incredible AV hardware, but lacked the processing power needed to make full use of it except in RPGs and action-adventures. Damn right. Most companies are content to ride the hardware they have until someone else starts making a competitor. Damn right.I tend to be somewhat anti-sequel. Not because the sequels are inherently bad, but because I'd rather see the effort they poured into Legend of Zelda 37 expended on a fresh new title. And all of oyu that kick back and wait for an interesting non-sequel to hit the bargin bins... YOU KILLED BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL!

STEALTH!