JB0

I think the only differences are that the 9-disc set includes the hologram card and the big box (obviously). Animated card, not hologram card. I own the three box sets, and they don't come with the animated card. Right. But nothing came with a hologram card. ... Shame, really. A holoraphic GERWALK would've been cool.

I think the only differences are that the 9-disc set includes the hologram card and the big box (obviously). Animated card, not hologram card. I'm under the impression they come with even the individual disks.

I'm still amazed at how many new titles are coming out for the DC, though. It's like someone forgot to tell anyone that it's dead. Hell, Sega doesn't EXIST anymore after the Sammy merger and the DC is still getting games. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Nothing like handing a thoroughly modern gamer a dose of REAL gaming. ... So, is he scheduled for Ninja Gaiden NES next? Or are you gonna baffle him with something old-school, like Asteroids or Space Invaders. Game hasn't been made he can't beat... *cackles evily*

*sighs in relief* I thought when people were saying closed captioned, they meant the subs were, well CC subs. You know, black boxes with white text, pulled out of the signal by a CC decoder. While I didn't care about the movie, it would be very bad if DVD publishers started thinking this was acceptable. But it turns out they're real DVD subs, just with sound effect tags.

OK, but you provide the monkey. Anyway, what about Gradius, or even Defender? Those were better games. A. You're talking to the president of the "I fartING HATE THAT CHEATING BASTARD GRADIUS!" fanclub. Any game that can become LITERALLY impossible to progress in if you die at the wrong moment is an automatic failure in my book. As tiny a change as starting with one speedup as the default speed would make it playable, but as-is I hate it. Maybe interesting sidenote: I LOVE Salamander, which is a Gradius spinoff. B. Gradius NES version came out a year later. The diffrence between 85 and 86 games on the NES is massive. We went from Super Mario 1 and Gyromite to Dragon Quest, Metroid, Zelda, Castlevania, and yes, a port of Gradius. 86 was when the system picked up steam and all the good stuff really started happening. With the exception of the single most packed-in game in history, all the games the NES is famous for are 86 or later. The 83-85 games are totally forgotten, with the exception of Super Mario 1. C. Defender is debatable. It certainly deserves credit as the father of the scrolling shooter, but I find it too complex for my tastes generally(though I've had a fair bit of fun with it at various times on various systems). I like my shooters simple, and never grew very attached to the 2-way scroll playfield, or the humanoid defense. You were EXPECTING anime accuracy from a Famicom game? Though I think it's clearly a version of Space War 1's final battle, reinterpreted to make a good FamiCom game as opposed to a good animation sequence. Many people would, especially in 1985, when gamers still understood the simple joy of an endless game that was a mere test of skill, with no measure of progress but the score. The ability to progress towards an ending was an arcade innovation created EXPLICITLY to force good players off the machine. People could play for hours on one credit on PacMan and Space Invaders and Asteroids and whatever else you can think of, including games believed to be so impossibly difficult that no one on Earth could last for 4 waves(the original Defender)so the developers had to think of a way to limit play time that WASN'T reliant upon the player dying. They did it by adding timers and autoscroll to rush you along towards an ending that was unavoidable. Many gamers at the time resented this, actually. Super Mario Bros. succeeded for 2 reasons A. it was a pack-in in America. Free games are almost always good. B. it had Nintendo's mascot in it. Mario was a well respected name from the arcades. Donkey Kong had birthed him, and Mario Bros. had given the world a worthy competitor to the legendary Joust(which Miyamoto has admitted he was actively trying to imitate). Yes, it's fun. But it's not THAT fun, and I wouldn't have paid 50$ for it. Certainly not when I could have Donkey Kong Jr., Dig Dug, Bomberman, Elevator Action, or the original non-super Mario Bros. In fact, if I'd bought it in 1985, I would've been expecting an upgrade to the original Mario Bros., and been quite disappointed. And in my opinion it's a fine little video game with the added advantage of having a Macross license attached to it.

Leader One. They're having fun with their GoBots ownership. gobots, Now that is a series I haven't heard of for a long time? shame they weren't as posable also. (imagine masterpiece CYCLE:)) It's CyKill.

I would recommend it. The OVA has more time for character development, etc. And some really nice exclusive scenes. But it's got some serious holes in it where they pried the script open to fit more time in. The movie is the story as it was originally conceived, and it flows a lot better for it, but you DO lose a fair bit of characterization that they had time to add in the OVA. And it's got some really nice exclusive scenes too, especially towards the end. Personally, I've been putting off buying the movie DVD. I've got a VHS with some damage(I think it was shipped resting on a speaker or something) that I got as a gift(hence, I couldn't return/exchange it) shortly before they ported it to DVD, and I'm having a hard time justifying paying that much for such a poor DVD(even though I consider my VHS copy pretty much unwatchable past the first viewing).

To be fair, a lot of animation isn't really required for this style game. It'd just look silly if the reguld's legs flapped around behind it, or the glaug waved it's arms. Scrambled Valkyrie is pretty low animation for the space sequences too. Minimizing the mappers here is kind of unfair, as the massively increased ROM size available with bank-switching of the character ROM is what made the higher resolution, higher frame rate, and more detailed sprites possible. (NES/FamiCom has twin ROM busses, one for program ROM, teh other for character ROM. Early mappers only bank-switched the program ROM, which let them make the levels bigger, but not graphics) Later mappers also had interrupt generators, and some japanese ones even had additional sound channels.

What if they go GameCube or XBox instead of PS2? Then it'll be 64- or 32-bit.

Heehee. "MY TOY! CAN'T HAVE IT!"

I don't recall any transforming vehicles in the Ray series.

Actually, for the time it's about average. 1985 puts it in with Super Mario 1(not 1st-gen, because the Famicom came out in 1983, but still ... old). Go to digitpress.com, hit the online rarity guide, and ask it what came out in 85 for the NES. Macross compares quite favorably to the titles around at the time. For a decent comparison... FC Macross came out at the same time as the FC port of 1942. Same day, if the Digitpress release dates are accurate(and I have no reason to believe otherwise). And Macross is a FAR more impressive game than 1942. It's actually a very good game for the time. And I'm with Skull Leader. The game's quite good. Especially as NES programming was in it's infancy when it was made. I prefer it to Scrambled Valkyrie on the Super FamiCom. Or DYRL on PS/Saturn. It's gaming in it's purest form, even if it could use another button or 2. Anyone that thinks "a limbless monkey could have made a better game" is welcome to prove the point. Sit down with a 6502 assembler and some NES documentation and MAKE a better game. You've got access to 20 years of understanding of the hardware if you know where to look. You aren't even limited in your choice of bank-switching chips(known as mappers in the NES community). Only the most primitive was available to Brandi in 1985. You have the opportunity to make as advanced a game as the NES/FamiCom can handle. Personally, I bet you'd be doing good to get Space Invaders, whether I restrict you to 1985 tech or not.

ALL HAIL THE DRILLA-SAN! I love that series. Shame it doesn't get localized more often(we're at 2 of 6 right now, I believe).

Disks should be pretty easy. The new PS2 design i ssuch that you won't have to change the case massively for disk-swapping. We go back to the PS1 ways, where you just wedged something in to hold the lid switch down. ... Unless Sony did something wierd to make said switch a pain to reach, which is possible.

That way no one can actually save the pictures he posts online (at least easily). well considering the actual url of the image, it is very easy no kidding couple clicks and i copied the url to my download manager. the personal library grows muahahahaha I usually just hit "save page as" then select "web page, complete" to defeat such protections. Then I just yank the pic out of the new directory at my leisure. With firefox you can simple display the page info and save any media file in the page, I think that is possible with mozilla and other Non-IE browser too. What can I say? I'm lazy. If I can't right-click, I brute-force the sucker.

Basically, who cares. As long as the 'y' isn't there, it's good.

Not realy the tv series shows how powerfull overloads are. Yah sure it may be cheap but it won't be as effective in complete coverage. But that was a barrier saturated with an extended bombardment. It absorbed a LOT more firepower than a single missile can carry. think your talking about the movie but i remember of the tv series just punching through the fortress. in the movie they used the missiles to weaken the walls so they can break in and take out the defenders. Right. Rammed it, using the PPB(an upgraded 4-disk version, no less) to protect the leading edges, fired thousands of nuclear warheads(the stardust cloud expanding around the Macross after it hits clear space), then activated the omnidirectional barrier to give them a chance of survival(whatever it absorbs, while a drop in the bucket, DOESN'T hit the armor plating, and the overload deflects more when it blasts out against the incoming wall of ... stuff). It wasn't the barrier that took the flagship out, it was those missiles aimed at everything of interest in the ship. Fields can be controlled, else it wouldn't be able to move around the ship. while in the tv series the PPB conform to the hull to the major shape but the distance varied with the smaller details of the hull like small towers that extend out. small i mean small to the ship like 40 or 50 feet out. I understand what you're saying. Think of a PPB disk as a hovercraft. Free-moving across a surface, but with no real altitude control. It's a hypothetical situation, but it COULD explain why not use the PPB as a ranged weapon. IF I understand what you're saying, the PPB disks are higher above the hull when they go across an antenna or something. That's logical to me if it's a field effect, as they're maintaining distance from whatever's under them, not from the hull. shame since confinement usualy defined in reactors, by defination its the same as containment. you lose confinement when the energy moves out in way. Confinement can be used many ways. I'm thinking in terms of keeping your energy beam cohesive. You don't HAVE to have omnidirectional confinement. A beam only needs a cylinder. the rod can be confined but anything that leaves isn't confine also we use laser diodes now and i don't think they work that way now. The beam can only be generated THROUGH photon confinement. Strip the mirrors away and you just get a flash of red light. And diodes are only used for some things. There's a lot of diffrent laser technolgies, and they all work diffrently, with diffrent strengths and weaknesses. A diode laser is great for size and power consumption. But it sucks for high-power applications. Longer barrel isnt confine it can be defined as focus and guiding more guiding than focus unless its a shotgun which has the chokes that focus the pellets. It also traps the gasses longer. Okay, so I was working with a hypothetical frictionless weapon. Stupid, I know. Of course, even in a hypothetical frictionless weapon, eventually the barrel gets too long, and your hot gasses have less pressure than the outside air. And then the bullet is being hindered by the gasses trapped behind it. Confinement doesn't always mean in all directions. Or permanent. And the gasses ARE confined in all directions untill the bullet leaves the barrel. From Merriam-Webster... Main Entry: con·fine ... 2 : to keep within limits <will confine my remarks to one subject> That's the definition I'm using. In the case of my beam weapon, we're keeping it within limits in the Y and Z axes, and letting it move freely along the X axis of the beam. The PPB clearly has confinement, with the ability to change the limits in 2 axes(essentially). It's not clear if hover distance is variable or fixed. focus and confinedment are diffent but silmar things. focus is point of space while confinedment is more 3d and more restrictive. the reflector would have to completely cover the lightbulb to be confinement. No. Confinement doesn't awlays mean locking it into a certain point. See above definition. The mirror in a flashlight keeps the beam within the limits needed for a flashlight to work as ... well, as a flashlight. It confines the light to a beam. humans uses mirrors to focus the beam the elements makes the light. QUIT PICKING ON MY WORD USAGE! ESPECIALLY WHEN IT'S VALID! everything is energy but it works in simlar but differnt ways. refer to PPB to ODB you said. Right. But keeping it to the same TYPE of energy. humanity is capable of anything given time and resouces, in macross universe they could easily do so if they wanted since pretty much master it in a short time. They haven't MASTERED anything. And not EVERYTHING is possible. I know the newtonian principle I'm not explaining newton's laws, just that ion drives as we know them generate pretty low thrust. The big problem is that you're throwing individual atoms around. 3rd law of motion is what we use to move things, and individual atoms just don't have the same "oomph" as giant clouds of pressurized gases. But you cna throw them for a lot longer. We've made probes with far more powerful thrusters. Heck, even Deep Space 1 had them for maneuvering purposes(BTW, DS1 isn't a satellite, as it orbits nothing). But they run out of fuel faster than the ion drive will(and yes, teh ion drive WILL run outof fuel. Every ion leaving it was stripped from a "fuel block"). Im not sure why your explaining what I said but in time ion engines if more funding to the devolopment would shoot out more than a single atom. easily from the picture they can shoot more out if they want to. very simlar to a TV eh. Also you still need energy to push the atoms out. stronger fields created with more power should shoot them out faster. DS1's drive DOES spit more than one atom at a time. And there's a serious tradeoff here. Is the extra electricity needed really worth it? You can stuff more propellant in your ship isntad of enlarging the generator, and as we see things now, that's far more efficient for fast acceleration. Big stretch...

That way no one can actually save the pictures he posts online (at least easily). well considering the actual url of the image, it is very easy no kidding couple clicks and i copied the url to my download manager. the personal library grows muahahahaha I usually just hit "save page as" then select "web page, complete" to defeat such protections. Then I just yank the pic out of the new directory at my leisure.

But in Macross it comes from a diffrent universe. But they're 2 diffrent things. The body powers itself from the dimensional rift, but the creature controlling it(the mind, essentially) maintains itself in this universe by consuming spiritia from the beings present here. They weren't DESIGNED to eat souls(exageration) but the body's new inhabitant(essentially a very complex parasite) needs to if it wants to stay here. I can't explain the physical appearance.

A collection is a collection. I play my Atari stuff about as often as I watch my videos(rarely). But I wouldn't dream of parting with it, because it's my collection. I would never USE a CDX in all probability. But I still want one, just because it's a CDX. You're putting your priorities onto the issue, which might not be his(in my experience you don't get that many games over that much variety without becoming at least part collector).

Actually, they also don't use them because they're disk-space hogs. And in some games they have trouble maintaining continuity(example: Parasite Eve 2. Every FMV with a weapon shows Aya wielding her starting pistol, regardless of what you have equipped, or in storage). As for the too much either way argument... Metroid Prime and Prime 2 are raw game engine. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Same for PN3's (very rare) cutscenes. If the game engine is high-enough resolution, FMV is just a waste of disk space. It's the cost and NOT the disc space that actually matters to the game developers. By that logic they'd've never STARTED with FMV. It's far cheaper now than it was when FF7 was made. The original point was to give them a chance to NOT have big chunky jaggies showing off. Now we have small, fairly streamlined jaggies, and it's not near as much of an issue. And we've got all sorts of features they couldn't dream of when they started the FMV whorage. Things like real-time faicla expressions, cloth that reacts like cloth instead of a cardboard suit painted like cloth, and so on. There's just no compelling reason TO use FMV in many cases now. FMV = Full-Motion Video. As it's not typically full-motion(static backgrounds, often limited character animation) and the term video is debatable(depedns on the usage), no. Cutscene is pre-scripted. FMV is a specific form of cutscene(only partially accurate, as it can also be used for the background in a game-engine sequence, or even as the actual gameplay in titles like Dragon's Lair). What blame? I APPLAUD the move. I've got plenty to say about lousy game design, but about all there is to say relevant to the argument at hand has to do with an over-abundance of cutscenes in general and continuity-breaking FMVs in specific. Practically speaking, it's not relevant 9 times out of 10. Going back to the Metroid Prime example, it only matters when you get a close shot of Samus' chest and the low-res texture maps show their ugly jagginess. Higher res texture maps would've gotten rid of it entirely. I like the Famicom and SuperFami games. Don't ask why the FC one, though. I have no good reason. And the PS/Saturn DYRL game. And the PCEngine CD shooter. ... Hell, I enjoy large parts of Battlecry too. It's not a BAD game, it's just not a masterpiece. And we want our VF-1's to be gifted with masterpiece games.

My mistake. Ha dLeader 1 in there because he's the good guy lader in GoBots. My head naturally associates him with Prime.

Crap... But she's so yummy... ... But parents have fighter jets... Hmmm... Death or girl, death or girl... Tangent: *thwacks the people that ducked in just to bash Mac7*

you would need lots of power to open a rift or else it becomes that free energy theory then half of macross becomes senseless, But once opened, it's stable. And wasn't free energy from a parallel universe the principle behind what became the protodevlin? I belive the protodevlin was solely powered by a type of spirita energy and used it for differnt purposes for attacking and folding. When they talk about the limitedless fountain of spiritcha at the end I think they was talking about their heart or soul. If they used free energy from a parallel universe why would they need spirit energy to contine. Isn't the spiritia to feed the beings that infected them, not to actually support the bodies? I never saw all of M7, so I'm going on what I read. Particularly these entries in Macross Compendium's chronology... PC 2865 Development on powerful biological weapons based on the Zentradi, "Evil Series," begins. [Note: "Evil" pronounced as "Eh-vil."] Evil is the abbreviation of the Protoculture term for "advanced (Zentradi) all-enivron biological weapon." Trial production takes place on a scientifically advanced planet (the first planet of the star system later known as Varauta), but because of unresolvable problems with the weapons' power exceeding the fighting capability requirements, trial production is halted. PC 2868 On the [aforementioned] scientifically advanced planet, the existence of a sub-universe is confirmed. According to survey results, this sub-universe is abound with super high levels of extra-dimensional energy, and this energy is discovered to have the potential for application. The trial production of super dimension energy gates which can supply energy from the sub-universe is begun, and genetically engineered biological super dimension organs are developed. These biological super dimension organs are extremely compact, and they are expected to supply enormous amounts of energy. Because of power problems, the trial production begins implementing the technology from the terminated "Evil Series." No problems are uncovered in simulations. The internal conflicts within the Stellar Republic revives the development of the "Evil Series." THEN we get this... PC 2871 On the [aforementioned] scientifically advanced planet, trial production of the "Evil Series" for final tests is begun. Seven Evil Series weapons of seven types including a highly mobile, humanoid "Sivil" for search-and-destroy functions and a super-scale, high-powered "Glavil" for fleet warfare are completed. The Evil Series tests are begun, but at the same time biological super dimension organs overload and extradimensional energy is released. The Evil Series' bodies are occupied by the spiritual energy life form from the sub-universe and thus creating, from the massive fighting capability of the Evil Series and the enormous potential of the spiritial energy, beings with extraordinary fighting ability and a coveting for life energy, "Spiritia." They covet Spiritia in order to continue existing as extra-dimensional beings in this universe. They begin invading the surrounding planets and systems using spaceships and weapons of people from the scientifically advanced planet that they brainwashed. (They later become known as the Supervision Army). See what I mean? Though it does demonstrate a danger in tapping dimensional rifts. You never know who's on the other side. the omni directional barrier was develope from the PPB system. The way I can see how they could make one from merging lots of the disk together like the PPB punch but to spread it out around a large object like a ship most likely had the bad side effect of overloading all at once instead of little bit (instead of dissapating)from a single disc can aborb rather than the "total damage" of a ODB system. after all diamonds and coal are differnt things but still the same carbon. That makes a sort of sense. And the carbon example is what I was talking about when I said they were radically diffrent. Same base, diffrent end result. PPBs don't go nuclear when they overload. They just cease to repel. And the omnidirectional barrier overload was so powerful because it released all the energy it had absorbed during the bombardment when it failed,not just because it was a barrier that failed. If it absorbs one laser pointer beam before it overloads, the energy released will be a lot less. lots of energy can be absorb from the kinetic force of peircing the hull and shelds. Not as much as an extended bombardment. For the yield you'll be getting, explosives are cheaper. 1-way absorbancy. You can go out, but not in. At least, that's how I thought it worked No, they unloaded thousannds of nuclear weapons inside a confined space, rupturing the biggest fusion reactor you can think of, and usd the barrier to protect them from the inevitable explosion(and still barely lived). No evidence barrier tech can be focused into a beam. And the PPB might have limited energy. We've seen it fail before, when struck with a single exceedingly hard blow. who says it has to be a beam eh . If it can move around a large ship thats over 1kilometer long then it can easily go through a straight line thats not very long for a standard gun fight. Since it the PPB Doesn't make direct contact of the ship but float just above the hull (for the macross the space between looks like a good 30 feet) in space one of the genius scientist in macross could figure out a way not to move a small disk but adjust the distance between the the disk and hull or guns front end or what ever and silmulate a projectile. Unless there's some sort of field effect that dictates the hover distance, not a intentional feature of the barrier. Like a magnetic field or something. That's an odd assumption. Is it easier to shoot lightning bolts, or to electrify the skin of a vehicle? For weapons purposes, confinement must be mastered before projection is dealt with. And it's possible that the PPB field naturally adheres to objects. I belive your talking about making a reactor and propulsion. weapon purposes today and yesterday (mainly nuclear devices) is find a nice empty spot and let the fury loose on it. Not really. I'm talking about a directed energy weapon. Actually, lasers only work BECAUSE we know how to confine light. Example: the classic ruby rod laser. You take a rod of ruby. Put a mirror on one end, a half-mirronr on the other, wrap a flash bulb around it. Fire the bulb. This excites the ruby molecules. They emit a specific wavelength of light when they cool down. We lose a lot out the sides, but everything travelling along the rod's axis gets reflected back and forth, untill we have enough photons bouncing around to pass through the half-mirrored end as a beam of red light. A longer barrel WILL increase the perfomrance, actually. But that's beside the point. The bulelt only moves because of the confined, directed explosion behind it. If we couldn't confine a powder detonation, a gun would work just like a grenade. I mean the ability to focus the energies being used instead of merely throwing them out there. A flashlight bulb isn't very bright until you add the reflector, for example. But a human uses mirrors to make the beam in the first place. But both are an application of electricity. It's the same energy in both. Just like a barrier disk and a flying green disk o' death would be the same energy. I don't think humanity is capable of harnessing it that way. BTW, ion engines(at least as they exist now) are only really useful for long distance trips. Acceleration is slow, but you get a lot more of it than other propulsion technologies. the only existing ion engine i know only produces thrust equal to a sheet of paper sitting on your hand but it was in a satalite with very limited power generation capasities with the solar panels. If you hook it up to a reactor and maybe redesign it nessarry to handle it it should produce much more thrust. enough to replace current ways to move around hard to say with the weight of a reactor. The big problem is that you're throwing individual atoms around. 3rd law of motion is what we use to move things, and individual atoms just don't have the same "oomph" as giant clouds of pressurized gases. But you cna throw them for a lot longer. We've made probes with far more powerful thrusters. Heck, even Deep Space 1 had them for maneuvering purposes(BTW, DS1 isn't a satellite, as it orbits nothing). But they run out of fuel faster than the ion drive will(and yes, teh ion drive WILL run outof fuel. Every ion leaving it was stripped from a "fuel block").

Actually, they also don't use them because they're disk-space hogs. And in some games they have trouble maintaining continuity(example: Parasite Eve 2. Every FMV with a weapon shows Aya wielding her starting pistol, regardless of what you have equipped, or in storage). As for the too much either way argument... Metroid Prime and Prime 2 are raw game engine. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Same for PN3's (very rare) cutscenes. If the game engine is high-enough resolution, FMV is just a waste of disk space.