Ten More Treasures

  • April 20, 2017

I’m in the middle of a lengthy reorganization of our ‘library’ room, which contains 6 bookshelves and loads of books, toys and other stuff. I spend a lot of time in this room doing my crafting and hobbie stuff and I’ve wanted to reorganize it for years.

This has entailed throwing away some books (and magazines, of which I had scads), putting others in storage, and generally moving stuff around. It’s taken ages, been harder than I thought, but has at the same time been a lot of fun since I’ve ‘rediscovered’ so much stuff I had almost forgotten I owned or simply hasn’t had the attention it deserved.

This then is a post containing ten items that live in the room. All unusual, all treasured, and all still getting a featured position in the reorganized library 🙂

PS2 Slime controller (2005). This is a fully functional PlayStation 2 controller modeled after the famous slime from the Dragon Quest series. I bought it when it came out but never used it much since it’s uncomfortable to hold. Over the years it’s become a bit sticky since it has a rubber surface and while it’s appreciated in value it’ll just sit smiling on my shelf for ever 🙂

Viewtiful Joe bobblehead (2003). This was a promotional item given away with early purchases of the game. It’s ceramic, looks like a bootleg and the head is a bit too heavy for the spring. It’s weird and has been a shelf fixture for over a decade. Amusingly this item is now ‘worth’ more than the game on eBay!

Darth Maul cookie jar (1999). I’ve mentioned this before on the blog; it was my first (and last? ever QVC purchase and is still my favourite piece of Phantom Menace merchandise. It’s fairly large (about 20 cm tall) but impractical for storage so for me it’s always been decorative. Another item that has appreciated in value.

A tiny castle (?). I don’t know where or when I got this but it may very well date to my teenage years. Items like this (and little dragons) were somewhat common decades ago and I always liked them and used to own a few. Alas this is my only one now and I love it. Incidentally if you ever see anything like this (the very small size is important) it may make a good gift…

Bootleg R2 droid figure (?). I got this in England last year, specifically by trading tickets for it in an arcade in Margate. I like R2 figures, and something about this one – with its wrong colours and mismatched leg lengths – is endearing. Although 100% bootleg, this is a key item in my Star Wars collection 🙂

Burger King bobblehead (2006). These were sold at Burger King to promote the Super Bowl over a decade ago! It’s so weird I love it. Another item that is ‘worth’ (on eBay) several times what I paid for it.

R2-D2 plastic mug (2012). This was sold (and may still be today) at the Disney movie park in Florida. It’s gigantic, and yes I found space for it in my suitcase when we visited 5 years ago 🙂

Dragonlance stained glass (1997). These were sold for $90 exclusively at the Gen-Con convention in 1997. I bought this a couple of years ago for much less at a local shop, and the seller had had it since she bought it at Gen Con back when they were sold! It’s quite pretty, made of painted glass with real metal lines between the colours. I’d like to hang it but it’s quite heavy and I don’t have an appropriate window so it rests against the wall. It’s tough to find these (there were three designs) for sale now but they seem to go for a premium.

Darth Maul glass ornament (2010?). It’s hard to find info on this online. I’m pretty sure I bought it at Target, which means it should have been fairly common, but I can’t find any on auction or sold online so I’m not exactly sure when it came out. It’s a highly detailed blown glass Christmas ornament modeled (again) after Darth Maul from Star Wars. It’s super creepy but also lovely and another treasure in my SW collection. No I’ve never put it in the Christmas tree!

This Doctor Who trading card (1996). This is card #26 from the 1996 Cornerstone Doctor Who card set. I’ll admit my memories of how I obtained this are clouded… can one of you fill me in? (No I didn’t write that outrageous slander on the card!)

My next goal is to organize the attic. Lord knows what I may find up there! If I ever get around to it, you can expect to see some very unusual ‘treasures’ here once I’m done!

Bonus Game Included (on c-side)!

  • April 13, 2017

Back in 1983, Pete Shelley (ex-Buzzcocks) released his second solo LP called XL1. Despite having great success with his first album, mostly due to the hit single Homosapien, this followup wasn’t very successful. And yet it was a bit of a landmark album for a very unusual reason:  the album came with a piece of ZX Spectrum computer software.

For those unaware, games were often distributed on tape in those days. Rather than using digital media, computers often input data via an audio signal, which therefore meant using cassettes or (much less commonly) vinyl records to distribute software. This was the heyday of the 8-bit games industry, and more cassettes containing software were being sold than containing music. It was a natural idea for a band to include software on a record… but Pete Shelley was the first to do it.

While the program was nothing more than a visualizer, it may have been the very first visualizer! The idea was you’d load it up on your spectrum and start it playing at the same time as the record, and then watch the pretty visuals play out on the screen while you sang along with the lyrics. Here’s the whole thing on Youtube (remember the software itself was silent):

Here is a fascinating account of the production of the software by the guy that made it. I particularly like how they put out a lock-groove on the vinyl version to save speakers (and ears!) since the raw audio of the code is just screeching white noise. Amusingly, in researching this post i found a forum post where someone described returning the cassette to swap it for the version without the game since he hated having to fast-forward through the screeching sound of the software every time he listened to the album 🙂

I can’t find any reports on whether this was a success, or even made a ripple in the games/music industry. I’m sure it was a novelty, but I wonder how many Pete Shelley fans made use of this even in those days? Either way it hardly set a precedent, and I know of no other examples of a band including visualizers on their albums…

In the early 1980s text adventures were a big deal, and successful enough that there was even a ‘do it yourself’ program called The Quill that allowed anyone to make their own game. One such person that did was Dave Greenfield, member of the band The Stranglers. He wrote a game called Aural Quest that was included at the end of side two of the (cassette only) versions of their 1984 album Aural Sculpture:

It’s a long-ish game (for a text adventure) in which you play the manager of the band as they tour around the world (starting in the UK, via Europe to Tokyo and eventually Brisbane) and get into misadventures. It was apparently quite challenging and since it was mostly ignored by the gaming press in those days players must have had a terrible time beating it without assistance. Here’s a video of a playthrough:

As best I can tell, this was the first and quite possibly only game actually included on an officially released album. Certainly it was the only game released on an album in audio format; if software was ever included these days it would be as a digital file on the CD. (Let’s ignore for the fact that even CDs are mostly dead…)

As a last curiosity, how about the Thompson Twins game? They were a synthpop band from the early 1980s, and in 1984 a ZX Spectrum game based on their single Doctor Doctor was released on flexi-disc only as a promo attached to a computer games magazine:

The game was a graphic-adventure, quite short and apparently quite bad. It lives on via emulation and you can see a full playthrough of the c64 version on Youtube:

This release is remarkable for many reasons:
– The fact that it was ever made in the first place
– The fact that it was only distributed as a free magazine promotional item
– The fact that it was distributed on vinyl disc rather than cassette

This last fact is notable: users would have had to record the disc onto cassette first before being able to load it into their computers. This wouldn’t have been difficult, but is just an unnecessary step and is probably what led to flexidisc software distribution never catching on! (Wikipedia has a good article on this game including the development, and additional research suggests the oft-delayed c64 disc version is extremely rare these days.)

I was a Thompson Twins fan in those days. I would have played this! I suspect the flexi was stripped from magazine covers in Oz though, and I can barely believe any Australian readers sent off for the c64 disc? Adam… did you?

And that’s that. I became curious about the idea of 8-bit band-related software-on-albums a while ago and this post has been percolating for some time. But despite my attempts this is all I can find. There were of course unofficial items (such as  Jethro Tull and Beatles adventures written on The Quill) and actual games based on bands (Frankie Goes To Hollywood) but none of these were distributed by the band or on vinyl record.

However… there was another unusual method of software distribution in the 1980s, in some ways even stranger than including code on vinyl albums. Maybe that’ll become a future post…

Sinanju

  • April 8, 2017

It’s been over a week since my last post (blame illness!) and quite some time since a dedicated Gundam post. Mostly the latter is due to my recent builds being quick-and-easy kits probably not worth their own posting, but this guy is a bit different:

This is Sinanju, a robot I know nothing at all about (since I neither watch the series or read the comics). However this is the first ‘Real Grade’ (RG) Gundam kit I ever bought and I’ve been very much looking forward to making it. While RG kits have been around for a few years, the only one that I had previously fallen in love with I actually bought and gave to SFL, so making that myself would have been ‘copying’ (to steal a term from AW) and only the worst sort of person would do that!

So when Sinanju came along with his gold trim and glossy red luster I had to have him! Here’s what was inside the box:

There are hundreds of Gundams in many different styles and levels of detail but very broadly they can be catalogued into four types:
1) High Grade (HG): Smaller (1/144 scale), easy-to-make and inexpensive (<$20)
2) Real Grade (RG): Smaller (1/144), more detailed than HG, more complex to build and more expensive ($35+)
3) Master Grade (MG): Larger (1/100), highly detailed with many more parts and higher complexity. Can get pricey ($50++)
4) Perfect Grade (PG): Super detailed, with insane detail and features such as LED lights. For true maniacs. ($hundreds)
I’ve made many HG kits, two MG’s (with another on my shelf waiting) and as I said this was my first RG. So how was it?

Well in short, complicated! As with most Gundam kits you start with the feet, and it was very quickly apparent that despite the lower price point and smaller size this was no less complex than the two MG kits I have already made. Here’s a shot showing one of the legs in the early stages of assemlby:

You can see the internal ‘skeleton’ onto which the superstructure connects, and then the outer armour (in red) on top of that. The three pieces shown include dozens of individual parts, and at times it very much seemed like the designers had broken an obvious single piece into two or more pieces just to drive up the part count of the kit. That said I was impressed with how well it all goes together, not to mention the (mind-boggling) level of articulation the finished piece has. Here’s two legs next to each other:

The difference here is only the the left leg (on the right of the picture) doesn’t yet have it’s armour. When finished, here they both are:

I posed these so you can see how much the piece can be manipulated to show the retro rockets when in flight mode. Otherwise these two are identical mirrors of each other, and all the rockets hide away nicely when the armour is closed up. Despite being an entirely plastic kit there are all sorts of moving pistons and joints underneath this armour and even the foot has about four joints which comes in very handy when trying to stand the finished model!

Here’s the legs attached to the waist with the skit armour attached:

This photo would have been taken after many hours of assembly. There is no paint or glue used at all, and you can appreciate how finely engineered the kit is by how well the gold-and-black pieces go together and how shiny the gold looks. There are also some flexible plastic pieces (such as the tubing in this photo) which are uncommon in HG level kits.

Now I took a few more in-progress shots but apparently deleted them so let’s jump now to the completed kit, which probably took at least ten hours over a few weeks:

It’s large and bulky and extravagant but stands easily with no support! As with most Gundam kits, it comes with a wealth of weapon options but I only opted for the sword and shield. If you like you can make guns, cannons and a polearm type weapon. It’s very poseable as well, so if you buy a stand you can put it in any sort of flying or attacking pose you wish. Here’s a side-view shot:

I’m very impressed with how he turned out, and he’s going in my curio alongside the two MG kits. While he’s not quite at their level of detail, he’s also quite a bit less expensive! As my first RG kit, this was a fun – albeit complex – build that ended up looking just as good as I’d hoped, and I’m sure there will be more RG kits in my future. If you’re new to Gundams though I’d recommend you start off with a HG kit or two before diving into RG. (Florence, this means Bearguy first!)

One last comment about Sinanju: there’s actually a pricey (~$120) MG version of him with more detail and ‘titanium gloss’ plastic. It looks incredible. I wonder if I can find it cheaper in Japan in a couple of months…?