He Once Broke a Sun With That

I think perhaps the best thing I have to share about this is a wonderful YouTube comment on the video: "End of the world? (EXPLETIVE) THAT NOISE, I'VE GOT A GIANT HAMMER."



It's an oddly symbolic moment, really, since GaoGaiGar was specifically created to be a response to Evangelion.

-Signing off.

Zone Fighter: Like Ultraman But Meaner

The character Zone Fighter was created by Toho (the company that makes Godzilla films) to compete with Tsubaraya Productions' Ultraman in a similar niche, presumably with the reasoning that if a former Toho employee could make a successful kaiju vs. hero action series, so could Toho.

The result is arguably inferior, as it didn't really go anywhere (although I suspect Toho didn't invest as much energy into it as they could have-if you look at the monster costumes, they look downright stupid next to the contemporary Ultraman series and Godzilla film costumes, with the obvious exception of Godzilla film guest stars, who were all over the darned place-and Zone Fighter was a little too obvious as a direct imitation of Ultraman) and not very memorable other than Godzilla movie kaiju guest starring.

Well, the Godzilla cameos... and the fact that Zone Fighter liked to solve his problems by shooting things repeatedly with rockets and dismembering them with energy crescents until they died.



Of special note: 0:50 (point-blank shot through the gut and out the back), 1:49 (head falls off after a delayed reaction to being shot repeatedly and black blood explosively sprays out), 4:30 (chops off arms), and 4:52 (delayed reaction head falling off).

The decapitations particularly are both gruesome and funny (my sister nearly died after 1:49).

Sure, Ultraman kills his enemies very dead most of the time, but he wears them down with hand to hand combat first, and then usually kills them in a single stroke. Much more humane. (And no, I'm not actually being sarcastic.)

Admittedly, Zone Fighter's way is a bit more batman.

-Signing off.

Surprising Brutality

(I probably wouldn't have put two videos like this up in a row, but I had a bit of a time shortage yesterday and my Tuesday night schedule is wonky lately.)

This fight between a "kraken" and a two-headed giant surprised me. Why?



Because despite the incredibly cartoony design of the kraken, it turns really brutal at the end there.

-Signing off.

I Love Me Some Huge Dragons

I'm afraid I know basically nothing about this movie other than the fact that it's described as being about Sinbad, but I enjoyed this clip.



"Warg! This thing that's two to three times my size is attacking me! I'd better hit and bite it ineffectually! OH GOSH NO!" (Since I can't caption a YouTube embed the same way I'd caption a picture, and don't have time for the screenshot, either.)

-Signing off.

Game Review: Armed With Wings

Armed With Wings is a game created by the same guy who made Red Moon, a game that I recommended with reservations. (The positive aspects were artistic style and the combat system; the reservations involved the "jumping puzzle" aspect of the later levels and the fact that there's a dumb justification used for the artistic style [my position is that no justification was necessary whatsoever]. Having since made it to the end of the game, albeit only with extreme suffering, I can also add "has a dumb story" to my reservations.)

Armed With Wings is an older game in the same art style, and it shows: It's still pretty, but the gameplay is rougher. For instance, your guy (who is actually named Armed With Wings, a name that even my kid brother thinks is stupid) can't jump at all.

His default speed is "flat-out run," which sounds like there's nothing wrong with it until you remember that if he goes off a ledge, he'll always go down... and of course every other ledge in the game has a bunch of instant death spikes beneath it.

These weaknesses are mildly mitigated by a few... er, make that one nice ability, the ability to somehow generate a little bird thing and send it out to scout and solve annoying puzzles.

You can also distract some (by which I mean "exactly one type who is mostly harmless, so what the heck is the point?!") enemies with the bird, but it's rarely really relevant.

As the bird is generally invulnerable, albeit with a short "lifespan" that limits how far from you it can travel unless you pick up a certain powerup with it, it's pretty good at the scouting job.

Of course, scouting is useless when you might get randomly dropped through the floor for a boss fight.

It took me thirty-plus tries to beat this silly looking boss (the victory was followed up with a seizure-inducing cinematic, by the way). Why? Because he spends up to two-thirds of his time spinning his sword like that, which makes him completely invulnerable, while also pushing you back towards a wall of spikes that he can knock you into.

As the game goes on, a tougher enemy type, the elite guard, shows up, and boy do I hate them. I think they're slightly nastier than that boss.

Why? They attack really fast, meaning you may not be able to retaliate, can take all of your health in about ten seconds unless you get in hits first, often respond to power attacks with their own power attacks (power attacks are only really relevant for a few minor purposes anyway), and can dodge like the dickens. Their only positive feature is that, since the only way they can dodge is by withdrawing, they're easy to drive into spike pits. That that's their one saving grace says a lot, doesn't it?

I mentioned solving puzzles with the bird, right? For some reason, the bird can pick stuff up, including stuff that even your larger character shouldn't be able to (though you need the infinite flight powerup in order to actually make use of it).

At least once, the puzzle is a huge pain, moreso than some of those enemies: A flying maze, where the limited flight duration acts as a strict time limit.

Oh, yeah, and you know what happens in the second-to-last level unexpectedly? Suddenly, things can hurt the bird, and this drains your life whenever it happens.

So what's the final battle in this game like?

Well, if you pound too much on the boss, he does this to you, and you always lose instantly when he does.

Because you get knocked into the spikes. Or occasionally inside the ceiling, which isn't any better even though you don't die.

So why am I playing this game at all? Well, obviously I like parts of it. It has potential. But this is definitely the weakest of the games this guy has set in his silhouette world. (I think he might be aware of the weaknesses of this game, because the third "Armed With Wings" game [Red Moon is also part of the series, more or less kind of] has the central mechanic of a summonable, controllable bird without any of that other stupid stuff.)

I don't really recommend it. (I kinda wanted to take a screenshot or two of the main villain's speech to the hero, because it was frikkin' hilarious, but unlike every other cutscene in his games, it's completely uncontrollable.) But I'll be talking about the other two games soon enough.

-Signing off.

Cobra Gets Mauled By Mongoose

This video makes me kind of mad.

Not at what's happening, really, although I like snakes and it always makes me a bit sad to watch one getting mauled. (It's far more common than you might think; snakes are essentially just mobile sausages, it's just that they're mobile sausages that are good at killing things smaller than themselves and being venomous. Of course they're popular prey.)



No, what makes me mad is the realization that all those cartoons that depict mongooses have been misleading people for decades. Look at that mongoose. It's huge. A mongoose doesn't get into a fight with a cobra, it just walks up and goes "munch munch munch." There isn't even a hint of drama, any more than there would be if a tyrannosaur walked up to an angry bull and ate it. (Well, a smidgen more drama, I suppose-the bull isn't poisonous.)

-Signing off.

FATALITY BRUTALITY

Betterman at least occasionally had really brutal fights.



He recovers from this by virtue of his Nebula form's head not being his "real" head (it's obviously a bit complicated).

-Signing off.

Game Reviews: Anti-TD

Anti-TD is short for anti-tower defense. Tower defense is one of my favorite game types-all the fun of looking down on a base you're building, but generally without the pain of having to manage resources or even usually bother much with maintenance. Gunning down hordes of guys who can't shoot back seems mean, but not when they're endless waves headed relentlessly for your base or equivalent. So what would the opposite of tower defense consist of?

Why, sending out those endless hordes, of course.

It's a non-mazing type tower defense, which is for the better as a simple computer program would be abysmal at trying that.

But how do you balance the endless hordes for gameplay?

Well, essentially you need to pick and choose carefully what kinds of "creeps" you send out. You have limited funds, and if you don't have enough money to send out creeps, you lose. Also, you can't just sit and wait, because the enemy drops towers for free periodically, making the path progressively harder.

So how do you win? By spamming, albeit carefully and correctly rather than mindlessly.

Through some mechanism or calculation that I don't perfectly follow, as long as you have creeps on the path, you make money, meaning that if you've chosen the right type, they'll be self-replacing and probably net you more money than you spent. There are around a dozen distinct creep types which each have five versions (and you don't need to unlock them, they're all available at the start). You'll generally want fast, tough creeps, which stand a much better chance of surviving for long enough for you to make a game-ending swarm such as the ones above from their revenue. The most expensive creep, the Schnell 5.0 (schnell being German for "quick" or "quickly"), costs $3000 in the game's money, and moves at mind-boggling speed; it's possible, if you play your creeps right, to make a swarm of lesser, cheap creeps that, while it isn't able to help you win directly, can give you in excess of $400,000 (enough for over a hundred blindingly fast Schnell 5.0s-and yes, I've done this).

So, not a perfectly balanced game, perhaps-even the toughest level can't stop an utterly endless swarm of super-Schnells-but one that is fun for a while.

-Signing off.

Game Reviews: Monster Master

Monster Master is a flash game that, like Mytheria, simulates a TCG in shrunken, simplified and less diverse format.

The model for this one, though, is Yu-Gi-Oh!, the TCG associated with an anime and manga that my sister is doing an extended fancomic for (and for whose Yu-Gi-Oh!-related blog I have done a couple of posts), which is based on Magic: The Gathering in very loose fashion, but has radically different rules.

Monster Master's (and by extention, Yu-Gi-Oh!'s) paradigm is quite simple. Once per turn, you can play ("summon") a Monster from your hand. In Yu-Gi-Oh!, stronger Monsters are limited by various restrictions, the simplest being requiring sacrifices; in Monster Master, it's a little bit simpler-Monsters have extended "summoning sickness" based on their strength. Dragons and Hydras take three turns to shake it off, while Rats and Leprechauns (yes, really) can attack immediately.

However, where Yu-Gi-Oh! has a very simplified "strongest wins" combat system with overflow damage, Monster Master has a sort of weighted "dice roll" combat system.

This is INSANELY frustrating, as a Monster with one defensive point can repeatedly fend off a creature with twelve offensive points, and other times, a significantly weaker critter can totally thrash a strong one attacking it. (Or whatever they're called.) A likable bit is that each Monster also has its own individual hitpoints, which is lacking in the Yu-Gi-Oh! combat system. However, Monster combat is incredibly frustrating and is like slogging through deep, squishy mud-not much fun.

What is fun are the spells. Yu-Gi-Oh!, because of the game's size and age, has a lot of diverse cards, the strongest of them being heavily restricted or banned. Monster Master has only a handful of cards, and a lot of its spells are based on cards that were too powerful to be allowed in tournament play, or sometimes even too powerful to be printed.

Which means that one can open with an insane advantage over the other. If you draw Gift, for instance, which draws two cards, there's a chance that you'll draw another Gift, and I have drawn three (the maximum possible number) on the first turn, and drawn an appropriately unhealthy number of cards with which to do unpleasant things to my hapless opponent. (Which, thanks to two-player mode, was often me. Ouch.) If you've ever played Yu-Gi-Oh!, you know that Gift's equivalent, the Pot of Greed, is generally considered one of the most powerful ever printed; it was one of the first ten cards to be banned.

Anyway, this is where most of the enjoyment of Monster Master comes from: Playing cards whose power levels make you wince. The "ground combat" is a horrible slog and not very much fun. The highest success rates I've had are with decks where I clear the path with removal cards and then call out strong monsters and use relevant cards to get them ready to attack sooner and more often. The Combine card used with a Dragon and a Knight to get a Dragon Knight (followed by a Summon to remove summoning sickness and a Charge!, which allows an extra attack) is a devastating combination, as the Dragon Knight has an enormous (for the game) twelve power-which is more than half of a player's health.

All in all, not the best game, but you might get some enjoyment out of it if you enjoy TCGs.

-Signing off.

Iron Man Cartoon Stuff: Robot Vs. Robot

One of the rather comically amusing things about the Iron Man cartoon from the '90s is that there was a perpetual rivalry between Stark Industries and Justin Hammer's company (whatever it was named-I can't be bothered to look it up at the moment), even though anytime the two's products were compared, the Stark product blew the other out of the water, and even though Stark Industries had to be rebuilt from scratch every third episode.

During the episode "Silence My Companion, Death My Destination," the fundamental nature of this rivalry is highlighted in truly spectacular (and amusing) fashion.

Here's Hammer's design for his bid for the US arms contract that they're competing over this time, the Invincible Guardian:

It has pop-out weapons.

Here's the Stark Industries competitor, the Watchman.

To be honest, these screenshots rather distort their relative sizes-they're actually mostly similar in size.

Those are Justin Hammer, James Rhodes, and a two-star general who apparently lost an arm in some war.

Despite the fact that it'd make more sense to 1) evaluate these robots doing their job, which is guarding stuff from outside interference, and 2) that there should be a costs/benefits analysis between the two machines, the test consists of the two robotic vehicles attacking each other until only one survives. Hmm...

The Invincible Guardian comes out, guns blazing, as the Watchman sends out its weird little triangles to spin around it with apparent intent to block weapons fire.

Hammer prematurely declares victory, but the weird countermeasures deployed by the Watchman are apparently impervious to both cannons and missiles, and it is unharmed.

And capable of doing something that only a cartoon military vehicle would do.

And the Invincible Guardian apparently is so surprised...

...that it doesn't know how to react to that. Not that I would either.

And it falls to little pieces after being zapped.

Hammer remarked a short while later that $40 million had gone down the drain... which sounds kind of low for developing and building a tank type robot, really.

Of course, it turned out that it was all part of the Mandarin's plan to give the Watchmen a computer virus which would cause them to destroy the stuff they were supposed to protect...

Oh, yeah, happy New Year's Eve 'n' stuff.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: Children of the Lens

I've been meaning to re-read and then review this book for a while, but for some reason I couldn't find it. Then, the other day my sister was looking for something on her bookshelves, and randomly hands it to me. I told her several times I thought she had it, but she didn't believe me... (She had it because, as I've mentioned in the past, she's a huge, huge fan of the Lensman anime movie. Unfortunately, this is the only Lensman book I've actually got easy access to [I don't think the public domain version of Triplanetary counts], and it's the last book in the series, a bombardment of series terminology and obtuse narration that also didn't much suit her tastes generally. Ah, well, you can't be a fan of everything.)

Children of the Lens represents the culmination of years of work by Smith, and the culmination of the original long-running Lensman Arms Race. It is also the culmination of a rather creepy breeding project. And when I say "rather," I mean "extremely." But more on that in a moment.

The ultimate weapons of the original Lensman Arms Race are pretty well ultimate. Number One is a weapon that makes the Death Star look like a pea shooter-a hyperspatial tube opening into enemy territory, out of which a planet from another universe is fired at multiples of c like a huge bullet at the target.

This weapon was fired twice; once at a planet, and then, just for good measure, at the same planet's sun. There wasn't much left.

Number Two was arguably not the same kind of weapon at all. It was not a device, or an implement. It was the massed total mental powers of every Lensman then alive, plus that of the Arisian race, guided and managed by a superhuman telepathic fusion. Keep in mind, the Civilization which the Lensmen were a part of had literally millions of member planets, as it spanned multiple galaxies; a typical good-sized member planet produced a hundred Lensmen a year. Assuming that the majority of Lensmen who graduated in the past twenty years were still active (not a dubious assumption, as the major protagonist of most of the Lensman books, Kimball Kinnison, was at least in his forties in this one), a low estimate puts that at something like 20 billion Lensmen. A fairly typical Lensman can telepathically communicate over interstellar distances and even kill someone by frying their minds at that distance; the Eddorian civilization, despite its age and power, didn't really stand a chance.

This isn't even going into the "loose planets" and "negaspheres" (antimatter planets) that were chucked around rather casually by the good guys, or the supposedly terrifying sunbeam that never gets used in the story. These were all old hat.

You might be wondering about my "rather creepy breeding program" crack earlier. Well, as it happens, the Arisians, using their sufficiently advanced alien license, decided to guide several genetic lineages, not just among humans but among four different potentially useful races in Civilization (humans being one of the four). They decided that humans showed the most promise, so they canceled the breeding programs for the Velantians, the Rigellians, and the Palainians (sorry, no super awesome children for you!), and only humanity gets to advance to the next level. And so, Kimball Kinnison's five children are the first members of a new race of superhumans. ... Think about that.

Yes, it means exactly what it sounds like. Chris "Kit" Kinnison is going to get really close with his sisters.

The first time I read this, I was younger and more naive, and I didn't pick up on the subtexts. Now that I'm better at ferreting these out... Well, let's just say that Wikipedia's remark that there were only a few ambiguous passages referring to this idea was just bull. It was about as ambiguous as a kicked puppy and about as subtle as a bomb blast. Kit and "the kids," as he called his sisters, hit on each other continuously.

For that matter, they also hit on their mother, usually while she was naked.

No, I'm completely serious. That actually happened multiple times.

What really gets me is this idea that, once the breeding program was showing fruit (ARGH), they canceled three of them. The three other races were shown to be immensely complementary to humans. Velantians were relentless, implacable, and tough as heck giant flying snake monsters, and Rigellians and Palainians both displayed analytical capabilities far beyond humans at the same "level." They all got along extremely well. I say, if you're going to have a creepy breeding program where you uplift several lesser species through eugenics, if they all get along then you should finish them all. That's an awful lot of wasted work, guys. (Also, what about the Nevians? They were pretty awesome, too-why didn't they get awesome super-Nevian breeding programs?)

All in all, a bizarre conclusion to one of the first great space operas. (Wikipedia's article was glowing praise obviously written by a huge fan.) Oh, yes, and technically, it was a frame story that was sent by a future Chris Kinnison to some unknown party time capsule style to warn them of the Lensman Arms Race methodologies or something, as it was suspected that there would be new counterparts to the Eddorians in the future.

-Signing off.

Game Review: Bubble Tanks Tower Defense

One of my favorite game genres is tower defense. Why? This is why.

So it comes naturally that I'd like Bubble Tanks Tower Defense, even though it doesn't involve actual tanks and the graphics are all just bubbles.

My biggest complaint about the game, in fact, is the mere fact that the graphics and sound effects never go beyond what you would expect from a game full of bubbles. A stupid complaint for a game called "Bubble Tanks Tower Defense," but a complaint nonetheless-because the gameplay is really fun (if you like tower defense games).

It's a lot like most tower defense games, really-it's just that everything involves bubbles.

Everything, that is, but the shadowy and mysteriously abstract walls.

What gets me about the walls is that the game's equivalent to air units, ghosts, go right over them just like they go right over the turrets. Yet they still need to go around the border walls.

Whatever. That's not important.

Interesting gameplay aspect number one-the upgrade tree.

Most such games have lots of upgrade tree stuff. However, I've never seen a game with quite so elaborate an upgrade tree. It probably helps that the most basic tower is the only one you can use without the upgrade tree, of course. That single humble tower must evolve into everything you use in the game.

Including the "mega" towers.

Once you have four towers clustered together in a square that have reached the tops of their respective upgrade trees, you can buy an upgrade to combine them into a single, massive tower. And unless I'm misremembering, it's even possible to merge four big towers into an absurdly huge one. Of course, the big towers aren't especially practical because of their cost, and I've never even built one of the gargantuan ones outside of this massively cheaty thing here.

(The telltale that indicates I'm cheating, by the way, is the little smiley. See it?)

The other interesting gameplay aspects are the enemies. Most tower defense games have pretty generic enemies-just average guys, fast guys, slow and tough guys, and flying enemies. (I hate flying enemies with a passion. I hates them!) But this game also has "splitters" (they become hordes of little guys when hit-I don't like them much, but they're variety and that's good) and "spawners" (who create bubbles that turn into replicas of themselves, though the replicas don't create bubbles themselves-I like these because they're fairly easy targets, though they'd be a pain if the spawn spawned more spawn).

The main thing missing from gameplay are blocks, that is to say, little structures to fill in gaps between the unwieldily large towers, but I can't complain too much.

Like any tower game, enemies come in waves, and you can get more points by getting the computer to speed the waves up. In order to maximize your defenses, you need to arrange them in a certain way to increase the area the "ground" units must travel over.

This is a good start, and is fairly typical of what you can do at the beginning. However, in order to maximize the effectiveness of this particular setup, I had to sell a few towers and rearrange them a bit.

If there are enough waves and you're getting enough bubbles, you'll be able to upgrade the quality of your defenses considerably, which in this game means huge towers like this one.

I often get impatient with this particular game and have the computer flood me with waves in an effort to get done sooner. This is often a bad idea...

But I'm not too worried. I managed not only to set up a winding path for the normal enemies to follow, but those green turrets at the center of the screen are anti-air... er, ghost... towers, and their central placement means the ghosts, beelining for the gate I'm defending, will go right over them. Ghosts are liable, by the way, to end most of your games, as air units are liable to end most tower defense games that feature them.

See? Won that one.

-Signing off.

It's Friday...

...so here's a link and some videos.

This first video is from a game where you play the Hulk. The final boss is the Leader, a guy who has a large head. Spoiler: The Hulk kills him with one punch.



The second is a boss fight from a Spider-Man game against Mysterio. Keeping in mind that Mysterio is master of illusions and deception, it's interesting to note...



...his deception, the huge lifebar, is aimed at the player, not the player character.

See you next week.

-Signing off.

Mary Sith

Ironically, the character I'm calling that is a guy.

So I saw this trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic...



I thought it was pretty nifty, but there was one thing which, as a Star Wars nerd, bothered me.
That being the use of Force lightning by a guy who may or may not be a cyborg, and who is wearing heavy armor.

What, you might ask, is the problem with this? The fact that George Lucas stated the reason Darth Vader never uses Force lightning is specifically because the damage to his body prevents him from doing so (no squishy hands and all that to use as the focus, after all). By that standard, since this dude is only maybe a cyborg (certainly, his hand is real-looking enough, though that doesn't mean much), it only maybe is wrong. But in Knights of the Old Republic, another game (though a different one than the trailer is for), Force lightning can't be used by anyone wearing body armor.

Er, not that that is necessarily important to this totally different game... I just got a Mary Sue vibe off of that guy when I saw him dress like Darth Vader and fight like the Emperor, is all.

-Signing off.

Good Idea, Bad Idea

Good Idea (at least by one definition of good): Building a giant army of nearly invincible robot soldiers to conquer the world for you.

Bad Idea: Hastily repairing said robots.

Oops.

-Signing off.

Awesome Dictionary: Running the Gauntlet

(expression, verb)
1. To do a difficult, arduous, or painful task, as in "I had to run the gauntlet at work today."
2. A traditional punishment in which the punishee was run down two parallel lines of punishers, each of whom struck the punishee or threw rocks at him. (Source of the name.)
3. What your enemies must do in the game Warzone Tower Defense.


-Signing off.

Teen Rangers With Robots

Chances are, if you lived through the '90s in the English-speaking world, you have some small notion of what the term "Power Rangers" refers to. Originating with a '70s era Japanese live action series which spawned a series of sequels that are now produced on a yearly basis, Power Rangers involves pretty much the same thing, recycling Japanese footage and blending it (sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much) with footage from an American (or Australian, or New Zealander) studio. A team of usually young individuals ("teenagers with attitude," in the infamous parlance of the first episode) works to defeat evil with flashy costumes and weapons, martial arts, and obscenely big robots.

Far be it from me to try to summarize it here, or even at my other blog, which is dedicated to the subject (and which I need to update more often... sigh). Google it for yourself if you want information. (I'll point out that Joe Rovang has a really nice fansite. Not for neophytes, but, y'know...)

Anyway, the matter of Golden Age comic books, and coincidences.

We join Jackie Law and the Boy Rangers. (How do you get a name like Jackie Law? I had a professor at college named J. Justice, but seriously...)

Jackie Law and his Boy Rangers are a gang of kids who beat up criminals, in the same tradition as lots of child-endangerment schemes. Er... Never mind. The point is, they fight gangsters and even Nazi spies, and they're better at it than adults. What.

Other than those things, you might wonder what they have in common with Power Rangers. Observe.

These kids investigate some gunshots and stuff, and end up catching the dying breaths of some inventor guy, who was shot by Nazi spies.

They come back again later after the police have left, wondering what kind of invention the guy was talking about. And so do the Nazi spies, including Luger, whose head luckily provides them with the information they need.

How fortunate, eh?

So what's the invention?

Guess.

If you saw it coming, it's because I telegraph like a Morse code master.

Anyway, they destroy some Nazi tanks that somehow get smuggled into the country...

Of course, anybody could do that with a proper giant robot. Let's see 'em give the robot to the military so some trained professionals can-

Never mind. Do you think that's foreshadowing there?

If you don't, well, no offense but you're slow.

So they're hunting a crime boss named Khron for no apparent reason. And when they meet him, he's got a lever.

Tip: Don't stand still when a crook is holding a lever. Because this might happen.

Of course, it begs the question "Why don't you just stand up, you morons?!"

But they don't, and they get out of the robot and become captives, while Khron takes the robot and steals hard workers' salaries.

Tip: If you've got a giant tank-smashing robot, don't think small...

Also, watch out for construction vehicles.

What.

So, what next?

They never use Loco again, that's what.

Seriously.

-Signing off.

Metroplex...

...is all your base.

Super Robot Profiles: Gold Lightan

Golden Warrior Gold Lightan (pronounced Gord Raitan) was one of about fifty bazillion schlocky super robot series produced by '80s anime giant Tatsunoko (of Robotech/Macross fame).



Notice anything... significant about Lightan there? He hangs out with a kid who's what, ten? And he transforms (through incredible size altering power) into a cigarette lighter.

"Oh," you say, "lighters have other purposes. It's perfectly innocent."

What if I told you that the kid formed a club/team called the One Pack Rangers?

I rest my case.

Moving on. Lightan is pretty typical of the Tatsunoko robots in that he kicks and beats the living daylights out of things many times his size. (Unlike most of the robots I mention in these profiles, by the way, Lightan is self-aware and self-controlled.) Like a certain other robot I've mentioned, he does so with extreme brutality. His "signature" move is jabbing his hand into an enemy robot and tearing out the "heartbox energy device."

But that's not the only case of Lightan's brutality. Observe:



Ouch. And again, ouch. Granted, it's a fighting game, in which size is often a liability rather than an advantage, and it was two on one, but nonetheless... ouch.

One last note: Lightan had many sidekicks who resembled R2D2/Transformer hybrids... which were all named [adjective] Lightan.

-Signing off.

Police Brutality

(If anyone notes a sudden drastic change in typical post time, it's not actually a change; it's just that, despite my settings, the blog was set to Pacific time [and I just corrected it]. WHAT THE HECK BLOGGER.)

No, I'm not talking about any incidents that were in the news. Forget Rodney King.

Behold the worst case of police brutality I've ever seen.



I have this suspicion that one difficulty people had watching the first Tekkaman series has mostly to do with scenes like this one. Subject A, "George" (apparently that was his Italian dub name or something), breaks into an enemy warship and then starts smashing stuff. This is horribly cruel. He could easily have cut the warship in half from outside, and then the guys inside would have been resigned to a quick decompression death or vaporization depending on what exploded.

But no, he had to kill them to their faces.

Et tu, ROM?

-Signing off.