Robot Claw

The Great Easter Chocolate Battle 2

April 1st, 2018

Another year, another Easter, another face-off in Chocolate Easter products. This year: rabbits!

Three to be specific, all rabbits, all milk chocolate, all about the same size and identical price ($3.99). I’ve eaten one a weekend for the last three weeks… let’s see which was best?

The first was Lindt, who as far as I can recall pioneered this type of Easter treat. These familiar little rabbits have been available for years now, and I’ve eaten my share in years prior.

The taste was of course sublime: exquisitely creamy and moorish. This was the thinnest of the three (which is a plus) and almost impossible to not gobble down in one go. Maybe it was unwise to start with Lindt, for the taste would be difficult to beat…

Ghiradelli was next. The packaging is obviously much cuter than Lindt – more a character and less an animal – but their budget obviously didn’t run to a real ribbon.

The chocolate though… well it was bad. Sickly sweet, and possessing the sort of vaguely-coffee taste I associate with dark chocolate, I couldn’t stomach more than a few pieces. KLS was equally unimpressed, and unfortunately some of this guy ended up in the garbage. Easily worse than Lindt!

Lastly came Godiva. The packaging as you can see is impressive, and the feel of the foil is soft and delightful too. This guy was just nice to hold, and I was optimistic about what I’d taste inside.

Opening it was a treat too: the foil splits into two halves rather than a single sheet. But the taste… the taste… it’s awful. One bite was all I could manage before being repulsed. I was reminded of dollar-store fake-chocolate, and while KLS is still bubbling away at it I expect a good amount of this bunny will be trashed as well 🙁

So it was in the end no contest. Lindt effortlessly won the Easter chocolate rabbit contest. But was it better than the otherworldly Cadbury rabbit I bought last year? Alas I never found that product this year, so we’ll never know…

Oh, and Happy Easter to everyone! 🙂

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Closed

Buried Treasure

March 22nd, 2018

Last year I went on an expedition into a tomb that had been sealed for decades: a crawlspace upstairs in J & J’s house. I found some startling things in there, mostly in great condition, and one of the most remarkable was this:

The Game Of Time And Space eh? This beauty was published way back in 1980, and is a board game made for and by ‘anoraks’. Back then I would have loved it!

Here’s what it says on the back:

Note that the complexity claims to tend low…

The game includes a big board, some boring plastic pieces (instead of cardboard versions of The Doctors?) and loads of cardboard tokens.

Here’s the board:

And a closeup of a very fanciful depiction of Gallifrey:

And here’s a selection of tokens:

Gameplay is a little like Dungeon and consists of the player moving around the board trying to find several treasures which are initially face-down and often protected by monsters. A selection of items can assist with movement, combat etc. and once the player has the pieces he is after he returns to Gallifrey to win.

A read of the rules seems to contradict the summary on the back: this game seems overly complex and tedious to play. I couldn’t convince KLS to have a go, but I imagine the item wrangling and large variety of rules does not a quick-and-easy game make.

Look at this quick reference rulebook for instance, which every player gets a copy of for reference:

As I said, by nerds for nerds 🙂

It’s also got very little to do with Doctor Who, in the sense you could easily change some names and art and the game would be the same. Shouldn’t time travel or regeneration been themes?

One day I’ll play this, and possible I’ll update when I do. But for me it’s an ancient and treasured part ‘of the collection’!

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Time | 1 Comment »

Operation NYC

March 14th, 2018

Last weekend we took a two-night trip to NYC.

We hadn’t been for years, and just wanted to shop and eat and visit a museum.

We took the train down, which is always fun, and stayed in a nice hotel right in the middle of the CBD.

It was very cold! But the streets were filled with people and we didn’t let the temperature stop us 🙂

After we arrived we hit the shops, somehow managing to drop mad dollars at Kinokuniya. Naturally I bought a load of postcards as well. Did you get one yet?

The next day after breakfast we visited the Intrepid, and aircraft carrier docked at a pier right in the city.

It’s part of a museum that includes a submarine, Concorde and even a Space Shuttle! It’s very good and highly recommended.

After a siesta we managed to drop even madder dollars at Koreatown cosmetics and Kpop shops before heading into Times Square for some lights!

And how pretty they were! If I look nervous in this shot it’s only because my face was freezing off.

Then the next day – after a bit more k-town shopping – we traveled home in our own private ‘roomette’ on the train. It even included a meal in the dining car.

It was a great little trip. We’ll probably make this a regular getaway 🙂

Posted in Trip | 1 Comment »

We Boldly Went

March 4th, 2018

Yesterday was my birthday, and despite the exhaustion I felt from opening an obscene amount of gifts we somehow managed to drag ourselves over to Dave and Busters to ‘play’ this:

I’d seen this a few weeks back when I was here with Y and J, but I hid my excitement from them because clearly this is a machine that only weirdos would be excited by.

It’s one of those sliding-floor token machines, where you drop ‘coins’ down a ramp in the hope of having them push other coins off the edge (the front of the above image) so you can win. In other machines of this type you can win the actual coins, but in this one you win tickets (for the redemption shop) and trading cards!!

As you can see it’s Star Trek themed, and there’s eight different card designs, with sixteen different cards in total because there are uncommon ‘limited edition’ versions of each. The machine periodically drops cards or plastic tokens down onto the playfield, and these can fall into the hopper and ultimately can be redeemed for tickets. The metal coins are recycled back into play automatically.

It’s a lot of fun. Dangerously entertaining perhaps. Aside from the lights and sounds (such as a phaser every time you drop a coin) there’s also a combo bonus, the thrill when a new card or coin falls onto the playfield and – best of all – the joy when something of note actually falls off the edge!

After an hour of play, here’s what I’d won:

The plastic tokens were worth 15 prize tickets each, and we had 68. The cards are worth points as well (100 or 200 for limited versions) but you have to turn them in so I didn’t redeem mine. With the 1020 total tickets we earned I bought this (for 1000) tickets:

And… it’s terrible! It barely turns at all and will likely be trashed quickly 🙂

So here’s some analysis. In total I sunk $45 into the machine, from which I got 1020 tickets which were redeemed for a $5 toy. But we also had an hour of fun, and (most importantly) I also left with these beauties:

6 of the 8 cards, 2 in limited edition versions. These are extremely nice, very high quality cards and I like them a lot. So much so I may return to get the other two (Chekhov and a Tribble)! The game is super fun, and I can’t deny I’d like to play it again.

Interestingly despite the cards all being original series characters, the machine is branded with characters from many different Star Trek series. Will they be cycling in new cards over time?

I also have a few doubles of some of the cards. To get one at random, leave a comment explaining why Enterprise was the best Trek series 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Games, Otaku, Trading Cards | 3 Comments »

The Impossible Puzzle?

February 25th, 2018

I bought two of these:

It’s a tiny red jigsaw! I was looking forward to making it and today is the day. Here’s the pieces laid out:

They’re small… very small. This small:

As usual, My first step was to sort out the edge pieces. This took longer than it should because of their size and the fact they’re shiny and reflective. Then it came time to assemble the border…

Time passed…

More time passed…

And then I realized the puzzle has a fatal flaw: the fronts of the pieces are slightly smaller than the back! This means – especially due to the size – it’s ~~virtually~~ actually impossible to pair them by sight:

Notice the pieces don’t quite look like a fit in the left (which is the front)? Every piece is like this. It’s a nightmare of trial-and-error, and I’d estimate with about 3x(150!) combinations the universe will end before I was done!

So yes, I gave up 🙂

Oh and the other one I bought? It was cardboard and apparently didn’t suffer from this flaw because Bernard already made it! Ask him and he’ll tweet a photo.

(Also the several other plastic Pintoo puzzles I have bought haven’t suffered from this weird issue. I blame the excessively tiny pieces.)

Posted in Miscellaneous, Puzzles | Comments Closed