The Raven RepublicGIANT ROBOTS!
Video starts after the jump. The largest mecha franchise made its debut in 1979 with Mobile Suit Gundam, and has since been growing strong. Even if you never watched any Gundam show, chances are you have heard about this giant multi-media franchise in one form or the other. The Gundam meta-series consists of the anime itself, its sequels, and alternate universes, lots of video games, comics, side-stories, novels, movies and various trademark applications on ordinary household items.
Does your iPhone lack any giant robot aplications? Have the urge to satisfy your urge to blow something up? Look no further than the recently released imech for the iphone. More info and a gameplay video after the jump.
A robotics hobbyist created this wonderful giant working beetle-bot that looks good enough to be in Terminator movie. A labor of love for many years, the RX-03 boasts an internal cockpit that can hold an average adult, a controller configuration that looks something out of Steel Battalion, and can actually walk under its own power. The TV news coverage of this machine beast after the jump:
Whatever happened to Sentry the prototype police droid? Or Hubot the friendly all-around house bot that carried an Atari game machine for you? No one knows, but at least they’re not forgotten thanks to The Old Robots website. Here you can see what toy robot such as Max Steele looked like in the olden days of the 1980’s, to actual bi-pedal robots, and the more recent small robots that recently hit the commercial market.
See what the future may hold for robots through the course of history. Laugh at some ridiculous ideas, be in awe in the ones that have shaped our time, and dream with the ones that may hold the key to the future.
The Old Robots website has it all.
Super Robots, not to be outdone by the unveiling of the life sized Gundam statue a few months ago, have responded with a life sized statue of their own kind. Tetsujin-28 (known as Gigantor in the west) was finally opened to the public today in all its 1:1 scale glory after months of construction. For those who are curious, Tetsujin 28 distinguishes itself by being one of the first animated mecha TV shows in Japan, thus helping establish the mecha genre. The franchise has further spawned three animated shows, two live-action movies, and a live action TV series that pre-dates the anime. See the opening ceremony of the life sized Tetsujin 28 statue after the jump.
This little mechanical buddy is now on the fore-front of robotics research by actually being able to read a users thoughts and respond to them in kind. Taku Ichikawa of the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo is credited with this remarkable innovation, which allowed him to successfully compete in the Robo-One amateur bi-pedal robotics league which includes events like robo-soccer and robo-battles.
A fan translation of Front Mission 5 is on its 4th iteration and is nearing completion. Front Mission 5 is the latest of the console versions of this mech-RPG, which sadly didn’t get a release outside Japan. Fortunately, a few hardworking fans of the series started translating it over a year and a half ago, and in its current state it is very close to completion.
As the FM5 translation project is drawing to a close, the translation team is moving to other Front Mission-related projects such as Front Mission 2 and Front Mission 2089: Border Madness, both of which never got an English release.
For more information and for the patch itself, please visit Frontmission.info. You’ll find other details on the project and how to apply the translation patch to your Front Mission 5. Note that the translation patch only works on the original version of Front Mission 5, and not the “Playstation Best” version which is a re-release of the original.
Thexder Neo, a re-make of the original Thexder game, which can be described as sort of a Macross platformer (Transformable mech in a platformer game) was announced by Squarenix to be released over PSN worldwide on 1st of October for the PSP platform. While a relatively obscure title these days, the original Thexder was apparently a huge hit for home consoles back in the mid-1980s which led to a sequel called Fire Hawk: Thexder the Second Contact, and remakes for the Windows 95 OS.
