I think of United States of Japan as a dystopian mystery with mecha elements which completed the story arc of Ben and Akiko, whereas Mecha Samurai Empire is a full-fledged mecha novel focusing on a group of pilots fighting against the Nazis.
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In the mecha corps, there's a legendary group known as the "Twelve Disciples," the very first mecha pilots who fought to protect the USJ against the Nazis in the early '50s.
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We enjoy both mecha fantasy as well as dark fantasy.
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But my personal favorite might be Robotic Rubio and Mecha Marco.
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"The dude that designed those wasn't even a mecha designer," says Yoko.
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It is because Mecha Wolf Chaos is great, in every way imaginable.
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I've watched hundreds of hours of Gundam, Macross, and other mecha anime.
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I've hosted an actual play podcast set in a homemade mecha universe.
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With Mecha, I felt like I was getting to tell my own story.
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Issues: the game depicts bees as eating pizza and controlling a mecha: wrong!
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Eventually, David's mother dumps him in the woods and he ends up captured and taken to a Mecha demolition derby of sorts where he meets Jude Law's character, a flamboyant and somewhat homophobically caricatured Mecha sex worker named Gigolo Joe.
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In Mecha, each of the cadets worked hard to get the positions they have.
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In both Mecha and USJ, I explored the idea of changing history through education.
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And, of course, Fortnite helping build that future, one mecha-monster battle at a time.
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And in 2004, FromSoftware was tasked with making a mecha game for the original Xbox.
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There's a moment that I thought was really important to have in Mecha Samurai Empire.
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David is thawed out by the Mecha, who have all evolved into Windows ClipArt people.
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It's a mix of fantasy and mecha genres, both of which I love working on.
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Austin is all about Into the Breach, a mecha strategy game from the FTL developers.
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What does feel specialized is the heavy presence of director, writer, and mecha designer Shōji Kawamori.
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But Tieryas puts a cyberpunk twist on the story, involving subversive video games and giant mecha.
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It's a twist on Gattaca's vision of genetic perfection, with less pathos but more mecha-sharks.
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So was reconstructing the history of mecha development through a parallel Vietnam War and Afghanistan conflict.
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So, FromSoft's anime-inspired mecha-fantasy title for 2018 is certain to be announced soon. Probably.
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But in the case of D.Va, she'd lingered too long as an all-powered mecha-god.
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The piece I am most proud of is the 'Baby-Mecha-Ganesh' I made last year.
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Kaz is accompanied everywhere by Charles, his mecha-butler (voiced by an extra-British Jude Law).
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Last year, he followed up that novel with another set in the same world, Mecha Samurai Empire.
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I wanted to bring more realism to the mecha genre, even if they're fighting gigantic Nazi monsters.
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It was my agent, Misa Morikawa, who helped select Mecha Samurai Empire, which, I hope, works well.
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In this world, Tieryas puts a cyberpunk twist on the story, using subversive video games and giant mecha.
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In Mecha, I was excited to get to explore the world's technology, culture, and daily life in depth.
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That's why I think anime excels in the giant mecha form because they make their characters so relatable.
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Ships slowly disappeared in what was essentially a gigantic risk battle, eventually just the mothership and mecha remained.
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Razer calls this new tech "Mecha-Membrane," and has built it into its all-new Razer Ornata keyboard.
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Even John Boyega, at his most charming, as main mecha controlling misfit of misfits couldn't make this fun.
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The Ornata is a "mecha membrane" keyboard, which is fancy talk for a hybrid between mechanical and standard keyboards.
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However, he doesn't have the test scores to enter the prestigious mecha pilot training program at Berkeley Military Academy.
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His mecha art for USJ got me itching to tell stories about those machines, including the non-bipedal ones.
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There are some mecha pilots who love close-quarter combat, whereas others like using weapons to attack from a distance.
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Japan rolled a 5, the aliens rolled a 6 and the Mecha Kitty, and the atmosphere of the room, exploded.
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The series at first seems to follow the general expectations of the mecha genre, but gradually unspools something very different.
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When I asked for the elevator pitch at PAX, here's what I was told: mecha JRPG roguelike with dating sim elements.
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I wrote every mecha different, not just the way they look, but the way they fight and the weapons they use.
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Fighting the alien occupier turns out to look a lot like Special Forces missions, but with more snakes and mecha-orbs.
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The Grapefruit League witnessed the unveiling of the new Mecha-Bird—bigger, stronger, maybe not faster, but you get the idea.
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Will it be worth it when I write the Great American Novel on the backs of these sweet, sweet Mecha-Membranes?
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The cast includes Godzilla, Ultraman, mecha from Evangelion, and more; their presence has ravaged the fictional Japanese city, as you might expect.
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So when it came time for mecha schematics, I really geeked out on the technical aspects while grounding it in the research.
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The result was a kaiju-inspired battle reminiscent of Pacific Rim and with clear nods to Voltron and other mecha cartoons and anime.
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What I think is most important is that it can't just become mecha porn, divorced from personal stakes, because that gets boring fast.
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Games that played a massive role in Mecha [even though they don't] have any mechas are the Persona and Shin Megami Nocturne series.
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Discussed: FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, Super Mario Maker 2, F1 2019, Hardcore Mecha You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher.
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To combat this threat, enormous mecha called Evangelions are produced and deployed, the catch being that they can only be piloted by teenagers.
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I also love Virtual-On, the competitive mecha game from my youth that pit giant robots against each other in high-speed bouts.
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The pitch was simple: Border Break took class-based FPS gameplay and translated it into a 10-on-10, third person mecha battle.
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My body had become a clumsy mecha suit, and I was trapped inside, trying to operate what felt like a large hunk of metal.
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This year, he's publishing a follow-up set in the same world, Mecha Samurai Empire, which looks to double down on the giant mechs.
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Last night, Sega did just that when they announced that Border Break, a long running, Japan-only, mecha arcade game is coming to PS4.
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Click here to view original GIF GIF Sources: MegaBots IncWhat's a team of giant robot designers supposed to do between Maker Faires and mecha battles?
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A.I. actually gets going once we're introduced to the main character David, a cute mecha kid played by future Kingdom Hearts hero Haley Joel Osment.
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Brigitte's Riot Police skin isn't Overwatch's first foray into police admiration, that honor goes to Korean mecha-pilot D.Va's "Police Officer" skin, back in 2017.
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Austin, Rob, Danielle, and Patrick are all about playing mecha tactics game Into the Breach lately, though some have caught the bug worse than others.
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About 10 hours into Daemon X Machina, Marvelous and Nintendo's new third-person, mecha action game, I finally hit the moment I'd been waiting for.
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The mecha emerged in the end as our victor, bouncing back after having an arm ripped off to plunge a giant sword into the monster's head.
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United States of Japan is an alternate history in which the Axis powers win World War II. Where does Mecha Samurai Empire fit into this world?
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Fujimoto dreams of becoming a mech pilot, and his only chance at this dream is to enter the mecha pilot training program at Berkeley Military Academy.
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The result of that partnership was Chromehounds, a predominantly online-based console exclusive involving the building and battling of giant, fully customisable mecha known as Hounds.
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Instead of controlling your mecha with a single arcade joystick, Virtual-On utilized a brand new Twin Stick controller, which was equal parts clunky and cool.
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The Razer Ornata's comfortable leather wrist rest and unique mecha-membrane switch design make it an excellent pick for gamers who spend hours at their battle stations.
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We build a model so that when new events happen, the mecha-dog will respond to it like the actual dog would have in the same situation.
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The combat is fast and fluid in the way of many of the best Japanese mecha games, but with hilarious American stereotypes thrown in at every opportunity.
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The biggest brand names of the bunch are spin-offs of Guillermo del Toro's mecha-monster fight film Pacific Rim and the Netflix original series Altered Carbon.
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We've known about a possible Pacific Rim anime for a while now, and it makes sense that we'd eventually see one, given the franchise's roots in mecha anime.
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Skies Unknown manages to do that with a plane, which makes the game feel way more similar to a mecha brawler like Armored Core than is immediately apparent.
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The setup for Rage 2 is that your small, technologically advanced wasteland settlement is raided by the genocidal Authority and its leader, off-brand mecha-Hitler General Cross.
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There are some interesting moral quandaries to chew on as the spaceman figures out how to handle Earth's less-advanced society with the overpowering force of his mecha.
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Rather than critique the genre, it centers on a revenge plot, glorifying Travis's killing spree with over-the-top action set pieces, complete with an unironic mecha battle.
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The mecha then did a one-armed floss dance — one of the many real world dances that have been appropriated into Fortnite emotes — before flying off into parts unknown.
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During the editing process, a huge chunk of my time with my editor, Anne Sowards, was working on the character development and making sure the mecha fights meant something.
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This week, Austin introduces the gang to Neon Genesis Evangelion with the first two episodes, and places the series' in the broader context of mecha anime the preceded it.
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This conspiracy aimed to test a new high performance series of mecha CPUs controlled by the harvested brains of wanzer pilots, introducing the series' first example of biotechnological horror.
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People have joked about the appearance of Mecha-Hitler, a reference to the boss from Wolfenstein 3D, but I'd be happy if this was the only appearance of Führer.
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Wandering around the wreck of a spaceship with mecha-teddy-cock Ice-T and listening to him talk about his "bitch girlfriend" was the moment my brain turned off.
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These "mecha-membrane" keys utilize a soft rubber "dome" membrane like those found on most modern keyboards, yet maintains crisp tactile feedback similar to that of traditional mechanical key switches.
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She's among the newest Spider characters, created in 2014 by My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way, and in the comics, Peni's world evokes the mecha anime of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
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But my favorite mecha games, shows, and stories explore giant robots as more than just walking tanks—while simultaneously reckoning with the fact that they are weapons of war, too.
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"Giant. Robot. Duel." — three words that shook up the internet back in 2015, when an American team of engineers named MegaBots challenged their Japanese counterparts, Suidobashi, to a fight by mecha.
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People have strong opinions about mechanical versus membrane keyboards, but the bottom line here is that the Ornata's mecha-membrane switch design strikes an excellent balance between the two, Medium says.
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There are links that tie them together for fans, but both Mecha Samurai Empire and the following book have different characters and stories taking place at different times in that history.
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Mobile Suit Gundam, which kicked off another hugely influential mecha anime franchise, had been around since 843, and one of the genre's most popular series, Gundam Wing, had debuted earlier that year.
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I know there are clicky keyboards out there, many of them based on the Cherry MX Blue switches which are specifically described as "clicky," but Mecha-Membrane is a whole other species.
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Not only will you be blown by how good this mecha anime series looks, you'll be floored by how accurately it sounds like a Gundam fighting a gigantic alien lifeform in space.
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There's a major section of the book where the main characters have to learn how to pilot by driving a crab mecha, which is very different in the way it articulates and fights.
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But when I see someone trying something fresh with giant robots, or even just artfully applying a mecha "theme" on top of a well known concept, you'll always at least get my attention.
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That includes a time in the studio's past, in the '43s and early '00s, when it didn't primarily make cryptic action RPGs, but was best known for making the beloved Armored Core mecha games.
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Not only did these Japanese games introduce new gameplay concepts, they also reflected the culture surrounding their creation, introducing players from all over the world to new ideas like mecha, aka, and giant robots.
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You are a pilot, marooned on an enemy planet, equipped with a supersuit that lets you run on walls, powerslide across entire rooms, and call a giant mecha buddy to help you in a pinch.
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You are a pilot, marooned on an enemy planet, equipped with a supersuit that lets you run on walls, powerslide across entire rooms, and call a giant mecha buddy to help you in a pinch.
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Not to drag Steven S. DeKnight's 10-years-later sequel—it could've been a much worse mecha-wreck than it is—but it's clearly playing in someone else's sandbox, tooling around with another kid's toys.
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When Evangelion debuted in Japan in October 22018, the "mecha" genre of anime — in which characters pilot their own personal giant robots to fight other giant robots — was already well-known to Japanese anime fans.
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Perhaps Left Alive will be the mecha version of Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation, and try to say something about this general state of affairs, but it seems more likely to only show us something dismally familiar.
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The striking lock-on missile barrages of Galak-Z are meant to invoke the "Itano Circus" of mecha series Macross, not only in look but also in gameplay feel, harmoniously blending narrative theme with mechanical design.
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The Season 43 send-off featured a knockdown brawl between a towering sea monster with a castle rampart affixed to its back and a multi-colored mecha that's like if Voltron had a robo-cat head.
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Click here to view original GIFJeff Bezos testing out the Method-2 mecha robot by Hankook Mirae Technology yesterday at a private Amazon conference on automation (Twitter)What would you do if you were a billionaire?
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Previously, if you wanted a full size Razer mechanical keyboard with numpad and Chroma RGB lighting, your starting options were the $22 BlackWidow X — featuring an exposed top metal design — or the $23 Ornata with mecha-membrane keys.
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While a piece like HYPERSLEEP, with its oxidized copper extraterrestrial alien skull, calls to mind H.R. Giger's work on the xenomorph in Alien, Blanché's poster, MECHA, has a more cyberpunk flavor, featuring what looks like a cybernetic soldier.
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One of the coolest things about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was Batman's Mecha Armor suit, and with some cardboard, spray paint and a few odds and ends around your house, you could soon be wearing it.
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Practicing self-awareness, even at the level of breakfast, is a sort of direct action against the mecha-corporations fighting, Transformers-style, to the death for the opportunity to tell you what you're allowed to like this year.
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At the same time, when people can rewrite history to the point that there are Americans who espouse Nazism, what I proposed as satire in the first USJ and in the forthcoming Mecha suddenly feels too close to home.
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It pays lip service to having characters with individuality and personality, but over and over, the writers forget about all these things, and just throw monsters and mecha at each other in a big, bright game of smashy-smashy.
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But no, people are just that excited to assume the role of mecha warrior President Wilson and save the country from evil — if only as a way to relish in the absurdity of the actual state of current American politics.
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One thing that was a counter-influence, in that I wanted to go the opposite direction of what's usually depicted, is that I hate the trope of a "chosen one" driving a "mystical mecha" and being better at it than anyone.
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Mecha Samurai Empire by Peter Tieryas A couple of years ago, Peter Tieryas published his debut novel: United States of Japan, an alternate history in which Japan and Germany won the Second World War, and took over the United States.
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The 2013 film had a lot of heavy lifting to do, as it established a version of Earth beset by immense, other-dimensional monsters called kaiju, and explained humanity's effort to fight them off with equally titanic mecha-suits called jaegers.
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It takes a lot for a game—especially a tactics game—to make me look up from my almost-700-hours of playtime in Into the Breach, and Bad North probably won't replace Subset Games' mecha masterpiece in my mind.
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Thankfully, Western fans of the dormant mecha franchise now have something new to scratch that itch: Mobile Suit Gundam Extreme VS-Force, a new PlayStation Vita game that is spiritual successor to the Virtual-On series in everything but name.
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Discussed: Sekiro, Dark Souls, Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, Civilization, Thrustmaster Racing Wheel & Pedals, Through the Darkest of Times, We Are The Caretakers, Man of Medan, Rad, Hardcore Mecha, What the Golf, El Hijo, Photographs You can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher.
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Workshops include "Create your own Pico Neighborhood Loterίa cards" with the Santa Monica High School MEChA Student Group; protest slogan screenprinting with artist-in-residence Mariángeles Soto-Díaz; and a zine workshop with youth from Santa Monica High School, led by Isabelle D'Amico.
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The new series will be filmed at a new custom built Robo-arena in Glasgow, Scotland and will once again task amateur robot builders to create and control their own mecha-gladiators to do battle for the right to be crowned champion.
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Because while the popular MechWarrior, MechAssault, and MechCommander games all focused on ranged, robotic combat, BattleTech (in both its fiction and within the design of the board game itself) is as much about hand-to-hand mecha combat as futuristic lasers and autocannons.
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But then Eva deconstructed the entire genre of mecha anime, and in a sense all anime, in that it was only nominally about fighting robots; at its core, it was a deeply philosophical exploration of humanity and what being "human" even is.
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The question hanging over Left Alive is whether or not the passage of time, and the assembly of a group of creators more closely connected to mecha games can successfully carry on the series in a way Front Mission Evolved could not.
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Here's what some of the Verge staff are currently reading: Tasha Robinson: I'm just diving into Only Human, the third book in Sylvain Neuvel's Themis Files series, which starts with parts of a giant, ancient, ultra-high-tech mecha-being discovered all over the world.
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According to Joshua Heckman, a Chicanx student at the University of New Mexico and a member of MeCHA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) and the Red Nation, it's time that Mexican Americans look to commemorate the other side of an already rich, anti-colonial history.
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Despite its problems, though, it fostered a faithful community, overcoming major technical challenges and offering a unique gameplay experience that would resonate strongly with those who enjoyed its unique take on mecha warfare and continuing to do so years after the game was taken offline.
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The screen breaks into comic book–inspired panels, characters are textured with Ben-Day dots, spider-sense gets represented by a series of squiggles — and that's before we meet spider-people from mecha anime, film noir, and Looney Tunes–inspired universes, all bringing their respective styles with them.
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The announcement, at E3 earlier this week, was met with excitement from longtime fans who've turned the game into somewhat of a meme, with its tongue-in-cheek script and its main character, Michael Wilson, a vengeful mecha pilot who happens to be the president of the United States.
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Co-written and directed by 2018 Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, the first Pacific Rim drew on the traditions of kaiju and mecha, added some funky neural science, and was gross and weird enough to be both recognizably a del Toro movie and often a lot of fun.
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The two new FLCL series shift the focus to new protagonists: Progressive follows 14-year-old Hidomi and her friend Ide as they encounter extraterrestrial beings who want to "unlock their hidden potential," while Alternative introduces the 17-year-old Kana, whose humdrum life is interrupted by a giant mecha falling from the sky.
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More obvious choices, namely Mamoru Oshii's seminal film Ghost in the Shell (which went on to inspire The Matrix), are mixed with eclectic features, such as Oshii's lesser known Patlabor: The Movie, Rintaro's haunting Metropolis, Satoshi Kon's surreal final feature, Paprika, Mamoru Hosoda's madcap virtual reality adventure, Summer Wars, and the mecha and pop music hybrid Macross Plus.
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Pros: Soft padded wrist rest, mecha-membrane hybrid switch design is easy on the fingers yet tactile and precise, anti-ghosting keys for accurate simultaneous inputs, and Razer's RGB Chroma backlighting looks greatCons: Not the best ergonomics for users suffering from wrist pain, and the magnetic wrist rest attachment has a tendency to shift during extended use
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Now, in all its bubblegum-tinted glory, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if elected, Donald J. Trump will pilot an enormous mecha in his likeness, use it to construct his long-threatened wall, and then destroy both the wall and the planet it was built on with a sweet-as-hell laser blast.
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While Daemon X Machina gave me a taste of the high-flying Armored Core 22-style of mecha action I've been missing for years and MechWarrior 22010 made being in the cockpit of an unstoppable, walking tank feel more destructive than ever, the truth is that BATTLETECH remained my go to mech game of choice this year.
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"Anything that's fun and over the top—like, there's an entire planet that's a concert venue willed with every kind of alien in the Marvel Universe, or a space battle with a thousand junk spaceships with a fleet of metalhead aliens versus a Valkyrie in a mecha suit—we could go wild on that," he says.
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And the casting is clever: Jude Law plays Charles, Kaz's mecha-butler; The Kid Mero and Desus Nice voice Kaz's best friends, Lexy and Gottlieb; and Tavi Gevinson is Helena St. Tessero, a disillusioned fashion blogger who goes from indulging in the upscale world of Neo Yokio to trying to convince Kaz of its bourgeois evils after she is possessed by a demon.
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This is because it spans the majority of the lifetime of Walter Feng: a USN soldier who starts out as a war orphan due to the events that form the background of the first Front Mission, and ends up as a father, a commander of an elite mecha unit, and a war hero decorated many times over after Front Mission 3 has ended.
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On the face of it this is perfect fodder for a technothriller game in the Front Mission style, but there is perhaps a lack of excitement for the game that comes not from its lack of focus on mecha, its breaking with turn-based tactics, or its PS3 style graphics, and rather from exhaustion with the technothriller conceit as, like cyberpunk, it more and more simply depicts a familiar reality.
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Bernard then appears as the inventor of the mecha CPUs at the heart of the conspiracy in Front Mission, the bankroller of the pro-independence coup d'etat in Front Mission 2 and the pro-independence guerillas in Front Mission 4, the first person to attempt to use MIDAS from Front Mission 3 for his own nefarious ends, and in Front Mission 5 combines the super weapons introduced in the first game and Front Mission 2 to create an international network of terrorist AIs aimed at destroying the superstates once and for all.
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