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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the trailer definitely doesn't promise any trajectory changes. It'd be one thing if Picard were still the dignified, principled, moral pillar of Federation Starfleet he was in Star Trek: the Next Generation. TNG Picard would have had some devastating speech to give about an alternate past where the Federation became a totalitarian fascist state. Instead, we're going to have PIC Picard delivering an awful lot of entitled senior citizen whining. I guess the budget must be in really dire straits if they're having to set an entire season in the present day to cut down on the effects budget. Amazon must've slashed their contribution to Picard the way Netflix did after Discovery premiered.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I meant the franchise as a whole. It's a matter of record that the post-Abrams brand of generic dystopian fiction branded as Star Trek isn't doing very well. ViacomCBS had to sell stock to dredge up the money for Strange New Worlds, and they're already in such dire shape they're in danger of being found in violation of the terms of their merger agreement by the US Gov't. If things don't pick up soon, there might not be a Star Trek franchise left in a couple years. Star Trek: Discovery's on its third major retooling in as many seasons in a bid to fix what's fundamentally unfixable. Star Trek: Picard's on its second. Remember when this series was supposed to focus on the new characters, and not just be a badly-written TNG cast reunion with some hamfisted political commentary?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's a big steaming pile of Do Not Want. I've heard CBS is having trouble finding funding for Star Trek again... hopefully they'll start changing ears instead of flying her into the ground.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, Strange Machine Games is just a teeny-tiny "indie" game publisher that does small batch print-on-demand printing for its products. Look at the actual pledge tiers, and the reason the normalized average pledge is disproportionately high relative to the cost-of-entry is obvious. The book they're Kickstarting has only the remains of the die-hard Robotech fandom as a target audience, many of whom are buying the game as a collectible rather than a game, so they're using the same tactic that comic book publishers use to inflate sales: limited editions and cover variants. Of the 230 pledges so far, more than 10% of backers (26) pledged for the more expensive limited edition cover and 31% (72) pledged at tiers that offer two or all three cover variants. If you wanna make money on a small fanbase, that's one way to go about it that doesn't require a lot of work. (It's also worth noting that Strange Machine Games isn't really using Kickstarter for its intended purpose of funding development of a product... they're using it basically as a preorder vendor for an already-finished product that just hasn't been printed yet.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, if anything that Kickstarter's funding goal was shockingly low... so much so that it would've easily been possible for one person to fund the entire thing themselves. The funding trajectory strongly resembles that of RPG Tactics too. Extremely low backer numbers, but a disproportionately high average pledge. The entry pricepoint is effectively $60 (the tiers that get you a print copy), but the average pledge is more than twice that at $148+/-$2.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... in all fairness, the Robotech RPG Tactics game was always going to fail. Palladium's inept handling of the Kickstater only slightly accelerated the inevitable. The Robotech fanbase was never large enough to sustain a high cost-of-entry tabletop game like RPG Tactics, even before Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles ended up undoing what little gains Harmony Gold had made in brand awareness after relaunching the franchise in 2001. The game was ill-conceived, with a shortsighted choice of scale for its miniatures that all but guaranteed the game would never move past the Macross IP, and dogged by quality issues due to poor design and manufacturing. What ended up accelerating its swift demise was that Palladium's owner Kevin Siembieda judged the Kickstarter's success the same way @Podtastic did, by the raw pledge total. He was so blown away by the much greater than expected pledge total that it never really dawned on him that the pledge total was as high as it was because the high cost of entry inflated the average pledge size, not because there were a substantial number of backers. The belief that he was going to make megabucks on the game motivated many of the short-sighted, ill-considered decisions that marched the game the rest of the way into its early, and shallow, grave. He didn't set out to rip people off... he just didn't have a realistic view of the game's prospects. So he over-promised even more than usual regarding the game's readiness, overspent on development of the miniatures, rushed into production without adequate planning, failed to account for logistical costs like international shipping, and then when he realized that hed made a mess of its finances he tried to undo the damage by tapping into what he'd let the pledge total convince him was a massive untapped revenue stream in retail sales. By letting the raw pledge total bias his view of the game's retail prospects, he ended up betting it all on a nonexistent audience's interest in the game and losing everything. That's a good example of why, if your Kickstarter is developing a product for retail, it's so important to base your decisions on the total number of pledges and the size of the average pledge after normalization to remove significant outliers rather than the raw total pledged. Otherwise, you can end up making bad decisions based on metrics that are less meaningful than they appear. Getting over 4x your pledge target sounds impressive on its own, but if that goal is tiny ($5,400, equivalent to just 90 average-tier pledges) and the number of pledges needed to reach it is small, it doesn't mean much. Really, I'd consider it more of an indictment of their taste if they drink that charred-black mud masquerading as coffee than backing an indie RPG for Robotech's least-loved sagas. That... is a helpful attitude given the circumstances. When it comes to Robotech, keep your expectations as low as possible and you siginficantly decrease your chances of being disappointed.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Not exactly an impressive feat, given how low the bar was set. The funding goal was just $5,400... equivalent to just 90 backers willing to pay $60 for a physical copy of the book. As with the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter, the sum collected is misleading. They might be more than 4x the pledge goal ($23,520), but that's because the paltry number of backers (just 156, 70% more than the absolute minimum) are disproportionately pledging for the most expensive tiers.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I could get on board with that.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    To be surprised. Trying to predict someone who prides themselves on their auteur approach to their signature franchise feels like a fool's errand.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, for you to even pretend to behave like an educator even in jest is an enormous slur on the professional conduct of everyone here who is, or has been, an actual educator. Really, the only response that would truly do justice to what you've done is Jim Downey's line to Adam Sandler in the last part of the Academic Decathlon scene from Billy Madison. There is nothing in what you've said or done that bears even the slightest superficial resemblance to good academic practice. It's thoroughly obvious that it's just pretentious faux-academic garbage.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, this is a known in-joke inserted by Studio Nue as a reference to their other work. Specifically, that's a nod to Studio Nue's then-recent work designing the new (green) version of Phantom F. Harlock's signature spaceship Arcadia for the Summer 1982 movie Arcadia of My Youth. (Studio Nue had also designed the blue version of the Arcadia for the 1978 Space Pirate Captain Harlock series, but were asked to design a new version of the ship since the model kit rights to the original resided with Takara and their rival Bandai was the licensee for Arcadia of My Youth.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Thanks again for the info. Definitely gonna take the wait-and-see approach about the upgrade, but I'm glad to hear there are likely to be more updates to those libraries. It's about all that's standing between me and a no-doubt frustrating afternoon trying to make my old NES play nicely with my 4K QLED.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, the whole idea isn't exactly congruous... From the spoilers, it sounds like the movie's trying real hard to build a plot out of nothing but references to other Macross titles...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Thanks for the info. Yeah, the upgrade to the Nintendo Switch Online service definitely does not look like good value for money at the present time. I had the family plan so my brothers wouldn't have to pay for it themselves, and all in all I think I'll leave it as-is until they put something compelling or interesting into the Genesis and N64 libraries. Do you know offhand if they're going to continue adding titles to the NES and SNES libraries? A lot of it's kinda meh, but there are some gems hidden among the dross.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Oh my, yes. I enjoyed that one immensely. The manga's ending was a bit of a letdown, but the TV anime really does a fine job with the parts they adapted. Currently doing a rewatch of older Tenchi titles before we start OVA 4 and 5 now that they're finally available on streaming. I have to admit, I forgot how relentlessly horny GXP was... that series just would not quit with the fanservice.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Has anyone published a list of what all's available in the way of the N64 and Genesis titles? There was already a Genesis emulator for the Switch that had a pretty good library behind it... so I'm hoping there's no overlap between those two.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    No reason to, because it's not the contradiction you think it is. 😉 I correctly identified it as an in-setting kitbash that used whatever parts were on hand. He correctly identified the goal behind the kitbashing in-setting, which was to create a much more capable dedicated space Valkyrie. One of the beautiful things about these doujinshi showing kitbashed VFs is that there's plenty of in-setting support for VF kitbashing. It's been a part of the setting since at least the early 90's. IIRC the oldest example of a kitbashed VF is technically the VE-1 ELINT Seeker, which in some versions of its presented backstory from the early 90's or before cited it as a improvised model conceived aboard the SDF-1 Macross while out in space. The oldest in-setting kitbash overall is the Phalanx Destroid. This just looks... odd. Like a VF-19's wearing a weird flared 80's suit.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Not so much a "looks like" as a "was explicitly built with"... the VF-X3 was cobbled together out of Destroid parts and VF-1 hardware by the crew of the Macross in the FamilySoft games.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    "Chunky salsa". Though !y favorite way of putting it is "a flight suit full of gazpacho".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Not the first time that's been done by a long shot. The old FamilySoft Macross games from the 90's had a prototype VF that was cobbled together from VF-1 and Destroid parts called the VF-X3 Medusa.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, the human body's g-force tolerance is actually somewhat better in the reverse position (facing away from the direction of travel). Of course, with 5th Gen VFs capable of anywhere from 30.5-40G of acceleration, the ISC becomes very necessary to avoid G-LOC, injury, or worse.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Combatants Will Be Dispatched. Not a bad series, though this one feels like it could've been made longer instead of ending where it did. It definitely has a vibe similar to KonoSuba and Chivas 1-2-3/Sorcerer on the Rocks.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Or, at the very least, an unconscious and completely useless passenger in a very expensive missile.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The figure given for the 5th Gen VFs is the ISC buffer capacity only. The structural g-load limit would have to be a lot higher since even the humblest of them can easily do 30G+ of acceleration from a standing start.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, you are indeed correct. My mistake.
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