Mr March

News just broke that Zack Snyder has been chosen as director for the new Superman movie (yes, the same one being produced by Christopher Nolan). Zack Snyder as Superman Director on /film Weirdness

Just saw a trailer for the Iron Man anime, which I understand has already been aired in Japan this month. I see Funkenstein has already seen it, but this is actually the first I've heard of this "Marvel Anime" 4-series project. Anyway, here's the trailer I saw (not sure if it's been posted prior): Iron Man Anime Trailer Looks very visually impressive, just hope the rest measures up.

LOL Thank you Zor Primus, that was hilarious. Ah, the good bad old days

Pronouncing it that way makes it sound vaguely familiar. It's probably some 1980s garbage that's being remade into an overblown Hollywood crap-fest. Well, happy birthday anyway

What the hell is "Macross"?

Preach it, brotha! After the first six months, I was ready to write this year off as one of the worst years for film in recent memory. Now into the second half, it's becoming one of the strongest years for film in recent memory. Nearly every film I see now is vying for my top ten of the year. "The Social Network" is another winner.

I watched "The Social Network" this evening and was amazed to walk out thinking this was one of the best movies this year. More than amazed; astounded would better describe my reaction. Didn't think much of the idea about a Facebook movie until really good word of mouth started circulating on the film sites. Even then I was hopeful and somewhat excited, but still skeptical. No longer. What makes a movie about Facebook worth watching? Because it has very little to do with Facebook the website and everything to do with a Shakespearean tale of friendship, trust, betrayal, sex, honor, reputation, loss, success, class, status, money and hate that just happens to be set in the age of the internet. This film is based on a foundation of clever storytelling and brilliant dialog and never fails to deliver on both. You will come out of this film endlessly quoting witty lines with a grin from ear to ear. The acting is incredible and I hope this cast is recognized for their talent. If you don't know any of these actors before, "The Social Network" is sure to make them known names now. While the writing from Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing) is definitely the biggest selling point of this film, David Fincher is certainly up to the task with everything else. The movie looks beautiful, the editing is perfect, the shot choices are flawless, stage direction is utterly enthralling, set design is amazing, special effects are nearly invisible and the soundtrack from Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) is truly inspired scoring. If you thought this movie was a bad idea, you owe it to yourself to see the film. You'll be pleasantly surprised and totally entertained. 5 out of 5. Go see it!

Some are still debating Evangelion isn't mecha? Wow. Talk about fighting a lost war long past... But I gotta say, you may just be onto something big with your "mechanical" idea. Gawd knows there's been many who've made a profit by presenting their customers with what is basically a big dump. I say change your name to G. Train Shyamalan and you've got a legitimate hit on your hands

It's horribly written, their definition of mecha is random and the criteria is rather arbitrary but I suppose it's not the worst list as far as "favorite lists" go. At least they remembered to include the venerable VF-1 Valkyrie, thus denying us our opportunity to scream bloody murder The Gundam and the Evangelion definitely deserve their iconic status, though why the Zaku somehow deserves it's own rank on a list that grouped all the Transformers in one go is rather silly. To me, one clown-colored robot is pretty much the same as the next, so I can't really condemn/condone any of the super robot choices. I will say it's good to see Gunbuster on the list, which always deserves some mention. From my own personal bias, I feel the list definitely needs more Five Star Stories and Patlabor

OMFG I LOVE IT! I CAME! NERDGASM! BEST THING EVAR!!! Hehehe, your newest picture is very good, Talos. I just wanted to post something other than the usual stale compliment and couldn't think of anything better at the moment

Hey, at least be thankful we got two new destroids out of Frontier (the Monster and Cheyenne II). It could have been worse, like the mockery they made of the original destroids for their tragic appearance in Macross 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuCMkjvmTdU

Oh, speaking of Galaxy Class ships, I loved the Galaxy from Privateer. It was basically the Millenium Falcon of the Wing Commander universe, but I felt it was distinct enough to look good on it's own terms. A fun ship to play and not a bad design either.

Yes, the Cylon Baseship/Basestar and the raiders are great designs. I'm fond of most of the BSG-reimagined designs.

I for one am most thankful Trek is under-represented since for far too long it was horrendously overexposed But speaking of the so far under-represented in this thread (and a favorite of mine)...

A rather odd reaction to the design. If one can accept under-wing hard point mounts in Macross (and reality), I can't see why the rocket launchers (they are 150mm unguided rockets) would bother anyone. But I suppose we all have our quirks, like cockpit designs I was going to mention this, but then figured the tech/canon nazis would cry foul. Surface to orbit in under five seconds obviously requires the Millennium Falcon to be going many hundreds of kilometers a second. Course, the Star Wars films never depict any star fighter pilot under acceleration stress (only jostled by impacts). We're simply left to assume technology somehow protects the crew from turning into paste when their craft accelerate to lightspeed

I think we're diving away again. I will briefly say you're stumbling upon one of the inherent contradictions of the Macross fiction: the Valkyries don't need transparent cockpit canopies. The Valkyrie pilot doesn't suffer any appreciable deficiencies operating the Battroid vs. the Fighter/GERWALK. Even if Macross distinguished performance between natural vision vs. electronic operation, it's not an aspect of the fiction that impedes my suspension of disbelief. For me, appreciating a fictional space craft design depends upon criteria like whether the creators leave pilot visibility to the imagination of the audience or supply a visual cue which can explain away an obvious physical flaw in the craft's design. That's it. Back to some spacy goodness I do enjoy, the UD-4 Cheyenne Dropship from Aliens

Just to clarify, this discussion is going beyond my initial criticism and into detail such as reaction time and situational awareness. I'm not concerned with such scrutiny, especially if it can't be quickly described visually. If some series/film/video game creates a space fighter without a traditional transparent cockpit canopy, all I need to see some BDI-like system or Wrap-Around Imaging system ala Macross Plus. The super robot cockpit if you will, for lack of a better term. A virtual environment display is an easy and visual way to substitute for the obvious lack of a high visibility cockpit. At that point, my suspension of disbelief is satisfied and the design can be embraced. If there's never any need to show the cockpit interior at all, so much the better. My imagination for necessity can fill the gaps in the fiction (like in the case of the Hiigaran Interceptor I posted from Homeworld 2). Btw, the audience can see advanced tracking technologies onscreen in Macross, it's not some obscure written piece of trivia. My whole point was that a visual cue be provided to explain things to the audience without exposition. In Macross, enhanced technology is shown visually in the animation. In fact, as early as DYRL a scene depicts Hikaru gazing rearward in his VF-1 Super Valkyrie to see an enemy Reguld displayed upon the inside of his cockpit canopy despite being physically obscured from sight by a FAST Pack booster. Point is even in rare circumstances where the pilot's vision is obscured, the technology in Macross is there to pick up the slack. Is electronic tracking worse than direct line of sight in the Macross universe? I doubt it, given how well the Battroid can be piloted on electronic tracking only. Digressing, I personally don't have any issues with pilot visibility in Macross since nearly all the Valkyries feature high-visibility cockpits by default. Even if a given piece of fiction does show the technology is wanting, I can usually substitute my own imagination in to take up the slack. It's when the viewer is hit over the head with a glaring problem in fighter design (to use Battlestar Galactica Reimagined as our whipping boy yet again) that it becomes difficult for me to ignore the issue and enjoy the physical design.

Ghost Train For the most part I agree with your ideas, which is just one of the reasons I give the older classic designs a pass. But even after Star Wars, space craft design was already becoming more practically informed. As early as James Cameron's Aliens we started seeing space craft with more practical considerations. By now, I kinda expect more thought to be put into space craft design, especially since our generation is typically creating most modern sci-fi. Btw, I doubt the pilots of FAST Pack equipped VF-1 Valkyries suffer any visibility issues since the entire inside of the cockpit is filled with volumetric images and other holographic tracking displays projected upon the canopy interior (a cockpit design motif that continues to be deployed even in the VF-25 Messiah in Macross Frontier)

Okay as per the OP, time for a rant about a dislike with fictional space craft Perhaps it's the attention to detail found in the Macross fighters that has spoiled me, but one thing that bothers me about fictional space fighter design is the lack of practical considerations like a HOTAS control scheme or even the mundane such as cockpits that fail to accommodate something as simple as all-around visibility. Granted, the case could be made that external cameras/internal monitors or virtual display of the external environment would make traditional all-around visibility via the cockpit (canopy) irrelevant. However, the fiction must explain all that. If we the audience/reader/player never see the inside of the cockpit for our fictional space fighter, I'm not bothered. However, once the interior cockpit is viewed, the fiction had best make sense or my suspension of disbelief suffers. Most of the classic space fighters (Star Wars, original BSG, etc) get a pass simply because practical detail was not a realistic consideration at the time or a failing due to limited budgets. Today, I accept no excuse for such laziness. I'm not even bothered by silly technobabble or other such overlooked mistakes in space craft design. The reason details like flight controls or cockpit canopies bother me is because they are all visual. We see them again and again as the series/movie/video game goes on. Especially those productions that spend a lot of time inside the cockpit of the fictional space craft, poor design simply calls attention to itself over and over again. The fighters of Battlestar Galactica Re-imagined particularly bothered me. Not only did their designs self-obscure pilot visibility, the cockpit interiors looked like they were informed by pre-1970s combat aircraft. So ridiculously anachronistic, even for a show specifically embracing a retro-technology style. For all the good those terrible cockpits did, the Vipers might as well have had propellers mounted on their nose Anyway, I realize it's mulling on minutiae about space fighters, when fighters in space isn't even a realistic concept. But we're geeking out about space creaft and why we like or dislike certain designs. So that's my beef

Caught me at a perfect time with this topic. I'll start posting some favorites and then talk about other topics in later replies. I just replayed Homeworld 2 and while I didn't much care for most of the designs from the first game (despite the highly imaginative detail and coloring) I felt the creators were really onto something with their designs for the sequel. Granted, the higher polygon count in the sequel made a huge difference, but the mechanical designs in HW2 were refined with more practical sensibilities. Some stellar off-the-wall concepts and shapes. I like so much of the mechanical designs from that game, it's a bit too much to post all of it here. It's hard to choose favorites, but today I'd pick the space station Thaddis Sabbah, the Hiigaran Interceptor and the Vaygr Battlecruiser. Speaking of Wing Commander really brings me back. Most of the designs have not aged well, but the Arrow still remains one of the best and most iconic ship designs from that PC game series. It's elegant and awesome in it's simplicity. Definitely a marquee mechanical design. One of the things I love about the design of fictional spacecraft is the sheer uninhibited imagination that goes into most of them. Hit or miss, it's one of the areas of creative commercial design where you can simply throw out the most bizarre and imaginative of ideas and see what sticks. Even a spacecraft design from a terrible science fiction film or TV series can often outshine the actual production itself. Of course, there are classic designs from productions such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Star Trek and such that are staples of sci-fi. But plenty of other fictional spacecraft can be impress, even something as odd and ugly as Serenity from the film of the same name and the TV series that spawned that film, Firefly.

A note about...the graphics problem with Homeworld 2 We may be off topic for this thread, but smoothly operating Homeworld 2 might be pretty important for those wishing to play this fan modification. So I found a solution online to the graphics problem I was experiencing. There is a display configuration for Homeworld 2 called "Vertex Buffer Objects" that for some reason is not supported properly with the ATI video card drivers. It results in graphic errors where ships are not rendered (appear invisible), backgrounds are blank (everything is black, except for stars) and nebulae appear as poorly drawn multi-colored objects. See pictures below (or the following links): http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/4661/homeworld2noships.jpg http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/2899/homeworld2rendererror.jpg To solve this issue, install the latest ATI video card drivers. Then, add the following line to the "Properties" run line on your Homeworld 2 shortcut icon (include a space after Homeworld2.exe): -noVBO I've tested this solution and it works perfectly. No longer any need for old drivers Major Focker Thanks for the description of capturing; would have been so nice if Relic included that information within the game manual So basically I'd have to scrap one of my own Battlecruisers to create a vacancy within the ship limit for a captured Battlecruiser. That explains why ship capture in Homeworld 2 is as useless as I've always thought, except under some unique circumstance, such as capturing a hyperspace-capable BC prior to mission 12. Nonetheless, I'll have to give this strategy a try and see how it works. I've completed the game and had a blast in the last mission. Poor Hiigara got hit with an Atmosphere Depletion Missile and lost 78 million people before the mission was over. Had to learn the hard way those stupid Pulsar Gunships can't even catch the missiles to intercept them. Sajuuk is so much fun to see in action. The beam cannon on the Sajuuk reminds me so much of the Macross main gun and it's got one helluva range too. I find it a little strange Hiigara only has a population of 180 million. That's like half the population of the US, but for the whole planet. But I suppose the population of Hiigara is largely only the remains of the Kushan population a few generations after the Mothership made planetfall. Guess all the Taiidan got kicked out

The difficulty of Mission 12 stands out so much simply in contrast to the rest of the sequel missions and the original Homeworld missions. Granted, the Homeworld games always were too difficult and the accessibility of the games suffered as a result. Yet while I personally found it only some minor inconvenience to play most of the harder missions over once or twice, Mission 12 simply seems way out of context with the rest of the series. I can understand wanting to build at least one real challenge that makes the player sweat, but then why not save that challenge for Makaan and the grand finale? I just think someone was asleep the day they had to play test Mission 12 There also comes a point where the player's style simply doesn't work with what the programmers expect the player to do to win. I've watched YouTube videos of players beating Homeworld 2 Mission 12 through straight up frontal force, using lengthy production queues to keep fleets stocked with new ships. But the actual combat is micromanaged to such a degree the action resembles a player at the controls of something resembling Street Fighter 2 rather than Homeworld. At that point I fail to see the worth of playing a "strategy" game if it's become a button mash or script race. But that's just me. Moral of the story, I'm glad Mission 12 is over and I can have fun again. I love Mission 14

Wow, it really was a stream of consciousness like a philosophy text. Very poignant and sad. I'm so sorry for the way in which he died. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Major Focker I've never managed a workable method for capturing ships work in Homeworld 2. I've no idea how capturing is supposed to work in the sequel, if at all. I can only use the Marine Frigate successfully for "event" captures as part of a mission objective of the story. The marine frigates (or MF...an appropriately vulgar acronym for this useless vessel) either get blown up as soon as they target an enemy - which means one must micromanage the MFs in order to avoid this - or the MFs just sit there inert after "capturing" a vessel. It's such a shame, especially after the ease with which one could capture and secure ships in the original game (which was a ton of fun). Nonetheless, I've finally beat mission 12 after a WAY-TOO-DAMNED-LONG 5-hour game. I will admit, the minelayer corvette added a bit of fun to what is otherwise one of the worst grind levels in any video game I've ever played. Watching an attack group of 3 enemy destroyers and a battlecruiser get reduced to 1 destroyr and one half damaged BC before a shot is even fired off is incredibly satisfying, especially on this level. I then played and completed the following mission 13 in about 20 minutes I swear, whoever designed mission 12 should be shot. It's a ridiculously annoying blemish on what is otherwise a great game. Big F I've never had any sound problems with the game. IN fact, the game will actually run with new drivers, it just won't "draw" any ship or detail properly. The frames and texture maps simply will not render, meaning all your ships are invisible (except for running lights). Also, the drivers cannot draw the nebulae, leading to a multi-colored array of what look like gouraud shaded objects stretching across the map. I'm just sticking with Catalyst Drivers 4.4 until I'm done playing the game, after which I'll reinstall current drivers. It's just inconvenient, but I guess for lack of a better solution, I'll endure it to play this amazing game.