Graham

I've been considering picking up a second Chaos, just to see if my first one is a dud. Still thinking about it though. Haven't tried the hot water or hair dryer methods yet. Will see if the clear nail varnish works first. Legs are not that sturdy on mine. Forgot to mention in my review that my Chaos has quite loose elbow and knee joints. Knees tend to want to buckle in MA mode and loose elbow joint cannot support beam rifle witout flopping down . Graham

Saviour's not too bad IMO. In MS mode I usually flip the cannons up over his shoulders so they are pointing forwards in firing position. Helps a lot with balance. Yes, I agree that most variable flying Gundams have extremely half-assed fighter modes, which usually consists of rotate waist 180 degrees, rotate head 180 degrees, bend legs at knees and stick shield either on the back or chest. Graham

Sorry, wasn't able to write more yesterday, work got in the way . OK, first up the quick review for those with short attention spans : - MSiA Chaos = Crap. MSiA Abyss = Excellent. MSiA Gaia = Excellent. Now for the slightly longer version MSiA Chaos Gundam Includes: 1 x Chaos Gundam figure, 2 x beam sabers with detachable hilts, 2 x detachable Mobile Weapons Pods, 1 x beam rifle, 1 x shield, 6 x hands (2 x closed fist, 2 x open hands for holding the shield or beam sabers, 2 x beam rifle hands). Positives: Attractive box, same style as other Destiny MSiA. Figure has nice sculpt and good paint job. Quite a lot of ABS plastic on this one, including the main body of the Mobile Weapons Pods and the MA mode head cowling. Good articulation (ver.2 knees and elbows). Well articulated waist allows the figure to bend forward (necessary for MA mode). Lots of gimmicks, such as detachable Mobile Weapons Pods which feature opening doors to show missiles and extendable beam weapon barrels. The thrusters on the Mobile Weapons pods are also articulated with a ball joint allowing you to simulate thrust vectoring. The MA head cowling also has a sliding eye sensor to reveal the beam weapon(?) underneath. Beam Saber hilts can be stored on hips. Folding claws on the feet and knees. Negatives: Very strong (nasty) PVC smell on opening box. Shoulder sockets are not deep enough, resulting in both the left & right arms falling off several times. Balance is a big problem in MA mode. I have not been able to make the figure stand up in MA mode at all yet. Beam rifle and two of the fins on the mobile Weapons Pods suffer from gashapon disease (warping). The ABS head cowling for MA mode does not attach firmly enough and is easily knocked off. The hip sockets for the Beam Saber hilts are not secure enough, meaning it is easy for them to fall out and get lost. Conclusion: Nice sculpt, but figure is let down by too many parts which fall off too easily and balance problems in MA mode. Definitely one to keep in MS mode, where there is no balance issues. MSiA Gaia Gundam Includes: 1 x Gaia Gundam, 1 x beam rifle, 2 x Beam Sabers with detachable hilts, 6 x hands (2 x closed fists, 2 x beam rifle hands, 2 x saber/shield hands), 1 x shield, 2 x back wing beam blades. Positives: Nice box. Excellent sculpt. Great articulation in both MS and doggy modes. Good paint job. Transforms easily and stays together well in either mode. No balance problems in either mode. Holds all accessories without problem. No gashapon disease. Beam Saber hilts stay firmly attached in their hip sockets (unlike the Chaos Gundam) Negatives: None really. Well, my only minor niggle is that it is not perfect transformation and you have to detach and reattach the hands when transforming to doggy mode. Conclusion: Looks fantastic (very menacing) in either MS mode or mobile-doggy mode. My favorite figure out of the three. MSiA Abyss Gundam Includes: 1 x Abyss Gundam figure. 1 x Beam Lance, 4 x hands (2 x closed fists, 2 x hands for holding beam lance). Positives: Nice box. Excellent sculpt. Great articulation. Good paint job. The easiest of the three figures to transform, just swing the blue arm shield things above the head and lock them into two pegs on the back section, rotate back mounted guns so they point forward and slightly fold the feet...that's it! Despite the big arm thingies and the back guns the figure balances well in MS mode and the superior arm articulation allows for some very martial arts looking poses with the beam lance (looks more like a beam halberd IMO). Negatives: Strong (nasty) PVC smell on opening the box. Few accessories, but that is accurate to the TV series. Slight warping of two of the long beam weapon barrels on the blue arm thingies. Conclusion:MA mode looks a bit hokey IMO, but it is supposed to be an underwater mode AFAIK, so I shouldn't be too critical. Good figure. Recommended. Graham

The Gaia, Chaos and Abyss MSiAs have just been released in Hong Kong. I picked up one of each a few minutes ago. They are presently sitting unopened on my desk. Give me a few minutes to get them out of their boxes and have a quick play and I'll write a mini-review. Graham

I'm a huge fan of Romero's zombie movies. Never heard of this game tho. Just ordered it. looks like fun. Graham

YF-19 looks nice. Doesn't seem to be painted, looks like the parts are molded in cream and black, which is good. that means less painting for those that are artistically-challenged . A few minor gripes though. At first glance it looks like it there is no way to attach the gunpod in fighter mode. Also, the feet do not close properly in fighter mode. Still, can't expect too much in only 1/100 scale. I do like how they have handled the front landing gear and the toy seems pretty poseable with no parts removale or swapping required. Might have to see if I can get one of these from Wonder Fest. Moving onto the VB-6, looks nice but I can't bring myself to be wildly enthusiastic about it. Maybe it's beacuse I'm a a fighter guy, not a bomber person. Or maybe it's beacuse I'm still pissed at Y*mato for breaking off contact with Macrossword without any explanation, especially after all the free publicity and help we gave them. I'm in half a mind to buycott Y*mato products from now on and remove all Y*mato reviews I've written from Macrossworld. If Y*mato want to be assh*oles, then so can I . This whole thing has left a very bitter taste in my mounth. Maybe one day soon, I should write the whole story on the forums, with lots of juicy pics. Sorry, for the OT rant, but this has been bugging me for quite a while now. Not quite at the stage where I'm going to burn all my Y*mato toys, but getting there. Graham

Wow... that many, I was under the impression that it was only a few hundred or a couple of thousand at most. But yes I agree, when spread out throughout the whole galaxy (galaxies?) 10,000 is not many. Actually, does SW take place in just one galaxy (a galaxy far far away ), or is it supposed to take place in several galaxies? Graham

Next question. At the time of the prequel trilogy is it ever mentioned how many Jedi there are? Graham

Still gotta be better than the subs on the HK DVD sets though, right? Graham

That helps to clarify things. Thanks. Graham

Hey graham, Can the Zeta Fix combine with Deep Striker? Also I have the EXS gundam. That wil work too right to make a blue deep striker? hehe I got him at hobby show japan for only 26 dollars!!!! Ya know, I haven't tried that. I'll see if I can find time over the weekend to play around with them. Oh, and all of my Sentinel GFF were taken out of storage last week and put back on display. I was getting bored with a purely Macross display cabinet. Graham

Interesting new rear view pic of the new Jedi Starfighters. So the wings fold then. Graham

Simply calling yourself a "Sith" won't actually make you one. Heck, I could call a press conference tomorrow and announce that I'm the President of the United States, but it obviously wouldn't be true. That's not really a fair comparison. The US President has the whole government & military behind him to support him. If you are the Sith Master, you've got er......one apprentice backing you up, that's it. And as there's only two of them, they'd have a hard time enforcing their dominance, if say a dozen other dark Jedi of similar power level suddenly decided that they wanted to call themselves Sith as well. This would make a great Monty Python type sketch IMO: - Upstart Sith: "We're Sith now". Real Sith: "No you're not, we are". Upstart Sith: "No we are" Real Sith: "Sod off, you can't be Sith!" "Don't you know the rule says only 2 at one time, a master and apprentice". "Upstart Sith: Says who?" Real Sith: "Says we" Upstart Sith: "You and who's army?" So what actually makes a Sith a Sith? What's special about them? How do they actually become Sith apart from one day just declaring "right, we're Sith" . Graham

Not sure why this was posted in the Macross Movies & TV SEries forum? Moved to Other Anime. Graham

The '2 Sith only' rule bugs me as well. We had a discussion about this in one of the other SW threads recently and I think the conclusion we reached was that although there are only 2 Sith at any one time, there can be more dark Jedi, they just can't call themselves 'Sith'. What the exact difference is between a Sith and a bog-standard Jedi who has turned to the dark side is, nobody seems to be sure. Also, I'm not sure if there is anything actually preventing a dark Jedi on planet 'A' from declaring himself a Sith even when there are already 2 Sith on planet 'B'? Graham

This could be very interesting. Wonder if Harrison Ford or any of the other OT actors would do cameos? Graham

Sheesh you kids make me feel old Graham, the grumpy old man

Probably not much. Yeah, shes probably been kept busy doing, ahem....'docking maneuvers' with Athrun for the last 2 years Graham

Hmmm..........I'll reserve judgement for now. Overall, I'm slightly prefering the Eureaka 7 mecha and character designs a bit more than the Aquarion ones so far. That may change though as more information and images become available. Some of the female characters for Eureaka 7 look cute . Not liking that the Aquerion mecha seem to be CG animated rather than cell . Also, the head of the Solar Aquarion looks too much like a Samurai helmet. I hate it when Japanese mecha designers do that. Graham

There's loads of other MP3 players that work great and look much better as well. You hardly ever see iPods here in HK. Pretty much everybody has these little cool looking cylindrical shaped ones they hang around their necks. Personally, I'm not into carrying lots of different gadgets, so an iPod holds no interest for me. I like to travel light, so I'd rather have one item that does everything rather than walking around like a dork with a seperate cell phone, PDA, portable gaming device, digital camera and MP3 player . I'm perfectly happy with the MP3 player on my Nokia cell phone with a 256KB MMC card that hold about 65 songs. Yes, it may not by 5GB and hold a gazillion songs, but so what? In one day travelling to and from work, I never get through all the songs anyway and it's easy enough to change songs on the PC when I get bored. Graham

Ahem....wrong forum. It ain't a toy and it ain't Macross. Moved to the Other Anime section. Graham

Ewan's chin looks elongated. Prosthetic chin or altered by CG?

As much as I love the 1/48, I'd say if he is not a toy collector and not used to handling and transforming 'collector grade' Japanese mecha toys, then it's probably best to stick with the 1/55 for it's overall durability and ease of transformation. All of us here are familiar with how to handle somewhat delicate Japanese mecha toys so that they wont break, but we forget that non-toy people tend to be somewhat ham-fisted and overly forceful, which is not good for the toy's health. Can we all say 'BP8...snap'! Personally, I'd stay away from the 1/60 as a beginner toy, as the removable legs, troubled gerwalk mode, general floppiness and easily scratched paint job can lead to more frustrations than pleasure. We're pretty much all hardcore fans here, so we learn to live with these deficiencies in light of the toys other charms such as superior sculpt and poseability, but a casual fan may be more disappointed than we would be. The 1/48 is best left to later on if he choses to move down the dark side and get into collecting Macross toys. If he gets it as a newbie, he won't appreciate all the features of the 1/48 as much as he he gets one later when he is more knowledgable. Just my 2 cents. Graham

MSG = Monosodium Glutamate iPod? Graham

During my lunch break today, I took the train to visit the 2004 HK Gundam Expo which opened today at Plaza Hollywood located in the Diamond Hill district. As I've only got an hour for lunch, I wasn't able to stay long (only about 20 minutes), but the expo was much smaller than in previous years and to be honest there wasn't much of interest to see unless you are a really hardcore, diehard Gundam fan. Here's a few comments on what I did/didn't see: - Biggest disappointment, the mini-skirted Gundam cosplay girls were not in attendence yet...Boo Hiss . There was a nice 2m tall statue of the Force Impulse Gundam and also the Blue Astray Second L, complete with big honkin' sword. You could pose with these for taking photos. Unlike previous years, there was not much new upcoming products on display. For model kits they had some of the upcoming Destiny HGUC kits on show along with a nice completed 1/60 scale Force Impulse which is due for release on 18 Dec (I may get this one). Some completed MG Balls were also on display, bigger than I expected and very detailed as well. Toys were even more of a let down. I'd been expecting to see the MMM GQ Force Impulse toy on display and also the MSiAs of Gaia, Chaos & Abyss as all these toys are due out in December, but nada. The only unreleased toy they showed was the HCM Pro Rick Dias due in January.....big yawn! This is really bad compared to the Expo 2 years ago when they had loads of upcoming releases on display. The only show exclusives I noticed was a box set of metallic plated HGUC kits from Zeta, including RX-178 Titans, red Rick Dias, Zeta and Hi-Zack. I didn't get these as I'm not a fan of Zeta mecha. There was also a 1/1 scale RX-78 hand you could sit on and take photos with. I'd read on Gunota Blog that this was actually supposed to be a full Gundam upper torso and head like in the Bandai museum in Japan, but the RX-78 upper body at this expo turned out to be just a painted 2D backdrop...cheapskates! TRU had a big booth at the expo selling Gundam models and toys. Nothing new or interesting that you can't easily buy anywhere else in HK though, besides the aforementioned metallic HGUC expo exclusives. There was also a display of painted Gundam model kits by some of HK's very talented model builders and also some mini-dioramas on display, nothing like last years huge diorama though. There was also a roped off area with kiddies building Gundam models, but I didn't pay much attention to this. There is probably more stuff that I missed, like gashapons and those kiddies card games, but as I mentioned I only had a very short time there before I had to hop on a train back to work. I may go back with a camera tomorrow, but IMO the whole thing was one big snoozefest this year. Graham