JB0

Oh, okay. I retract my capslock.

But what about the ones we DON'T play on TVs? Handheld systems, computers, arcade machines? They're called video games because they use video displays instead of fixed pattern displays(Game&Watch and Speak&Spell are both examples of this, though hardly the first) or text printouts. Yes, some of the earliest computer games used printers for output, most notably Trek. As you might imagine, this was not popular with the people paying for the paper the mainframes were chewing through. Ralph Baer argues that only games connected to actual raster-scan televisions are video games. His definition has problems, both for the obvious reason of it's not what everyone else means(is Asteroids a video game? How about the Gameboy? Baer says no) and that it makes the nature of your game change with what you're displaying it on. For example, while my XBox is connected to my LCD computer monitor, I'm playing computer games. But when I take it to the living room and hook it into the slightly-aged CRT TV, the exact same games BECOME video games. By the same token, if you hook his ancient Odyssey prototypes up to a modern LCD TV, they AREN'T VIDEO GAMEs ANYMORE. He's just bitter that Computer Space beat the Odyssey to market, that Space War predates the Odyssey even further, that several other games predate even his earliest unbuilt design sketches, and that the Odyssey, despite being the very first home video game*, was a COLOSSAL FAILURE. *Or first video game, that thing Pong TOTALLY ripped off, everyone else sucks neener neener neener, as Baer insists.

NO! MSX SALAMANDER IS BASARA'D UP WITH THE GRADIUS POWER BAR! REAL ARCADE SALAMANDER OR NOTHING! ... I am passionate about this.

I've got it! The one movie adaptation to rule them all! WORMS.

Sorry, but he had a pretty big hole in him. And hard vacuum doesn't do nice things to people under the best of circumstances. There's no believable way to bring him back. The only way he survived is if they upload his brain to a new body, a la Grace. Lacking any evidence that he was a cyborg in the first place(on the contrary, Frontier outlawed cybernetics), he's dead. Certainly, the timing was cliche, but... it's been an incredibly fierce war. People die. Even the good ones. At least Klan didn't go Romeo and Juliet on us.

Mach Rider! Road Blasters! Fast cars/motorcycles, guns, explosions! What's not to like?

No Blast Works? Everyone needs to support Kenta Cho! ... Personally, I'd've rather seen Torus Trooper go retail than Tumiki Fighters. But TT is available as a bonus on the disk!

Well, the PE movie wasn't based on the game anyways. It was a film adaptation of the original horror novel that the games are sequels to.

Grace's non-human physical attributes could be explained through excessive cyborgification. I think she began life as a wholly organic being, and went totally overboard with aftermarket mods. Though at this point, having swapped bodies after detonating the dimension eater, whether she's technically a human with a "pimp my ride" body or an android becomes a philosophical argument. You could argue that the being that was Grace died when the bomb went off, and the current Grace is a new being that just HAPPENS to have the memories of the old one. Which is a complete pain in the rectum, and gives me a headache. ... Of course, she could've moved into a cloned organic body with MORE cybernetics. I forgot for a moment that they got that tech from the zentradi. Anyways... boobies.

Other personas? You mean the voices in her head? I'd assumed she was in communication with someone else, and that she's not crazy... well, not "voices in my head" crazy. Remember, she's a cyborg. She doesn't NEED a phone.

Asteroids.

I think I may need to watch the latest episode ASAP.

The implication is it's part of Project M, or another similar endeavor. Which is actually a fairly understandable, if distasteful, development. He disliked the military intensely from the start. The conclusion of SW1 was a huge shock to everyone, and it would be easy for him to blame the military he already disliked for everything that happened. Especially since he wasn't there from the start of things. He can merrily conclude that the warriors aboard the Macross have been pushing and pushing and dammit the zentradi would've left us all alone if we hadn't started shooting at them, because he wasn't there for the "running away with our tail between our legs while they try to blast us to death" part. Even BEFORE the end of SW1 he's speaking out against the war, though admittedly he wasn't inciting riots. It was only right before the final battle that the reality of the situation impressed itself on him, and apparently it didn't impress itself very well. Just enough to get him to participate in the single most lopsided assault in all of military history. Post-war, he extends his hatred to the military-controlled New UN.

But KOnami did. I assume it was a brainfart. Or sarcasm.

Speaking of limited resources... The GBP turns the VF-1 into a cheap destroid, meaning your fleet doesn't need to lug around a bunch of largely useless destroids and spare parts in anticipation of the day they land and set up camp somewhere and start NEEDING infantry mecha. They can use GBP Valkyries in that role until they get destroid production up.

That would definitely explain the magic accompaniment. It wouldn't explain how the music knows to go into a holding pattern when he needs to talk to someone, but... a smart player could probably be set up to do it, and they seemed to have enough funding(I mean, they got the first VF-19 on the Macross 7 fleet, that says something right there). It's actually a physical part of the cockpit. There's a big post sticking out of the back that connects it to the rest of the plane. Presumably for tracking purposes. ... Ehh, I guess it snaps out. Oh well... We don't even know that. All we know is that when he was little, he got mad at a mountain for not appreciating his music. No, not really. There may not be a single dramatic incident, but people's decisions are based on their life's experience. And the stronger it's affected you, the stronger your take on the issue is likely to be. And I can point to examples where the cost of peace was higher than that of war. There's examples in Macross 7, too. Heck, Basara's stubborn aural assault on the protodeviln was arguably an act of agression, though he didn't seem to view it as such, until it became a clear matter of "them or us." And even then he flip-flopped, first participating in the operation to trap Gavil and Glavil for the Battle 7's cannon, then turning around and objecting to Operation Stargazer. He only participated because he was been told he could make them LISTEN TO HIS SONG! if he beat the nukes to the cave. EVERYONE has prejudices. They don't always choose to acknowledge them, but they have them. And I think Basara has a superiority complex, personally. I still don't get the whole mountain thing. That's a bizarre obsession, even for a kid. And he DOES seem fod of the wild outdoors, which raises questions about how he wound up on a colony ship in the first place. Much less in an abandoned ghetto as a stowaway on a colony ship(I got the impression he wasn't on the official roster, though clearly no one's gonna space the stowaways). Maybe he traded the freedom of an untamed planet for a larger audience? But Basara wasn't really about the size of the audience. I assume Ray is somehow responsible, but... it's still a big question mark. He exists for my amusement, and he fails at it. One of the reasons I stuck with Macross 7 through the slow beginning is that I wanted to know WTF was up with Basara. It was my first and largest question about the show, and it was left untouched. How did he get involved with Ray and Sound Force initially? I can't imagine Ray just walked up, said "Hey, wanna sing in a jetplane?" and Basara went "Yeah, sounds cool." ... Okay, I lie. I CAN imagine it. And I hate myself for it. The point is, he remains a VERY unrelatable main character, made all the worse by the fact that he takes most of the available camera time that could be devoted to characters with actual personalities.

Well, swinging the guitar around is unrelated to playing it. So the flight stick part is okay... sort of. So we've got a guitarstick, that's kinda almost maybe reasonable, if you squint a little. Now, the real question is how do we do the throttle. And the pedals. And the everything else. We already know that there's buttons mounted on the neck of the guitar for secondary functions(including real honest-to-goodness missiles, thank you, Ray!) Maybe twist the guitar neck for throttle? I know you can't get away with it on a real guitar, but... this isn't a real guitar. It shouldn't be hard to build one that doesn't rely on the vibration of strings, even without overtechnology(in fact, real-world guitar-based MIDI controllers have existed since the 80s). Pressure-sensitive pads down the neck for finger position detection and strings at the base for continuity with conventional guitars. Or even a set of strings at the base and a second independent set down the neck. The actual soundwave creation is all done digitally in either case, with the plucking of strings serving to issue MIDI commands(or some future replacement of MIDI) rather than create an actual soundwave(or electronic equivalent thereof). Really, something less conventional would probably suit their purposes better. But it would require a bit of retraining, and who knows if Basara would agree to use something less than a "real" guitar. http://www.hollis.co.uk/john/synthaxe.html Speaking of 80s MIDI guitars...

Real life isn't built around the adventures of a single person, nor is it attempting to tell an interesting story. Macross 7 IS built around the adventures of a single person, and IS attempting to tell an interesting story. Unfortunately, it's built around a fundamentally unrelatable person.

Only in the most ham-handed of shows does a character sit down and say "So yeah, I'm a dirty pacifist hippie with a guitar because when I was younger ..." There are ways to develop things WITHOUT the character just sitting down and explaining things. Ray seemed to have some knowledge, but as a third-tier character(tier-1 = Basara, tier-2 = Gamlin+Mylene), he wasn't allowed to share this information. Not to Mylene, not to Gamlin, and not to us. If I recall, Basara didn't do the customization. He got the plane from Ray as-is. And while the Jamming Birds were a complete and utter failure, this is through no fault of the 2-seater approach. In fact, there's a distinct advantage there, since the pilot is free to focus on piloty things while the musician is free to focus on musicy things. Also note that Ray and Veffidas were in a 2-seater. Because as third-tier characters(and I'm being generous including Veffidas here instead of with the flower girl and background scenery), they weren't important enough to get their own mechs.

Problem is, a fold isn't instantaneous. Not even for the people inside the fold. And for those in real space, it takes even longer. How long were Hikaru, Max, Misa, and Kakizaki gone when they got captured? 2 weeks? And from their perspective, it wasn't even long enough to start worrying about where their next meal was coming from. If you're under attack, you need defenses NOW, not as soon as a carrier can be mobilized and make it through the fold lag.

Maybe Ninja Gaiden? The NES game, I mean.

But how did he get where he is? Basara's annoying to a lot of people, and I thnk part of that's because there's no attempt made to show people WHY he is how he is. What gives him this burning passion? Why does he believe so strongly in his music's ability to change the world? What made him such an extreme pacifist? We have ONE flashback of him trying to move a mountain with a guitar. That's simply not adequate, especially for a character that gets mad at OTHER PEOPLE when he's forced to resort to violence(the VERY FIRST episode has him yelling at Mylene because she MADE HIM punch someone). He's not a well-established character by any stretch, and it really hurts the show.

FINAL FANTASY SEVEN LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!1111111111111111111111 Seriously... I think they COULD make a great Metroid movie. I also think they WON'T make a great Metroid movie. And to be mildly creative... Maybe the 90s Battlezone game? You know, the RTS/FPS hybrid? America VS the Commies IN SPACE! WITH HOVERTANKS! How is that NOT a recipe for complete awesome?

NOT IF THEY WRECK HER PLANE! Actually, it's junk for another reason. Regardless of whether you think Kawamori should be allowed to make DYRL exist within the Macross universe, Basara isn't in DYRL. He's in The Lynn Minmay Story, which is a DIFFERENT in-continuity movie about Space War 1. It seemed to be a lower-budget, "made for TV" type of thing than DYRL.

My two cents, and a Petite Cola: Slow start. Sad, but true. You WILL be tired of Planet Dance before it goes anywhere. Basara is freaking annoying. And he gets no character development. Mylene and Gamlin are FAR more interesting lead characters, despite their secondary status. Just focusing more on them would've made the show a LOT better. The show totally crashes after Operation Stargazer. But it's almost over at that point, so ride it out. It features a few interesting concepts, but they're poorly handled. Macross 7 is an OK show. It could've been a great one, but... it's not. I've seen FAR worse, though. Focus on Mylene and Gamlin. Pretend Basara is a secondary character. And pace yourself. Don't try to plow through it too fast, or you'll wind up stabbing yourself in the face.