Radd

They can't unless they licensed those rights separately, or if Tatsunoko also had international merchandising rights to DYRL. I'd say the latter is more likely, but I'm just guessing of course.

Better drop it or he'll have your hide.

Dr. SMOOV is a true American hero.

It's not that people hate all-caps, it's just that using all caps to write a book, magazine article, or web post looks really kinda silly. It's generally a (useless) tactic to make one's post stand out from a crowd (akin to "shouting down opponents") and generally employed by younger, less rational contributers. More often than not, it speaks negatively of the person doing it. Here's where the argument falls apart. BW did not deal with HG. HG dealt with Tatsunoko. The court decision did not "change" the contract between the two, it clarified the rights of the individual parties as observed through the eyes of the law. If Tatsunoko sold HG rights that they themselves did not own, then yes it does affect HG. HG does not have those rights and their only course of action would be to work with BW on BW's terms, or sue Tatsunoko for damages, which of course they don't want to do. I'll borrow your rental analogy. You rent a room. Turns out, the "landlord" didn't actually own the building, and had no right to rent the room to you. Uh-oh. The actual owners come around to find you in their building. You try and argue with the real owners that they can't "change the deal" and you're going to be very disappointed, as well as homeless. It's just as likely that BW doesn't see the north american market as being worth the legal battle. This is a tactic that is used in Hollywood, as I'm sure you know. A company threatens a bogus lawsuit to fend off a competitor. It doesn't matter that the person threatening has no legal standing, it will still cost a lot of time and money to get it all cleared up. In Hollywood, the usual outcome is the studio being threatened with legal action either backs off to avoid the hassle, or settles with the company tossing around bogus claims. That is an absurd statement. There's no polite way to say it. A movie or a videogame is a derivative, not merchandise. The thing is, videogames (like comic books) are considered merchandise under American law. Movies, however, are correctly categorized as a derivative work and there is simply no credible way to argue that it would somehow fall under the category of "merchandise". What it all comes down to is what the companies in question do. HG has been conspicuously backing away from Macross. The stories, designs, characters, everything. An odd thing to do, considering it's the most popular part of the franchise. BW has been neglecting the north american market. It seems both companies are biding their time, avoiding a potentially costly legal showdown. So, while BW hasn't budged. HG has been backing down. At the very least, we can infer that HG does not have all the rights they've been claiming and that the Tokyo Circuit court case has affected their actions, which beforehand were more aggressive. Beyond what the actual companies in question do, everyone we argue here is pretty much moot.

I'm not certain what all the arguing is about. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. Clearly, if HG has the rights they claim, they will exercise those rights to their advantage. They'll want to play up the most memorable and popular segment of the original series as much as possible. If they don't, then they'll likely try to distance themselves from Macross as much as possible, by creating sequels that push the designs that they are more confident regarding their ownership (likely MOSPEADA since Southern Cross is pretty unpopular among fans) , redesigning any Macross era characters that do appear so as to be barely recognizable, and generally bending over backwards to avoid pushing BW into an unavoidable legal showdown HG cannot win.

How often have reviewers been kind to his movies, though? If I'm recalling correctly both "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" got a lot of poor reviews, and those are two of my favourites. "12 Monkeys" wasn't bad, and "Fear and Loathing" is probably my second favourite Gilliam movie (I have trouble deciding if I like that or Munchausen more). I haven't seen "Tideland", but "Brothers Grimm" was a paycheque movie where Gilliam had relatively little control. Hardly a basis for saying he hasn't been good since '91.

Wedge didn't first appear in FF7, either. He's been there since at least VI (though I saw an article saying he was there at least as far as IV, as a Redwing). Also, Wedge is also always with another character with a familiar name, Biggs. Though in the American release of FFVI they renamed Biggs as Vicks for some reason. Throughout the series, several airships have been named the Enterprise and the Falcon. There was also an airship named the Nautilus.

I think the Robotech movie idea came to be more from the 80's remake mania on the part of Hollywood than it did from HG or Frontier. Everyone is trying to find a Saturday morning cartoon they can turn into a blockbuster motion picture right now.

And right about there is where the whole thread goes south.

Just goes to show you there are no honest companies in this industry. S'why I'm not big on undying loyalty to any one console dev. I've loved and hated all of them at one point or another.

I sometimes wonder what 360 failure rates are like compared to the PS2 failure rates. A lot of people I knew were on like their 4th PS2 by 2001. If I recall, though, Sony denied the high failure rates and wound up losing 2 lawsuits over it, so that should maybe count as at least one blunder. Microsoft at least acknowledges the failure rates, and don't they make an effort to repair/replace them at either no cost, or just shipping?

Oh man, I can't wait to hear more on this. The X-wing/TIE Fighter series has always been my alltime favourite. I hope they expand and improve on the melee options from Alliance and make the online multiplayer not suck. They actually removed some camera options from multiplayer, the ones I used the most in single player, like "follow target".

Heh. I know that the landfill story is just that, a story, but E.T. is still considered one of the worst games in history. Personally, I'm not certain it deserves the title. I actually enjoyed it when I was a kid. Then again, I don't recall the bugs that apparently plagued it. Though it's true, the licensed shovel-ware of the time, and many of Atari's other practices, really killed the industry. Remember the Kool-Aid Man game?

That wasn't really a blunder, though. The Dreamcast was great, had great games, and was pretty fantastic when it came out. The problem was Sony's advertising and the fanboy fervor that grew up around it and swept the PS2 into console dominance. Sony really drove the era of bullshots to new heights with implications that the PS2 would be able to pull of graphics I'm not certain even current gen consoles could manage. They were using test footage from the Final Fantasy movie for f----'s sake! Saying, "The PS2 can do this real time!" And people ate it up, even when the early games weren't even as pretty as Dreamcast titles. I still occasionally run into people online who drunk so deep of that kool-aid that they will still argue that the PS2 could do better graphics than any of that gen's other consoles. If anything, you could call the mob mentality of gamers at the time one of the biggest gaming history blunders outside of the Sega vs. Sega war. Total case of the tail wagging the dog. Going back further in history, I forget if anyone brought up landfills full of E.T. cartridges yet?

Tytania always seemed like it was on the verge of something great, storywise. It never got there, though, like the whole series was just a prologue. I didn't hate it, but I was disappointed. It felt like the first two episodes of LotGH stretched out into a full season. Too much fluff, not enough content. I think the people behind the show just never let the major events in the series (of which there were several) come off like they were big events. I guess it's more like the first story arch of LotGH with all the suspense and drama sucked dry. It's a show I very much want to like, but story-wise, it falls flat. Also, didn't care much for the animation, 2D or 3D. LotGH was never about great animation, but made up for it with a very distinct look, and awesome story and characters.

I'd love to see Mikimoto involved in another Macross series or movie. I still need to check out scanlations of M7 Trash and Macross the First.

I once heard that Gunpei Yokoi wanted to design a virtual reality home console to replace the SNES. Nintendo approved the project, but then continually cut resources to Gunpei's project and then began making unreasonable demands, such as making it a portable system. The end product was not at all what Gunpei Yokoi had wanted to make, but a product of trying to meet these demands without the necessary support from Nintendo. When it bombed, he was the one to take the fall. No idea how much truth there is to that, I've never been able to find any sources to corroborate that story with.

I recall Clarke writing that Kubrick changed the destination to Jupiter because they couldn't come up with a Saturn visual that he was happy with for the movie. This, in turn, had the happy side effect of making the story a little more streamlined and Jupiter's moons provided more to play off of in the sequels.

Call me crazy, but I'm fairly certain Pete is joking. Ludicrous, I know.

I understand your point, but it doesn't change the fact that the action was, by far, pretty uninteresting. In the books, there were other kinds of aliens, and though it's been probably over a decade since I actually read the book I recall it seeming as if the bugs were described as being more advanced, with more variety amongst the ranks, than is shown in the movie. At the very least, the actual battles in the books were described in such a way that would have translated pretty well to the big screen. There's more to battles than a flood of identical bugs flooding a large open plain while G.I. Joe jumps to the walls, firing wildly into the mass of insectoid bodies, whether your talking books or novels. Nothing wrong with enjoying a bad movie. I enjoy plenty of bad movies. I could see people enjoying Starship Troopers as a bad movie. I didn't. If it were more camp, and less everything else, I'd probably love it. Neil Patrick Harris being a more central character could seriously have 180'd my ability to enjoy the movie. Doogie makes everything better. Space Nazi Doogie, fighting with his physic powers to save the human race from the bugs who were fighting back against our invading them? That could have been spectacular. More of the propaganda, less of the 90210 space GI Joes. Still would have been a bad movie, but it would have been a gloriously bad movie!

True enough. The second game was ok. X-Com with uglier sprites. I could deal, tho. After that, every game was a mess. Add the Master of Orion sequels in that category, too. The first game is genius, simple and addictive. I'd have games that lasted weeks, and other times I'd spend most of a day blowing through a game and starting again. The sequels just kept adding more micromanagement, making things more complex and unintuitive. Took all the fun right out of the concept. I'd kill for a clone of the original game ported to the DS or iPhone. Maybe just pretty up the graphics a little, add more customization options to the races and ships? The gameplay of the first game was just perfection.

I'll also add that Starship Troopers was just a bad movie, regardless of what one thinks of the book. Personally, I thought the CG was overrated even when the movie was still in theatres. Too many identical bugs running around made it visually uninteresting. The attempt at plot was so stupid I still mourn the braincells sacrificed in watching it. The campiness might have saved it, except there was far too little of that in comparison to the just plain brainless frat boy style action and tortured attempts at characterization. Also, maybe it's just me, but since Robocop, Verhoven just comes off as if he were some other poor schmuck poorly mimicking Verhoven. I love Robocop, I love that style, but Verhoven just never seems to hit the right notes like he did back then. As for 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's my opinion that the book and the movie compliment each other perfectly. Like Gui points out, they are both the product of Kubrick and Clarke working together, bouncing ideas and feedback off of each other. I love the book, and I love the movie. And I enjoy each all the more for the existence of the other. They each excel in their format, and accomplish what the other cannot.

The Sega vs. Sega blunder was the biggest I can think of. The Saturn was a great system. Sure, it couldn't do 3D as well as the Playstation, but 3D in general sucked for that entire generation, with few exceptions. 2D games looked great, and there was a lot of untapped potential to continue the trend of better and better looking 2D games. And no console in that generation did 2D as well as the Saturn. Out of the entire generation, the Saturn's 2D games hold up better to the scrutiny of age than most of the popular 3D games of the time. Let's face it, the prettiest parts of Final Fantasy VII were the prerendered backgrounds and the FMV cut scenes. If the 32x had never happened, and the Saturn was properly supported, we might have seen more done with 2D gaming (which Sony was famously hostile towards) even into the following generation when 3D gaming really matured.

I thought the reason it looked worse on the PS3 was the PS3's RAM limitation? Either way, the 360 is a much more popular, and therefore more profitable, console to develop for. So game developer's hands are tied if they want to make the money. Not a blunder to put your effort where it will show the biggest payoff.

I'll just say I strongly disagree with some of the examples others have given and leave it at that.