GU-11

Same here. Even in the promo pics, her head looks too small and the neck is disproportionately long.

Whaddayaknow, the money I saved from having the Ozma pre-order canceled on me can now be put into this. In fact, I think I like this more than the Ozma.

Fcuk it, my local hobby store just canceled all pre orders for the Ozma. Couldn't have told me earlier, when it was still possible to buy from an online store. And since I don't do ebay, my only hope lies in a possible Ozma Armored Parts bundle that may or may not be web exclusive. Then again, there's always Yamato a few years down the line.

Just entered the final "episode" of FF XIII-2. Damn, the difficulty of monsters in this game are WAY unbalanced. Was killing bosses left and right in the past few boss fights, and suddenly got my ass handed to me by a random encounter enemy called proto-behemoth. This is downright ridiculous! And don't get me started with that damn quest boss, Gorgyra. Well, time to do what all RPG's are made for: level grinding.

I caught an episode or two on TV once way back when, and it did have a certain shonen anime eccentricity to it. I'll have to Google this Leena character and see what it's all about. True. I never quite appreciated just how user-friendly and convenient Bandai's kits are, until I started building Kotobukiya's AC kits. If only Bandai got the license to Armored Core. Frankly, I'd rather deal with fixing up the sprue marks myself than to add another 20% to the cost of the kit.

Hmmm, it's not so awesome any more without all that weathering and detailing. Still worth a look, though.

Oh. Well, the most I've seen for a model kit is in the DMK Transformers kits. The flames for Optimus were pre-painted, and the metal "ribs" on Bumblebee were done in silver. Personally, I think washes would take up too much time for it to be cost effective, since you essentially have to wait for the wash to dry before wiping off the excess. Now that makes a lot more sense. What I like about the DMK Optimus kit is that even with the flames already painted on, they also give you a separate set of decals in case you feel like painting the kit. I dunno about you guys, but I just have to get that robot velociaptor with the shopping basket. It's equal parts of cool AND funny. Getting closer and closer to clicking that "order" button on the hlj page. But on second thought, I'll just wait until it gets officially restocked. Backordered stuff can take anywhere from a few weeks to months before being available. How'd they get around the problem of paint damage from sprue removal? The sprues would have to be very strategically placed in order to avoid damaging the paint.

There might be certain exceptions, though. The Aaliyah Krasnaya I built is a little too tight in the joints, if anything. Still, I didn't dare to risk even posing it with the guns up, and just had it in a neutral pose with the arms at a low angle. That said, the kit wasn't exactly designed for dynamic poseability, what with all those stylized protrusions and pointy edges.

Wha? You mean there are actually model kits out there that are perfectly airbrushed/spray-painted right on the runners? What's the point in that? You'd almost definitely scratch or damage the paint while cutting the sprues off, and sanding off the nubs. Tampo's, I can understand, if you're not planning on painting the kit, but fully painted parts? On the other extreme, they didn't even bother to touch up the parts on my Border Break kits that were supposed to be molded in a different color.

Just a friendly question, but out of curiosity, why would you expect a model kit to be pre-painted in the first place? Most modern kits are molded in color-accurate plastic, but I've never heard of a model kit that's pre-painted. Detailing, yes, but not pre-painting. If anything, Kotobukiya kits almost always require a bit of painting for added accuracy, unlike Gundam kits that usually look great with just a layer of clear coat.

In the first place, maybe they should have included like plastic "side-skirtings" that fit into the ball-joints to replace the hip things with the original releases--the naked ball-joints look pretty bad. Then there wouldn't even be a need for a retool. Then again, I doubt they would have anticipated the disapproval of fans towards those hip kibble things. That said, while I agree that the hip things are inaccurate to the Seekers' G1 designs, I don't really hate them. I mean, if you posed them at a 40 to 30 degree angle like sword scabbards, they actually look kind of cool. BTW, that Diaclone illustration seriously reminds me of a Gundam fig, primarily the chest area.

Oh. Pretty good for a KO. Wonder what that says about Takara when they have to follow the design tweaks of a third party company. BTW, was it Kawamori who took over from an earlier designer prior to the hip kibble thing or was the Seeker mold his design from scratch?

Not much of a Zoids person myself, but you gotta love this one; a ridiculously well-armed robotic dinosaur shopping for ammo. If I didn't have four model kits waiting in line for me to complete, I'd buy one just for the heck of it.

I'm not much of a morning person [just woke up and feeling really drowsy], so I've got no idea what that comment about iGears means. As for MP-10, I bought one despite the price because like you, I totally love how they managed to keep the proportions between alt and bot mode. That said, I still think it's rather expensive. Good point.

More free roaming than you can shake a stick at. Each location has at least two timelines, and you can freely jump between timelines as many times as you like, whenever you like. In fact, most side quests actually require you to do so in order to fight monsters or pick up objects. You can also reset the progress in a certain timeline by acquiring a so-called gate seal. Although doing so might cancel the availability of a quest. I don't know if this is a glitch or not, but I reset the timeline on Academia 4XX AF, and the bestiary collection quest I had opened but still haven;t completed was gone. The guy I was supposed to talk to to activate the quest suddenly got "locked"--by that I mean, the "talk" option was gone, and I couldn't interact with him in any way. Either way, it's as non-linear as it gets, so much so that you tend to forget what the story's about sometimes. Fortunately, they have a "story so far" feature every time you load a save, recapping the events in a video montage. Ans yes, you can retry battles if things don't go your way. There's a catch, though. See, there's something called a "Mog Clock", which is basically a timer counting down from the moment a monster appears on screen. Slash it with your weapon in time, and you get bonus in the form of a full ATB bar and auto-haste at the start of the battle. If the monster hits you first, you start the battle without said bonuses, and it's impossible to get a five-star rank, which in turn gives you more CP and better chances of getting rare items. The worst thing that can happen is if you fail to slash the monster in time, because failing to do so results in the retry option being locked--getting killed brings you back to your latest save. The good news is that you can always retry boss fights, because they're plot activated instead of random encounters.

I'd be laughing if this weren't so eerily true. Takara seems to be on "gold digger mode" these days. While MP-10 is a great fig, the price was undeniably overkill. And instead of giving us new molds, they're retooling the Seeker mold and hoping to squeeze more sales out of the mold with a Sunstorm repaint.

BTW, 50+ hours into FF XIII-2, and loving every second of it. The plot obviously plays second fiddle to the gameplay, but the sidequests were nice, with the sole exception of the stupid clock puzzles. Randomly resetting every single time, it's a chore to solve if you're not prepared to pause the game, copy the damn numbers on paper and spend an hour figuring it out. At the same time, Just finished DW7, not that many here even care about this game. As far as story is concerned, this proves by far to the the most historically accurate and flows well from one kingdom to the next. The ending was also very satisfying, with a decidedly epic feel in the FMV. The ability to switch weapons really does wonders in breaking the monotony of the fighting. While the moves are basically standard copies for each weapon, mixing between the main and secondary weapons makes it more fun than previous DW games. Nice to see that they actually made an effort to properly pronounce the names of the characters, though I'll miss the times I chuckled like a idiot to the mention of Lord Cow Cow and Cow Pee. Cons: You can't ride special horses in Story Mode. Not even when you're supposed to own them, ie. Red Hare for Lu Bu [sadly, not playable in Story Mode], Shadow Runner for Cao Cao, Hex Mark for Liu Bei. The standard Chestnuts are pretty darn slow; unless you're using Dong Zhuo or some other super slow player, you're better off hoofing it. The Qiao sisters still look like children. And they're supposed to be married to Zhou Yu and Sun Ce?! They look more like fathers and daughters, for Pete's sakes. One thing that would have made this game much better is subtle aging for certain characters. Sima Yi looks young enough to be brothers with his sons in the Jin campaign.

Yeah, Xenogears is one of my favorite games for the PSX. The thing about sprites is that they age far more gracefully than early 3D renders. IMO, the plot is one of Square's even come up with, possibly even beating out FF7 [yes, I know there's FF Tactics and many others, but I only started playing Final Fantasy games from FF7 onwards.] Other than that, the gameplay was pretty fun, with just the right amount of complexity. If there's one thing to complain about, it's that the giant robots felt like they were tacked onto the game for "coolness" sake, and little else. They added next to nothing as far as the plot was concerned.

I'd gladly pay an extra 100 USD if Takara made the MP-10 look that good out of the box.

Yeah, it'd make more sense as an included shell than it's own product. It's a cool idea to display the shell as its own piece, though, since you can't really tell if the car is actually inside it or not. Either way, it's too rich for my blood, especially after pre ordering the Tumbler. Besides, I've got absolutely no space for something of that size in my display room. The Tumbler will be taking up the last sizeable piece of real estate.

That's not the actual thing? But the shield mode will be essentially one solid piece like what was shown, won't it?

The what? I thought it's just parts for the car that snap on to recreate the "shield mode." Are you saying the shield mode version is another product altogether? EDIT: Never mind; it's just a one-piece shell that clamps over the damn car. In fact, you could actually display it as an individual piece, since it covers the whole car.

It says it also features the "batmoblie shield"; I'm guessing it's snap-on parts like the intakes on Yamato's 1/60 Valks? Doesn't look like they can pull off a "perfect transformation" gimmick with what's essentially pure special effects.

Much better than the original green, and the stickers really add realism to it.

Pass. Already have DMK Bumblebee. What I need right now is Megatron and/or Sentinel to go with Revoltech Optimus, as currently, only ROTF voyager Starscream is barely in scale enough to be posed in a diorama with him.