Archive for the ‘Toys’ Category

Perfect Cell

Saturday, April 6th, 2019

I haven’t posted about a model kit in a while, so here’s the latest I’ve made:

This is a character from Dragonball Z (a Japanese manga) done as a plastic model kit! Here’s the runners showing all the colours:

Much like the recent Miku bust I’d made the instructions were bilingual which I suppose makes the kit more accessible. But as usual the almost-completely pictorial assembly guide made it an easy build despite some tiny pieces.

Notably the kit includes a ‘muscle building’ system which just means his mottled skin is made by overlaying a lighter piece onto the darker background:

The precision is as usual for Bandai – excellent – and this works very well.

The head contains about 20 pieces alone and the final kit probably a couple of hundred:

It’s quite large and very posable, although as usual I chose not to display it in battle mode with energy ball attack.

Overall a fun build that looks great. If I was a bigger DBZ fan I’d certainly buy more from this range.

Trash or Treasure?

Wednesday, March 27th, 2019

Recently I saw this in the shop:

Collectible items?!? $50 in value for only $15?!? I’d have had to have been a fool to ignore this. So of course I bought two immediately. One for me, and one for Bernard who also appreciates a bargain.

In this post I’m going to reveal almost all of the contents. Now I’ll be upfront and say it wasn’t all great, so I’ll separate it into three categories from worst to best. You can ask yourself: is this product the bargain it claims to be?

Let’s start with the Utter Trash

With two exceptions every item inside was a ‘blind packed’ product, which meant a bag containing one or more of a series of randomly packed goodies. The above photo shows the items that were essentially worthless. Beyond garbage. Refuse.

The mini NFL caps were sub-cereal-toy quality and it’s difficult to imagine anyone wanting them. As you can see the box contained two packs of them and they were so awful I only opened one and saved the other to use as a future gift for the only NFL fan I know who would appreciate them (Adam).

The minions armbands almost literally made me weep with how much I hated them. The Spongebob dog tag was just a waste of metal and paint and the (five year old!) Skylanders ‘puzzle eraser’ didn’t go together, didn’t stand up and didn’t even function as an eraser. Also it was hideous. And trash.

Naturally this irredeemable trash was thrown in the garbage at light speed. Surely the rest of the contents would be better?

Let’s now move onto the Probable Trash

An eclectic mix we had here. You’d be tempted to look at most of this and say “Surely this is utter trash as well?” And you’d probably be correct. However there was a chance that the contents of these packages – randomly packed as they are – could be acceptable. Even worth keeping?

Spoiler alert: most weren’t.

I hate Garbage Pail stuff so much I wish I could delete them from reality. I only included these stickers in this category since I predicted a tiny chance some could be useful for postcard hilarity. I was very, very wrong and gleefully binned them all.

The ‘hubsnap’ is a weird and utterly useless piece of trash that sort of functions as a ‘clicker’ noisemaker. They were very badly printed with Marvel character graphics and – let’s be real here – are utter trash. Once again I took joy in discarding one and stashing the Punisher one away for a future gift for Florence, who mentioned she was a fan.

As you can see the Yokai Watch pin is trash, the Guardians and TMNT dogtags utter trash, and the Yokai Watch dogtag a few atoms shy of trash since it was sparkly gold.

The last item though… the Walking Dead dogtag and sticker. That was – ahem – borderline not trash. I’m intentionally not showing it since it may also become a future gift.

So of thirteen items so far the tally is twelve are trash and one is borderline ok. It’s a good thing I saved the best for last!

And so we arrive at the Hopefully Not Trash

Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Hobbit! Some high-quality licenses here, so the hopes were high. Did I hit the jackpot?

No, no I didn’t:

The Star Wars erasers are – what’s the word? – oh yes, they are trash. Hideous, not-puzzling and not functional erasers, I questioned the need for their existence as I stashed them away in my ‘random Star Wars trash’ box never to be seen again.

I was hoping for the cute spherical little owl toy in the Harry Potter bag but got that silly ginger instead. He was dense and heavy and somewhat spherical himself and made for an easy projectile as I hurled him into the garbage across the room.

And finally the Heroclix figure. Well, it’s total garbage. A common fodder figure from a tabletop RPG that no one plays anymore (and I never did)? There’s a word for stuff like this, and that word is ‘trash‘.

Sixteen items therefore, and almost all of them are total or even utter trash. One may conclude that had they any actual value they may have sold for their original price and not at the savage discount I bought them at. But that would ignore the joy of opening them all, none of which I actually experienced.

So in conclusion this product contained literal garbage and was a total waste of money. However since the contents are random, then perhaps the second one I bought – the one I sent Bernard – was very different. Perhaps he hit the jackpot, and opened a cornucopia of delights? Hopefully he’ll share in the comments…

Dungeons & Dragons LCD

Sunday, February 10th, 2019

Before Christmas I visited a nifty local retro store and the shop owner, who recognizes me now, said he may have something I wanted. He reached under the counter and produced this:

Yes, the game was inside:

This is a handheld LCD Dungeons & Dragons LCD game from 1981. I’d been wanting this for many years but had never seen a copy for sale. I opened my wallet and handed over the $80 he was asking in light speed!

The game is complete in box with the instructions, which are well-written and remarkably long for a game like this:

It’s a maze game in which you must defeat a dragon or die trying. Gameplay takes place on a 10×10 grid of rooms and you can move around in any direction until you either kill the dragon or are slain.

As you can see your current location is shown, and via the ‘cursor’ and ‘move’ buttons you can head in either of the four directions. There are no walls or dead ends; each room has four exits and the maze wraps around. Some rooms contain pits (which end the game unless you have the grappling rope, as I do above), bats (which move you randomly) or the dragon (game over).

You’ll need the magic arrow (found randomly) to kill the dragon, and you get one shot only to try. The dragon icon above reveals that the dragon is in an adjacent room. I took a gamble and shot north and failed, and then I headed east and…

Game over!

It’s very difficult. 13% of the rooms are instant death, and with only one rope and one arrow the chance of success seems minor. I played about ten games and only found the arrow twice and only once did I encounter the dragon while I had it.

As a child I would have loved this game, carefully mapping it while playing to assist in victory. It’s only the second actual D&D electronic game (the other, a board game, we also own) and is probably the first actual ‘electronic RPG’ (of sorts). While it does have a score, that’s only if you win, and since it’s time-based I imagine luck plays too big a factor!

Note the text: Look for other exciting games in the Action Arcade Series! It turns out there was only one other – a Masters Of The Universe game that is identical in gameplay to this one with a different LCD. It’s apparently even rarer, especially in the original blister packaging.

I’m happy with my purchase, and this is now a gem in my collection. Now should I do a followup post about the electronic D&D board game from 1980?

Leviathan

Sunday, January 27th, 2019

This kit was immensely fun to build and looks incredible. I hope LEGO has more innovative ideas like this in the future!

Tokyo Three

Wednesday, January 16th, 2019

Today we headed across town to the korean part of Tokyo where Bernard was near-overwhelmed by the multitude of K-Pop shops:

And left his mark on the local economy in a frenzied ninety minutes of shopping:

As if that weren’t enough we then – after a brief stop at the hotel to store the loot – headed over to Akihabara where I found out Gundam kits have become so big they now include handles:

That a Virtual Boy game is pushing a grand:

And that the ‘electric city’ still dazzles at night:

Bernard needed a rest so didn’t stay in Akiba too long, and I ran myself ragged looking for games and books and didn’t even enter an arcade!

No worries: we’ll return on Sunday 🙂