ComicKaze

I will say Tom Cruise because he's both a bad actor and a totally stupid and crazy person in real life for buying into and being fanatical about scientology.

Damn Right! Top Gear is a Bad ASS show! Jeremy Clarkson (though sometimes his statements are subjective) is a very good judge of cars, he doesn't descriminate by what the badge says but whether the car meets it's intended purpose. If anyone wants to read some of his articles on cars go to http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,12529,00.html . Very good stuff there 343276[/snapback] The interesting thing I've learned about Top Gear, is how much Honda is the geriatric brand of the UK. Whereas elderly Americans drive things like Lincoln Continentals. Old people in the UK apparentely love Hondas and they have a total old people image in the UK. That's hilarious when you consider how much of a youth-brand Honda has always strived to fill in North America, especially with the extra helpings of rice and budget.

Which was the "Anime Style" episode? Not Chinpokemon but the one where they buy magical weapons and then they get reanimated in anime stylized versions with a cool Japanese theme song? Another one is Southpark Is Gay where everybody becomes a metrosexual.

The only things I liked about it. 1. My favorite Canadian band, Platinum Blonde played a rock band or aliens or something in one episode. 2. Adrian Paul - His crappy TV role before assuming the mantle of Duncan McLeod THE HIGHLANDER - which he followed up with the crappy TV role of Tracker. 3. Theme Song is cool.

I'm guessing Picard's Stargazer was a Constellation class from the Excelsior era. What's a CA?

For this scale, they should have had internal lighting. They've had it for smaller scales.

Okay, I got Lost Coast fixed, seems like drivers were conflicting, had to run driver cleaner twice. Anyway, a 3200+ A64 and a 6600GT DOESN'T MEET MINIMUM SPECS? That sounds pretty fishy. I'm running a 2500+ Athlon XP (well overclocked to 3500+ for XP's scheme), and an X800 XT-PE AGP and I'm getting 25-35 FPS with 2xAA (Adaptive AA registry hack on), 4xAA 1280x1024. It works great. And the only real story is that your mission is to disable a Combine Artillery weapon that's firing into the town. You never get into the town or anything, you only get to explore a bit of the cliff-face, a church, that's about it. It's a very small level. Longer than 3 minutes but not very long. It's fun though, I missed playing with all the physics in HL2 and you actually use the physics to jam up the gun which is fun. Basically just a tech demo afterall but looks nice.

I played it with all settings full except the FSAA, it was at 2x, mine's usually at 6x, at 1152x864.The HDR was too much i guess. I had the same crashing problem too. My X800 was OC'ed and was playing everything fine except Lost Coast. I un-OC'ed it and it ran with the FSAA turned down. Owell, it was pretty fun. I had fun knocking the combine all the way down the cliff. 340949[/snapback] I'm running an X800 too, but flashed to XT-PE. Maybe I'll downclock it but my pipes are unlocked. I tried turning down the AA too, oh well, I'll try really knocking all the settings down but that doesn't make sense that the HDR is caushing actual crashes, it gets 24FPS at 1280x768 for the short time I am able to play before it starts freezing my computer.

Lost Coast is consistently crashing on me. My setup and overclock has been running everything I throw at it stable for months. Played through HL2, FEAR, Quake4, and spent several hours in COD2 last night. But when I start Lost Coast, I'll get the sound-stuttering HL2 used to give me, and while I can stare straight ahead in the game with no issues, as soon as I start looking around, or go closer up to something, the game will freeze everytime after a few seconds. I've gone and underclocked my components, turned off CPC on my ram, gave my ram more juice, underclocked and reduced voltage to CPU, and tried various clocks on my X800. No dice. Everytime I run Lost Coast, it just crashes very quickly as soon as I move the mouse and walk around for a bit. I don't know what's going on.

Its out today. Man I keep hitting shift to sprint but not finding it there.

AVP would work, but they need to do it in space, in the Aliens timeframe.

Well, he looks like he has all his fingers. So definetely Dark Tower I type of scenario. I guess I should read them again. I read up to 4 and then stopped and completely forgot everything from the stories.

Man... why is it that every Asian-American actor who actually manages to become well-known for a role that breaks ethnic stereotypes turns out to be gay? First B.D. Wong, now my dear Excelsior captain. -Al 340344[/snapback] Well you could kind of tell from "The Naked Time" when Sulu went crazy and took off his shirt running around the ship with a fencing foil. Then Kirk just hit him and he totally crumpled limply.

Well this is a fun thread. So uhh...anybody have any idea if I can replace the reflective TFT LCD in my Neo Geo Pocket Color with a backlit one?

The emmy award winning character he plays on Boston Legal currently, where his other associates are Odo and Murphy Brown.

At first glance, you'd think he's a genius at getting himself typecasted over and over again. First Kirk, then T.J. Hooker, now Denny Crane. But the reality is he's just playing a lifelong roll as William Shater as everybody and the character is just getting fatter and more indescribible in behavior as we proceed along the story.

That's awesome! Except that must be the Reba West Minmei - need to get her totally drunk to sing.

Shout-outs to Penguin and Mr. March, fellow Calgarians. Just zoom in all the way to your city until the red markers are separated from each other and mouse each to see who they are.

thanks for the mp3, I lost my copy awhile back, hmm, should look for other songs, I love early 80s - I don't even know what to call this genre. Synth New Wave?

I'm mostly complaining about CG as in the process of coloring anime these days. And I enjoy many modern animes like Yukikaze and FMP. Unnaturally smooth gradients in the digital sense result from technology not being able to properly reproduce a proper color depth for the gradient. This is a completely different thing. If you switch your desktop from 32-bit color to 16 color with a gradient background, you'll see the same banding. Nonetheless, this is still unifrom coloring. I'm talking about when older animation styles tending to have very differnt colors run right up against each other instead of having a smooth transition in the shading. No, I do not expect perfect animation. Many of my favorites are old shows with very bad animation. I guage things based on the overall artistic aesthetic and I simply do not like the art styles of either GiTs or Macross Zero though their stories have quite a bit of merit. It's quite silly to actually say that the animation is of a higher quality in Daicon IV as it's obviously not. It's mostly still frames of badly drawn sci-fi imagery from the early 80s imposed on each other in an old dissolve effect. Daicon IV actually has a lot of inbetween frames that aren't very well drawn but the action is so frenetic you never see them. I meant quality in the sense of artistic quality (which we all know is a matter strictly of opinion), not technical quality. I'm talking about artistic style and that's simply a frame that shows off the kind of coloring and shading that I prefer. Notice how I'm talking about how much ZZ's animation is attrocious in the actual post? I love super-saturated colors. I love stylistic reflections off metal. That's all I'm saying. As for my version of a modern ZZ, I spent a lot of time on it and I didn't do anything in my mind that was negative or overtly biased. I tried my best to make it look good and a reproduction of what I see in modern animation, giving it as many positive attributes as I could think of. I just changed the unnatural reflections to proper matte color gradients like on metal. Gundams should not be glossy like they appear int he 80s. It's just what I see in most animation today, and I tried to make the background be more integrated with the foreground. I'm not arguing that it's any worse. Old anime's tending to have acrylic background paintings that looked completely different from the foreground, and when you actually had part of that background animate, all the detail would be lost from it completely and it'd turn into a of super-saturated cel of one bright color. I'm saying, I don't like how new anime looks, not that it's bad. That's all. It really bugs me and drives me nuts, but I still watch new anime.

-double post sorry

These days, CG still sticks out like a sore thumb to me. When I saw Gollum, he just stuck out (I don't like CG in movies either - all hail Batman Begins which used as little CG as possible - Batman hanging off the monorail was a real stuntman on a cable on a long track - and Nolan even went as far as to locate an old photographic developer to develop the film process he used - vs. Mr. Lucas who shoots everything digital). I didn't like LoTR at all. I kept imaging how the scene looked with the actors walking around sets pretending Gollum was there. I prefer Christopher Nolan's take on man. CG expressly used only if it fits the film and used with extremely subtley and prudence. But anyway, I do like some modern animes like Yukikaze, FMP, etc. I just really yearn to see some coloring and details like in older animes and especially high-budget anime movies of the 80s and 90s. But that era has passed, nothing that belongs to it exists anymore. I also miss the lighting effects, where they actually cut a shape matching the light in the cel and light would shine through a filter through the plate while photographed.

Okay, I'm tired of explaining my opinion on why old and new anime are different to most people (especially new anime fans)...so I made up this image. Now the original is a Gundam ZZ shot from a cel from the opening sequence (I believe), but I've spent some time maniping the image so it more resembles current day animation styles. Remember, this is only a general comparison from my artistic point of view of how the 80s image were to look if somebody animated it today. I realize that ZZ's animation was usually attocious due to very low TV budget, but even then, the higher quality frames (not the inbetween frames) still had some of these attributes, especially the metallic reflections that I love so much. I'm not saying that either is superior, but I prefer the older style. It's just what anime means to me. Do you guys agree with this? You could say that the new Gundam Zeta movie would be a better comparison - but only if you used the high quality frames from Zeta because they are mostly integrating modern animation with general TV budget clips from the original. It's possible to achieve the same quality of mechanical motion and reflection in the old style of animation, although you rarely see it because it is very expensive to do. The coloring method is mainly what I'm arguing, and not the realism of the actual physics of what's being animated. There's certainly more stylistic interpretations of anime, where they apply the usual anime exaggeration to the anthropomorphosizing of robots - classic example, VF-2SS in the title sequence of Macross II striking it's pose. But I still prefer that, to seeing actual CG models with computer generated cell-shading applied to textures. I'd love a best of both worlds approach. Where CG would be used for blank wireframe models, but the actual animation is hand-drawn and colored with some allowance for artistic exaggeration or stylism here and there-> but that will never happen.

That's a 5 minute short, that is well known to be a labour of love on the part of its creators, made for a fan convention. It's good. I've had it on my computer for years, and I love to watch it every so often. Nearly half of that 5 minute animation is still frames and a panning over the outline of a vegetable shaped spaceship. Additionally, a good half a minute to a minute of this animation is reused footage from the Daicon 3 opening. That leaves us about about a minute and a half of truly excellent animation mixed with about half a minute of minimalistic animation towards the end. All of this is wrapped up with an uplifting song and some very nice editing. Now normally, I wouldn't be so critical of this animation. It's trully excellent work and I love it a lot, but you insist on comparing it to 10 years of animation. So we've got here about a minute and a half of truly remarkable animation, on the other hand there's the second Ghost in the Shell movie. Sure, very heavy on the CG, all digitally coloured. Still, I bet you can find more than a minute and a half of hand drawn animation that rivals or exceeds that found in the Daicon 4 opening. That's using a movie that I felt the best feature about it was that it didn't suck as much as the original GitS movie. Dredging through Wasted XIII, Macross Zero, the recent Captain Herlock series directed by Rin Taro, and any Miyazake movie made in the last 10 years, I'm certain you'll find plenty of 2D animation that is equal to the Daicon 4 video, and you'll find it in greater quantity. I agree 100%. However, 99% of the time, hand drawn mecha are poorly drawn, horribly animated. 99% of the time, hand painted cells mean inconsistant colours, miscoloured cells, missing colours, and overall cheap looking. Need I sit you down to watch some AnimeFriend episodes of SDF Macross? How about the original Gundam series? The 80's Tetsujin 28 maybe? The thing with CG is, it is easier and cheaper to produce something that looks better than 2D on a limited time and budget. However, it is more difficult and more time consuming to produce something that looks exceptional, than it would take with 2D methods. On digital colouring I have to disagree with you even more, though. In the hands of people that know what they're doing, digital colouring can look better, and more consistant, easier and cheaper than hand painted cells. The problem is that when people with questionable colour theory skills are given an unlimited pallette of colours. They make their linework really dark, they make their colours really bright, and they do nothing to break up large expanses of flat colour, or unnaturally smooth gradfents. That's where the problems comes in. Finally, as has been pointed out, if you think all old anime was filled with tons of excellent motion, it's obvious you've never studied animation. Anime has always made use of limited animation techniques, such as still frames where nothing but facial features move, or maybe some limited arm movement. A big part of the reason so much western animation was done in Japan was because of how cheap it was, a big part of why it was so cheap (other than that they pay their grunt animators starvation wages) is that they cut so many corners. The philosophy over there has almost always been, very pretty imagery done with limited animation. This opposed to the western philosphy of making the artwork simpler, but giving it more motion. 339071[/snapback] Yes, but your examples are all pretty much the late 70s/80s low budget series. You have to admit that the quality improved considerably up through the 90s. And I don't really care, I just love hand-drawn anime, even if it looks cheap. It screams character to me while CG seems flat and lifeless. I'm entirely superficial in that I'll not be able to enjoy an anime much if the animation style is too modern. To me, the net effect of using computers has caused the more lower budget shows - no matter the quality of the storyline) to look EVEN cheaper because it allows them to take even more shortcuts and the artists can be even more lazy - plus now most of the CG colorization is farmed out to Korea and China these days. AND I LOVE UNNATURALLY SMOOTH GRADIENTS. Most anime isn't striving to be realistic. What I loved about 80s animation was the bands of color, the super sharp contrast, the super-saturation of colors, the brightnes, the energy, the feeling. Even down to the gritty pencil and pen outlines where you can see a grain against the characters or grit in the cell against the hand-painted or watercolor background. That was just beautiful art. Now with CG, the background and foreground all melt into each other and I just can't stand it. I don't like my anime like this at all. And I don't know what your definition of quality is but I can't rate Macross Zero or GiTs anywhere NEAR the level of animation done by the oldskool core of Gainax for Daicon IV. There's personality and character in their art. GiTz and Macross Zero are overly polished to remove any sense of the artists so that the whole thing just blends together and it seems like a boring CG puddle to me.

Hey it's a big deal. Even Bandai's Gundam Z domestic NA release forgoes the proper opening and ending themes because they are too cheap to pay royalties to the artists. Last time I checked, there wasn't any great demand for these two obscure 80s tracks.