Ollie Barder, formerly a freelance journalist, is now a senior games designer. He also spends a sizeable amount of time playing robot games and dusting an ever growing collection of Japanese diecast robot toys. In his spare time he runs the mecha gaming specific blog Mecha Damashii.
Virtual On Force is pretty much being sold as an arcade perfect port, much in the same way Oratan was for XBLA, so it's meant to look dated - though from what I saw at the show they've done some more work on the VR models/textures as well as injected ...
I think Yee is taking a prudent and responsible approach there are many games that kids should absolutely not play. I'm saying this both as a gamer and a designer.
Not sure about the Steel Battalion reference, as that was much slower with a far greater emphasis on simulation. Gungriffon was very much a straightforward and visceral arcade game, even on the Saturn. Gungriffon is still a much maligned series of games nonetheless.
The design in question is the Warhammer http://sarna.net/wiki/Warhammer , which was originally the MBR-04-Mk VI Tomahawk http://www.new-un-spacy.com/sdfmacross/destroid-tomahawk.htm from Macross.
