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News: Gundam Extreme Versus 2 Initial Roster And Location Tests AnnouncedNews: Gundam Extreme Versus 2 Initial Roster And Location... As the rest of the world has Gundam Versus on the PS4, Japanese arcades are gearing up for the upcoming Gundam Versus Extreme 2. On May 12 and 13, stores in Tokyo and Osaka...

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News: God Gundam and Master Gundam DLC Coming To Gundam Versus In JanuaryNews: God Gundam and Master Gundam DLC Coming To Gundam... It's been a long time coming, but God Gundam and Master Gundam are finally joining the Gundam Versus roster as the next DLC units in January. While we've had several melee...

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News: Aegis Gundam, GM Sniper II White Dingo Ver. and More Coming To Gundam Versus This DecemberNews: Aegis Gundam, GM Sniper II White Dingo Ver. and... This December, even more suits are being added to the ever growing Gundam Versus lineup. The first is Aegis Gundam, last seen in Gundam SEED Destiny: Rengou VS ZAFT II Plus...

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News: Atlas Gundam DLC Coming To Gundam VersusNews: Atlas Gundam DLC Coming To Gundam Versus If you were hoping for more Gundam Thunderbolt units, there's good news! Atlas Gundam will be joining the Gundam Versus roster as DLC in late November. This will more than...

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News: Gundam Versus To Add Phantom Gundam As DLC UnitNews: Gundam Versus To Add Phantom Gundam As DLC Unit As we await the upcoming Western release of Gundam Versus on September 29 on top of unreleased units such as Pale Rider and Gundam Guison Rebake, Phantom Gundam has been...

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News: Wonder Festival 2012 Winter Coverage

Posted on : 12-02-2012 | By : | In : News

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The latest Wonder Festival has had all manner of lovely trinkets on display. From Sentinel’s RIOBOT versions of Anubis (pictured above), Jehuty and Detonator Orgun (though we’re more excited by the inclusion of the Tsugumori from Tsutomu Nihei’s brilliant though overlooked Knights of Sidonia manga), to some very nice figma toys of both Tekkaman Blade and Tekkaman Evil. The new VOLKS injection plastic LED Mirage is still looking all kinds of sexy too. Though the biggest and nicest surprise of them all is the appearance of Kazutaka Miyatake’s power armor from the 80’s Starship Troopers OVA as a new Revoltech figure. If you want to peruse more pictures at your leisure, then you can do so here, here and here.

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Toys: Destroid Tomahawk

Posted on : 03-08-2011 | By : | In : Toys/Kits

Hardware:

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Courtesy of our good friends at HobbyLink Japan, we’ve been sent the 1/60 Destroid Tomahawk (Weathered Version) toy from Super Dimension Fortress Macross that’s on sale. This particular design is a unique one though as it has had some quite massive ramifications on mecha gaming over the years.

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News: F.E.A.R. 3’s Power Armor Is Not Afraid Of No Ghosts

Posted on : 28-10-2010 | By : | In : News, Videos

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F.E.A.R. 3, the next game in a line of first person shooters about high technology and the supernatural combining to create a general mess of things, has had its power armors, imaginatively named the Power Armor and the Enhanced Power Armor, revealed. The two battlesuits previously appeared in F.E.A.R and F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, and the EPA was in fact pilotable in F.E.A.R. 2, but the trailer they’ve sent out implies a lot more mobility on their part this time around, making their existence part of what I see as a kind of renewal in Starship Troopers type power armor, where the “power” component to their power armor wasn’t just a heavier load of armor and munitions, but also thrusters which allowed a single infantryman to move quickly across miles of territory. The typical “space marines” of today, for all their glitzy tech, still find themselves cowering behind crates just like any other human but it seems the industry may be moving in a more interesting direction.

The designs of the PA and the EPA remind me a bit of the Tau’s Stealth Suits and Crisis Battlesuits from Warhammer 40,000, which could make it a rare example of a game adding more mecha-like elements by being inspired by a Western design, rather than a Japanese one.

Worth pointing out is that the mechs here seem designed to incorporate the general FPS feel of the rest of the game rather than to merely add a “vehicle mode”; the game still visible looks, and seems to play, like an FPS while unmistakably incorporating the functions granted by the mecha. Obstacles and cover that would hinder a regular human fall easily before your robot’s might, expanding your tactical options, but the player’s point of view stays the same, stopping the player from dissociating from the “closeness” of the action. This was a problem with the EPA in F.E.A.R. 2, where the mech sections, while fun, seemed to be at odds with the game’s main trick of being a horror FPS.

Hopefully the developers, Day 1 Studios, will be able to produce something that will make us forgive them for MechAssault.

Spoiler

[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GAXsqjkIYQ]

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Videos: New Shooter ‘Firefall’ Has Space Marines in Mecha Backpacks

Posted on : 06-09-2010 | By : | In : Videos

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At the PAX convention in Seattle, Red 5 Studios released a gameplay trailer of their upcoming free-to-play online team-based shooter, Firefall. Notably, the studio has staff who previously worked on World of Warcraft and Starsiege: Tribes, so it’s not just an online team-based shooter with an amazing gameplay trailer, it’s one by some of the people behind the world’s biggest online game and an online team-based shooter held by many to be a classic, respectively, so the sheer potential this game has is simply staggering.

More mecha related though are the player characters’ armor, which from all appearances seems to work like that of Tribes’, where a character’s role would be determined by the armor, weapons and equipment they had equipped, rather than by having specific classes. And again like Tribes, these are suits of powered armor that allow a limited form of flight through the use of jetpacks, replicating the kind of combat in the novel version of Starship Troopers. While the Starship Troopers movie, which had a radically different plot from the book, muddies this a bit, the original novel had a huge effect on both the mecha anime genre (more specifically, Real Robots) and the “space marine” trope that simply cannot be overstated–they wouldn’t exist in their present forms without it.

In the West, the “space marine” interpretation is obviously the most popular, while Japan adopted the mecha aspects of the novel’s powered armor as their own, but it has only been recently that we’ve started to see the two different genres, which share the same common ancestor, sharing ideas. Games like Lost Planet and Vanquish are starting to take elements from both sides and are creating something new and original, and Firefall seems to be a part of that trend, with even Gears of War getting a piece of robot action these days.

The Firefall armor, for instance, not only looks like the earlier Tribes’, but incorporates a number of features uncommon in the West but more common in Japan–the armor is in general more colorful rather than ultra-gritty gray and includes glowy verniers in addition to more standard thrusters, much like Japanese mecha of today, versus the “space marines” we see more often in the West which de-emphasize these mechanical aspects. The glowy verniers themselves seem to be inspired by Gundam 00’s GN Drives or perhaps some of Gurren Lagann‘s “spiral” imagery, and according to the little data we have available on Firefall, they might even share a few more similarities to them other than looks: they seem to be related to “repulsor technology” a bit like how GN particles (or UC Gundam’s Minovsky particles) could be used for shielding or improved movement. It seems like the powered armor can also use an ability similar to Armored Core: For Answer’s “Assault Armor” in the cinematic trailer (which also shows off deployable robot drones, and the most painful-looking asstacular female ‘armor’ seen to date). The gameplay trailer, with its ten minutes of awesome, follows:

Spoiler

[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-CdQmxH96M]

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News: Vanquish Has Powered Armor, Gundam Space Colonies

Posted on : 06-06-2010 | By : | In : News, Videos

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With the latest trailer for Vanquish, we finally see what the game looks like in action and I have to say that my initial skepticism about it has all but vanished. The game’s pedigree is excellent, being created by Platinum Games (Bayonetta, Mad World) and headed by Shinji Mikami (Devil May Cry, Resident Evil) but the early screenshots and teaser trailer released to the gaming public made the game seem, at best, an interesting take on the overused “space marine” trope all too common in current-gen titles.

The new trailer puts any doubts to rest because not only is the action as frenetic as we would expect from Platinum Games, but rather than simply using space-age armor to explain away the amount of damage these characters are capable of soaking up, we can see in the trailer that the main character’s powered armor provides him with additional movement options as well–one scene shows him boosting from one set of cover to another almost instantaneously, while another has him using his thrusters to gain enough vertical range to smash a foe.

It’s nice to see designers thinking about what ways these wonderful “space marine” armors could change combat, and while the scale of powered armor doesn’t exactly match that of mecha, and thus is really a whole different kettle of fish, a lot of the solutions are the same–just as giant robots shouldn’t be treated as human analogues, humans in powered armor should have different skillsets following from their upgrade. While Vanquish isn’t the only game in recent memory to play with the trope (Section 8 being a good example) it’s good to see some of the most talented people in the action game business working on the problem.

On more firmly mecha-related territory, I’d also like to point out some interesting similarities between Vanquish and Mobile Suit Gundam. Both deal with humanity expanding into space not onto different planets, but rather in O’Neill cylinders floating freely in space that use rotation to generate an approximate feeling of gravity, and both have these colonies eventually being used as weapons, by taking advantage of the plentiful solar energy resources of outer space.

While it’s hard to tell where the homage ends and genuine cultural absorption begins with the Japanese and their (perfectly reasonable) obsession with Mobile Suit Gundam, I do find the use of Gundam as a reference point interesting, because much as the mobile suit’s use in Gundam is to provide a vehicle that can operate equally well in space, under Earth’s gravity, and in the artificial “gravity” of O’Neill cylinders, Vanquish is taking the commonly used Western term “space marine” quite literally, as Vanquish’s power armor seems to be designed both as a spacesuit and as body armor, used to infiltrate a structure floating in space. Most of what are called “space marines” in the press tend to be neither, operating on planets rather than in space and not being any more mobile than regular troops being shipped to a far-off planet.

Hopefully Vanquish will be the great game that it looks like it will be, and that it will create a renaissance in the West regarding the Men In Space Suits, Holding Guns, Shooting Aliens genre, maybe even something a bit closer to the original Western concept; when the West made Starship Troopers into a movie we kept only the fascism, while Japan kept only the robots. Needless to say, Mecha Damashii supports robots over fascism.

Spoiler

[flash http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=100953]

[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLxVt6qxDFM]

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News: Lost Planet 2 Released

Posted on : 11-05-2010 | By : | In : News

Hardware: ,

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The much anticipated Lost Planet 2 has been released today in Europe and the US (the Japanese release will follow next week). This is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition released way back in 2006, a game which bore many thematic similarities to Robert A Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Due to the player having to battle large insect aliens, called Akrid, in a variety of mecha. We will be reviewing the game shortly as well as covering the new Kotobukiya toys on their release, so keep an eye out for that.

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