MKT

Sat through Rebel Moon, I have to agree with many of the reviews & sentiments out there. This is one the shows where the trailer is much better than the movie by a thousand times, and incidentally when I went back to rewatch the trailer, I realized about 1/3 of trailer scenes are not even in the movie? The whole show is like a bad meme of a whole lot other movies or media lol. Some are just too in-your-face that you wanna shout out "that's (so and so) from (insert-the-movie / game)". Why I say game is that there are 2 shots from the show that straight out reminds me of places & scenes from World of Warcraft (Blade's Edge Mountains for anyone who played back then). The other thing that stood out at beginning, was when baddie Noble appeared, and he looks like a carbon copy of M.Bison. Not from the game, but Raul Julia's portrayal in that campy 90's Street Fighter movie

Never planned on getting these, but recent sale at Hobby-Genki was too good to pass up..

Ah ok, that makes perfect sense now. The caption while prominently showing the front of Fighter threw me off earlier.. It's a good thing they painted up the intakes, consistent with the YF-19. Most of the other Chogokins so far have left the intakes unpainted. Also the tampo markings look like pretty nice after being so used to Yamato's plain jane for so long. Luckily no ugly NETFC wordings on the wings lol. There's still those rather prominent 'General Galaxy' on the underside, but its ok as we'll already try to hide its belly as much as possible for display.

Gotta say this Fighting Armor line is quite a hit & miss. Individually most of them look good, but not so much when putting them together because they will all be the same height due to the same body. Obviously prefer those characters who originally have a face mask, so this line will be more natural for them. That said, I’m tempted to pick up Wolverine due to how good the colors look even if he is ‘faceless’. Magneto so far looks the coolest though..

I think the hips could be excessively tight in previous releases, both VF-19 Advance & YF-19 FP, so might want to loosen the screws on the back first..

Could be translation error, but I also wonder about ‘engine nozzle fins move one by one’. Not referring to the intake covers, are they?

Sort of took it for granted previously that the cockpit seat will rotate like what Yamato / Arcadia did for some of their valks, but it sounds like Bandai is just making them swappable parts.

https://tamashiiweb.com/item/14740/?wovn=en Price: Yen 35,000, excluding JP domestic tax PO: 10 Jan, 2024 Release: June 2024

Macross 7 the only series I've yet to watch. But the toys have grown on me.. Merry Christmas everyone!

Nice remake animation.

I actually saw that pic not that long ago, but if not mistaken it turns out they were of old prototypes in 2020.

And now I'm just realizing the sales solicitation pics have no yellow tinted canopy..

Lol the price.. its just about the same as Arcadia's SV-51, but we know that valk was much larger. Tables have really turned between Bandai & Arcadia. Can't see a backplate & a few simple fast pack pieces to justify a massive increase over the recent non-FP YF-19 either. I thinking Bandai expecting this to be a once off mold with no repaints down the road hence the high MSRP.

Lighting is warm white, but the darker tone is mostly down to pic processing. Actual blue is slightly lighter.

Had to look up Life Force / Salamander, and its great there's already this type of gameplay all the way back then. I guess it skipped my local arcades at that time. What I'm pretty impressed with is how fast & smooth the sprites move, compared to what I remember of other shoot-em-ups of that era.

Took sometime to dig through the Arcadia VF-1J M&M thread, but here is the link to the improvements: https://ameblo.jp/arcadiaac/entry-12312374556.html The improvements were very minor - basically tolerance adjustments & new screw covers, but it just highlights that even for minor stuff like this, Mr. K took the trouble to communicate it out. I forgot about it too until your post. All these while I was more fixated on the metallic gold highlights on Arcadia's copy which I thought looked better than Yamato's yellow, but now I reckon that cockpit tint is a bit of a step backwards.

From jenius's site:

At this point, it's likely exactly the same as Arcadia's first issue, otherwise Mr. K would have tweeted something about improvements like what he did for the Tomahawk, or the VF-1J M&M. Still, if there are stealth improvements it would be welcome.

It's pretty interesting they are switching up the gameplay into various shooter types. Looks like the developers are putting some genuine effort into gameplay mechanics rather than just it mainly being an IP tie-in, and it makes good use of 3D assets that we would not have seen in the old shoot-em-ups. I hardly game these days, so not sure if there are other shooters out there which does the same thing as presented here, but from what little games I know, it feels a bit like Nier Automata with genre crossing gameplay depending on stage.

I forgot about this issue, so I went back to check. Thankfully the paint on the stabilizers is done correctly.. However, I then noticed the modex numbers.. Looks like I got KC-ed! The numbers on the vertical stabilizers are correctly aligned though. On a related note, I wonder why the numbers on Max & Ben differs from Macross. Here they are 113 & 202, but on the Yamato 1/60 Kakizaki it is 112, and Chogokin Max has 111 printed. Another inconsistency is the numbering fonts used for Ben's 1A & Rick 1J. On Rick, his modex is 101, but the font used for the number 1 is just a straight 'I', whilst on Ben's as seen above, it is '1'. But at least for Rick, there won't be the issue of the modex being upside down!

I received the Vermillion Squadron in their new, smaller packaging today, so just some brief unboxing impressions: Rick's packaging comes in a black box, no viewing window, with a sleeve that goes over it.. The new box is substantially smaller than the old packaging, although they have the same thickness.. Just like before, the valk is packaged in Battroid and comes with its own clamshell that fills up the whole box. The accessories tray goes under it. No missiles or stand in this new package. Max & Ben also come in the same smaller-sized packaging, but unlike Rick there's no sleeve but just stickers on the black box to indicate the product within. I opened all three of them just to inspect for any defects. Apologies if no further pics here, but just describing my impressions of them from here on. It has been a long while since I laid eyes on a KC valk in person, but it does appear that the quality of paint and tampo have considerably improved from previous efforts. We know that most surfaces of the valk are painted, and the paint looks really consistent in terms of thickness & application. No unevenness, orange peel, stray splotches or over/under spray can be detected on my copies. I can see the panel lining have been done very well - no irregular line thickness or splotches where 2 lines meet. I briefly compared the tampos with a v1, and this current version has more, such as the 'no step' markings along the wing edges with the tampos being very sharp & legible even if the fonts are tiny on some of them. Rick's was the first one I opened, and an additional surprise awaited. I was expecting the predominantly white valk to be all matte finished. Instead, selected areas have a slightly different finish on them; a somewhat subdued sheen that contrasts just a little to the matte finish on rest of areas that is not easy to capture in pics. It is not a glossy finish like the older Bandai DX, but a very soft lustre - think of a timber surface that's been lightly finished in natural oil instead of synthetic polish. Despite the different surface treatments on the valk, the whites remain evenly matched. In default Battroid, it really looks good but given the build's finicky nature, I don't think I will transform it to Fighter to see how the different paint finishings look like. For better or worse, this dual sheen treatment isn't carried over to Ben's or Max's toys. Everything is matt-finished on both of them. I don't know if it will be odd putting all three of them together and Rick's slightly shinier whites being very conspicuous, but I don't think so. Given the outstanding paint job it has, which is really the one & only thing going for it, it is quite a shame that KC's build quality & fit continue to feel suspect with this mold even if there haven't been widespread reports of catastrophic breakage. When I took the valks out for inspection, I was very reluctant to move any of the joints, such is the play-unfriendly nature of this mold. I'm pretty confident Threezero's upcoming iteration of the VF-1 will easily surpass KC's in the build department, and hopefully the paint (if not molded in coloured plastic) will be as good.

Wotafa:

Never knew there are video essays this long on YouTube lol.. I recently so happened to be contemplating on what little highlights I recall of SNES Super Metroid, and that section of video was a timely reminder of specific gameplay & stages I have mostly not seen since completing it eons ago. From what I remember, it took quite some tries for me to finally get invested into the game. At that time, there were lots of buzz in practically all the magazines that covered SNES (my main & go to gaming mag was EGM, anyone remember that?), but just from the printed still pictures, I recall the game looked rather dull. Everything looked dark with rather flat colour palette. When I finally got a copy of the game, I promptly got bored within perhaps the first hour or two. The graphics, visuals & overall presentation were very different to the types of games I was playing at that time. Eventually I sat down with it again at length, persevered, and I remember there was a point far enough into it when everything just clicked and then I could not put down the gamepad! Fast forward to comparatively more present times, to when I picked up gaming again. It was Tomb Raider 2013, and the way one gets to access new areas in older stages with newly learned abilities from later stages was a huge deja vu moment - a direct callback to my Super Metroid experience, and I soon learned that Super Metroid was largely responsible for this aspect of game design in the years after. I will always have a bit of soft spot for Samus, even though Super Metroid was the only Metroid experience I had. I did not watch the whole 7 hours of the video, but it is a great way to glimpse into all the other Metroid versions & sequels that came after. Thanks for posting this.

Haha I should have known not to discount these little figures. Having occasionally peeked into the 'Collectors' section, there must be some toy produced of every mecha from the original Macross at a time or other..