However all was not lost, since I bought a black light! Much fun has been had looking around the house under UV light. Here’s a selection of example photos:
The most notable item on our fridge is our glow-in-the-dark Baby Jesus (upper right). This is hardly surprising, since it’s made of a material designed to fluoresce.
An almost forgotten wall sticker hidden behind a door reveals a dramatic (and appropriate) surprise under UV light!
The sticker wall on a bookshelf, showing not all whites are the same when blacked!
Check out that Gundam plastic runner on the table. This isn’t even one of the UV sensitive Gundam kits 🙂
Keimi the mermaid (from One Piece) has a secret! Speaking of figurines…
Power Girl looks very different doesn’t she?
For an item that cost me a tenner at Wal-Mart (and is already breaking) this is a lot of fun!
A couple of weeks ago (it’s been that long?!) K, B and I visited a museum in Berlin dedicated to Computer Games. It was small, but it was very good, and perhaps even the best of the few I’ve visited over the years. Here’s a random selection of things we saw in the museum…
In the earliest part of the museum they had the landmarks of pre-computer gaming, such as (very) 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons:
And the first gamebook every written, Sugarcane Island (written 1969, published 1976):
They had holy grails of the Golden Age:
Crazy game art from the 1980s:
A small but good condition arcade:
A well-done series of rooms decorated to resemble certain ages of gaming. Here’s Bernard in the 1980’s attic room (presumably a typical German household attic from that era):
They also had Germany’s own homegrown console from the early 1980s. Only about 40 games were ever released:
You could design your own sprites:
You could post with Lara Croft(s):
Or you could look ridiculous playing Atari Ms Pac-Man using a titanic joystick:
And you could even risk your life playing the Painstation:
This is a massive two-player Pong game where the players are penalized for mistake in the form of heat, electric shocks or whips to the hands (see details here). We watched two people play it and as the game progressed they certainly seemed to be feeling the pain. I would have played it, but my compatriots were hesitant 🙂
As I said, a small museum but a goodie. If it wasn’t hot and we weren’t already overcome by ruination, I would have liked to have spent hours there reading all the information. Recommended if you’re in Berlin.
A few weeks back I went to a local convention and bought this:
I’m sure I don’t have to explain why, but in case you’re having a senior moment…
This, my friends, is a Zoid. Specifically from the series called ‘Robo Strux’, which were the US Zoid rereleases from 1985. Zoids are robot animals (often dinosaurs or predatory cats) and I’ve always liked their design. As a child we were too poor for me to ever own one, but I’ve been remedying that in recent years! I was agog to see such an old one for sale at my local con, and my agog-level doubled when I discovered it was unmade. A quick ebay search told me his price (at which I first baulked) was low, so I snapped it up. I was a very happy man that day.
Unquestionably the value of this product was mostly due to the fact it was still unmade and almost complete (only the sticker sheet was missing). Were I a fanatical collector, I would have put it somewhere safe and been happy in the knowledge I owned it. But I bought it to make it, and this past weekend I did. Here’s what was inside the box:
And this was between the pages of the manual:
So it was purchased in NYC back in March 1987, almost certainly for $9.99. That’s about $21.50 in todays money. Which is much less than I paid 🙂
The basic construction of the kits is remarkably similar to today’s models. There were several runners, molded in 5 different colours. It was snap together, and very easy to assemble with only cutters and a file (to remove the flash). However since the model is motorized and the legs need to move, some pieces were loose against each other and held on by interesting rubber caps:
Even after 30 years, the rubber was still perfectly pliable.
As a kit designed for children, there weren’t nearly as many pieces as one of the ‘High Grade Master Model’ kits I’ve been buying recently, but there were still enough to make it interesting and fun. The design was very clever, especially of the legs. Here he is the first time he was able to stand up:
Assembly took me about an hour, and was great fun. I wish the dude at the con had had more of these buggers for sale!
And here he is finished:
Oooh! Dangerous and mighty he looks, but Gordox (or more correctly Gordos) is apparently a specialized command unit more useful for his long-range sensor and communications than his offensive abilities.
