Cent

*gasp* the traditional $50 threshold has been broken! Its kinda about time that happened though, even though I'm not happy about it either. The prices for everything else were rising, so it wasn't going to be long before PC games had to take a hit too.

I've never been banned from 4chan. Tell me, does it only prevent you from posting or even accessing the site to view it?

It definitely is another blunder. Inconsistent with the universe. Misuse of existing characters. No more base building. No more teching. DOW1-type population caps. Mandatory persistent experience system (mix of DOW2 and DOTA). No more Construction Yards. Supposed to conclude universe, but god knows how they'll do it with the apocalyptic plotholes they have now. I'm not half as angry about it though, since I'm not going to be suckered into buying it like the first one.

Are you fcking serious???? Pink Peckers? Time to find a new series to collect for T_T

Dead Space was great. Mirrors Edge not so much, but good try anyway. Brutal Legend didn't strike any chords with me. EA infuriated me with their chain of lackluster titles after taking over the Command and Conquer franchise. Not only did they recycle it into juvenile trite, but slapped together some poor writing and plot and threw universe consistency to the wind. Of course, then they'd try to feed you the storyline plothole fixup by having you purchase the expansion.... In which you get a 5 second explanations during FMVs, often just saying that so-and-so died before the game events occurred, or that Tiberium underwent a mysterious overnight transformation and that researchers could not come up with any answers. Wow. Lame. By 'filling the gaps' they meant just acknowledging their poorly written inconsistencies in an official FMV. When they dumped their Tiberium FPS game, I was the happiest guy ever... Finally thinking that they were acknowledging they had no idea how to turn the wheels on this franchise, and that they'd turn their resources to a better investment. No. Then they went and announced CNC4, which is shaping up to be the biggest slap in the face ever. After reusing the SAGE engine to death, you'd think that they'd do something a little more innovative so that they'd maybe fix some of the bugs that has plagued the entire series of games from the beginning. Nope. They don't even support the games much at all, and barely ever release hotfixes, especially when their next title releases in the next half year or so. (They call them hotfixes, but are really patches that get released as quickly as a month after the game breaking bug becomes rampantly exploited.) I'm not sure how many personal apologies were given out by EA directors... I lost count. Of course, thats not where the hatred stems from. MPBT was binned, although it was great. Possibly not EAs fault (could have been Microsoft licensing issues), but we'll never know. Their sport series basically got farted on PC, since they basically went 4 years in reverse as they began to prominently code for consoles and just port the stuff over back to PC. BF2 got the worst milking mod sequel ever in the form of BF2142 (which Tiberium basically looked identical to... Except more post-apocalyptic). Tech Support has always been terrible. Ive had EA games just flat out BREAK on me when you update to their latest patch. Rewind the patch one update and it works fine again. EA recognizes the problem as legitimate and claims they will locate and solve the bug by the next patch which should be a few weeks. A few months pass, and if you're lucky, a new patch does come out. However, it does nothing to fix the problem, and still fails to load the game. By this time, EA has entirely forgotten about the minority of people screwed out of playing and have just moved on with their current demographic, until the next game in the series is properly hyped and released. And have you been to the EA boards? Sure, EA gets a lot of flak for being EA... But their mods are the most egotistical smart asses ever, forever defending over-hyped future releases with statements of 'You haven't played it so you can't criticize it (but you can sure join in on the hype bandwagon)' or 'Make your own game before criticizing ours.' Bwuuhhhhhhhhhhh???????????????????? I'm not even going to get into how that logic fails so miserably. And you know what, I don't blame the mods. They NEED to do that as a part of their job. Heck, a friend of mine on their boards became mod, but essentially lost his freedom to opinion because of it. He had to remain 'optimistically neutral' regardless of previous personal opinion. And have you even tried to use EAlink, their online distribution system? It's slow, unoptimized, prone to catastrophic fault on delivery and game execution, and frequently inaccessible (which you need to do to play your games, btw... Since there is no CD to check, you have to connect online to do checks) with some of the slowest support teams I've seen for what is supposed to be a 24/7 online service. For every game that EA does make that is new and actually something interesting, they've got 10 others just milking the same mold. And I don't mean continuing a franchise, because that's perfectly fine. But if you continue the same franchise (or even a set of franchises within the same genre) with the same engine, same gameplay elements that we've seen in a previous installment or a direct competitor's recent game... That's just a waste of my $50. I love the Playstation, but even I looked down in shame when the PS3 tried to mimic the Wii's remote gimmick. That's what EA is like with most of their games: a cheap copy cat but with a overpriced price tag and support teams with cotton in their ears.

What the hell happened to Shin and Sara? Or maybe its better we don't know considering how dumb that OVA got.

EA is not the developer to turn to for reaching above and beyond or exploring greater frontiers. They're all about milking the same engine used in the previous iteration of the same tired franchise, copying over elements from other successful titles to tout as new innovative features in their upcoming games and massively try to cut down development time so they can flood the market with a whole batch of new releases with their respective support teams fading away 2 weeks after launch. Yea. I hate EA.

hm, i kinda wanna know how that sniper gunpod is hanging down so low even in gerwalk. i know the vf-25f armored has a double stack gunpod adapter, but that looks even lower than that... And Im pretty sure that adapter is held by the arms being in the locked fighter position... so how its doing that in gerwalk is puzzling.

Pretty sure Kerensky lived 100 years. Where's the gene for that eh? =P

Funny, since MPlus was better than every other Macross series, imo. Why? Bitching planes; packed with dogfights and stunts; good music that didn't solely determine the outcome of every battle. So whoever did MPlus, props. The movie version was mostly a shoddy cut and paste version though. ??????? What are you talking about? Kawamori had a hand in tons of Armored Core games to date.

Yes they did. A little too chunky for my tastes though

MWF has been getting impossible to use during the mornings or early afternoons before 2PM PST. I can reach the main forum index, but viewing any posts or sub forums will get me nowhere as the host is non contactable.

Okay those eyes were a pain in the ass. The best way to do it is if you have something that works like a rubber or sponge stamp. Make sure the stamp is flat, and lightly coated with the paint of your choice. Using a piece of semi-absorbent foam will work too. I forget what they're called, but back in elementary school we had these stiff greenish bricks of foam that absorbed water very easily. I used to stick toothpicks and flower stems in them and call it art. I'm sure you can find something like that at a local arts/crafts store. Anyway, take whatever stiff flat material it is that you're using as your stamp and gently impress the eye onto it. This should give you a very light coat your selected paint on the edge of the eye. Subsequent coats of this will give you a solid, sharp paintjob. Be very careful when you press the eye onto the foam. The amount of pressure is crucial, but too light is better than too heavy. If your base coat for your gun was acrylic, and your eye pink color is also acrylic, cleanup of a smudged mistake will be difficult without risking damage to the black.

Eye? You mean the hexagonal pink thing at the end of the larger set of tines? You've already painted one from what I can see there. I did mine with a brush by just carefully carefully staying within the border. Trying to mask it just gave me more problems than just plain brushing it on. My advice is to thin your paint a little more than usual, use a very fine, stiff brush and gently apply more and more paint until you reach just the amount you need to achieve coverage. Since you're overlaying it on top of the existing black, expect to do at least another coat to get a solid color. Be very careful in handling, as you'll scratch off the paint in this process very easily (and it will remain this way until you lay down a clearcoat when you're done). (If you meant the scope's lens/eye piece, then just getting a hypodermic needle, positioning it dead center over the area of application and dropping a tiny dab will do the trick. This will also give you a slight bulge in the paint, to emulate the lens bulge, if you use little or no thinner.)

Hm. Kinda sucks that the battroid (and I'm guessing gerwalk too) legs dont hold their positions with or without stand. that puts a huge dent in playability and posability.

Yes I do. It was called Armored Core. I like Battletech's very rugged and crude feeling with blocky mechs. The japanese have their own style... Learn to love both I suppose, but I still think I'd leave Battletech to the westerners.

I'd have to admit that M7 wasn't something that I was proud of in the series. If I had to introduce a friend to Macross, I certainly wouldn't start them off on M7. Not all the designs were good either imo. Some were just plain ridiculous like the VF-11MAXL and the design of the VF-19 was not as visually appealing as the YF-19. Top that off with Basara and a forgettable plot with some cheesy music-mumbo-jumbo (an evil in all of macross imo) and it's really hard to say that Macross is more down to earth than something mainstream like Gundam. Fortunately though, there are saving graces: the VF-19 is amazing, and the VF-22 is pretty sweet too. So, buy it for the mecha and just pretend the lame stuff doesn't exist! Ignorance is bliss!

............ Man. I'm sorry, but those decals look like ass. Here's the problem. When you wanna do itashas, you have to make it look classy with the characters. You have one large decal piece of a portrait of the featured character, and a consistent simple paint scheme that matches it. The way its done here involves 5-7 different portraits of the same character, sloppily placed over the plane's existing paint scheme, regardless of whether or not the character's colors matches it. =/. They're everywhere all over the plane, and you're not even sure which decal to look at first. Honestly, they just need to release some larger single decals optimized for fighter mode, and whoever's applying it should probably repaint the entire plane to match the decal's color scheme. Its a lot of work, sure... But it'd look far better than this.

Wow its like Christmas over at Hornet's house

please give it the proper kneecaps in gerwalk. those are so cool T_T

No, the soot was airbrushed on. I couldn't imagine how you would try to emulate that effect with a paintbrush o_o.

I'm holding out on purchasing any iteration of the VB-6/HWR until Yamato reissues a new and improved one.

"Hikaru, I am your father!"

I finished the sniper rifle, and took quite a bit of liberty in my selection of colors as I mentioned above. The pink just doesnt sit well with me. Painted the outside highlights red, but i couldnt airbrush it as masking these small areas around edges and curves gave me a lot of trouble. Small details like the red dots on the side of the scope were also painted red. The scope lens itself (very hard to see) is also painted It was worse trying to brush inside the mask, so I just skipped masking altogether. The green-yellow was airbrushed with masks, and was much easier to do. Sorry, pics arent good, but my digital camera is really old and handles close shots and low apertures poorly.

yea the paint seems to wear off relatively fast on the DX 25s for a toy. On the model kit, the bandai decals are paper thin and rub off after light handling, so you HAVE to clear coat it a few times. You can coat the joints too if you dont want them loosening up (coat them again to restore stiffness).