it was seeing these three episodes that led to me purchasing the series on dvd.
This series is superb, featuring excellent mech design and has characters that actually interact (unlike other series', mentioning no names...)
This series will batter at your expectaions, throwing away characters in a few seconds, leaving you briefly shocked at the suddeness of their slaughter, and confound your expectations, letting characters that you would have expected to be saved die as one of the blue (strange alien creatures that have invaded earth to fold humanity up into little green balls -no joke- so that they can later return to feed. Oh yeah, and i believe they also eat anything, and tend to burst out of the ground or through walls...) flashes past like an 18-wheeler truck.
So... not for the easily shocked, but otherwise a sound, solid series, especially for those who got into the giant robot genre through neon genesis evangelion (i know i did...)