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Bib Fortuna variants

started playing Front Mission 5 last night. I saw a cameo

It's a rare thing to wind up paying less down the line. With the auctions "that got away" from me or where I didn't put a bid in, I generally wound up paying MORE later on. Glad it worked out for you!

Another day, another Combaticon. We're up to MB-06 Tornado, which would be their Vortex. Huh... Are we going to have a repeat of yesterday? If Onslaught was MMC's most-compromised Combaticon, Vortex was probably the runner up. His torso was narrower at the top and widened toward his waist, which is kind of the opposite of the animation model, his feet were like little vestigial stubs, and in a set that was pushing cartoon accuracy, he didn't even have the little nacelles on his shoulders. And once again, Magic Square has sauntered up to the party and dropped a figure that's almost too cartoon-accurate. I mean, the proportions are basically spot on, the landing gear is sticking off his hips in the correct fashion, and they've even managed to replace helicopter details on his shins with the cartoon's vertical black stripes. And, just like the other three, Tornado comes off clean, with no kibble that isn't supposed to be there. And man, that's just how good Tornado comes off next to MMC's Vortex, which was a revelation for me at the time. Unique Toys looks like they took the cartoon design and made it busier and bulkier. And Zeta's just looks like they took the G1 toy's torso and started stacking kibble on him until his limbs were more folded alt mode panels than actual body parts. Aside from the little arm guns, which are attached out of the box but do come off and get partsformed for alt mode, Tornado comes with his gun. He also comes with a big chunk of the upper body for the combined mode. One kind of wonders why this bit didn't come with Night Tracer and the chest shield already attached, and why Tornado doesn't come with a hand, but we've still got one to go, right? Once again, Magic Square doesn't dissappoint in the articulation department. Tornado's head is on a hinged swivel that can tilt down until his chin touches his chest and up a full 90 degrees. His shoulders rotate and move laterally 90 degrees. His biceps swivel, and his double-jointed elbows bend a total of 180 degrees. His wrists swivel and bend back, and his got individual fingers with ball joints at the base for swiveling and folding of the palm (thumb) or curling and splaying (fingers), plus one additional pinned hinge per digit. His waist swivels, and though he doesn't have the double hinge that the other three and therefore can't do a back bend, he still has one hinge that gives him 90 degrees of ab crunch. He's got the drop down hips, which can go about 90 degrees laterally and 45 degrees backward, but nearly 180 degrees forward. Tornado can axe kick Munitioner and Heavy Gunner in the face if he wants to. His thighs swivel, and his double-jointed knees can get around 140 degrees of bend. No up/down foot tilt, and unlike the other three he kind of doesn't have a full ankle pivot. The front of his feet do have a hinge that gives him 90 degrees of faux pivot, though. By now, you can probably guess that Tornado's gun has a small tab on the handle, and that the tab fits into a slot on either palm. The connection seems a bit better than on Munitioner or Heavy Gunner, though. It's kind of interesting that Magic Square and MMC both hit on the same idea... if the animation model gives Vortex round forearms, why not make them the engine nacelles instead of the tail, and stuff the tail into his torso instead? What's surprising is that converting the waist up into the back half of the helicopter is actually easier on Tornado, as I continue to find the clearance issues on MMC's frustrating. I've owned him for years, and I still don't think I've ever transformed him without the head coming off. Turning the robot from the waist down into the front of the helicopter is another story. Yeah, MMC's Vortex is probably my least favorite all-built-in limb to transform, but Tornado's got plenty of Magic Square's usual splaying the leg apart like a flower petal opening at the knees, then flipping and turning panels until they're basically inside out. It's the sort of thing where, even after you've done it once or twice, you still find yourself scratching your head and saying, "wait, how did this go again?". But hey, at least he's not a borderline shellformer like Zeta. So, subjectively, I might argue that MMC's Vortex is a much more realistic Kaman SH-2 Sea Sprite, and therefore better (Zeta and UT went for more realistic helicopters, too, but they seem to have gone for the wrong ones, namely a Sikorsky HH-53 Pave Low and a Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk, respectively). Objectively, we have to talk about cartoon accuracy again. Tornado's got that rounded face, something almost halfway between Vortex's lumpy G1 toy and the almost too-round cartoon. He's got the single window that wraps around the front, with the quartet of windows on either side. He's got the two nacelles just chilling on either side, with the additional intake above the cockpit. Most impressively, he's got the guns on his tail boom, but they're sticking out on little winglets. MMC, Unique Toys, and even Hasbro all included those little guns but put them right up against the tail. And if you look at his control art, it almost looks like that's how they're supposed to be. But that's just the angle of the control art; if you actually bother to watch scenes of Vortex in the cartoon then sure enough those guns are set on winglets that actually give them the clearance to fire around the crew area. This makes Tornado inarguably the most cartoon-accurate helicopter. I'll note that he's not perfect, though. The nacelles on the sides are formed from Tornado's forearms, which begged the question; what to do with the nacelles on his shoulders? Well, they flip over the shoulders and you wind up with two additional exhausts behind and between the engines. To be clear, I don't hate them; Vortex' animation model does have that extra intake over the cockpit that Tornado managed to capture, plus they half cover a gap in the tail boom. That said, they're not cartoon accurate. You may have already noticed that there is another landing gear that folds out of the tail. You might also have noticed the barrel of his gun sticking out of the nose is a most cartoon-accurate fashion. In fact, part of the reason it's so much more cartoon accurate than MMC's is because instead of sticking the entire gun into the nose it really is just the barrel. So... what do you do with the rest of it? Magic Square doesn't really say. The handle does fold in, leaving the same sort of peg that the others have used to mount their guns to their alt modes, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere on the helicopter to plug it in to. Perhaps, when we combine everything, there'll be a place on the gestalt body, kind of like how on MMC's Vortex's gun actually plugs into Onslaught. For now, though, if you split the tail boom, unhook the arms, and fold them and his head down you'll notice a cavity where the tail resided when it was in his torso. Nothing really fills that cavity in helicopter mode, so you can kind of stuff the rest of the gun in there and close him back up. It'll rattle, as it's just loose in there, but it can't fall out unless you open him back up. So that's something, I guess. Although I do like the realistic alt mode on MMC's Vortex, MMC's Vortex has always been my least favorite of MMC's combiner figures. Yeah, I like him even less than their Onslaught. So I have no qualms about handing the "best Vortex" crown to Tornado. He looks better and poses better in robot mode, and while the transformation has its annoyances, frankly, so does MMC's, so at best they'd tie there. And subjective preferences for realism aside, Tornado's helicopter mode is more cartoon accurate. End of the day, this is yet another strong effort from Magic Square with just one more team member to go.

But what time?

https://anime-export.com/index.php?product=100612

https://ew.com/hugh-jackman-death-robin-hood-first-look-exclusive-11857327

Marvel Legends Deathbird and Gladiator x2.

Preordered DK-78A at The Chosen Prime.

Youch. That doesn't give me any warm fuzzies about getting the rest of the VF-19s.

In hindsight, I've never been so glad to have lost out on a bid I made for a used, first version of this a couple of years ago. Plus this one turned out cheaper than my final bid...

It might not be mandatory, but I'd love to play this new one with this controller. Too bad the lack of fingers on my right hand doesn't allow me to do that XD

I'm definitely in for some fun and popcorn on the big screen! Bringing my son along to enlighten him

The Japanese CEO's and executives hate MK and see it as an cheap low brow inferior ripoff of Street Fighter making it highly unlikely there will ever be a crossover. Kinda like how kaiju fans would love to see a Godzilla X Gamera crossover, but Toho won't ever agree to that. Still everyone thought a KOF and Street Fighter crossover would never happen, and Godzilla was finally allowed to fight Gamera in the Gigabash videogame, so who the hell knows?

Lots of crazy little things going on. I’d be afraid to even touch it

Reminds me of Shamalamadingdong's Signs and Jordan Peele's Nope. That's not a good thing. This is going to be one of those things where it gets hyped up and once you find out the big twist you are left like "Oh... That's it? That's (censored) stupid."

AC7's IIRC "Standard" control scheme is similar to that game's fighter mode controls. Maybe start there, with the added knowledge that simply selecting a target won't lock all missiles onto it; you'll have to get both in range and at an advantageous angle (either behind the target or facing it head on). Best of luck.

Excessively kind. Like so many other titles the last few seasons, A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai is a fairly lazy, uninspired, genre follower of an isekai series that makes zero effort to do something new with the genre or innovate on any of its usual tropes. It's a low effort copycat series cynically trying to cash in on the genre's popularity while it lasts with a form letter setting and story. Its one halfway original idea amounts to an outrageous hot take on the standard western fantasy slow decline of the Elves. The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess is very similar to it, in the sense that the closest it gets to an original idea is having the protagonist acknowledge and then overreact to every form letter trope it dredges up like a YouTube reaction video. Since the season's winding down, I decided to go back and give Clevatess a whirl. It seemed like a promising work of dark fantasy for the first couple episodes... but it definitely feels like that promising start is being wasted past the halfway point. After spending half a dozen episodes on the existential threat posed by Clevatess and the dark beasts and how all of the humanoid races are confined to one small corner of the world by unnatural apex predators they have no hope of defeating, abruptly changing gears from that to "generic evil wizards want the baby" is such a massive f***ing downgrade that it's hard not to feel disappointed. There's no depth to them either. They're just psychopaths. Pretty boring fare.

I guess he was also attached to Cowboys versus Aliens. Didn’t care much for that one either. It seems like a movie about one really long fart joke, so I’m more interested in the reaction of those that do go to see it

If there was no indication of who was directing/writing....I would have thought this was some M. Night Shyamalan flick....

I’m pretty sure a lot of people have been thinking about it, but it’s probably more to do with the DC/Marvel rivalry. MK has DC and SF has the Marvel attachment

Yeah, the trailer is a really dud. It's just a black box, doesn't make me want to know more, it just annoys me, and makes me not care.

Gamespot English language interview with Kono and Shimimoto.