Games – Page 37 – Robot Claw

Magic Days

January 17, 2016

That’s the Prince of Randwick himself, preparing his deck at the MTG prerelease tourney we attended yesterday.

It was a fun, low pressure casual event in which everyone won prizes. This was good for me because I badly played a deck I had badly built 🙂

The players themselves here are pretty much the same as in the USA. Except for the funny accents Aussies have 😉

After the tourney we went and checked out the pinballs at the nearby RSL club, which led to a lengthy (and fascinating) discussion with the guy who manages it all and is heavily involved with pinball collecting.

An evening of cricket on the Telly (and more MTG playing!) rounded off a fun day.

Today – my last full day this trip – I walked to Bondi along the cliffs via Coogee Beach. I do this walk (which takes a few hours) every trip and it’s always great.

It wasn’t too hot or too windy, as if the country was apologizing for the weird weather it gave me this trip. Since it was a Sunday, the walk was extremely popular with both locals and tourists alike.

Pleasant weather notwithstanding, I was ruined by the time I got to Bondi Junction mall, and almost wept when I sat down to this:

Which was immediately washed down with this:

Tiredness notwithstanding, today was another great day!

Pong

November 27, 2015

For my next electronics kit challenge, I made this:

Yes, a TV Pong kit, in component form. It was cheap (about ~$10) and looked easy to assemble. Could it be any good?

Here it is ready to be put together:

Not a bad amount of pieces. The PCB is very clean and easy to solder onto, and compared to some other kits I have made this one was extremely easy to assemble. All told, it only took about an hour. Here’s the finished product:

What you can’t see: my impressive soldering 🙂

But the true test was to come. Skeptically, I connected it to my ‘TV that exists just for old game consoles” and turned it on…

The ball moves so quickly it’s almost impossible to hit it, even in the 1P mode. But whether it is playable is immaterial: it worked first go!

Even if you’re not impressed by that, I was 🙂

Con Swag

October 20, 2015

We bought a bunch of stuff at the con. Here’s a selection:

That’s issue 1 of a magazine that ran for only 3 issues back in 1967. It’s basically a girls romance comic with some ‘true love advice’ and articles about dreamy male celebrities of the era. Some guy was selling scads of all three issues of this, probably found in an abandoned warehouse.

KLS bought this disapproving cat plush. I think it’s disapproval is due to it being the smallest and cheapest plush we bought at the con 🙂

I got these 4 old D&D Modules for a song. To my surprise, one of them is a single-player version that uses invisible ink to hide the events! Only two squares in the entire book have been inked in. I wonder if the remaining ink still works?

Autographed Chris Achilleos art, now framed and on my wall. The guy I bought this from (I also got an Achilleos poster) knows the artist, and was telling me how friendly and gracious he is. He said he had another print somewhere in his voluminous stand, and I was hopeful for some FF or DW art, but alas he couldn’t find it 🙁

More art, this time a lenticular Miku poster. See how her blue matches the colour of my study wall! We bought a lot of art at the con, from posters to prints to autographed works. Much of it is already framed and up on our walls (or KLS’s office wall).

Speaking of Miku, here’s the con-exclusive Nendroid they were selling at the Good Smile booth. It’s super cute, and somehow ended up leaving the con with me 😉

KLS purchased this tiny ‘sea bunny’ resin figure direct from the artist. It is based on the recently discovered ‘sea bunny’ species of nudibranch slug, which looks like this:

So cute! We stumbled upon this fortuitously, since the artist was only there for an hour and only selling 25 of them. I guess he’s somewhat famous since the person in front of us was very excited and had some of his other stuff for him to autograph. He was friendly and seemed genuinely happy people were buying his stuff.

Last but not least, could this be the find of the show:

All 36 packs, unopened! A world of spice and worms and Gom Jabbers and Kwisatz Haderachs just waiting to be uncovered! Plus there are stickers too. Even though they are already 31 years old I’ll let them age a bit before eagerly ripping into all of them…

…unless you want a pack for your very own self? If so, let me know in the comments.