armentage

for that hunk of resin... $85 is reasonable, IMHO maybe could you lower the cost with Rotocast? Can a caster comment on this?? 336028[/snapback] Rotocast? Is this a comment to the casters or to buyers?

I'd love to have one, but $85 is a bit too much

Testor's liquid cement is very nice. It's a welder, but a very gentle one - far more gentle than the Testor's orange tube. I used the orange testor's for years. If you're not careful, you can really mar up your model with stray drops of glue. Once it starts to get too thick, you better toss out the tube - you start to get strands of glue that refuse to go away. The loose strands will end up maring your kit something awful! Lately I've been using the newer blue testors tube. It smells better and seems to be more gentle. I haven't seen it actually mar a model, and it seems to okay on paint. The liquid cement is fantastic. It's not as strong as the tube, but it gets the job done VERY well for small pieces. It's easy to dab it in to small crevices.

If you do get the Plexi-Stands, be aware that it is difficult to pose a strike-valk if you're using 3 equal-length rods (each stand comes with 3 long rods to rest your toy on). If you want to pose your Valk flying level, you're probably going to want 1 long rod (to go under the nose) and 2 short rods (support the legs/engines) Look at my ... diagram... /=----------------------------((+==(== <<--- Strike pack! \===================== <<<(((( _____ /==================== ---<<--------/---------------------- ^ \\\===== \=====_________ Nose \\ \=============== ^^^^ legs/thrusters To get a pose like this, you'll need something like a 5" rod for the nose and 3" rods for the back.

I'm really feeling the comments about a lil-dough going a long way. Primers and Paints can be REALLY expensive! Mr Primer comes in the tiniest little cans, which must be half-empty, and can run me as much was $9 each down in NYC Chinatown. I like hearing about all these cheap alternatives... sometimes I get the feeling that recommendations of "The BEST" where the best costs 10x as much as everything else are just penis-lenght competitions...

I hear all sorts of good things about "Plasti-Kote" primer. It's inexpensive and available at many large retail chains in the US. There's Mr Surfacer.... the thin spray puts down such an amazingly smooth and thin coat.

The art work is great, but your site is very hard to navigate. Lose the silly little tiles and give us a real preview of the images, along with some text that lets me know what I am going to be looking at when I follow a link. Imagine a handicapped person trying to navigate your site, or someone with poor vision. They would be extremely frustrated. Fancy/cool page design might be fun for the designer but its usually a pain in the ass for the web browser.

How about tricks for holding heavier pieces? Masking tape on skewers sure does sound like a great idea - it's a varation on what I do now (I'll ball up tape on the end of a paint brush). When working with pieces that have Poly-caps, sometimes I'll mount a limb on old-school Testors plastic brushes. They happen to be the perfect diameter and material (harder version of the same sort of rubber) to mate with a Polycap plug.

Can someone point me to some nice tools for holding my model pieces while airbrushing? I have a pair of surgical forceps that I've been using while modeling for almost 20 years now (I dont even know where I got them) and while they are great, I only have the 1, and they are pretty expensive ($10 each) So what I'd like to hear are some suggestions of tools for holding and mount small model pieces (i.e. gundam armor, landing gears, etc) for spraying/painting. Let the games begin! Thanks!

Are these booster kits still available anywhere?

HEHEH I have Protoculture Adicts #3! It was absolutely awful, but oh, how I worshipped it. I must have read it 300 times. If I can even find it anymore, I'm sure the pages have yellowed and begun to disintigrate

You know, I don't know where I got it form, but some how I ended up with a copy of Animag 12 sometime in 1990. I didn't order it, I think US Renditions sent it to me as some sort of a promotion for having bought the Robotech VHS Box set from them (FHE!) Man, that brings back some memories. I remember looking through those old magazines in rapt AWE of that stuff, thinking "these must be the best stories EVER!" Sure, looking back, most of the titles they were reviewing were junk imitations of the other titles that were well known here (L-Gaim, various Ninja stuff, etc), but it did make an impression. We ought of have some sort of Anime Nebula Awards thanking those old timers for helping to make anime so accessable in the US.

the newer sps are now backlit. http://media.gameboy.ign.com/articles/652/...mg_3086349.html 330865[/snapback] They're still too small, though. 330888[/snapback] Hahah I can't believe the timeliness of that. Just as I'm thinking "maybe these old-school GBA's are okay with their screens" an even better one comes out! Oh, it turns out I was trying to play the GBA's under one, half-burned out 40-Watt bulb without any of that nice diffusion (soft-white) coating. I bumped her bedroom lights up to 100-watts and we were able to play 4-Swords very well. Speaking of 4-Swords the game TOTALLY OWNS. Puzzles, great music and game play and just the right mix of competition and team-work. It's perfect! I highly recommend it. Played it for 4 hours in one sitting and while I did get frustrated at some of the harder puzzles, you really get a strong sense of satisfaction from play. Contrast this to FF:CC where there is no goal at all and you need to deal with annoying poo just to move around the screen.

One more thing to add about the GameCube -- The controllers ROCK. After using the XBOX Controller-S (the smaller one) for a year, I can really appreciate the GameCube's. It's size is perfect for my big hands and the GF's small ones. She absolutely adores it too. I really love the way they made the important buttons bigger, and have gradually "less important" buttons placed further away. Really innovative design they came up with.

Thin white to the consistency of milk? I must be doing something wrong, when I thin my Tamiya flat white out too much (near 50:50) it begins to sputter.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm geting my grubby hands on a copy of 4-Swords today. A big part of the trouble finding good MP games is that few titles actually explain just how they are Multiplayer on their box, or tend to emphasize their competiative mini-games more than the co-op part. I'm vaguely tempted to plop down the $50 for a copy of XMen Legends:2...

Sounds exactly like an RPG to me. I have to have hte only visible GBA in existence. I've never had any major lighting problems. 330085[/snapback] Well, usually even the worst RPG gives you background story and reasons to go to a particular place at a particular time, and tries to develop the characters SOMEWHAT. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance had an over plot and flat characters, little detail, etc etc, but it was still better than FF:CC As for GBA screens... maybe you just happen to have some kick-ass eyes, JBO!

I've heard that Symphonia was awful... Player-one is totally in charge of the RPG part, and the other players only get to take part in the combat. The combat is supposed to have serious camera issues with multi-player mode, which some people claim makes the game unplayable. It makes me a little hesitant to try it it. ANYWAY.... I picked up Two GameBoys to try Final Fantasy:Crystal Chronicles and I must say we were a bit dissapointed. Graphics & Sound are beautiful, but the game seems to be an exercise in tedium without any RPG fun at all, WHAT SO EVER! You just walk around this stupid chalice and fight. I made the mistake of getting used non-backlit GBAs, which are totally useless unless you are playing in the brightest light. I'm begining to feel that the Xbox might be the way to go with the Co-Op games XMEN LEGENDS 2 anyone?

I use Tamiya airbrush thinner. It smells exactly like Isopropyl alcohol... Anyway, it sort of depends on the color and type of Tamiya paint I'm using. Thicker glossy colors naturally need more thinner, about 50/50 ratio. Thinner military flats, i'll do 30/70 paint to thinner. Some colors, like Gun Metal (glossy metalic) I'll use only a few drops of thinner, maybe a 15:85 thinner/paint ratio.

Can we play it together on the same GameCube (w/o an onilne connection?) I have a huge 50" TV that can do side-by-side Split-screen. It'd be funny to network 2 gamecubes on the same TV just to play together!

I'd heard the same thing about Video Games.... that sometime in the mid-90s, the money previously spent on Anime memorobilia by fans was being redirected towards video games and the associated toys/books/fan-crap. Talent goes where the money is.... This was info from some Japanese anime/manga industry magazine a friend of mine was reading at the time. It certainly sounds like a reasonable idea...

Must say that the GC Nintendo games are pretty amazing. They really do fantastic things with very low polygon counts and smooth animation. The music is amazing too! I bought her Zelda:Wind Walker and she played in rapt intensity for hours. Definately a good choice. Thanks for the input!

You know, as long as we're playing on the same team I don't really mind what the games are. (except sports games, never liked them) Well, I pulled the trigger on a GameCube. Even if it doesn't have the best co-op games, it's cheap, the games & accessories are cheap, and she LOVES nintendo chars!

I think it's a different Zelda game I'm thinking of, but one of them definately allows you to have some crazy GBA Multiplayer fun.

I know this is off topic (off-macross) but I was hoping to get some feedback from you all. My girlfriend LOVES cooperative multi-player games, and my XBOX just doesn't cut the muster. There's a few games, like Baldur's Gate:Dark Alliance, and ROTK, but not much else, and certainly not much variety in terms of game genre/style. I'm going to buy either a PS2 or a GameCube, because those two systems have a lot more of the "family" and "together" marketshare, and hence more games. My question is, which system? GameCube has some fabulous new multiplayer RPGs, (FF:CC, Zelda Wind Walker) but they require 2+ GameBoy Advanced units to play, which makes the GameCube a very expensive proposition. PS2 is always a winner, but many of it's games are single-player Teen-Angst or Lonely-Geek... So basically, I'm not sure which system to pick. Can anyone out there give me some pro's and con's for each system, in regards to multi-player COOPERATIVE play? (Cooperative means games like Gauntlet where you play together, NOT games like Soul-Calibur2 are where you play against each other)