It's Apparently "R 'ha" With A Space (The Space Is Important When Searching Your History)

Okay, the plot for this is simple (albeit interesting), but for something animated by one dude?



This is amazing. I particularly love the character designs (the alien and the robot).

-Signing off.

Yo Yo/Buy These Toys

(Whoops, dangit, I put the same video up twice instead of the second video to compare that I intended.)

Yet more parallels between Transformers and Bionicle:

Silly rap commercials.




("Dudicus.")

-Signing off.

This Is Cool Yet Flawed (So I Don't Actually Have a Problem With It)

I'm of two minds on this short film. (Note: There's a character who swears quite a bit, in case that sort of thing bothers you.)



The first part of me thinks it's a really cool little film (especially with the maker's note that it had essentially no budget), and I'd totally love to see the rest of RL7's story.

The other part basically thinks that there couldn't possibly be a stupider way to check for malfunctions in a robot, especially an insanely dangerous one with organic brain components apparently harvested from a hapless victim.

Not that this actually makes it less enjoyable, it just strikes me as the stupidest idea ever.

-Signing off.

Dude, Where's My Robot Manservant?

It's just as well that the retro futures they told us were coming never happened. Case in point:

Imagine if kids had robots that they could order to carry them around. Makes the health problems that we see now look pretty mild, huh?

(Image from The Young Children's Encyclopedia Britannica, specifically the "robots" article. Pretty soon here I'll dig up some images from the "future" article, which are also pretty awesome. These are wonderful old books, especially for kids, and I remember them fondly from my childhood.)

-Signing off.

Wait a Minute, He's a Robot...

Y'know, I miss this show (Medabots, or in Japan, rather hilariously "Medarots").



It's kind of unfortunate that they chose to dub Metabee here with what is generally considered a "black" voice, because it brings up questions of whether the dubbers were stereotyping.

But then, a very large number of the children watching the show would never have heard of the stereotype (I know that I'd never heard of it until sometime in the last year or so while perusing TVTropes), so it feels more like political correctness obsession ruining things than anything for me.

In case you want the negativity inherent in the first part of this post flushed out, here's one of the series' more awesome moments.



The awesome part isn't actually that three robots suddenly tapped into their secret powers to fire off giant blasts of energy which nothing could survive. It's that (while you don't see it here) their target ultimately shrugged it off.

-Signing off.

China Still Loves Giant Robots

(I'm being self-referential, just so you know.)

Y'know, this looks like a decent CGI anime-type show from China here...



...but my favorite part is probably the song. (It's definitely my sister's favorite part.)

-Signing off.

Greatest Terrible Movie Ever?

I think I embedded a trailer for this once, but I can't be sure.



This looks like it must be the best ridiculous action movie (as well as the just plain most ridiculous action movie) ever made.

(FYI, as near as I can tell, there's Russian translations loudly trying to talk over the dialogue. Not that I can understand either of the languages it's in.)

-Signing off.

Golden Age Moment of the Day (75)

From Smash Comics #26 (you could find it here if you're interested)...

Remember, kids, Bozo the Robot/Iron Man: Guy who hits people really hard such that they accidentally die. He's no killer./sarcasm>

-Signing off.

Game Reviews: Robots Vs. Zombies

Robots Vs. Zombies is a fairly dull slightly modified tower defense game.

The point of interest is that you control a mobile robot that can shoot the creeps (in this case obviously zombies). This robot is essentially similar to the tank from Tank Destroyer in terms of how you control it-i.e. nice, smooth and easy controls.

Obviously, you can also build turrets. There's not much variety, though. The upgrade tree has basically no interesting features that I can tell.

If an enemy reaches the goal area, it picks up one of your MacGuffins (sadly not brains) and tries to carry it back to the gate. If it dies before it gets there, it drops it in place, meaning the next zombie to get that far can get it sooner. It's a kind of interesting, but also very annoying, mechanic in my mind.

Why are you shut in this nearly indefensible room trying to hold off zombies, and why don't you just shut the danged door? Who knows?

A fairly boring and somewhat inferior tower defense game, although it's got pretty nice graphics. Unless you're looking to see huge puddles of blood on the floor where the zombies buy it, you're better off playing a more interesting tower defense game than this one.

-Signing off.

Walter Walther Walzack and Serious Walther Walzack

In The Brave of Gold Goldran, perhaps the silliest Brave series (albeit the one with the coolest-looking lead mecha, Goldran), there's a completely inexplicable nation called Walzack whose royal family members act as the primary recurring antagonists. (Wikipedia actually remarks "There is no information on the origin or location of Walzack in the series.")

The first of these characters is perhaps the best character from the series, "Walter Zack" Walter, or more properly Walter Walzack. (I like to call him Walter Walther, for obvious reasons.)

Walter Walther's life is, despite his wealth and power, a long series of events that make him react something like this.

This particular face, by the way, is his reaction to his own fiance trying to kiss him. Yes, he's that much of a man-child. (He was apparently raised by his butler, Colonel Sangross [who is apparently a joke on Colonel Sanders-yes, really], and other servants, who as his employees apparently weren't very good at bringing up children.)

Apparently, aside from being Royal Prince of Walzack, Walter Walther is also his nation's ambassador to Japan (!) and also a world-famous movie director (!?!). Despite being first in line to his nation's throne, having what would be a cushy job for any other person, and also having another job that could probably make him all the money he could ever want, he's decided to embark on the highly expensive and arduous task of being a villain in a mecha series. (Fortunately for him, apparently his country developed really good escape pods, because they only failed to save him once that I've seen, and that time he wasn't injured because of the rule of funny-he actually swam away through the air instead. Also, to be fair, his family believed that if they could get all the MacGuffins [which naturally are the Pokeballs artifacts that contain the ultra-powerful Brave robots], they could rule the world, so...)

A big chunk of his troubles comes from the fact that he's trying to defeat super robots with relatively more ordinary mecha, but his solutions are often hilarious, such as using concrete to keep a mecha that magically rises out of the ground when called (even on other planets) from joining the battle, or using wheeled feet to retreat from a finisher attack with limited range. Eventually, he realizes that he's terrible at this, and so he eventually changes sides and allies himself with the strongest Brave robot from this series, Captain Shark (who is not only a robot that transforms into a spaceship that looks like a shark, but is also a pirate). After that, he tends to have a much higher success rate, and also dresses as Captain Harlock.

Then there's Serious/Sirius Walther Walzack, who as the name implies is a much more effective villain.

Serious kind of upsets me, because the character is drawn as a pretty person in an animation style that makes everyone look pretty much the same (kids and adults are nearly indistinguishable from each other), has a sexy voice actress, gorgeous long hair... and is a twelve-year-old boy.

You can imagine that, as I am an adult straight male, this kind of mixed signal is rather, well...

It makes me want to do a Walter Walther face, I guess I could say.

Honestly, I thought Serious was pretty cool when I thought he was an adult woman. (The character was apparently raised by robots, and is very, well, serious, and nearly emotionless. A female character like that can be interesting; it's certainly rarer to see someone like that in anime.) Now, I can't look at him for very long without pulling an Ackbar.

-Signing off.

As Inorexably As The Future Itself

I dunno, I just like that phrase.



Cheesy robots FTW.

-Signing off.

Gold Lightan Hands

(What the FLIP was that, Blogger? Yeah, yeah, maintenance, I know, but you [temporarily] nuked a bunch of posts [and I still had to partly fix mine, at least-did anyone else get those weird number boxes in their tags?] and made it inaccessible for long enough for me to miss a post? Worst maintenance cycle ever.)

I've talked about Gord Raitan Gold Lightan here before. For reference's sake, here's the intro of the series.



Finding toy commercials always seems to add new context about robots like this.



GIANT CREEPY SPECTRAL HAND ATTACK. (Actually, I suppose GIANT CREEPY SPECTRAL HAND-POWERED TRANSFORMATION would be a lot more accurate, but I'll go with that.)

-Signing off.

GALACTRON... THE... TRANSFORMER

THIS... VIDEO... FEATURES... A... ROBOT... THAT... TRANSFORMS... AND... CALLS... ITSELF... A... TRANSFORMER.



Mocking aside, it's kind of funny that Galactron here (who "battles" an even sillier "robot" named Reptar) can apparently get away with calling himself a "transformer." Even if he is from the Freedom Federation and has the POWER OF FIRE.

-Signing off.

Fun With Mad Science/Magic

I recently did a very brief review of the Mardek games.

Beyond the sense of humor...

...there's the fact that the gameplay is genuinely interesting and clever.

Thus far, my favorite character(s) is/are the above, Legion, a robot that ended up with four souls living in it. (Baron von Doomkill is only one of them.) Legion is similar to Final Fantasy's blue mages, who learn magic used by enemies; the way (t)he(y) learns it is by being hit by it. Legion learns attacks instantly upon being hit, although (t)he(y) can't learn every attack, and there's no way of predicting which will or won't be learned. This means that Legion can learn a completely new ability in the middle of a battle, and this has potential for crazy situations. Legion is also the only character who can be targeted by the skill Repair, which not only heals him for a large amount, but boosts his stats for the duration of the battle.

In fact, I already have a completely nutty story about using Legion in battle, despite having played with him/them for, oh, all of half an hour.

In one of the game's regions, the Dream World, there's an enemy called a Pixie. Don't think it's a harmless little creature, it's actually among the nastiest enemies you can encounter randomly. It's immune to most of the elements your characters can use, is guaranteed to dodge physical attacks an average of 60% of the time regardless of how fast your characters are (its stats that determine how often it should dodge otherwise are also quite high, meaning that your chances of hitting it are really low), and it has a huge variety of devastating status effect-inflicting attacks. Only one of your characters has a magic attack that can work on it consistently, and that character is also the easiest one to knock out. Ironically, Pixies have fewer than 250 hitpoints, which makes it all the more frustrating.

And, oh yeah, it also gains every positive status effect in the game at the start of a battle. That's Barrier (halves all physical damage), Magic Barrier (halves all magic damage), Haste (gets two turns per round), and Regeneration (heals a small fraction of its health every turn).

Anyway, I decided I wanted to try to get Legion to learn some attacks from Dream World monsters, as they tend to have elements that other enemies don't have much in the way of resistance to. However, I forgot to take my party member who can cast Light element attack spells, and naturally randomly encountered a Pixie right out of the gate.

And as Pixies are wont to do, the little devil cast Addle Gas on my whole party right at the start of the battle, which Confused everybody... except Legion, who isn't immune, but was apparently lucky. (Confusion is the game's "make the victim attack completely at random" status effect-which isn't as bad as it is in some games I've played, as being hit by a physical attack snaps them out of it. Hilariously, Confused characters and enemies may attack themselves.) Legion's turn came up... and I had Legion cast Addle Gas, which (t)he(y) had just learned.

Pixies aren't immune to Confusion.

The Pixie's confuzzlement gave me a breather, and my party recovered. However, I had no way to damage the Pixie reliably (my party really wasn't optimized to fight it, although in my defense, it's really hard to optimize for the Dream World), except for giving it Poison... which was canceled out by the Regeneration it had. And it was still attacking my party periodically.

Then it hit itself with an attack that Silenced it, meaning it couldn't use magic anymore. Cue the Pixie attacking repeatedly with its only physical attack, Poison Sting, which dealt only five to fifteen damage and sometimes inflicts poison. I had two party members who could remove Poison, so this wasn't a problem. (Hitpoints were in the high triple-digits for the entire party at this point.)

That still left the problem of who could deal damage. Mardek was equipped with a water-element sword, which was useless because the Pixie was immune, and also had an air attack (the Pixie was immune to that too). My other characters could deal a variety of elemental damage, but all of it was in the four "classical" elements, which as noted the Pixie is still immune to. The only damage type that I had access to which would damage the Pixie was "physical" damage, a non-elemental damage type... and the only character which could deal it was Legion, my lowest-level and slowest character.

(I suppose I might possibly have run away, but where's the fun in that? I also forget about escape options all the time, and in fact I think I've only ever run away by accident.)

Then I remembered that Legion had also learned a form of dark elemental damage, and tried that, hoping it would get past the evasion ability. I got a few hits in with it, but it ultimately didn't work well enough.

And then I remembered the aforementioned Repair ability. I had the character who uses it spam it like crazy while having Legion take swings at the Pixie in hopes of making a blind hit.

Eventually, Legion managed to get in two blows this way, bringing the Pixie down to just ten hitpoints. So close... And then Poison kicked in before the Regeneration, taking those last ten hitpoints.

That was possibly the most fun I've ever had in a computer/video game RPG.

Some Old Robot

I actually mentioned Elektro the robot at some point in the distant past on here; it honestly wasn't an inspired post, so I'll let it remain anonymous.

Elektro was rather hilarious, because he was designed to do several rather... oddball things, such as inflating balloons.



The other major purpose of the mouthpiece? Smoking.



Yes, probably the most distinctive feature of this "technological marvel"* was being a bad role model.

No references to retro robots are truly complete without mentioning Elektro. Elektro, and this guy.



Truly, he is the pinnacle of robot design.**

-Signing off.

*Technically, he was only a remote-controlled dummy, and while he inspired at least some comic book robots and helped usher in the idea of robots being a potential part of society, he was really just a relatively complicated remotely controlled device that is exceeded in complexity by numerous modern children's toys, e.g. anything made by WowWee-and heck, more impressive similar feats of engineering were achieved long before then.

**Obviously, I'm being facetious, but I do love that little guy.

Robo Force: The Revenge of Nazgar (Part the Fifth)

When we last saw those silly-looking robots, they had just gotten out of a big sludgy lava substitute.

This means they need to go back to base for repairs-their power packs have been depleted or some such thing. (They probably also want all that squishy "lava" scraped off.)

Meanwhile, Hun-Dred and company arrive at the final location, which they really should have known about in the first place...

...but we'll let it slide.

Not only does it contain Nazgar's brain, it's also actually a giant frikkin' tower fortress that's been camouflaged with rock and is armed with a gigantic death ray capable of targeting Celestia (the big happy techno-city from earlier) from miles and miles away, even though it probably ought to be beyond the horizon line.

And Nazgar is happy to have his new body, courtesy of Dr. Fury (remember him?).

Mark Fury breaks in by himself and breaks his father out, beating the ever-living heck out of some of Hun-Dred's robots in the process.

I reiterate: A dude took on two heavily armed killer robots without a weapon. And neither he nor his father got hurt.

This is about when the death ray starts bombarding the city...

...so Deena and the robots head in.

This causes the villains to unleash their defense system: GIANT METAL PTEROSAURS.

It doesn't work very well, and the good guys are inside in mere seconds. (And with good reason: There's only a couple of minutes left before it will be over forever!)

As they enter, Maxx Steele is confronted by Hun-Dred, who is determined to take the other 'bot down. He whips his robot-killing drill out and proceeds to-

-break it on Maxx's shoulder?! What?

And then, Maxx punches him-

-CHEESE! Across the room?

And then he explodes.

What was that?

Wait, here's an excerpt from an "Official" Robo Force page's Maxx Steele bio entry:

With the motto "Any mission, any time, any place," [Maxx's] primary assets are his brute strength and his almost total invulnerability.

You don't say?

Anyway, Nazgar is preparing to escape, and that flunky guy who betrayed the security council in the second part wants to escape too.

He isn't allowed to get into the escape... doohickey, and after it closes, all the good robots but Maxx Steele and Coptor (who carried out Dr. Fury) show up. The flunky points at it and shouts "Nazgar's in there!" and Deena and the robots shoot the heck out of it.

I mean, they seriously mess this thing's stuff right up.

Granted, this was just open-ended enough that Nazgar might have been using a teleporter or even a more mundane method like a trap-door to escape, but it's not going to be followed up in later episodes, because there aren't any.

The death ray can't be shut off, so Maxx (remember, he went off by himself) goes and breaks it with his bare hands robot gripper things.

And then, in celebration, he and the robot boys have some nice refreshing suspicious beverages.

Just like that one time in G1 Transformers, although we don't see the part where they all get drunk and start using their robot abilities in hilariously inappropriate ways.

I guess that's probably for the best; better they go out on a high note.

As I've said, this is a fun little cartoon; it was probably helped by the fact that, being only one segment, it couldn't afford to waste a second, so it just goes by at breakneck speed.

-Signing off.

Robo Force: The Revenge of Nazgar (Part the Fourth)

When we last saw Hun-Dred and his goons, they were about to embark on a quest to find the other two message crystals.

They start out by threatening a woman, in one of the rare speaking roles by a villain robot other than Hun-Dred ("Vulgar," in case you're wondering).

It's not necessary to threaten, though, because she's actually an android (!) who can be made to tell them through code words, making her the first non-standard robot to appear, and also kind of hard to listen to, because her voice is grating as all heck. She hands the crystal to them, they listen to the message, which tells them they'll find the next in some volcano or something, and they head out.

This is where the volcano is.

Somehow, from the tip they got from the guy they threatened last time, the good guys have caught up enough to know where to look, and so they aren't far behind (though the robots force the humans to stay behind because the air is poisonous).

Hun-Dred and goons find the last message crystal on this odd rock formation in the middle of a huge pool of lava-ish stuff. (It doesn't act much like lava, which is why I say that.)

By spinning all three message crystals at the same time, it plays another new recording. Wouldn't these be nifty RPG quest items?

Then the good guys parade in.

And...

...they promptly get knocked into the "lava."

This is, of course, where the commercial break goes.

After the baddies leave, they try to fly out, but the "lava" is too sticky. So one of them fires up his handy grappling hook, and they human robot chain their way out of there.

The final proof, by the way, that this stuff probably isn't lava:

It makes me think of cake frosting, but it might make you think of something... less wholesome.

Anyway, they get out of there, and...

...and that's all I have for today, because I intend to wrap this up next time in one fell swoop.

Business get serious.

-Signing off.

Robo Force: The Revenge of Nazgar (Part the Third)

When we left off, Hun-Dred's goon robots had surrounded Dina Deena. (I only figured out the official spelling-with the help of this page-after writing the last one. Incidentally, why does it have to be such an ugly spelling?)

And they presumably captured her, because it cuts away to a new scene.

Apparently, Hun-Dred's base is a literal underwater castle, which is pretty awesome (though admittedly also pretty silly).

Maybe the script called for an underwater fortress, and got interpreted literally.

Anyway, Maxx Steele and Mark Fury and company have come to invade it.

They split up, with the robots going to blow the place up (!) while Mark Fury checks the place's prison cells in hopes of finding his father, Dr. Fury.

Instead, he finds Deena, of course. (The Doctor was in another castle.)

And then some guy with a hilarious mustache threatens him from behind.

Fortunately for him...

...Maxx Steele thought he'd keep an eye on him, just in case.

Then he leaves to finish wrecking the castle.

We see something of a gunfight between the good robots and... these guys.

That's right, unreleased toys (Plundor, Fangar, and Arsenal) got an appearance in this, albeit as nameless, all but faceless goons who get slaughtered by the hero bots. (You can find more information on them on the page I linked to earlier, or here if you're too lazy to scroll back up.)

The castle has been sabotaged to explode (or something) and everybody escapes, with Mark Fury carrying off the mustache guy to interrogate later.

I mean that pretty literally, by the way-Blazer the flamethrower bot has a few words with the guy.

He grills the guy for information (not quite literally).

These robots... are starting to strike me as being rather bad role models.

Anyway, since I haven't remarked on it yet, I might as well address it here: There's a rather odd bit concerning the robots. All robots have exactly the same basic design, no matter their origin. Hun-Dred may be hundreds or thousands of years old, and is virtually identical to Coptor, who was built by Dr. Fury, and to Maxx Steele, who was built by Mark Fury (though admittedly, probably from Dr. Fury's notes or something). There is absolutely no reason for this. I suppose I might be able to accept the idea that this basic design was so ingrained into these people that they couldn't even imagine building them differently, or maybe this simply being the most efficient robot design (snicker), but it's still rather odd.

Anyway, nitpicking aside, after they get their information, mustache man jumps out the window, and I'm pretty sure they were in a plane or a skyscraper or something, so... Yeah, he probably splatted.

Next time, we get to join Hun-Dred and the goons on his search for Nazgar's brain.

-Signing off.

Robo Force: The Revenge of Nazgar (Part the Second)

(Part the First is here.)

In the last three minutes, a relatively large amount of stuff happened that will be the backstory for a character who will be important for the rest of it. In the next three (or so), it will establish a huge amount of backstory for the world it's set in (which cannot be Earth, by the way).

Anyway, we left off after ten years had passed between scenes.

This subtitle establishes us as being in someplace called Celestia. I think it's a sort of city-state thing, but it's obviously a smidgen vague.

We zoom in on a large, official looking building, which turns out to have some sort of big council... thing in session.

They're calling Councilwoman Dina Squall (or something like that) to speak on matters of security.

Her first statement, that a group called the Cult of Dre(a?)d poses a threat because of its proclaimed intention of reviving a guy called Nazgar, is laughed off because Nazgar lived 2000 years ago. (Obviously, this is where I realized that it's rather unlikely this planet is supposed to be Earth.)

This guy here...

...even insists that he's actually a legend.

This, despite holographic video archive of a conflict that Nazgar was involved in. (There are references to "Zeton" or something, which I guess must be the planet Celestia is on.)

The same councilman accuses her of fakery, so she pulls out a "message crystal" which apparently came from ancient times and which was apparently captured from one of Hun-Dred's hideouts, and spins it like a top on the table.

This shows off a holographic message from ol' Nazgar, who claims that his brain will survive.

The council is still unconvinced, and chastise Dina with a remark that she ought to be hunting those guys Mark Fury and Max Steele, who have been "making fools" of them.

Now, here's another great little fight scene, this time with human on robot but mostly robot on human violence. (The robot is Maxx Steele, who does seem rather preoccupied with making humans look like fools in this bit.)

Maxx's fighting style against humans is pretty simple: He just stands there and ignores everything they try to do to him, while kicking tossing the heck out of them.

We also see Mark Fury...

...who, by the way, was the kid in those first three minutes whose dad was kidnapped.

It turns out that he was involved in a bar brawl because he found an informant, but the informant gave him bad info and/or arranged for him to be ambushed. Protip: If you're going to ambush a guy with a large robot buddy, bring your own large robot buddies, instead of a punk with a purple mohawk.

But where did Maxx Steele come from? He wasn't built by Dr. Fury in the first part, only that helicopter robot was.

Such questions will have to wait.

Remember that suspicious councilman?

For some reason, we see him in some kind of dwelling, and there's an unsettling symbol on his wall that he seems to be paying respect to.

He calls someone on the phone. And unlike the last time I talked about a suspicious person making a phone call, it's not Cobra Commander.

He tells Hun-Dred (who, in case you couldn't tell, is the leader of the Cult of Dred) that Dina Squall has that highly important message crystal, which is one of three that, when used together, will lead Hun-Dred to the brain of Nazgar.

...

Wait a minute, if the Cult has had this thing all along, what the heck are they waiting for?

(Don't think too hard about it, and let's move on.)

So, several of Hun-Dred's robot goons pop out of back alleys and off of buildings in order to surround and ambush Dina.

Push the drama button.

And there we are, a great cliffhanger!

-Signing off.