Today I have sci-fi on the brain, and I want to talk about something equal parts ridiculous, impractical and awesome... Mechs: Multi-ton, bipedal, vaguely humanoid death machines. So climb into your cockpit, power your systems on and initiate enhanced imaging while we look at some of my favorite mech content from pop culture.

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Voltron: Defender of the Universe

This show was new when I was very young, and while I don’t hold it in high regard, it was my introduction to the concept of giant bipedal war machines. In the show, the mech pilots all drive big robotic lions. When all five of them come together, to form a giant mech. A quick web search revealed to me that this show was kitbashed together from two anime and dubbed. Pretty cool.

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Return of the Jedi

This is another one I saw very young. (I saw the original trilogy *way* out of order.) Anyway, I didn’t even consider this one until I did a web search to refresh my memory and saw it among the many thumbnail pictures. The AT-ST seems to fit the bill. Bipedal, check. War machine, check, internal pilot(s), check. It’s honestly not that different from some MechWarrior stuff. The AT-AT checks off a lot of the same boxes but has more of a dog-like shape.

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Robot Jox

I found this one somewhere before my teen years, and watching these large mechs do stop-motion battle blew me away. Looking at clips of it with 2025 eyes is rough, but at the time I was captivated.

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Exosquad

Primarily, Exosquad was about humanity engaged in a civil war with the Neosapians, a slave race they created. But the way they did battle in that show was via E-Frames, which are a kind of light mech with flight capability, even operating in space battles. They also used exosuits, which came in the form of power armor with similar but more stripped-down capabilities. Very cool.

Here are a couple of the old toys I keep on my shelf:

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BattleTech

Right on the heels of Exosquad was the BattleTech cartoon. I honestly can’t remember anything about this show except that it was a good ole American cartoon in that it existed to sell you toys. (I had the big mech toy that had a weak point in between its legs that caused the arms to pop off. A valuable lesson for any young man to learn.)

I do remember that the show came up with a good gimmick for the poor-looking 3D animation of the time. They would switch to “enhanced imaging,” which would be simplistic 3D animation, which to me made it look much more like a PC game.

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Megaman X

Megaman X isn’t all about mechs, but it featured something that really stuck with me. In one or two levels, you get a mech that you can jump into. And the antagonist, Vile, uses one to fight you as well. I was so taken by this thing that I built one out of Lego with wheels instead of legs and wrote down the instructions.

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MechWarrior 2

A friend lent me his copy of MechWarrior 2. At the time I found it a bit difficult, and I don’t think I finished it. The game has a host of systems to make the game much more of an immersive sim, like heat management, customizing your weapon loadout, environmental factors and more.

Just look at this intro. Very cool.

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Metal Gear Solid

The entire plot of MGS is that a terrorist force has a mech called Metal Gear Rex, which has nuclear capabilities. Thus, your mission is to find and disable it. When you finally encounter it, you can only beat it with the help of a crazed cyborg and tons of missiles.

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Gurren Lagann

I found this anime on Sci-Fi channel’s Ani-Monday block of animation. It has a cheesy kind of coolness to it and a power creep that is amazing. The main character finds an old hidden mech he mistakes for a mining machine at first but finds out it has the ability to lock onto other mechs and multiply their combined power. By the end of the show, the mech is operating at cosmic levels of power.

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Sucker Punch

Again, mecha isn’t the focus of this movie. I really liked it, but it seems like a very divisive movie. Anyway, during one section, they are dropped into a sort of steampunk WW1. One character hops into the mech depicted below and provides cover for her allies. Very cool.

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Pacific Rim

I love this movie, just wow. It features kaiju versus mech combat throughout the movie. I rewatch this one anytime I stumble upon it. It was this movie that inspired me to make my own roleplaying game Mech VS Monster, or MVM for short, years ago. A project I abandoned but kept the world building I had done. World building you can see in my upcoming book Walk Amongst the Stars. (it’s also not about mechs)

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Titanfall

I ultimately didn’t play Titanfall 1 very much, but the concept of the game was amazing. Do battle as a footsoldier until your mech is ready, then call it down from low orbit and hop in to deliver a whole other caliber of mayhem, or keep going on foot and let the mech autopilot do the heavy lifting.

While I liked Titanfall, it was really Titanfall 2 that really did it for me. They kind of perfected their formula, and I played the game as much as I could. Unfortunately, it never got that popular, and I couldn’t really recruit any of my friends to play it. Oh what I wouldn’t give for a Titanfall 3 with a single-player campaign somewhere on par with the second game.

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If your favorite isn’t here, I probably didn’t see that one. Plus, the list is based on my recollections, so I probably forgot something. Also, while I was digging through the web, I noticed a lot of debate about what exactly qualifies as an exosuit, power armor, mech and more. I’m sure I’ve cheesed off some fellow internet nerds, but do me a favor and put those complaints up your butt.

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Handhelds

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In a previous entry, I mentioned that my older brother had one of those handheld Popeye games. Then I started noticing those Tiger Electronics handheld games. And once a friend in school let me try out his Super Mario Bros. wristwatch. But because they were one simplistic game that never changed, they didn’t really appeal to me. Nintendo was about to change that.

1989. I’m part of a large group of kids in my grade school gymnasium. I can’t quite remember why, but I think some extreme weather cooped us up in the gym during recess. It’s a fuzzy old memory. The part that I remember is that one kid near me produced a Nintendo Game Boy from his backpack and turned it on with a pleasing, bling, and then he settled into Super Mario Land.

As a kid, I picked up on the existence of the Game Boy through cultural osmosis, and as a gamer, I was naturally curious.

“Hey a Game Boy, can I try it?”

“No.”

Fair. I didn’t even know the guy, and that was an expensive piece of tech. Why’d I even ask?

“Can you turn to the side a little so I can watch you play?”

“No.”

Well that was just harsh.

Looking back, I think I just wanted to get a handle on how it compared to the NES. I watched the blurry green screen from the side for a bit before giving up and finding something else to do. Later I would get Nintendo Power, which gave me a good idea of the system’s performance. The Game Boy was kind of weak compared to the NES. But it was portable, so you were sacrificing performance to gain portability.

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As the years rolled on, I would encounter handhelds and occasionally try them. A couple of my friends had the Sega Game Gear. It attempted to outdo the Game Boy by offering a larger, color screen. I think those guys used to mostly play it with an AC adapter since it was such a battery gobbler.

And I had a friend whose gaming evolved with every Nintendo handheld release. So I got to see the Game Boy Advance, Game Boy DS, and finally the Game Boy 3DS.

I never really got into handheld gaming. Back when I was a kid, if I could con any money out of my parents, I’d much rather spend it on my NES. I didn’t have a regular scenario where I needed to kill time. When I was on the bus going to and from school, I’d entertain myself by imagining a super-fast ninja jumping around the terrain we passed, occasionally slicing objects out of the way. That, a skateboarder or a rollerblader. In high school, I added a Walkman to my bus routine so I could listen to Metallica and White Zombie while my ninja friend jumped and chopped.

Many years later, I had an office job where I worked the graveyard shift, and as a result, I had about two hours where I had little to do but wait for others to do their jobs. So I invested in a PSP3000. It was okay, but I never took to it, and it was rough getting interrupted all the time. I got Loco Roco, Patapon and Half Minute Hero. Luckily for me, Sony made the PSP much like their PS3, which meant that it had a bunch of capabilities beyond just games. It became my dedicated MP3 player that I toted back and forth to work. It had fantastic battery life too. Then it kind of morphed into my podcast player.

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Handhelds were never for me, and I just didn’t care about them. But as the years went on, I gained a level of contempt for them. Each handheld system would inevitably generate some exclusive games that I never got a chance to try out. Nintendo eventually fixed that problem with the Switch, a game console and handheld system in one. But that’s a story for another time.

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I just finished a cool new design and I couldn't decide which I variation I liked more, so I uploaded both!

Check these out on my TeePublic merch store: http://tee.pub/lic/zvZBrspe6WM

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