Dave

Gundam Neo Experience 0087: Green Divers is a short film made in 2001 for a planetarium screen (that's why the screen size is constantly changing), which has of course limited its availability over the years. Up until today, if you weren't at those planetarium shows, there was no way to see it. Among fans it's mostly known for a fanboy-bait appearance by original series protagonist Amuro Ray in a really slick-looking custom Zeta Gundam variant.

It showed up recently as an extra in a Gundam mobile game, so now anybody can watch it and all us Gundam nerds have scrambled to do so because we love the purple Zeta so much.

So it's really funny that Green Divers is just a very specific educational film. Two kids riding on a civilian space transport get caught up in a battle and have to escape to earth, from escape pods to a shuttle to atmospheric re-entry. At every step of this process, we're given the actual space science involved in great detail, often down to the math. You even get to watch the before-flight instructional video for a space lifeboat. (The character skips through at a point, "enough already!")

And at the very end, for the Gundam nerds in the audience, Amuro shows up. He isn't actually shown on screen, but his voice, the custom Zeta with the big "A" on the shoulder, and everything else about his appearance give it away. Suddenly it's Gundam, for five minutes! Amuro saves the kids, of course, talks a little bit about the future, and the camera lingers on his Gundam adoringly.

I wonder what it was like if you were just a kid on a school trip and you had to watch this. You'd probably shrug. "Oh yeah, there was a Gundam movie on that trip? I don't remember anything. Amuro was there."

Love this video demonstration of what happens with the Street Fighter 6 live commentary feature if both players just don't do anything.

It's a testament to how well thought out this feature is that the commentator "finds" topics to talk about for most of the running time of the video, without repeating himself too much because they recorded him saying the same things in a lot of different ways. Even when nothing is happening, he can still describe conditions:

-The timer. At the big intervals the commentator makes notes.

-The gauges. Drive is naturally full and super is naturally empty, and so it's reasonable for the commentator to speculate that the players will want to put their resources to use. Even if they never do.

-The range. They're just standing there at starting range, but every fighting game player knows there's a lot to starting range and of course they've recorded lines about that.

-The round condition. In the second and final round the commentator is noticeably more excited and the lines reflect the urgency of the situation. Even though it's not urgent!

It's impressive that the commentary feature can fill in time like this without sounding too robotic or fake.

The Geass collab brought with it a very silly game mode where you can potentially score a 5x multiplier on your hand score. This turns something pretty basic into a game-ending one-shot kill.

Probably the best thing Mahjong Soul does is these silly non-competitive variants for events. I don't play it much because the grind is atrocious, but no question that Soul re-energized online mahjong by just taking oppressive ranked pressure off people and letting them just have fun playing mahjong, nya.

This is a G-frame candy toy of Hi-Nu Gundam. About an hour to build in full. Pretty fun build but low quality. “They did a lot for 12 bucks” kind of thing, and this is Hi-Nu so it's inherently impressive. When you're done with it you've used every single piece of plastic and the box even folds up to be thrown away. Leftover plastic combines into the world’s worst display stand. Side skirt armor does not like to stay on.