JB0

I feel obliged to defend the destroids here... Some, like the Spartan, can move quite fast when the need arises. Despite having a lot more armor than a VF-1. It was built with the intent of being able to engage in hand-to-hand combat, which necessitates a certain swiftness. I'd bet a Tomahawk is a fairly swift unit, too. Sure a Monster or a Phalanx is slow, but they aren't front-line combat units. Heck, the Monster can shoot at things that are almost a hundred miles away(160 km, and I assume the range is for a planetary situation, where gravity and wind resistance come into play).

Conventional firearms get hot too. That's why the gatling gun exists, to alleviate the barrel heat problem. A problem exacerbated in space by the lack of conduction and convection of heat away from the barrels by atmosphere... Maybe that's why it's so fat. Gives it room for a cooling system. The VF-1S could be argued to have the same principle in it's head lasers. If you program the computer to rotate the firing order, you have a "gatling" laser turret. I agree with this totally. Diffrent weapons defeat diffrent armors. A weapon-grade laser would chew through modern tank armor like nothing, because it's not built to deal with optical weapons. About the only benefit it has is the front surface is slanted, which makes the impact area larger. But if we mirror the armor, it becomes much more resistant. Even dangerous to the attacker, if the armor is perpendicular to the beam, but that makes it a lot less useful against projectiles. Pretty much. A full burst, at 1200 rounds a minute, rips through your ammo in 10 seconds, if I did the math right. Fire in bursts, and it lasts a lot longer. A half-second burst gets you 20 bursts, with each burst carrying 10 rounds, which is a LOT of damage. Real-world comparison... The modern A-10 has a 30mm gatling(admittedly, it fires at 3900 rounds a minute), and it's used as a tank killer. Carries almost 1200 rounds. Eats it a bit slower than a Valk, but still not a lot for sustained fire. Reading it's designed for 2-second bursts. But Regulds seemed to have no armor to speak of, actually. Cannon fodder in every sense of the word. The classic "blows up if looked at funny" mech. I always thought the disappearing gunpods were animation errors. Ah but it doens't have to shoot them all, maybe setting a few off causes a chain reaction exposion Quite likely, if they're too close to each other or aren't smart enough to dodge explosions, which are pretty non-discriminatory in what they damage. Note that Guld did this with a computer forecasting where every missile would be at every moment in time, so he could choose with 100% certainty spots the missiles couldn't reach before he got there. I don't think it's a very feasable plan for non-BDI planes. ... Never mind that Isamu proceeded to do it in a VF-11. He had more than a few close calls in that stunt, though. Bloopers. Though Macross 7 has a beam converter for gunpods.

Eh? People would complain about seeing Misa's cleavage? Boy there must be some real weirdos out there ... We've already seen Misa's cleavage. We want something new. Like Millia boobies. Seen them, too. Try again Kim, Shammy, and Vanessa?

It's my fault. I started reading it immediatly before they cut it. I can only assume that it was dropped just to spite me.

Yah. Apparently everyone else is paying royalties, but Sony wanted to skip it. Only thing I want to know is... why not sue over the DualShock 1?

Glad to help. Wish I could offer more help. KLOV has a link to the AfterBurner manual, but it's broke, so no good there...

That's what I did too and it seemed to work out much better. In the end I found that I used all modes more or less equally in different situations. I used fighter a bit in ground missions, and all three in aerial levels. I found that the battloid was quite useful in shooting down missiles and quick turns in the dogfights. Just had to make sure to keep your finger on the thrust button so that you weren't hovering. Yah. To heck with flares. Wouldn't have been that bad if they'd told you where he was beforehand. That level as a whole dragged quite a bit. It was like they took 3 seperate levels and glued them all together just because they took place in the same map. I didn't mind the protect/escort mission as much as some, but it was annoying that some levels seemed to require a trick. In the cat's eye mission, for example, if you just flew in circles dropping flares you didn't have to fire a single shot... And if you went hunting, they were going down. Another trick to that one... the fighter pods focus on the cat's eye exclusively, while the other mecha focus on you exclusively. So shoot fighter pods first, and save the hunting for when you can't find one(preferably for powered armor, because they hurt you more than battlepods).

Ah, forgot about archive.org... Let me rummage it back up... I THINK it was www.gundamproject.com... You sound as if those people where lying. Everyone knows it's true. They did rip off Robotech. Harmony Gold could kick Studio Nue's ass anyday. Carl Macek is a genius and Reba West should be nominated for a Grammy for her work in Robotech! The Protoculture is a an alien race? Yeah right... And...uh...HG RULES!!! I'm Joking of course... *cackles* Actually, he says the portable fold generator is so they can bust up enemy bases without lighting the political powder keg that is nukes. Not that they won't use it, just that they have another (very powerful) option now before they get there.

Thats an insult to the muppets. The muppets were cooler and more mature than M7. I am not ashamed to be a fan of the muppets, but M7 fans should be ashamed to be fans of that pride parade of a show. Is Star Trek better? Gubaba DOES look suspiciously like a tribble...

Eh? People would complain about seeing Misa's cleavage? Boy there must be some real weirdos out there ... We've already seen Misa's cleavage. We want something new. Like Millia boobies.

No big deal. Never heard about magnetic fields being involved before. The I-field is the minovsky particle lattice, for the record. Only one I know of went down a few years ago. To be fair, it was actually very intelligent and well thought out. It was just wrong. You didn't come in crying about how the japanese ripped off Robotech or anything like that. That puts you above far too many people immediatly.

He deserves an entire show entirely dedicated to him... they do. every time you see a draino commerical you can see him get uncloged from the sink. Yah. They keep evicting him from his home. It's so sad...

Kombat.

Personally, I've never had either device hurt my fingers, with rare exceptions(Sony-brand PS1 d-pads spring to mind, as do TI-brand 99/4a joysticks). On D-pad intensive games like sidescrollers, the Dual Shocks still destroy my thumbs. The downside of arcade sticks is that it costs a fair amount of money to get a decent one, and to most people it's just not worth it. On the other hand, a nice Sega Saturn controller for the PS2 costs about $30 and is probably the best balance. I'm using the afore-mentioned Soul Caliber 2 stick. Not the best stick ever, but good enough. I think I paid 20$ for it, admittedly not when it was new. ... I still find the PS Saturn pad incredibly ironic.

True. But nuking batlteships in space, or dropping tactical nukes on major military installations(provided they were clean devices), would be an acceptable usage in a society that doesn't view nuke as a dirty word. Depends entirely on the culture. You could be fighting a race that doesn't care if you kill civilians, or even thinks it's a good tactic. Aliens are, well, alien. They don't think like us. Again, maybe. Hypothetically, we could do clean weapons. Fusion weaponry is far less dirty than fission weaponry by default. And if you can get rid of the fission initiator, and use the right fuel mixture, it's a perfectly clean nuclear weapon. Well, in space combat it doesn't much matter HOW you punch a hole in the ship, as much as it does that you holed the ship. If stuff like the Macross cannon is fair game, fusion weaponry shouldn't be shunned. Of course, I think the Macross cannon is more powerful than any nuke... that would be a better reason than politics to not use nukes. Don't have to run fighters in or worry about the missile being intercepted, no negative PR, and it's more powerful anyways. True. Very true. I suspect humanity would view genocide in a very dim light, though, regardless of how it was done. I was thinking more in terms of space combat between fleets, really. Situations where environmental and civilian population impact aren't relevant factors. Or because there was no risk of environmental contamination. The first strike against the zentradi was in outer space, so contamination wasn't an issue. And it was kept secret from civilians, so they didn't even have to worry about public relations. Just offending their enemy, who was more impressed than offended. The final battle of space war 1 was a last-ditch attempt. To heck with public relations, let's unload several thousand nukes into this fool and see what happens. Again, it's space combat, so who cares about the nonexistent environment? I've not seen all of Macross 7, so I'm not entirely sure how the nukes were used in that situation, though given teh nature of the foe, it may've been a case of "nothing ELSE kills these guys, let's try the nukes before they eat our brains." A valid point. But when peace fails, and you're in a situation where there's no environment or civilians to worry about, nuke 'em all and to heck with PR. Good point. ACK! RAW-BOOT-ECK NAME! ACK! Kakizaki got killed in an atmosphere. And it wasn't exactly a planned overload. ... I wonder how well the blast would travel in space anyways. We've never seen, likely never will. I'm sad now. Another good point. Doubly so if you have to get the arming codes from headquarters instead of the ship's captain carrying them.

Who plays fighters with a pad anyways? Suck it up and drop a couple bucks on a joystick. Heck, SC2 generated an XCube 2 stick with SC2 artwork on it. Oh I can name a genrous number of people who do play with a pad buddy. A whole generous number who've been playing a pad since Street Fighter II. If my opinion irks you so much, then why don't you drop a couple bucks on a joystick and buy one for me, you just might change it to an opinion you like. *blinks* Ooookay then... Personally, I've never had either device hurt my fingers, with rare exceptions(Sony-brand PS1 d-pads spring to mind, as do TI-brand 99/4a joysticks).

I'm with Max on this. The Xbox controller is fine for fighting games. If you gotta play on the PS2, get that Logitech Cordless Action controller. Joysticks for fighting games might sim the arcade experience better, but who goes to arcades anymore? Personally, I think arcade sticks are unwieldy. I think joysticks are just plain better. I've done side-by-side comparisons, and I play better with a stick than with a pad in most cases.

http://dweeb.net/afterburner/ssrfix After Burner 1, but pr'ly relevant to the AB2 hardware. Instructions to fix lock on and danger lights that refuse to, well, light. You may have better luck asking around at an arcade-oriented message board, such as forum.arcadecontrols.com The site's primary focus is MAME cabs, but there's a very good amount of "real" arcade machine knowledge there.

You say that like it's a BAD thing. Not that there's anything wrong with a more intellectual game, but there's still a lot to be said for raw reflex games.

Absolutely true. But, Sony also seems to have to deal with higher demand for the PSP than Nintendo does with their DS. After the holiday, between new and used, there's alwasy a DS in stock. As for Sony... there aren't even display units in stores. Every working unit they could build, they're pretty much boxed and sent out for retail. And every PSP with one or two dead pixels is one or two more in consumers' hands. For every one person who says "Damn, a dead pixel! This bitch is going back!" there will be two more that will shrug, remark that the dead pixel is only noticeable under certain conditions (like when the screen is extremely dark), and forget about it. As I recall, there were serious DS shortages at launch too. IMO, not enough is not enough, and you may as well attempt to supply the best product possible to the people that buy them from you. Of course, I also think you shouldn't launch a product if you can't meet demand for it, but no one seems to be listening. Cynical me says the demo unit thing is more along the lines of Sony going "Hey, we're the PLAYSTATION! We don't need to prove we're any good, people buy our product then sit there insisting it's better than everything else regardless of reality." I heard people going on about how the PS1 was more powerful than the Dreamcast at least once. *rolls eyes* The DS is "wierd" and Nintendo doesn't have the ability to sell products on name alone. So the demo units were needed to get people to go "Wow, this is neat." Perhaps, but if that were the case, where are those games now that the PSP has launched? Over the course of Thursday and Friday, we sold 60 odd PSPs, plus a truckload of games and accessories (we actually sold out of a few games already, like Spider-Man, Twisted Metal, and Lumines). We sold two DS games, no accessories, and no systems. Well, I saw "Catch! Touch! Yoshi!" got released about 2 weeks ago. That's one. Beyond that... Hell if I know. 'S a real pity how they've handled this thing so far.

Who plays fighters with a pad anyways? Suck it up and drop a couple bucks on a joystick. Heck, SC2 generated an XCube 2 stick with SC2 artwork on it.

Nintendo's been holding DS games from America while releasing them in Japan. Only theory I've heard is they were gonna start blitzing the market once the PSP hit to suck consumer dollars from Sony. That wouldn't pan out, considering that most of their more advertised or more highly anticipated games (including Need for Speed Underground 2, Super Mario Bros, and Metroid Prime Hunters) have been pushed back to late June. That's too late to even compete for the late adopters of the PSP who were holding out for GTA. Yah well... There's a lot of games that Japan's gotten that would take minimal effort to localize that they just haven't bothered with yet. It's the only even mildly logical explanation I've seen why the DS has been virtually unsupported untill now in America.

It's not actually something that can be dealt with, if I understand correctly. It's not a Sony issue... dead pixels can affect literally any LCD screen. Not sure what causes them, but my computer monitor had one. A dead pixel can be a a white or colored dot, or simply one pixel on the screen that doesn't light. In my case, on my PSP, it's a light, very small dot. You can only really notice it against a dark screen. Yes, but Sony seems to care about them less than Nintendo does. As I understand things, SCE has a no returns policy for dead pixels in Japan. Far cry from Nintendo's policy of "That wasn't ever supposed to get out of the factory, sorry about that. Here's a minty-fresh one."

I thought it was because nuke is a bad word. Even in space where there's no environment to contaminate. Regardless of how "clean" the weapon is, the conception is still that nukes make the area a radioactive hotzone for millenia to come and spew masses of fallout into the atmosphere. So yeah... political reasons. And pretty much the same ones that keep us from using them today(not that we actually have a really good reason to use even the smallest ones currently, aside from some proposed "bunker buster" weapons that WOULD spew fallout like there's no tomorrow). ... Of course, if it were purely modern-day politics, they'd also have masses of activists up in arms about the fusion powerplants they're using...

Indeed. I wonder if it say's thank you after picking up trash. I keep thinking of the vending machines. Imagine a street sweeper that stalks you and attempts to cut you off, all the while chanting "Turashu? Turashu?"