Dec 102015
Carja
Dec 092015
Ahoy mateys! It isn’t talk like a pirate day it’s mash-up day and I kept the best for the last (for this theme)! Let’s get to it!
Captain Power was a technological jump in toys. The action figures were pretty standard for the time, though I really liked the vac-metal armor the heroes wore. No, what was special about the toys were the vehicles and playset accessories. They were interactive and reacted to signals transmitted during the television show (live action instead of the traditional animated fare). The Power-On Platform would activate with lights and sounds at the same time that Captain Power armored up in the show and the jets could “fire” at the television targets to score points and get shot. If you took too many hits, the ship would eject its pilot and the game would be over. The story was a bleak post-apocalyptic affair where Captain Power and his soldiers of the future were resistance fighters trying to take down Lord Dread and his army of machines in the wake of the Metal Wars where man fought machines – and machines won. I believe I had all the first wave figures from the series. I also had the Power-Up Platform which was cool in theory but didn’t really do anything except have a flashing light and a neat sound effect. The jet fighters were out of my price range so I didn’t get those at the time. A friend ended up giving me his Phantom Stryker years later. The show was long gone so I don’t believe I ever really got to try the game. The show aired really early in the morning so I never did get to see all the episodes. I have the DVD set but I’ve yet to watch it all the way through.
Here’s Big Oonch as Captain Power. The line work is pretty standard, but what I feel really sets this piece apart is the colouring. I’m REALLY happy with the way he turned out. Don’t forget you can click on the picture to enlarge it.
That’s all for this week. Next week is the start of a new theme that promises to be a little simpler style-wise but promises to show my artistic roots. See you next Wednesday for the reveal!
Dec 082015
Dec 072015
…there are only 10 days before the release of The Force Awakens. Granted that’s if you’re going to the midnight showing on the 17th, which in all likelihood I’m not. But the movie WILL be out so that’s good enough for me. I’m trying not to get my hopes too high for the movie, but I’m still pretty excited for the release.
But speaking of the number of shopping days before Christmas, that’s also dwindling down and I have next to nothing ready. I see some wild internet shopping going on in the next few days.
I didn’t have game night this past weekend so I had to make due with the board games I bought on Steam. I played a fair bit of Splendor but more than that I’m getting the hang of the Witcher Adventure Game which, as my friend Mike pointed out, is a video game port of a board game of a video game. After playing a few games, I can’t imagine playing the tabletop version as the digital port is so smooth. In the board game, you and up to three other players take on the roles of one of four available characters and try to complete quests and subquests for victory points. The game ends at the end of the round where a player has completed the requisite number of main quests (1, 3 or 5 depending on the length of game desired).
Players have two actions per round which can be used to travel, develop (gain abilities/spells), investigate, heal or a special ability unique to each character. By traveling and investigating, the players will collect 3 different types of hint tokens. These players can trade use the hint tokens to complete subquests or to get investigation tokens which are required to complete the quests. Each character requires a different number of hints to get investigation tokens. Triss for example, only needs 3 blue hint tokens to get a blue invetigation token, but she needs five purple hints and seven red hints to get the respective investigations tokens for those colours. In addition, Geralt has more character dice at his disposal, Triss is good at recharging spells, Dandelion is good at amassing money and Yarpen can take more hits before he loses access to his abilities so each character really has a different feel. I’ve only tried Triss so far as I wanted to get an idea of how she works before trying another character. I’m going to try Dandelion next because he’s a bard and bards are cool.
I guess that’s all for now. I have one more overtime session ahead of me next Saturday. It’s subtle but I can feel an extra bit of fatigue starting to build so it’ll be none too soon. Anyhoo, have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.
Dec 042015
