JB0

Was anything noteworthy cut ASIDE from the lesbian cybersex? Though knowing those 3 pages were there DID add a semblence of sanity to Batou's appearance and Motoko's reaction.

There's a greater concern - and that is that games without licensed NFL logos and the like won't be able to compete. If that turns out to be the case, if the mass-market is more concerned with having the real teams and players than with having a quality game, then the competing games may be produced on lower budgets, or not at all. And if EA doesn't have any serious contenders they need to compete with in the real of football videogames, they're less likely to spend a lot of effort making their games better. It's more likely they'll continue milking their existing code for as long as they can. That's the real concern, I think - that this exclusive license will result in a lack of competition, and a lack of competition will result in a lack of innovation. That assumes that people really HAVE gotten dumber in the years since the SNES and Genesis. ... Well, that or football fans are dumber than hockey fans. Personally, I don't give a crap about either game. Just not a sports person. I'm working on the assumption that people WILL quit buying EA's games if the quality goes down the crapper, and WILL turn to unlicensed alternatives that have the features they want(I assume that the game is more important than the label). Sidenote: the numbers I've seen say that North America is roughly 50% of the video game market. Can't recall where I saw that, though.

Mmmm... Dammit, I never picked up a copy of Arc the Lad Collection.

Good call on the Yamato. Nostalgia only takes you so far, and even as a kid with a Transformers addiction(and Robotech and Voltron and GoBots and...) I was always disappointed with the lack of articulation in many of the old '80s toys. Currently my Jetfire is on display solely because it's a nice counterpoint to my Gakken Legioss. I just don't have anything else near that size for my shelf o' mecha, and the Legioss can't be allowed to dominate it so utterly. Even then it's a poor comparison, as the Legioss is just so much more flexible. And quite a bit more bulked up. I have nothing to offset the bulk(even if Jetfire's FAST packs weren't all busted up). Once I can afford to grab a 1/48, Jetfire's getting packed away somewhere.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Gods, that's funny. I guess they're doing a "best original shot" to "worst new shot" comaprison here.

Either BluRay disks or HD-DVD. Depends on who wins the upcoming war. Neither of which bears any advantages for programming orignally created for televising in NTSC format(or PAL, for that matter), their sole purpose being to allow the storage space needed for high-resolution digital TV formats. No matter how many times you reprint Macross, it's still going to be the same product, designed to be viewed on an NTSC set. The current US DVDs represent the upper limit on the material, really. There's no evident compression artifacts, and the image is as clean as it's going to get. All you'll get from high-def encoding of it is more pixels per film grain. The original source film has an upper resolution limit, and it's quite low for a TV production, especially one from that time period. It's like watching Sorceror's Apprentice in Fantasia 2000, if you saw it in an IMAX theater. The grains in Sorceror's Apprentice were the size of my head. And not visible at all on any of the new clips, which were originally designed and photographed at the higher resolution needed for an IMAX movie. For a more hands-on example, take a large bitmap, like a wallpaper. Your choice. Scale it down to ... I dunno, 128 pixels wide. Consider this the photographing of the cels. Now scale it back up. It doesn't look any better scaled up, because the original data is lost forever. Except that you can revert to the original wallpaper in this example. The original cels for Macross are likely lost forever, and even if they aren't, no one is going to re-assemble and rephotograph each frame. Even if they did, it wouldn't be the exact same show. Cels wouldn't be seated exactly the same, for trivial starters. Undoubtedly, some recycled footage scenes would be swapped out(so that, for example, you don't have ground combat in space). And we most certainly wouldn't see the photography errors present in the current version. But even then, the drawings are very low quality by even modern NTSC animation standards. There's just not going to be much improvement from going back to cel and rephotographing, beyond the removal of photography errors. Macross simply doesn't NEED more disk space than is available. ... Unless you do something like remix the audio into DTS ES and create an entire new video track rendered entirely in CG and meant to be viewed at 1080i. Which won't happen, because Kawamori doesn't wanna touch it again and Harmony Gold ... well, do we WANT them remaking Macross(ignoring the question of if they even CAN make deriviative works legally)? Or put the whole thing on one disk, which won't happen because all businesses want to squeeze your wallet for all it's worth. You won't get an entire series for 20$, because they already know they can get more out of you than that.

I think that's phonograph records... Hypotehtically a DVD should last longer stored horizontally, as it puts less stress on the glue holding everything together. But it's such a trivial diffrence that it doesn't matter. Store them like you do CDs, unless you're the barbarian that stores CDs in large naked stacks.

So you're buying to resell later? *shrugs* To each his own, I guess.

Well Tecmo Bowl did have real players, but it had original teams which were based from the real ones. Just what I said.

Too rich for my blood. Besides, I've never understood the whole "mint in sealed box" mentality. I buy stuff to use, not to sit in a box under a shelf collecting dust.

Maybe I'm getting the totally unlicensed and original Tecmo Bowl mixed up with the licensed Sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl. ... Wait a second... just looked it up. NES Tecmo Bowl had real players, but not real teams. And Super Bowl had both(it apparently takes a license from the NFL to use teams, and a license from the NFL Player's Association to use players). Hence the confusion. Adn the original arcade Tecmo Bowl game used neither.

The problem is that we all remember the unlicensed games and with the exception of Cyberball, they were nothing compared to Tecmo Bowl and the earlier Maddens (with real players). It is a lot more fun playing as Favre or Owens, seeing their faces and hearing the commentators discuss them than playing as 'generic' #4 or 'generic' #81. The thing that really sucks is that Visual Concepts was just getting the ball rolling with the casual gamers. Oh well, here's for another 5 years of mediocrity. Didn't Tecmo Bowl only have team names, not player names? Yes, they did... but as I understand, according to the licensing deal that EA made with the NFL, only EA gets players, stadiums, and TEAMS. So not even the Tecmo Bowl formula would fly now. I'm just saying, it's proof that real player names aren't needed, as that was insanely popular, and remains what many consider the definitive football game. Sounds good to me.

Sounds more like a good reason TO do it to me...

You can make the best, most fun football game ever, and you can have every major gaming magazine and internet site agree that it is so, and it will only sell a tiny fraction compared to the one with the license. This is because gamers might enjoy the flexability and creativity in a non-licensed game, but the majority of the football games seem to be bought buy people who's idea of channel surfing is going back and forth between ESPN and ESPN2 and who only buy sports games or even just football games. Even though I desperately hope Sega comes up with SOMETHING in place of their NFL games, lower sales will likely discourage them from doing that, and instead they'll most likely focus on what sports they do have licenses for (for now). Besides, what's the best non-licensed sports series you can think of? Am I wrong to suggest Mutant League? I might as well point out now that Mutant League is one of EA's properties. I was going to nominate Atari RealSports Football for the 5200, actually.

The problem is that we all remember the unlicensed games and with the exception of Cyberball, they were nothing compared to Tecmo Bowl and the earlier Maddens (with real players). It is a lot more fun playing as Favre or Owens, seeing their faces and hearing the commentators discuss them than playing as 'generic' #4 or 'generic' #81. The thing that really sucks is that Visual Concepts was just getting the ball rolling with the casual gamers. Oh well, here's for another 5 years of mediocrity. Didn't Tecmo Bowl only have team names, not player names?

Man, you people are crazy. EVERYONE knows that Jetfire is the best Valk ever. Him and Starscream.

YOU raped my childhood! Yes, you. Sitting behind your monitor, so smug and secure. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE!

I hope it curshes both. ... But it won't hurt either, as the people they market to don't give a crap. They believe you should take it up the rear and ask for more. And no, I don't just mean die-hard sports fans. Many many gamers believe that they have to roll over and accept whatever is offered to them, even when it is known to be a horrible product.

And yet some people still cling to the belief that there will someday be an MPC Beta. Hope and belief are diffrent things. No one EXPECTS it to happen, but a lot of people WANT it to happen.

What's all this about monopolies, and EA has killed the entire market for football games? Am I the ONLY person that remembers the days of unlicensed sports games? Just because you don't have XXX team's logo and Joe Blow's latest stats doesn't mean the game is any diffrent. In fact, they tended to be BETTER games because they were worried about making a good game, not one the licensor would approve of. ... Of course, they also weren't relying on names, stats, and graphics to sell. They were TRYING to sell games based on good solid gameplay. And at one point after licensing had taken over the sports game industry, unlicensed hockey games were considered superior to licensed ones because the NHL, in a brief attempt to clean up their image, forbade licensors to include fight sequences. In a subgenre where fight sequences were often more elaborate than the actual sport part of the game, this was a recipe for disaster. They relented when it became obvious that people EXPECTED fight sequences in their hockey games, and wouldn't buy ones that didn't have them. Fact: all this means is that next year's football games won't have "your" team's logo in there. Big deal, get over it. If it means that much to you, well, they'll almost GUARANTEED to include a logo designer anyways, so you can make your own logo, name your own team, and VOILA! You're playing as the Vice City MegaPimps or maybe even the boring old *insert REAL city/team here*.

Just mentioning it in case someone forgot/missed it. Personally, I'd like to see both shows out there again. With the option to view them in their original form. ... But then, I'd also like to see them show up in Super Robot Wars. And that won't happen either.

Didn't they also say there would NEVER be a remastered Robotech, that it wasn't possible, that all the edit lists had been lost? And that Director's Cut Robotech COULDN'T exist, as the televised version WAS the original cut? They have no credibility. Stuff they say can't or won't happen has a nasty tendancy to happen. Stuff they say will happen... doesn't.

I DO seem to recall wading into Hell. I don't recall having to die first, though. ... Wait... you DO get killed at the end of episode 1. Unless that's shareware only... It's been AGES since I've played Doom. Much less the full version.

By contrast, if I'd seen the movie first, I never would've looked at any other Ghost products. I didn't think the movie was just a bad Ghost in the Shell movie. I thought it as a bad movie.

If they want to handle the original works like they did Rawbooteck, we're overdue for a new version. I hereby predict that HG ordered them to cease production and begin work on a new, dubbed version.