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I think the difference between American 'walking attack helicopter' robots and Japanese WEEABOO FIGHTAN MAGIC ROBITS is 'plausability', which mostly means just good agility, make everything else like a tank or something.

Japanese Robots in the classic sense are superheroes. They're either flying things on rocket packs (IE, Gundam, Zone of the Enders, Gunbuster), Ginormous (Gigantor, Sentai Shows), or Rollerskating WTF. Most of these pretty much violate physics, and go superfast.

American Robots, while influenced by Japanese ones in the last few decades, tend to either be hulking slow (Mechwarrior thing) or focus more on agility but without speed or physics violation. So, Battlemechs in the artwork and cinematics are moderate sized, surprisingly agile, and not really terribly fast. They don't turn on a dime or change vectors quickly, but can bob and weave and do that sorta thing. Starship Troopers power armor or Transformers arent particularly fast, but pretty agile. Most everything else does seem to be a redrawn tank though, because that seems 'most reasonable' to our suspension of disbelief, compared to a 50 foot tall samurai with a lightsaber.

Seriously we can't even get a Mechwarrior game that lets the robots extend their arms out to shoot their guns. Or even do what the Thor in Mechwarrior 2's intro does where it casually steps around a rock face while pointing its arm out to take a potshot at the Mad Cat.

So maybe an American-robot game needs to be about bobbing and weaving with cover? Oh god. Stickycover. We just turned Mechwarrior into gears of war.

Are you going to be like those MWO forum guys?

Plz don't be

I love this code.

'Western robots' = mechwarrior and ... Uh ... 40k?

'Japanese robots' = scores of licences all across the spectrum of robots.

'Plausible' = what I like.

'Ninja' = stuff I'm totally ignorant of.

'Gears of War' = not enough of a simulator

I'm trying to decipher this thread because i dunno.

Like. Plausable = Something that's not about a thing with two legs zipping and suddenly changing vectors with a trillion newtons of thrust like all those newer macross shows have, with the pilot-killing maneuvers. Or like, how a 400 foot tall Evangelion can sprint faster than sound.

Western Robots isn't too specific, nope. Not much media with them, that aren't basically mechwarrior thingies, or like power armor, or clunky tank turrets on legs. METAL GEAR ZOMG.

FIGHTAN WEEABOO MAGIC = joke name for shit take it easy

Science fiction is thus 'plausible' when it has shit propulsion. If it goes too fast - it's 'unrealistic'. Cherry picking examples is just fucking sad; there are whole shows about robots so low-end that they travel to the scene of action on the back of a truck, Gundam traces robots from experimental space-fighters not very useful on the ground to absurd heights of agility, etc. Oh noes, Evangelion!

Calling Transformers and the Metal Gear 'western robots' is fucking hilarious, btw.

So yeah, if you're a cretin who defines 'plausibility' as 'has to suck as much as Btech', you might have a point AS WELL as being a giant idiot.

Maybe you should just grow up and accept that a 'typical Japanese robot' just doesn't exist, and this has been explicitly acknowledged for fucking 30 years.

Evangelions are extremely fast and agile but I'm not sure what that has to do with the price of tea in Armored Troopers VOTOMs.

Stark wrote:Science fiction is thus 'plausible' when it has shit propulsion. If it goes too fast - it's 'unrealistic'. Cherry picking examples is just fucking sad; there are whole shows about robots so low-end that they travel to the scene of action on the back of a truck, Gundam traces robots from experimental space-fighters not very useful on the ground to absurd heights of agility, etc. Oh noes, Evangelion!

Calling Transformers and the Metal Gear 'western robots' is fucking hilarious, btw.

So yeah, if you're a cretin who defines 'plausibility' as 'has to suck as much as Btech', you might have a point AS WELL as being a giant idiot.

Maybe you should just grow up and accept that a 'typical Japanese robot' just doesn't exist, and this has been explicitly acknowledged for fucking 30 years.

Are we seriously having this conversation about what kind of magical super battle robot is best?

Jesus christ. Whatever you want to call anything, maybe we should define western robots as Gort, the Iron Giant and Bender? All semantics.

'Plausability' is pretty fucking simple. Does it violate the laws of physics in it's actions? Like every single Macross Flight Maneuver done after Macross Plus? If yes, then that's not plausable. Are we going to say Gurren Lagann is plausable now? Giant robots are idiotic anyway. BTech has it's incredible mounds of retardation as well, but what the christ are we even talking about anymore?

If there's some disagreement about most 'western' sourced robots being slow, well... think of the majority of renditions of robots in western games and movies, which has them slow clunky things. Mechs in most games (See BF2142, Mass Effect, Total Annihilation/SupCom, Planetside, C&C, Starcraft, etc) are basically the Aliens Power Loader with guns, scaled up or down. Same with shit in movies like those Matrix APUs and whatevers from Avatar.

Nephtys wrote:'Plausability' is pretty fucking simple. Does it violate the laws of physics in it's actions? Like every single Macross Flight Maneuver done after Macross Plus?

Does what you refer to really 'violate the laws' of physics? Is this really true of all relatively agile giant robots? Is 'slow and clumsy' actually more plausible, given that we are supposed to accept these robots as the premiere weapon of war?

Ford Prefect wrote:Evangelions are extremely fast and agile but I'm not sure what that has to do with the price of tea in Armored Troopers VOTOMs.

You know the coffee of Uoodo City is quite bitter indeed!

So I used to own the big Strong Bacchus toy made by Yamato and while I was previously skeptical of how a Scopedog or other AT can move around on just a single wheel under each foot, turns out the thing glides around pretty easily when you push it :3

They also made remote controlled Scopedog Turbo Customs you can have move around and fire IR beams at each other in a mock fight XD

Nephtys wrote:'Plausability' is pretty fucking simple. Does it violate the laws of physics in it's actions? Like every single Macross Flight Maneuver done after Macross Plus?

Yeah uh...

Did you watch the original series or DYRL? Same dudes did the choreography. One of them went on to create Evangelion while the other created fuck and piss Angel Cop. I've never really seen any huge shift away from the series's basic style, which actually can make the idea a little less novel as time wears on.

While no animated medium is perfect one-to-one with real physics, even basic flight simulator can emulate the idea of a Valkyrie.

I mean, think of what we've accomplished in real life with the X-13 (MADE WITH SLIDE RULEs) and things like the X-31. While the animated equivalents may be stylized, they're not done without some research as done by animators headed up by a plane otaku.

Ford Prefect wrote: Does what you refer to really 'violate the laws' of physics? Is this really true of all relatively agile giant robots? Is 'slow and clumsy' actually more plausible, given that we are supposed to accept these robots as the premiere weapon of war?

Yeah this I don't get. It's like, we accepted AT-ATs because they were impervious to most conventional weapons and it was kinda neat. Then we get the Clone Walkers and they totally suck at everything and make no sense. 40k robots are mostly huge death churches so whatever.

The only time I ever played 40k was when my friends at college wanted to use my Jumbo Grade Gundam as a Titan.

Like I said in a previous thread, the only thing Mechwarrior ever showed us is a bunch of robots that are utterly helpless against their own weapons.

So I'm sad to report that AC5 is kind of crap. It's bland and pretty boring and ugly as fuck.

Really? Frod and Strak can't stop talking about 500 useless parts :v

I mean i'm an hour or two in and while it's nice to see how much the game likes its coops and multi it's just so ugly. It makes quite a few throwbacks to Chromehounds too but it's fundamentally Armored Core, not CH. I might be too used to For Answer's Gundam gameplay.

I hear it has Char kicking and Mega Man X wall jumping.

It does. Boosting is very toned down and you actually have to boost off of buildings to get up anymore, and buildings their will be. The game looooooves its bland urban environments a bit too much. I like the way it handles aiming though. Fire control mixed with light shooter aiming elements.

Fire control was such a revolution wasn't it?

And yeah I can see the problem with going from SPIRIT OF MOTHERWILL to buildings and shit.

Also we need someone with another type of Kos-mos avatar in here :x

The styling of ACV is less sci-fi and way more Gulf War. I think it has pretty good atmosphere though, and it's way more polished and better organised than previous Armored Core games. I actually like the idea of For Answer's robot style more than ACV's, but pretty much all of ACV's mechanics are better and its controls are better designed.

Also that weapon change animation :3

Weapons have max range due to ballistics and varying damage based on velocity?

DUMBED DOWN FOR CONSOLE. Mechwarrior is WAY more complex, you babies. More 'realistic' too, like Star Trek over Star Wars.

I like that you can get around your FCS limitations with regular aiming; I almost wish you could toggle FCS in the times where you'd rather play a shooter, depending on situation.

Ya think i'm actually being unfair to the game? I'm open to the idea, I might have come in expecting too much For Answer.

I know what MW players sound like. :v

This weekend Ford and I will be coopsing so you should join our little band.

PS3

Lol good luck with that.

I have a ps triple. Need to get it back from my neighbor though.

Get it back so I can relive my coops glory days of Chromehounds.

I'll ask for it back next week. He was in the middle of moving. Maybe I can ask for a small usage fee of getting ACV for me XD

I've been trying to suss out how they're "improving" the gameplay in MWO and all I can find after the best ignorant robo-racism all I can find is "converging aim points" and "some Catapult noob launched with so much ammo he couldn't use his jump jets."