Robot Claw – Page 402 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Valrave The Liberator

July 19, 2015

I wanted to make another robot kit, but rather than a weeks-long HG Gundam or Zoid (both of which are on ‘my stack’) I instead opted for an ‘easy’ 1/144 kit.

My thoughts first turned to the impressive Strike Freedom Gundam 1/144 RG kit, but Florence is going to make that one and I didn’t want to ‘copy’! Then an enjoyable search online led to me buying this guy for about $20:

It’s ‘Valrave’ from the anime Valrave The Liberator. I neither know or care to know anything about the anime but loved the design of the mecha 🙂

Here’s what I found inside:

I hadn’t bought a 1/144 kit in a long while and was surprised at the detail of this one. 7 different plastic colours along with metallic stickers is more than I expected from a budget kit.

Assembly was easy enough, with the whole shebang taking maybe 4 hours in a few sessions. The most complex part was easily the abundance of stickers:

Here’s a before-and-after of the right leg:

If you look along the bottom edges, half-way up the leg, and along the rims of the two curved hip pieces you can see where I (carefully!) have applied stickers. I needed tweezers and patience to get these perfect, and thankfully they were normal adhesive stickers and not the challenging water-applied decals.

Here’s all the body parts pre-assembly:

And here he is put together:

So much detail for such an inexpensive kit! He’s very poseable, extremely well balanced and looks great.

Next were the weapons and stand. I’d never had a kit with a stand before so even though he stands easily I put him up on the stand as if he were hovering:

There are many weapon options. I went understand, with just the one sword and shield. Here’s a shot from behind:

And here he is in his new home, sharing a shelf with a giant stuffed Peep:

Obviously I’m very pleased with everything about this $20 model. Good thing I bought another in the lie at the same time 😉

Probably Of Interest Only To The Bear

July 18, 2015

I haven’t made a World of Warcraft post in ages since I stopped played about 2 years ago (Sep 10, 2013 to be precise). Blizzard have been relentless in trying to get me to return, offering me free game time several times over the years. Mostly I ignore the offers, but yesterday I redeemed a free week and logged on to see what has changed.

Here’s what I saw upon login:

Of course there has been a new expansion added as well. I found it interesting they don’t mention that.

A couple of UI buttons were highlit with big glowing help arrows. One was the ‘collections’ button, that contains the pet, mount, toy and heirloom collections. Here’s a shot of the toy collection:

And here are the heirlooms:

There are so many mounts in the game now (>400 I think!) it’s just a bit crazy. The new ones added in the expansion are mostly boring reskinned wolves and pigs, but this guy caught my eye:

Look at the cost! Many of the new mounts seem excessively pricey. I guess Bliz wants to reduce player wealth.

Speaking of wealth, the other UI button they were directing me to was the in-game shop, where you can buy mounts and pets…

Or other things like game-time tokens ($20 each) that can be sold on the AH (~24k gold apiece) or even a $60 – sixty dollars! – level boost:

I wonder if they only priced it that high to make the additional cost of the expansion (which includes one boost) seem like a deal?

Anyway I had to see the new character models, which were billed as a big draw. For comparison, here’s a shot of Momomo (my main character) from back the days of the old models:

And here she was, all ready for some styling, immediately upon logging in today:

It’s not a massive difference is it? The short hair and weird face were not to my liking though, so I tried a few looks…

Before settling on this:

The fancy new character models are underwhelming. For starters the characters still look quite dated due to the limitations of the armor. And secondly the vast majority of characters have their faces covered by big bulky helmets (or shoulders) so you never see the new faces anyway. Not a selling point in my opinion.

Since I don’t have the expansion – and don’t intend to buy it now – playing the game stuck at level 90 is a bit like getting a free ticket to the movies but having to leave after the trailers. There wasn’t really anything to do that wasn’t available back when I quit, so I got bored very quickly.

I did have one quest I was always meaning to solve, so I went and beat up this dude:

They have added some sort of buff when it comes to fighting lower-level monsters (including raid bosses), which made Black Temple a faceroll. Which is good, since I’ve forgotten how to play and the class has changed so much I couldn’t really be bothered to relearn 🙂

Oh, and the game is dead. There wasn’t many people on at all (including in the capitals) and the guild seems to only have a dozen or so people that play:

So my free week didn’t keep my interest more than 24 hours. I parked Momo on her pretty sparkling horse (obtained from playing Hearthstone of all things) and said goodbye once again:

I’m sure one day I’ll buy the new expansion(s?) and return again. Just not today!

Intellitourney 2015

July 13, 2015

It was time once again for another TV game system tournament. The place: KLS’s parents house. The time: July 4 weekend. The entrants: KLS, Jim and myself.

Three experienced combatants would this time set sail into unfamiliar waters: Intellivision!

The (emulated) Intellivision system contains about 60 games and includes controllers modeled after the original as well as the plastic overlays. It’s nicely designed, and much better than the Atari one with its poorly working IR wireless controllers.

The usual rules applied: only play single player games with scores, no practicing and each games winner goes first on the next game (a disadvantage).

The graphics are stylish, with effective use of color and quite a bit more animation than I thought the system would have. Of course the games themselves have aged very poorly, and are probably best played these days in a tournament such as this.

We put our hearts and souls into the struggle, and it took us about 4.5 hours to play every game that fulfilled the requirements!

It was a hard fought battle, full of triumphant highs and terrible lows, craven bluster and stoic bravado, of cheers and of jeers and even a few tears. But by the end none of us doubted who had rightfully earned the title of ‘Ultimate TV Game King‘.

Here are the results:

The first plot shows the cumulative scores (2 pts for a win, 1 for second, 0 for last) and the second plot shows the score percentage per game.

With my usual humility, I’ll graciously accept your congratulations for my impressive victory 🙂

This last photo shows screenshots of the best game in the collection: a strange Pac-Man/RPG hybrid called Thunder Castle. It had three levels, of which we only saw two, and was perhaps the only game in the system I’d be interested in playing more…

…but that’s going to have to wait, since I’ve also acquired the Colecovision TV game system, and the early stages of Colecotourney 2015 have even begun!

However it will take months for the next ‘Ultimate TV Game King’ to be crowned. Stay tuned 😉