Vic Mancini

It's the P-996 Lazer!

http://gta.wikia.com/P-996_Lazer

Sorry, still don't see it. I mean just the position of the engines alone and the fact that we know Kawamori is all about Sukhoi...

Characteristics that resemble the T-50:

-Position of engines

-Tail boom

Characteristics that resemble the J-20:

-Delta wings

-Canards

-Lack of tailerons

-Overall proportions

Perhaps the lack of tailerons shouldn't count, (since that's a Macross staple), but I think the J-20 still has more defining characteristics in common with the YF-30 than the T-50 even without mentioning that trait. And what does liking Sukhoi designs have to do with anything? We all like Sukhoi designs. They are pretty planes, no doubt about it. But that doesn't mean Kawamori has never designed any VFs after planes that weren't Sukhoi. The VF-1/0 was a Tomcat. The YF-21 was a Black Widow. The VF-17 was a Nighthawk. The VF-14 was a BlackBird. The VA-3 was an Intruder. VF-5000 was a Raptor. Etc...etc... Not all his designs are inspired by Sukhoi. Most of them aren't.

I don't know why people are getting all worked up about what real plane a fake plane looks like.

Yeah, nobody is getting worked up that I see. We're just discussing the YF-30.

The extreme perspectives of the 3/4 concept art view makes the wings look more delta than they actually are, I suppose. I'll concede that. But, I still see more in common with the silhouette of the J-20. I really don't see any T-50 in it. The delta wing + canards, narrow fuselage, and lack of tailerons are more common to the J-20.

You guys are all wrong. It looks like it was inspired by the J-20 more than the T-50 or YF-23.

Which is why it would've worked better as a high budget miniseries on HBO or something. Like so many have already stated, the only think reason it has the title World War Z is for existing name recognition.

I totally agree.

With the obvious changes made already, why not just make it its own film and save themselves the royalties paid to Max Brooks?

Because the studio is going to make those royalties back ten-fold? They wouldn't do it if they didn't think it made financial sense.

I highly recommend the book. It's a light read (I finished it in an afternoon), but very engaging. The book is basically a bunch of interviews with survivors, laid out in order from the start of the war to the end.

And honestly, it would've been a challenging book to adapt properly unless you had a large ensemble cast where actors like Brad Pitt would be OK with only acting in a specific scene/chapter of the story. I'm not surprised they had to change the fundamental way the story was delivered. Anyway, I'm not passing judgement yet. Hopefully it will still be a good film in it's own right.

so you all have seen the movie?

B/c i can't exactly tell whats going to happen from the trailer.

Yeah, trust us, it's pretty obvious to anyone who has read the book how little the movie will follow it based on that trailer. It's that evident. Oh well, hopefully it will still be good in it's own way.

Totally watched it and, even with lowered expectations, was still totally let down by almost every aspect.

I think the reason some people (myself included) disliked it so much is that expectations were high for Scott to return to form.

Ehh?

You sure about those lowered expectations?

Well I finally got around to seeing it. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about, I thought it was pretty enjoyable and this is coming from someone who hates almost all new movies. I didn't think it was a lesser film than Alien.

Some pretty clouds and sun glow on my flight home from an uneventful strike mission.

Your video reminded me again of how much I should get a Track IR. I'm a LOMAC player and have never had the chance to try out BMS. It's a shame that the combat flight sim has been on the endangered species list for quite sometime. Hoping what DCS is doing in allowing Third-party companies to develop aircraft for its games gives the franchise some life.

TrackIR is worth every damn penny. I can't express how much I love it.

I haven't tried LOMAC. It looks great, but BMS is just more my style, and I'm a huge Viper fan so it was an easy choice for me when I was choosing a new sim to dedicate myself to. But the teaser for Flaming Cliffs 3 looks amazing. Have you seen it? The new F-15 pit looks even better than the BMS Viper pit.

I have a funny feeling that the combat flight sim might become a little bit less endangered than it used to be.

I used the forum search to see if anyone's talking about it, but I didn't find anything. BenchMark Sims updated the game with a patch in Sept/2011. (http://www.benchmarksims.org)

It's like a whole new game and probably the best air combat simulation available right now, which is amazing considering the original game was released in 1998. The last month+ of my life has basically been devoted to it. I'm obsessed.

Here's a video of me going mano a mano versus a Tomcat, guns and AIM-9Ps only:

But there are hundreds of better youtube vids if you're late to the party like me, and want to see what BMS is all about.

Anybody else playing this?

No love for the 11? Come on!

So let me get this straight... the reapers safeguard all organic life, by killing all organic civilization before/just after they can create synthetic life and recruit said synthetics to aid them?

Lol. Yes. I never thought about the recruiting aspect that way before. Now it seems even more silly.

I don't think that Reapers are synthetics, at least not in the same vein as the Geth, EDI/EVA, etc.

Synthetic or not...I think the funny/weird/not-so-thought-out part is that the Catalyst's solution to prevent everyone from destroying themselves is to destroy everyone. Yes, everyone sort of lives on by being preserved for eternity in Reaper form, but who are we kidding, the solution mostly defeats the purpose.

The Mass Effect story made more sense, and was more emotionally powerful, when we didn't know where the Reapers came from or why they harvested civilizations. It was better when they didn't need an explanation. I always assumed they just evolved over time, kind of as if the first Skynet just kept snowballing and was never stopped by the civilization that created it, or any civilization afterward. Their origin or purpose wasn't important. But no...Bioware throws us this curve ball in the last 10 minutes of the game and explains why the Reapers were created and why they reap, and that explanation is a solution that defeats it's own purpose.

You're talking about a form of synthetic life who's master plan to keep organic life from being wiped out by synthetic life is to wipe out all organic life in the galaxy. Clearly they are not particularly good at long term planing.

Lol. Good point. Reminds me of this:

Update:

I've been doing another run through ME2, and I'm less confused now about how the Reapers got to Earth. Previously I thought the Reapers were about to come through the alpha relay in the Arrival DLC, and the goal was to blow it up before the reapers came through. But I had that wrong. After listening more closely to the dialogue, the alpha relay is only how the reapers are going to get to the rest of the galaxy after they arrive in Batarian space which is on the outer most fringe of the galaxy. They're actually about to arrive via good ol' FTL, and you just have to destroy the relay and get the hell out of dodge before they get there. So the reapers actually reach the Milky Way well before ME2 is even finished. Presumably they wipe out the Batarians, (convert them to husks), and FTL their way to the next closest relay, and that explains the six month gap between the end of ME2 and when they reach Earth in ME3. So my bad, it all makes sense now.

What still doesn't make sense to me is why the Reapers put together an elaborate plan to come through the Citadel relay in ME1, (and in the countless cycles that occur before ME1), if FTLing their way to the Milky Way was going to be so easy for them. Oh well...

Except that one is a legitimately good piece of media and the other isn't. but besides that they're very similar.

...said the guy who plays Lollipop Chainsaw.

Well, the 80's cartoon it is not “the source” but it is the real source of the TMNT explosion of the time and the reason for the legion of turtles fans in the first place. The original comic was an indy parody of the Frank Miller-esque style of writing at the time full of mutants, teenagers, grittiness and ninjas (they even jokingly tie Daredevil’s origin in the first issue).

The fan following that the indy comic got was still jack zero when compared to the real world. Playmates got the licence when then they were a small toy company and the turtles were a cheap comicbook licence. They did the kid friendly cartoon that pretty much changed everything other than the names to push their figures. It REALLY took off and now we know them thanks to that, surfer pizzas and all.

Not totally dissimilar to Robotech/Macross. Macross being a partial parody of super robot anime shows of the time, and then finding more exposure around the world after a dumbed down rebranding.

And I agree with others about Eastman and Laird's original rendition. Even as a young kid, that was the version I wanted more of. Not the bullshit version where they were all different color mask wearing pizza obsessed surfer douche bags fighting robot ninjas. But I watched the shows anyway and ate the crap that I was spoon-fed, because some Ninja Turtles were better than no Ninja Turtles.

Solution: Have Wes Anderson direct/co-write. Bill Murray will be sure to follow, plus the new recruits can be Owen Wilson & Jason Schwartzman = Sequencial win!

I would be so on board for this.

Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Live Gameplay demo

Looks like the Black Ops team is treading on Modern Warfare territory by bringing the franchise into the future like that. I wasn't really a fan of Black Ops, but I do enjoy COD games for what they are and this does look more interesting to me than I thought it would.

@Graham:

Not to get all nerdy-technical on you, but FPS (first person shooters) are games where you look directly through your character's eyes. Halo, Half-Life, etc.

Games in which you see your character on screen, like Mass Effect and Gears of War, are third person shooters.

Well whatever the case, it's a shame that it's all left to conjecture and interpretation. Because I, as an individual player of Mass Effect who is speaking on behalf of only myself, feel like the rug was pulled out from under everything I had accomplished in ME1 and 2. That was the experience I had. And we're talking about a game that goes into excruciating detail into the background stories of it's characters, the cultural histories and governments of a few dozen civilizations, the inner workings and physical properties of all the weapons and technology, and just about every other detail of the ME universe...but when it comes to how the reapers actually got here, and why it doesn't contradict their entire plan to come through the conduit, it's glossed over in about two lines of dialogue over a vidcom. And I think that sucks.

Sorry, but even 300 years is still nothing more than a drop in the bucket to a species that is millions of years old and hibernates for 50K years at a time. That's less than 1% of a Reaper's hibernation cycle. They could just wake up 1% earlier and get here on time. Unless the FTL travel time for reapers is thousands of years and impractical for Reapers to travel, it makes no sense to devise such a complicated plan, or for us to stop it.

And even if you are right, why would the Reapers bother with indoctrinating Saren if their journey to the Milky Way was already 99% complete. By then it's pointless. They could just call up Sovereign and say, "Yo dawg, no need to blow your cover and tip off the various civilizations of the galaxy by indoctrinating a spectre and half of the Geth. We're like five minutes away, and the invasion has a much better chance of success if you just sit tight and lay low for a while." What's the point of all those battles and sacrifices in ME1 and ME2 if the 300 year FTL journey of the reapers is virtually over? The significance of our past accomplishments are still counterfeited and the first two games were just a series of sacrifices that were made in vain. And if that's the case, so be it. But there should at least be a scene which addresses it. Shepard should have a moment where he realizes that he's been wasting his effort for two and a half years.

And I still disagree with you that the Reapers traveled here by FTL, because there would be no reason to write Hackett's dialogue as, "They just flooded through the mass relays" instead of "They just flew here by way of FTL, the old fashioned way". It doesn't serve the story any purpose for Hackett's explanation to be worded that way if the Reapers just FTLed to the Milky Way.

Shepard only discovered the Reapers about 2 and half years before the Reapers reached Earth in ME3,. however Sovereign started indoctrinating followers in secret as the "Leviathan of Dis" 18 years before the events of Mass Effect 1. Which implies that it took at least 20 years for the Reapers to FTL to the Milky Way after their Citadel backdoor failed to open.

Well I assumed there is a super massive mass relay wherever the Reapers are hibernating that connects directly to the Conduit. So why would they start FTLing away from their relay and towards the Milky Way before Sovereign's defeat and before they know they're stranded? That doesn't make sense to me. And even if they did, (which I don't believe), 20 years is still a blink of an eye compared to the hibernation period of the Reapers. Why would they go to so much trouble to set up the Conduit plan just to give themselves an extra 0.04% of sleepy time? That's like setting up a huge elaborate plan just to give yourself an extra 11.52 seconds of sleep before your drive to work in the morning, (assuming your regular nightly sleep is 8 hours).

The only way the Conduit plan makes sense is if the Reapers were so far away that FTL travel was either impossible or impractical. Or if the plan's sole purpose was strategic, as Ghost Train was conjecturing.