ewilen

There are some good mecha sequences in M7. The ones that stand out in my mind (I may be forgetting others) are the one(s) where Millia intervenes in a battle using her vintage VF-1J, and the much later episodes with the attack on the Varauta base. If you really don't think you'll like the series, you could just download those episodes. Check the synopses over at mahq.net to see which ones they are.

The PS3 will blow the XBox 360 away in technical capabilities, but reports are that MS has done a better job so far with the online gaming human interface. That shouldn't be too hard to fix, though. Also, I hate Microsoft. Assuming MS sells theirs at a loss, like they did with the Xbox, I'd be tempted to buy several thousand and dump them in the sea, or turn them into Linux servers. (That also assumes I have unlimited cash.) But I'm not going to spend $400+ on a console, so it's unlikely I'll buy any of them in the short term.

Great discussion, very informative. I'm guessing that Nobunaga TV series is this. There's an old Mac game called "Nobunaga's Ambition", by the way. I remember that I enjoyed it at the time.

I guess I was out of town when this first came up. Count me interested, but not certain--depends on the price.

I hated the Keaton Batman and I wasn't that crazy about the bits & pieces I saw of the others. This one actually looks pretty good, although I agree about the Batman voice. Putting Katie Holmes in it also helps since my wife is a fan of hers from Dawson's Creek.

One of the most thrilling moments of my life was walking up a hill in San Francisco when a Blue Angel passed directly overhead, seemingly bare feet above the buildings. It wasn't just a roar but a loud buzz that nearly had me hitting the deck. I try to catch them every year at Fleet Week.

Many interesting comments to which I'll add a few drive-by observations/comments/BS-- 1) Not only are games cheaper in constant dollar terms (due to inflation) but arguably they've improved compared to their predecessors. Yes, I know, Star Raiders was kickass on the Atari computer and all that, but who can doubt that the brilliance of those golden oldies would be lost on all but a few afficionados compared to the top tier of PS2/Xbox/GC games. Therefore, by the econometric method of hedonics, the price of games is deflating even faster. 2) As our good friend AgentONE would point out, market research should allow companies to forecast the profit from prospective game projects based on multiple variables including retail price and production costs. That is, (a) the more you spend on making a game, the better it will be. (Not always true, sure, but it's a plausible relationship.) (b) The better the game, the higher the demand. (c.) The higher the demand, the more you can charge for it without hurting gross sales. The calculations can also be done backwards so that game companies can work backwards from the price of games to find the optimum investment to maximize profit. Among other things, this means that, all else being equal, keeping prices up is a way of keeping quality up as well. 3) But for flagship games like the Halo series, there are other factors which probably keep the price down. These are "killer apps" that help popularize consoles, so the console manufacturer has a strong interest in making them affordable. I have little doubt that Microsoft accepted a less than optimal profit (maybe even a loss) on the Halo series, and Sony would be smart to subsidize the publishers of certain games as well. 4) About piracy, one might expect that raising prices also increases the incidence of piracy, which could make price increases self-defeating. But in some markets, piracy may thrive even if prices are nominal, below the minimum needed to support even minimal game development, and "honest" buyers may be unlikely to turn to piracy regardless of price (although they may opt not to buy). Conversely, it's not clear how many additional copies of a game would be sold if piracy was impossible. Certainly not as many copies as there are bootlegs--essentially the same argument that's going on regarding mp3's. So it's really pretty difficult to assess the impact of piracy on sales, and from that, to pricing and profitability. If we accept that games are cheaper in real terms than they were in the old days, we can note that piracy was harder back then (since games used cartridges not discs) but the prices were higher. Hm...

They're not too expensive if the price doesn't scare away so many consumers that it hurts the manufacturer's profit. Personally, I wouldn't pay $50 for a videogame, but one of the benefits of getting into console gaming late is that I can start with the classics which now sell for $10-$20.

If you can get it for that price, you might be able to flip it on eBay and make a little money. But more likely than not, it's a mistake at BBTS. Around here, the MPC's aren't well regarded. You might look into a Yamato instead. http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=13716 http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=6477 Welcome to Macross World.

The $61 does look like a pretty good deal even though the antennae seem to be missing/broken, since aside from that it looks like it's in pretty good condition. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...item=5973730030 Is following link the auction that had the same picture as the one you won? http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...item=5972204243

The subtraction mechanic is also perfectly valid. Faster? Depends on how good you are at subtracting and how big the numbers are. Realistic? Depends on the limits to the attack/defense numbers. I'm not familiar with DW so I'll withhold judgment. IIRC Runequest does give advantages to attack #'s above 100%--I think they cause a reduction in the defender's defense rolls, and they certainly increase the chance of a critical hit. You could look at that as a kludge and you'd probably be right, but it does address the issue. That issue is, I guess, that no matter how good a character is, you always want it to be possible for another character to be better in a meaningful way. However, if your goal is realism--I realize it may not be--you have to face the fact that at the upper levels of skill in competitive contests, one competitor's superiority may not be visible except over multiple trials. Or to put it another way, in many cases the nature of the activity is such that the difference between any two "masters" is minuscule compared to the difference between a "master" and a "neophyte"--to the point that the difference is too small to be represented at a given level of abstraction.

He is, just not recognizable--he's the trooper who kills/gets killed by Roy. But yeah, no Glaugs in DYRL. Still, Yamato has done the Hikaru-style 1J (appears for a second in DYRL in GBP armor but it's mainly a TV item), the M&M 1J's (TV only), the VF-1D (TV only), and the GBP (again, mainly a TV item). And they'd be crazy not to make a nice Glaug, since the only real competition among toys is the old Matchbox version, and the design is immensely popular with fans of not only Macross/RT fans but also Battletech.

There's no indication that Yamato will release it in green, but Yamato plays its cards close to its chest. I think there are a lot of fans in the US and Japan who would like to see it in green. The DYRL design differs from the TV design in more than just coloration. To quote Graham from his Q-Rau review (q.v.): Or look at this page and note the differences in the antenna, "eye", and the "bell-bottom" portion of the legs.

If you can get your hands on it, and you have a laserdisc player, sure... I thinkt the VHS versions come up on eBay not all that infrequently. Here's the Kiseki PAL version: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...ssPageName=WDVW

If you're desperate, you could produce your own letterboxed dub by digitizing the audio from the Kiseki CotB or the American Super Space Fortress Macross, then mastering a new DVD based on the FX Perfect edition or the original Bandai. Just add another audio track.

What Renato wrote above is supported by the fact that the Kiseki dub and sub both say "Running Time 110 minutes" on the back. But the MW page says the dub has been edited for content. I hope someone reads this who has the power to make the correction.

One important point about the realism issue is that realism isn't the same thing as detail. This is something that often comes up in discussion of board wargames but I'm not sure the concept has been explored as fully in RPG's. Any mechanistic model will contain abstractions both in the inputs and the outputs--the key is choosing a level of abstraction and a range of outputs which work for you. This is all detail, not necessarily realism. Runequest doesn't do badly in the realism department, either, but I seem to recall that the probabilities of fumbles were too high--something you could see by supposing that a cohort of swordsmen were fighting a battle--a rather large percentage of them would cut off their own arms in the first minute of combat. But by comparison with D&D, it was really no contest in terms of realism. (Or, given that D&D wasn't aiming for realism anyway, there were still scaling problems that produced weird effects, such as the difference between healing a low-level character and a high-level one.) Check out Harnmaster. In many ways it's an elaboration and improvement on RQ. You're looking at the mechanics too closely. The important point is that if you're facing a better fighter, you're more likely to get hit. If you have a 25% parry against someone with a 30% attack, he's going to hit you 22.5% of the time. Against someone with an 80% attack, he'll hit you 60% of the time. I've read this many times from people with fighting experience, and since I have none, I'm inclined to believe them. (Back when I played chess I found that the same thing applied, though the fact that it did tells me that I really had a long way to go.) Anyway, a realistic system doesn't have to be complicated. You could have a system where each guy rolls a pair of dice, adds some modifiers, and then the difference between the modified die rolls is the damage sustained by the low roller. Give each character a certain number of hit points, and you're done. Such a system could easily be more realistic than D&D, and probably no more or less realistic than most of what's out there. The only question is whether it provides enough detail to support the narrative, and that in turn depends on what elements of the story you want to emphasize.

I've never played D20 but applied moderately, the idea of "equipment bonus to defense" isn't so wacky. Many games which use pure absorption also have problems. Some combat systems either directly or indirectly arrange things so that armor both deflects attacks and mitigates damage from successful attacks. From a realism standpoint, I think this makes the most sense, but it isn't always worth the trouble. The problem I always had with D&D was the effect of armor wasn't moderate, and the primary mechanic for representing defensive ability was the addition of hit dice, which often didn't scale well.

Okay, that's kind of what I thought, and I could have sworn that the MW video page used to agree.

It's not clear if there's a VHS version of SSFM. The version from the previoius post might be it, but the MW VHS page says otherwise. If there's no VHS version, your only option would be LD as shown here.

Congratulations!

Yup, that's how it starts. Britai and Exedore talking about the artifacts and odd signals coming from the enemy ship, then a cut to the Macross emerging from the darkness with the themesong fanfare. The only thing you might be missing is the logo from the distributor (I want to say it's the shimmering Toho logo, but I could be forgetting).

Ah...AC, one of my long held pet peeves. Armor should resist/absorb damage, NOT make you more difficult to hit. Graham Man, this takes me back to a decade plus of debating over on rec.games.frp. So many roleplaying paradigms, particularly in fantasy, were pioneered by D&D, and the following decades were largely exercises in unlearning them. Classes, levels, AC's...

Someone said 17" and that's what I get, too.

I think it must be this, i.e., the genericized rules from DP9's games, which have been extracted from the various backgrounds. So now, to play Heavy Gear, you need the core rules plus a background book; to play Jovian Chronicles as well, you add a Jovian Chronicles book. Looks like interesting stuff...