1/1 LowViz Lurker

But that's what I mean by marketability: Would you rather watch a show where the main character is trying to reason with the villain when the villain is just acting and 'playing a game' to get close enough to cheat you? Or one where the guy actually sees the evil for what it is and acts on stopping it go any further? There are other people's asses on the line which is why the loner is more appealing. It's why characters who know better, never trust the by-the-book way of doing things (they are just boring and whiny and come off as mindless robot) and can go beyond what others have told them is right or wrong ways of behavior by thinking for themself and thier own instinct. My only goal was to point out that people prefer those who use common sense to solve the problems rather than playing into the hands of the enemy by taking a soft aproach. It's why Wolverine get his own movie because he is more marketable. Maybe also give the others more space to develop, but I think as a lone character he can survive because he fits the tough guy archetype. Same reason why a person might worship a sporting superstar and ignore a great poet or painter. It's just that maybe the feat of courage or physical strength is more exciting to watch. They want to see someone able to cut through the BS (no psychoanalysis) and fight the villain who they know is able to outsmart the authorities which "normal" people in the story can't because thier abilities are average. Like in macross plus you can think of Dyson as a reckless irresponsible pilot or see him as a person with unique ability that allows him to overcome problems in his own way to save people. (he lectures Myung on this later) The weakness of him is that he probably hates teamwork (it might seem 'weak' to need help, james bond doesn't get rescue, he is usually in control and able to rescue others) but this need to go against the limits (break the rules that ordinary people must follow and are "safe") in extraordinary circumstances are necessary for an audience to give a poo and to be of any use in the real world. In a way he is pioneer we all "look up to". That's what a hero is (it's my own definiation): they can go above the ordinary and stand out amongst all the other heroes. Usually the tough characters hate others getting in the way of something because it might slow them down. eg Luke isn't just a jedi tied to rules, but is defiant enough to act on his own and solve the problem his way. All the jedi are heroes but just not as "marketable" as the main character. The main character is asked to kill his dad. As if. A knight would do this for his "duty" a common sense person would say "forget that, I'll do this my own way". Similarly Dyson in macross plus isn't going to just accept that the ghost is too hard and whine about it, he will take the risk and do the dangerous thing and still manage to beat the odds (and save the girl on the way) despite it being against common sense and against orders to take those risks - just to prove he is better. He is more "marketable" this way because it makes him look strong. Like a cowboy who has taken on all comers and survived by his own ability. (the loner doesn't like recieving help, or told how to do the job) The weak thing would be to be a good little boy and listen to the manipulative black guy (who probably only cares about himself looking good) and that would be the end of the story - but it would be crap to watch. And lastly wolverine is popular because he can challenge the idealism of all these "intellects" who are less likely to be a good judge of a situation they are not experienced in. (too focused on other things) It might be a "narrow definition of hero", but in order for a character to stick out from the rest, these are things important to most people and whether they "like" the character or not. It's not that I don't give a poo about the other xmen but that by focusing on wolvy I think they have positioned themselves to capitlise on his tough guy attitude to things and attract the most people. If it were a movie with cyclops I think I would be bored because like the hulk I don't think he is that interesting a character imo. To illustrate what I mean there is an episode in the cartoon where beast is actually in jail for a crime he didn't commit. He chooses to serve time in jail, despite this. Magneto offers to break him from the jail, but he refuses and decides to stay. Now there is several reaction you can have: 1. he follows principles this is admirable. 2. he should do everything he can to prove innocence 3. "what a boring bookworm, I would never read his comic! Why doesn't he just break free? He is innocent dammnit" I would probably be thinking along the lines of the 3rd option because, the other two would be boring to watch. It doesn't translate well to an action movie. It's not a popular thing to do. It's not "cool" response to take. Whereas a character that breaks the law, (realising the system failed) but does things his own way is a more appealing character for a comic. (these are just my own theories where I think the best characters tend to be those who have control of thier own fate, and get revenge on the characters that had set them up and managed to gain the leverage by exploiting the imperfect system to gain an unfair advantage using thier cunning. In many way I think this is why I like to think Guile was the major character in the street fighter animated movie because we all can sympathise with him from the start, whereas Ryu wasn't likeable because there was no reason to really care if he lost or won any fights and there is no emotional charge - merely that he is the main character in the game.)

Ok but it shows that the leader that can't see beyond thier own idealism and selfishly believes he is the bearer of all truths is misguided. (because he is a hypocrite) He may be compassionate but so is Magneto, or even Darth Vader. That can be a flaw that allows the enemy to exploit as a weakness that must be pointed out. Whereas the "team" wants to make thier leader happy and do good, the lone wolf is able to challenge that leaders' methods by at least questioning: was this the right way to go about this mission? Was what we are doing really the right for my friend (leaving him) or just escaping to save our own skins for someone else? (xavier wants to use wolverine to help stop magneto but won't let wolverine get sabretooth, even though sabretooth is lying and "acting" and able to break through the "justice" system through trickery or good acting in front of the crowd changing his behaviour while no one is around to see his true color) IMO being grounded in reality is one of the important skills and can come from experience or just having sharper and more accurate judgement skills. This is why people like the anti-hero. Just because Cyclops or Xavier have higher rank, they will automatically think he is just responding by letting anger "control" him, denying emotion when it is convenient to thier own ideal or way of doing things. So naturally they come off as the "do gooder", and the more straight-thinking ones come off as the violent one who can't control thier anger or is too mean or harsh. A good example is Judge Dredd, where he can come off as almost too scary. Anyway, while Xavier is telling wolverine that it is bad to let your berserker rage to get out of control, the enemies themselves are able to take advantage of that situation (being too soft is not good either) and harm others. (ie in that particular instance in the cartoon, we see jubilee buys into sabretooth's act too and sympathises with him for a while in a moment of poor judgement allowing her to get herself into a dangerous situation) After that event we see the bad side of xavier: even though he is a psychic he could not have seen all ends and predicted that a situation like that could have gotten out of control and learns something from that mistake. I'm not saying he is not a hero too, but that a more marketable hero is one that thinks with sharp instincts and can make the right judgements when apropriate. So a mass murderer that laughs at the system that allowed him to get off easily and keep commiting more crime and murdering and slaughtering more innocent people, is much easier to hate, and an anti-hero is much easier (and preffered) to like in this situation than a softy, or a by-the-book hero. Because the latter assumes playing by the system will always get the person and is perfect from the begining. They are just "going through the motions" as if they were part of the machine itself rather than thinking, "is this method the best?" "are my ideals flawed?" "do I have a right to judge others in how they go about crime fighting and use them, when I myself failed to protect my own people and even conveniently break my own rules to get my arch villain?" The anti hero can see all the flaws from experience from fighting the criminal, and is sick of seeing the bad guy have his way each time, so because as an audience you are cynical about the system yourself, (and the hypocrisy in the idealist) you are more likely to want to root for the "ass-kicking" type of characters like batman, dredd, or wolverine because they use common sense rather than abiding by some stupid rule "just cuz its there". Often we make the assumption that the anti-hero is the guy with no compassion when the opposite is true: he is just choosing to fight in his own way and method and looking at it from experience. (ie that the character has gone up against some evil and cunning villains before and can smell the BS and trickery and wants to nip it in the bud early ignoring the beauracracy and getting things done.) By going underground for a time they might be able to get more work done than if they had played into any traps. If taking the defensive posture and assuming you can't trust something until you can confirm it is worthy of trusting, (through experience and knowledge of that person's past) you ensure much more safety than being optimistic about what you don't know and believing them on thier word. That's one of the important skills of the team, wolverine is able to sense and sniff the bullshit and act as a early warning bullshit detector in that sense. (because the world isn't perfect, people don't play by the rules, you need gut instinct and experience to guide your action) That I think is the reason people are attracted to the antihero characters because they look at the world through more realistic perspective and not blinded by this belief you can shoulder the whole worlds problems yourself and take respeonsbility for everything. People can take responsbility for themselves through mistakes and experiences and listening to thier instinct. As the rules can be bended when it suits the idealist, they sometimes don't want to see what is infront of them until it is too late. Xavier is trying to capture this dangerous "Magneto" guy when all this time one of his henchmen, Sabretooth, is right at your doorstep, and you have gone soft on him and played into Magneto's scheme all along, and even prevented the antihero from protecting the team from him, allowing things to get even worse and put Jubilee in danger. I think that is why in a team you need one character that can check what the others are doing is really the right or wrong thing and even choose to be against thier way of doing something when it goes against thier better, more experienced judgement and sense of morals. (ie abandoning morph because you are scared the casualty for taking the risk might not be worth it - a brave heroic person would be reckless and choose to go against the book/orders/wisdom which is usually the trait of the more popular heroes who have the skill to beat the odds. What might seem reckless and tactically stupid isn't reckless if they are doing it for the right reasons and makes for a good show)

When I first got into them I was disapointed at having missed out on Roy Focker vf1S. There was all this excuse that if they re-release a roy the diehard collector would no longer have incentive to collect valks anymore because it sort of devalues the toy for them and they would no longer want multiples so it should stop and never reissue anything ever again. Seems ok to me so far.. (people still demanding more vf1) But I do admit that had I not been able to get a valk I wanted I would have settled for one I didn't want (ie something like buying a CF in abscence of vf1s, so maybe it works out that because everyone has different things, it makes them more valuable and people would be prepared to pay higher overall price for each one regardless of how unpopular it is but more because of collector "rareness" and that overall that it is a pain in the ass to find) But the ironic thing is I ended up with a low vis (these were still not that hard to get at the time) in abscence of the VF1s (sold out but now common).

For all the complaints about wolvy hogging the movie, realise that he is one of the main characters in the x-men everyone likes. In the cartoon when it was believed morph died I sympathised poo loads more for wolverines courage (wanting to go back for his friends) than cyclop's duty to follow orders and complete a mission. The impression I get is that cyclops is the goody-goody teacher's pet who everyone hated at school when he would dob their classmates in, while wolveringe is grounded in reality and will face any fight despite danger to himself. Cyclops methods of course being the more practical, but still being less likable traits in a "hero". The one weakness of wolverine is he hates teamwork and like all the "cool" super heroes/heroes like batman and spiderman, he is a loner. All comic geeks love the loner characters more than the boy scout types. Even if cyclops is cool I can say he is less marketable to comic fans who go for the "clint eastwood" tough guy as thier model. What makes the loner "cool" is that they are survivors who think independantly of the group and can sometimes come in handy when the leader of the group is a hypocrite. (ie even in the cartoon wolverine was proven right when xavier tried a soft apraoch at trying to tame sabretooth, knowing absolutely nothing of SB past actions and being wrapped up in so much idealism he ignored the safety to the others for his dreams) Xavier is a dreamer living in a fantasy, whereas Wolverine is the common sense one when it comes to sniffing other people's bullshit (when the vilains take advantage of Xaviers softness) or using gut instinct. When they others accuse wolverine of being too agressive they automatically dismiss it as him just liking violence and overlook that he is the more perceptive of the group. I can agree that I don't think wolverine should be leader, but he should be the focus because that is who most people see in a hero. (there is more to it than super powers, but things like giving up ideals to protect and help a friend, seeing through other's deceptiveness and calling them on it, not mindlessly agreeing with orders given above just for brownie points, choosing to fight one on one instead of needing help from others - this is a thing all boys go through to prove themselves at some stage in thier life -, and niping a problem in the bud before it has a chance to gets worse and the villain can get away on an easy punishment while laughing that the leader is a softy and won't really do anything to stop them the next time, etc) Those were the qualities that I liked about wolverine in the cartoon. Unlike the other members on the team, (who are just going through the motions and taking orders) it was always wolverine do the "common sense thing" and going after the bad guys the old fashioned way by hunting them down and beating the poo out of them. (if he can) Xavier's main weakness is that just because he is the founder of the school and he is nice, that niceness can sometimes be taken advantage of and endanger people and it was shown he was not "always right" and his judgement was often off because he was blinded by ideals and poo.

I hope we dont see stuff that is too fancy and stylish. More real life and believable. Like when duenan grabs, punches, rips the arms off the enemy mecha, trips it off balance while shooting the body several times and holds it at gunpoint that is enough. Only do moves that are efficient and quick and would seem practical. I was just watching Final Fantasy Advent Children and although I can understand RPG characters in fantasy world doing these floaty jumps, jumping off walls (even flying?? and continuing to fight while suspended in midair) and wielding weapons so large at quick speed that it would rip thier arms from thier shoulder sockets, I would hope they tone down the stylistic action and show restraint. The action sequences in that are cool (the sword fighting is my fave bit) but I would hope they show that element of training and skill and common sense more than making people so super duper special that they have time to literally dodge bullets like it was nothing and move with fancy twirls and spins and stuff as they are floating in the air. (yes i love me my HK action movies, especially those jackie chan police story ones, but just don't make duenan too godlike you know what I mean? Make it more patlabor in terms of danger level and realism level) Duenan != cyborg like Motoko. Injuries, and punishment for bad decisions should matter. Unlike in Ghost in the Shell, there is no comfort in knowing you can just wreck the your own body and even "die" (later eps) to trick the audience, ...and then just get the body replaced, making them virtually immortal unless you cut thier head off; robbing it (life) of any sense of value and taking out any sense of danger )

Sword Fights: kenshin ova (but I think Samurai Champloo comes close at the last ep - very interesting finishing move ) Hand to hand: Street Fighter Animated movie (chun li vs vega was very cool especially how it flows: with each move being a counter to another move, and the counter itself being countered and so on..) Mecha: macross plus (its the changing of modes and missile swarms - and the fact the mecha don't move like poo But I do like mecha brawl once in a while with each mecha taking damage and it being a contest to see who's robot can take more damage and not fall) Epic: Macross DYRL. The explosion at the end was cool. Although how did hikaru survive it? The best fights to me are the ones where you really don't expect the character to win. They get out of the fight through a combination of luck/circumstance, skill, and cunning. I think ninja scroll was good for the fact that each character was using a combination of either magic, thier environment, some strange technique (the big guy with the boomerang) or just plain melee attacks. (the bloody brawl at the end on the sinking ship) So there was an interesting combination of styles.

Thanks, just what i was looking for.

I've seen enough pics of the garland. Was wondering if anyone had impressions?

Enforce? Are we going to get banned if we disagee? But yeah I do kinda think the make up has been layered on a bit for the shot. I think as a rule they should show them without makeup so we get to know them better as ordinary people. IGN is a wierd site imo. It should just be a game site and they should have a seperate site for other stuff rather than trying to integrate all these unrelated things with games. Plus they really need to get rid of those ugly ads and make everything free. I only very ocassionally go there as a result of the ads and stuff.

If you've played the macross arcade game (vertically scrolling shoot em up) you'll know what I mean. In it the gerwalk mode has this beam of death that fries anything in its path. The battroid uses mainly missiles swarms (in spirit of the gbp) and the fighter has a spread shot. All made up for the game. Anyway I just thought that if it ever gets to a point where humans become so advanced I wouldn't be surprised if we could reverse engineer the stuff on the afos and miniturise it. (in macross zero the afos has the sdf1 style main cannon, and can fold as well as 'fly' with some kind of anti gravity that it generates by itself. When they talk about 'organs' in the compendium I am assuming the master geneticists that the PC were, must have somehow been able to create organic technology that generates the energy the way you see the organic robot in evangelion. All the functions of a PC (like Sara being able to fly = anti-gravity, Sara being able to create the barrier with her mind = Full barrier, and the afos just folding with no fold booster and being semi-organic 'robot' in nature,......all stems from some kind of life force. That is: if a person can do this using thier own abilities like sara maybe the PC understood how it worked (it wasn't "magic" to them, but a kind of science) and were able to grow it, or manufacture it without machines. Making part machine/part living organisms that were virtually living aliens with thier own life.) If the afos was an organic robot, (not an actual living organism) you could say the PC just copied what existed in nature and made an artificial version. (that there were creatures/animals/aliens that had anti gravity naturally, or that could lift objects with thier minds, or that could generate a field around thier body for defence) and then they reverse engineered the animals they studied and made mechanical versions of them. The evil series of soldier being more organic types. (With the alien theme being them genetically modifying organ parts of one thing to interface with another non-organic thing. Brain and nerves connected to the ship in DYRL for example) If you think about the variable wing, it is similar to actual bird. You could say it was inspired by nature. Now this links up with my theory that because exedol and britai at some point believed the legends of "super humans" in SDF:Macross when he and britai were watching kaifun's kung fu movie, that maybe if the zentradi were scared of the movie, then maybe, just maybe they had been told, heard or witnessed these super human types with powers that can allow them to generate that energy naturally somehow? (ie magic to us) that somewhere in thier memory is the record of an actual event locked away somewhere? (similar to how the zentradi and meltrandi in DYRL movie had a memory of an ancient song locked in thier brains and when it was sung it erased the mind conditioning their masters had purposely used to brainwash them into becoming warriors? The music is like a key to unlock that door that releases thier original personality, like a hypnotist clicking his fingers and the person awakening from sleep. The aliens 'forgot' the song they once knew even though it was locked away somewhere, but in fact it was locked away on purpose by design as a control measure.) We see creatures (protodevlin) in macross 7 able to withstand the environment of space, not to mention shoot stuf from thier body and teleport at will as well as fold items and lift things with thier minds like magic. It is hinted that britai is partially able to withstand punches from a robot and that he is stronger than his inferiours. And Sara and Mao displays some of the magic ability in macross Zero. So why not the next step of evolution (PC being the ones who helped evolve us from monkeys) be that of a god-human? One that can fly with anti gravity generated naturally, one that has mind powers to lift things using psycho kinetic ability, one that can create a barrier like sara in macross zero etc and actually support the ancient legends of the 'super human' that britai and exedol were so scared of when they saw that Kung Fu movie in SDF:Macross with the little guy beating up the giants and shooting energy from his fingers and poo? I think if Sara was allowed to float down, lift rocks, and control machines using her brain alone, that there is something to this theory of the super man being real as opposed to myth in the macross universe. (as shown in the kung fu movie of the guy flying up into the air and beating the giant) And after Exedol and Britai saw this image instead of naturally dismissing this like any ordinary person would, that may have unlocked a memory of actual PC using powers like that for real. (as opposed to the aliens just being stupid which I admit is the more logical explanation since they probably don't know what entertainment is) So instead of having giant soldiers with naturally-strong bodies they somehow were able to create "super men" with compact bodies that could channel energy say from some other dimension with thier mind or something. (teleport or fold as if it were a mere magick spell or effect the world around them like the guy in akira)

Is there like a box set of the whole tv series which I can get? (link with pics of what to look for would be nice.) I hate buying stuff as seperate volumes..(too lazy to make repeated trips to store)

It's a big shame. I like patlabor and lodoss war. I also liked la blue girl. (don't know about yaoi stuff since I'm only into girl-to-girl type porn ) Maybe his friend might end up on an IGN article for girls "VA hunks" hahahahahaha...

I guess it will some day get to a point where the humans have mini SDF main guns like the afos. (ie gundam wing style beam rifles ) Eventually the fighter will be like on the DYRL macross arcade game where the gerwalk mode has a massive beam but only for a short time or something. heh

That robot mule is scary. The way it autoadjust as the guy kicked it was cool. And here I thought all robots needed to have chunky feet for balance. They need to make a variation that runs more like a dog at full speed. (ie hind legs spring it forward, front legs land while hind legs swing forward and hit the ground...and the cycle repeats to cover a great distance) Does anyone get reminded of the AT-AT from star wars?

They look ok to me but isn't ign a game (geek ) site? I think they need to eventually put some naked pics up of the women to boost hits. Then later pretend a sex vid was stolen from thier home and they make money from that by pretending there are people selling them on the internet without permission. (when it is them behind the stunt all along) They would make enough $ to quit voice acting imo. Most of the people here are probably into the fictional hentai babe anyway.

Mr March: There's a good review of episode 1 on eurogamer: http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=65249 Very positive impressions all around. (usually they are pretty harsh critics) the reader's comments section might be worth checking out later too These are my thoughts. I just realised one thing though is that as you get older rather than going for those massive epic games that take up a lot of time, people today might like the idea of only a few hours of a game at once. When I think back to all the games, like the adventures like Zelda and stuff, I know I would never be able to commit that amount of time to the game again. ie You beat them once, and then maybe play a second time after knowing what to do and how to solve a puzzle or dungeoun just to get 100% of all the secrets you missed, ..and then never touch it again because of how long the thing took. My main fear is that all games might go that approach. I don't think I mind so much that it exists but that maybe the old "sequel as a whole game" idea might be avoided in favour of just patching parts of a story together without a feeling of completness. (eg you want to know what happens to a character so you keep playing, but say the quality of the game drops a bit or they pad that part with heaps of time consuming stuff that isn't enjoyable. But you force yourself to keep buying and buying to get a proper ending anyway) The one advantage I can see is like with a tv series maybe you can get more indepth into the characters of the story and this will make genres that are not normally epic (fps) seem more RPG-ish in scale. (ie there is a major twist worth caring about after developing the characters, and over time, people start playing the games more for the story itself - a bit like me with final fantasy games - I am not as much a fan of the gameplay and system itself, but tag along for the ride to see "what happens next")

What do you all think of episodic gaming in general? Is that a good thing or bad thing? I personally wish they would make whole games, an expansion, and like after 2 years you get the sequel which itself is another whole game. I personally hope episodic doesn't take off (and companies don't jump on the bandwagon) and that it kinda fails.

Nice. Looking at all the galleries and transformation sequence now. The head looks nice (how they got all the stuff inside and you can see it through the visor. That is what could have been done for the 1/48 vf1 ) 20 years? Sh!t you're patient!

Dude start a banpresto collection. That will cheer you up. Most people are probably happy to own just one yamato (superior to all previous vf1 toys) when they first begin. There are people starving in africa who haven't even heard of macross.

The hands look nice. I wonder why they made one finger fixed pose though? Wouldn't it have been better to let it curl up to make a fist?

Very cool. Thanks for that. Can't wait to hear impressions of the toy.

The angel birds are in the first ep at the flight show aren't they? I wonder if the aerobatic valkyrie pilots themselves dressed up as school girls in keeping with the theme?

Some movies are not movies that are designed to be good to rewatch. You see it once, then maybe a second time to analyse it, and then think about it afterwards and that's it. Terminator 2 is another story. I can see the cyborgs actually doing stuff like beating things up, shooting, driving a car, piloting a helicopter, riding a bike and using the shotgun to stop another terminator, and many other "cool things" (disguising itself on the floor, opening the elevator by morphing hands, sliding into cracks, impersonating people to trick them) that keep you from getting bored. There are explosions, fights, car chases, stunts (the bike one crashing into the helicopter to hijack it was 'cool') and many other exciting things like long winded shootouts and miniguns. That's more what I like. Leave the brain at the door, and just relax. I really hope the Battle Angel Alita movie is done up in a action movie style with good pacing. I don't think I can go back to movies like BR anymore. I love it as much as the rest of you but do not want to see it remade. (just hope they do the final cut and leave it alone)

If it is non-macross, something from patlabor would be nice. I like the alphonse. (an unbuilt model kit sits in my desk drawer) Which is why if they do something that isn't popular, only aim for the serious collector. Forget the small scale stuff if you are going to do better versions in bigger scale imo. I for one hope they do the sv51/52 for macross zero. As long as the bad guys have cool mecha too, then I think there will be interest.