Some quick shots from my office…
Only two of the above we’re provided by me. The rest came from colleagues, friends or students. In time this was noticed, and other students thought it was a good idea…
So it spread! I put the four Australian ones on the side there, but again most were from others. As were…
Israel, Mexico, Hong Kong, Singapore, Austria, Norway! So many places I haven’t been (as well as some I have). Where will I get cards from in the future?
I got it into my head that there were too many ‘model assembly’ posts here so cut back on them intentionally. But here I break my own rule because:
1) It’s been a while since I’ve made a ZOID.
2) This kit was a gift from JF.
The kit I refer to is this:
And here are all the pieces before I started assembly:
As usual with these kits, it seemed a bit over engineered, with 3 or 4 pieces going together to form what could have been one. But the quality control was fantastic and although more difficult than your average Gundam everything went together nicely:
Those are the legs and arms, just before I attached them to the rest of the body. It’s ridiculously articulated and I was amazed how well balanced it was:
Here’s the cockpit, complete with tiny pilot:
Yes the orange ‘glass’ canopy opens.
Now I’m no Z.O.I.D. fan (says the guy with 6 pricey kits…) so I can’t give many details about this robot but I can reveal that Gun Snipers are (apparently) semi-autonomous ‘Helic’ ZOIDs created using the ‘Organoid’ system. I’ve no idea who Leena is, but I’m guessing the ‘special’ thing about her ZOID is the ludicrous amount of weaponry it carries.
You see the above shot was only half way through. It took me at least as long again (several hours) to assemble all of the weapons:
Attaching them all to the ZOID itself was no easy task but I managed after a little bit of cursing…
It’s pretty great isn’t it! Here’s an overly-treated scale shot with a LEGO minifig:
Overall a fun build and a spectacular looking kit once complete! Thanks JF!
At a convention a few weeks ago for the princely sum of $5 I bought this:
It’s one of the very earliest video game magazines, dating to before the ‘crash of 1983’. It’s from the same publisher of the old sci-fi magazine Omni, and the format is very similar (silver pages, yellow pages with fiction, somewhat pretentious tone).
This was very much a magazine without an audience. The inclusion of fiction, the monthly news round up heavy on business content and the (repulsive) interview with Don Imus suggests they were going for the Playboy approach. So much so I’m surprised there’s no cheesecake photos!
That said it’s also an interesting curio from the earliest days of my favourite hobby! For instance I was surprised by the lavish adverts for Atari 2600 games:
(By the way I’m ripping off Ashens here and taking photos of the magazine on a couch rather than scanning it. Hey I’m lazy!)
And the lengthy strategy sections – which take up a decent amount of the magazine and cover arcade and 2600 games – are charmingly low-tech:
The middle one is a four page guide to the arcade game Kangaroo which was probably mostly forgotten even when this issue shipped!
There’s also a guide to third-party 2600 joysticks, a lengthy but superficial article about pinball machines, too much fiction and a lot of uninteresting (even then I suspect) ‘monthly news’.
What isn’t well-represented though are advertisements. I’ve shown some above, but there are very few in total and many of them are clearly there as part of some paid-content promotion:
That’s just one of two ads for Cosmic Creeps, an Atari 2600 game profiled and given a strategy guide in this very issue…
The other element common to today’s magazines that is almost entirely absent are screenshots! In fact, in the entire issue, there is a grand total on one real shot (as opposed to drawings of the screen) and this is it:
Can you name the game? (And yes, I suspect it may also be fake…)
Anyway this mag was sold at the con by a guy who flogs old magazines of many kinds, and at the same time I got some very old Dr Who magazines as well as a bunch of cheesecake horror mags. Why was he selling this one issue of a 35 year old gaming magazine? The cover!! It features a preview of sorts of Revenge Of The Jedi (tied to an article about the 2600 Jedi Arena) which includes this gem:
It was all mostly true, if a bit off with the date estimates!
Anyway a curio from the dawn of gaming time. This magazine would run another year and change names twice before becoming another victim of the crash that almost sunk the US industry, but from what I see here I struggle to wonder who bought it even then?
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! 🙂
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’!