A Fun Interlude: Mecha' Pron, not the Nasty Kind

I was kicking back here after a brief nap and then breakfast, thinking about my old days playing a now-defunct game called called Battletech. I've mentioned in passing that I'm interested in comic-books, so I thought we'd take a break from work and talk about Mecha' comics, and maybe some comic-book and gaming sidelights and these sorts of topics. I want to start off with a sort of history of Mecha' books, which starts in maybe 1971 or 1972 in Japan with a manga book called Gundam Wing, and I also want to talk about some real funny stuff about manga books and anime animations in general. However, this isn't to make fun of manga books or anime, which has its "pop styles," and its "don't mention it around me gross-a** pornography styles," and even some parts of the genre that might be called "high art."

Right around or just after the initial Gundam Wing manga book series started, there was a massive Mecha' craze in Japan. A Mecha' is a kind of humanoid-looking warrior-robot, that often has an ability to transform between different kinds of craft. So there it was 1971 or 1973 in Japan, and it was warrior-robot everything, everywhere you turned. In the year 2008, and pretty much since 1976 or so when that particular fad ended, there is now and has been really only a cult-following for Mecha' books in Japan.

The initial Gundam Wing had incredible designs for the robots, and I would surmise one reason that a book like Gundam Wing was conceived is that you can do Mecha' designs with your eyes closed and one hand if you know how to do blocking out well at all. There aren't too many kinds of comic-book design-art that would be easier to sketch out. Gundam Wing had these incredible sketch designs, but it was far more campy and lower quality than the early 80's anime for Voltron, in both Gundam Wing's original manga and later anime forms. The Gundam Wing manga has been resurrected on a small scale, and while there are "split-off," books that are more contemporary and gothic, the main Gundam Wing book continues on its barbarous war of camp and outright lame and "cheese."

The real classic book, with sketch designs for Mecha' that remain unparalleled to this day, was a book called "Macross One." Macross One managed to take on some more serious elements, but if you think back to the Robotech animes released in the States in maybe 84 or 85, that would be some of the art from the original Macross anime. One of the things in Japan about manga and anime, is that the publishing houses make every effort to make the stuff as cheaply as possible. So, as in the case of Robotech, which was released a few years before in Japan, they took frames from principally two old anime animations, but actually quite a few more, and then spliced everything together, and voila! - a brand new anime television series!

The mangas and animes coming out of Japan are filled with that kind of stuff. So let's say you have something like Gundam Wing, where the Mecha's are in fingerpaint primary colors and things, and you want to make Gundam: The World of Darkness... You re-color the basic Gundam frames, steal from your grab bag of gothic franchises that your publishing house also owns, and now we have instead of Gundam McPlayland, Goth Gundam. RAHR! In some cases, an entire manga or anime is simply built from old stuff pasted together without any new material present at all, as was the case with the Robotech anime.

They have other tricks as well. Let's say you want to make a digitally-rendered anime, and in Japan, - again - they will cut costs any way they can. They might take some old art, digitize it, apply a little texture, mix and match some things, take some screenshots from arcade games, and again, a brand-new digitally-rendered anime.

The game Battletech, of which I was the sole master, has a pretty similar origin story. First off, the engine in Battletech was mathematically perfect. No matter how a munchkin min/maxed, it was still a perfect game. It required thought, skill, and it required a great deal of practice if one intended to be any good at the game. It was not a game where one could simply advance and unload and win, if the other player knew the game at all. There were a ton of variables to keep in mind, especially if one was playing more than 2 or 3 of the mecha's against each other. Also, the dice could go wrong on even a great player like myself, and the other guy had a shot at winning, even if he just minded his pint's and quart's and had only played a few games.

The problem with Battletech was that the simulation, while mathematically perfect, was very complex. It could take four hours to resolve a two-player 4 mech' on 4 mech' search and destroy mission, and the guys I played with and I would sweat over the table with graphing calculators all night. The other problem was that Battletech got started in America in 1976 - no joke - and all of its designs were sketch designs thieved directly from Macross One.

The FASA company simply assumed that these Japanese products would never make the United States market, and when those products did make the United States market, that was the end of Battletech. Also, Battletech was pretty much gone even before that, because FASA kept introducing new material that mangled the perfect mathematical engine. My friends and I bought the new figurines, simply because they were fun, and then played by the Ancient Rules of the Game.

I played strictly Eridani Light Horse. The back-story was that the Eridani Light Horse was a special-ops division of the old Star League that used only Mech's of light or light-medium tonnages. You were supposed to get all Veteran units if you played Eridani because you played only lighter mech' designs, but the Veteran units advantage was really massive, deceptively so, and I actually agreed with my group that playing by the normal unit representations was more fair, even though it made it harder to win. Further, in the old rules, the light and light-med mech's were really a fair match for the heaviest mech's in the game, if you knew how to play the game correctly. Most of the guys I played against preferred a mix of heavy-medium's and heavy-heavy's, and maybe one or two assault mech's, but I got so good at playing next to no tonnage that I had to leave the group because things were getting so bitter.

I played pencil, paper and dice roleplaying games, and enjoyed playing them, and I was an incredible Dungeon or Game-master, and I enjoyed running games. However, to be blunt, even though some arena fighting and a small amount of actual lance combat was as good as it got with my group - and I had far bigger ideas - Battletech was my game. If I didn't win that night, it was because my dice were rolling poorly that night, once I got down how to analyze and play the game.

I have never been a big video game fan, and there is a list of maybe eight video games I ever cared enough about to play to the end, or even to spend enough time with to develop some skill at the video game. They have tried to revive Battletech, and other than the first problem that part of the fun of the game was the eye-candy of those Macross One mecha' designs, the game is really now no more than "munchkin-fun." All the skill the game takes is to just advance and unload all of your weapons with the biggest design and win.

Just recently, there was a digitally-rendered full-length Macross anime, and if you look at the youtubie-site, some of the clips people put up might still be there. As per usual, cost-cutting is everything, and a lot of the clips are simply the same footage over and over, much of those clips being overly busy so that the whole frame doesn't have to be rendered in detail. However, there are a couple of original high-quality bits, just 10 or 15 seconds here or there, and the designs are unreal.

Mecha' stuff is a lot like pornography for me - something about the whole "robotic-warrior," vibe. In particular, there is a shot from Macross Zero of about 10 seconds, where one of the alien warriors of massive size is assaulting a base, and these defending mecha's open up a hull and two great big mini-gun gatling guns come out, spraying bullets and shells all over the place. That is what I like to see!

I am going to be geeky and tell one of our better Battletech night stories. Two of the guys who had been playing 'Tech for over 10 years were going head to head one night, and I knew I wouldn't get to play. However, these guys were really good. These guys who were more trad-"ground-pounder," type players, and I was the Eridani hotshot, and I wanted to see what happened when these guys went toe to toe.

They picked out two pretty trad lances, a lance being four of the mechs, medium mechs on the heavy side, heavy mechs on the heavy side, and Kay picked an assault mech for his command mech'. The only unconventional mech' was that one of those guys, let's call him Jay, always picked out a Marauder as his command mech'. The Marauder was the best "a good defense is a good offense," mech' in the game. It wasn't even an Assault design, but it was on the top side of the Heavy class. When that puppy laid down fire it was time to go hiding. We called it "the Beast."

Offensively, only the Warhammer Assault design came close, and that design had a heat-index that made it nearly unusable. The Marauder had a pretty good heat sink rack on it as well, although with those high weight-classes, heat index was always a big factor in the Ancient Rules of the Game. To make it even better, it used the "Officer Enemy Pod," Macross One-design for its figurine, which was way sexy. The big problem with the Marauder was that the thing had armor that made some medium mech's towards the mid-range of the medium class laugh in hysterics.

The mech' was nearly impossible to play, and even if I had been better at "ground-pounding," I don't think I could have ever figured the thing out. I tried a few times, just as an experiment, and I failed utterly to make sense of the design. Jay knew how to use that mech' like nobody I have ever seen, and it was a great design, but not a "safe," design. It was a temperamental beast and mishandling it led to it being destroyed before it could be used.

So, Jay takes the Command Lance to the East side, generally a good play, and in particular on this terrain because there was a great deal of woods to block long-range fire. The other guy, let's call him Kay, decides to accept the pull into the more open terrain. Kay lost a mech' right away from his secondary lance, and Jay shows up out of the woods on his flank, and now, Jay should have Kay eating humble pie, with what we used to call a "brand new heavy," and a brand new Marauder at that on his flank.

Well, Jay gets in range to use the Marauder's afterthought back-up weaponry, and Kay has mishandled this game to a degree that I find hard to believe, because Kay was the most stable and trad of all of the stable, trad players in our group. Because Jay is on the flank, that afterthought weaponry ought to eat Kay's outer flanked mech' alive with no problem at all. That outer-flanked mech' happens to be Kay's lone Assault mech' and his command mech'. So Jay shoots off the Marauder's short-catch, and Kay is running a Battlemaster, which wasn't a very good design but could take a heavy beating. However, Jay is on the flank, and he scores a shot into one of the Battlemaster's plethora of ammo bins, and Kay's command mech' experiences a core-meltdown and goes nuclear.

All seems very bad for Kay, and this seems like it is going to be a one-hour rout in Jay's favor, even when we're done sweating over the graphing calculators. The heat phase of the turn starts. Now, after firing the Marauder's short-catch, which was all beam weaponry, and that was a usual design technique in the old game, Jay has built a high heat index but nothing that should be catastrophic. However, he has to roll five or more on his two six-dice to avoid a spontaneous ammo explosion. He rolls a four, and the Marauder's one ammo weapon, the absolute strongest weapon in the Ancient Rules of the Game, though again - deceptively so - goes shazaam! - and that ammo bin was an explosion that no mech' that carried the weapon could survive when the bin was full. Jay's Marauder experiences a core-meltdown and proceeds to go nuclear as well.

We had a house rule that the heaviest mech' on the field had to be the command mech', and that if you lost your command mech', you lost the game. The game ended after about 6 turns and about 30 minutes. It was a command mech' double-kill in the same turn, and the only double-kill game I have ever seen.

I'm coming back with more comics-stuff. I want to explain my whole take on comics in general, and also how that take has changed significantly over the years, particularly just this last year. I'll break a little, and then I will be back.