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Chronocidal

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  1. Chronocidal
    So, it might even be a bit more convoluted than that. Based on another video I watched through, a lot of these flags for targeting children's content may be automated. As in, Youtube looks for common children's themes, and auto-labels videos for them. I watched one of the Midnight's Edge videos, and they specifically scattered some gory scenes from horror films through the video at random intervals to intentionally flag the content as inappropriate for children, because otherwise a bunch of Star Wars footage would probably not set off any alarms, despite the words being said. It seems there isn't solid knowledge of what is going to be happening yet, but maybe people are preparing for the worst in different ways.
  2. Chronocidal
    I guess the ironic thing is, the wing hinges are pretty much the most solid part of this version. The legs work fine, ankles seemed okay, though a bit stiff to pull out. I just find it sad that it seems every single new release winds up being a trade-off of features and caveats. They make the wings better here, the arms go limp, and suddenly all the little metal pieces to make it more sturdy wind up chipping paint. Same as the Bandai YF-21.. the legs are finally right, but everything else looks off. It's great for fighter mode, so that's probably where it'll stay.. it's just disappointing seeing these sorts of design flaws creep in, when they worked fine on the first version. The design of the shoulder pins is just lousy. It's just a press-fitted pin that seems to rely on a rubbery washer for tension.. which clearly isn't doing the trick for me. The entire joint depends on how hard that pin is shoved into the shoulder mount, and it'll just loosen up over time as the pin works out of the socket.
  3. Chronocidal
    Not to be toooo snarky, but if you ordered from NY, you might not see it until next year anyway. I can't say anything about package forwarding service, but I'm guessing this is just a temporary change for travel/vacation time? You might be able to set up a temporary forwarding address with the USPS that'll do that, but I don't know what kind of minimum amount of lead time or duration those sorts of setups might require.
  4. Chronocidal
    If you can pin down a rough estimate of when the package will arrive, you could arrange for a mail hold during that time, so it just gets held at the office. That can be a little unpredictable, but if you aren't expecting any other important mail, you could potentially just set your mail to be held for a month once you receive the shipping notice, and then cancel the hold once it arrives.
  5. Chronocidal
    Welp.. dunno what I'll do with this one.. maybe use the Arcadia in fighter, and the old Yammie for battroid. Arms are completely void of tension, and spin like pinwheels at the shoulder. At least it looks pretty, I've always loved the design.. but the logic involved in how they managed to decide that metal-pinned shoulders were a viable design choice eludes me. No spare legs included, but they seem to be the correct ankles at least.. maybe I can call HLJ and request a set of spare arms instead. Edit: Minor update.. it'd been so long since I'd gotten an Arcadia product, I forgot about the tradition of out-of-the-box maintenance.. given the option I do like having access to the screws that Bandai likes gluing covers over. So the shoulder problem was partly an assembly issue (gee why does this sound familiar..), and whoever put it together shoved the shoulder onto the pin 90 degrees off from where it should have been, meaning they didn't engage the pins that were supposed to give the arms at least some tension. Fixed that.. so the arms have basically gone from "overcooked spaghetti" to "undercooked spaghetti." They still have barely enough tension to hold their own weight, which basically means any gunpod poses are gonna have to be from the hip. Also, joy of joys.. the paint on the metal wing joints is already flaking off out of the box. Not from the wing itself.. but because the tolerances between the back edge of the wing and the tails was too tight, and the tail managed to rub a nice silver spot on the trailing edge during shipping. Ugh. On a more positive note though, I cannot express how much I've missed hooked-hinge gear doors and canopies the past few years. I really hate how both Bandai and Arcadia seemed to jump on board the sliding hinge craze we see on practically everything now, when the hooked offset hinges just look so much better when opened, because they're actually hidden.
  6. Chronocidal
    Quite a few in the thread, ranging from around $215 on up. I'll probably skip on the green version, but I'll totally be down for a red one if it's done, and that gray version would be a no-brainer. Seriously, I've almost never even given the Legioss a second glance in any incarnation, but this thing just blows all the other iterations away in appearance.
  7. Chronocidal
    Much as I'd like to give HLJ my business on this one, I'm thinking I'll go with Anime Export's lower price this time. Grabbed a pair to start, and if we get more colors later, I'll probably grab more, and maybe sell a blue one off. I was sold entirely from the top view, that is the cleanest version of this craft I've ever seen.
  8. Chronocidal
    He's saying the Bandai missiles themselves are a ripoff, and wants to wait for the knockoff because they'll be a better value. I'd have to agree. I mean, unless you like paying $50 extra for something Yamato always included in their price. Hell.. I bought entire VF-1s with missiles for less than Bandai wants for just the missiles. They've turned nickeling and diming into an art form at this point.
  9. Chronocidal
    Glad to hear they're taking care of it! I've got to open mine later today and see what the situation is.
  10. Chronocidal
    That Dana Sterling figure card looks like someone on the Golden Girls decided to try cosplay.
  11. Chronocidal
    Those arms... frighten me. Did they just get posed awkwardly in the package?
  12. Chronocidal
    One thing to keep in mind is actually how many valks you can fully outfit with a single missile set. Technically speaking, I only needed one set to cover Hikaru's 1J, his 1S, and a theoretical Roy, because you can outfit them each with a different loadout. The only missiles that you really can't mix and match into canon loadouts are the TV missile clusters.
  13. Chronocidal
    I might grab another pair of missile sets to future-proof the eventual releases Bandai unveils.
  14. Chronocidal
    I actually spent a good portion of my lunchbreak simultaneously cringing and laughing til I cried as I realized just how fitting that analogy is.
  15. Chronocidal
    I've heard this point made elsewhere, and I forget who summarized it, but they compared Disney's acquisition of both Marvel and Pixar to the Lucasfilm deal. The huge difference to both of those situations was that they pulled an existing production pipeline along with the IP. Lucasfilm didn't have much of that, at least as far as the movies went, so they had no existing experience or proven talent to fall back on. If they wanted to stay true to the franchise, they should have been pulling from the people who already had both feet in the pool (or in Filoni's case, practically growing gills). To make a slightly dated comparison (and ignoring the lootbox fiasco), it's the same issue I felt EA had rebooting the Battlefront games. Where the originals actually felt like LucasArts properties with a unique gameplay feel to them, the EA BF games wound up feeling like Star Wars mods for whatever current Call of Duty or Battlefield game they were working on. If you want a successful organ transplant, you use tissue from someone who shares some of the same DNA. If you want something to feel like it belongs in an existing universe, you pull from talent with previous experience in that universe.
  16. Chronocidal
    All joking aside, I'm waiting to hear more about later episodes, but so far, it's sounding like this show is off to a pretty good start.
  17. Chronocidal
    I never actually thought of it before, but the way you phrased this had a big old lightbulb appear over my head. Robotech is literally the Human Centipede of anime.
  18. Chronocidal
    But.. the tail hangs out and doesn't interfere with anything, and the hinge isn't a double fold like the YF-19's rudder. Besides, why would they need to fold part of the tail smaller? The biggest part doesn't change any. I think that was also me, saying it looked like they glued a 1/72 nose on a 1/48 back end. I actually don't think the tails are too big, I think the arms are just far too small. It might just be the diameter (and the freaking tiny hands aren't helping at all), but I'm also looking at that line art, and thinking that while the hands do reach the knees, the angle of those arms isn't the same. The line art pic has the arms in a much more aggressive pose, angled both outwards and forwards. The elbows on the Bandai display don't look bent forward at all. Maybe a better pose would help, because right now they just look whimpy and limp.
  19. Chronocidal
    Wait... you got replacement legs with the same problem as the originals?
  20. Chronocidal
    See, no, this doesn't need to be "let go." If your customer support department is making promises, and you aren't fulfilling them, that's a nasty black mark on your reputation. I do apologize because I didn't mean to sound like I was going to be raking them over the coals or anything. Whether I need the spare parts or not, if I don't receive them, I'm going to be contacting them to let them know they weren't included, because I can quote the email promising me they would be sent. I don't mean to be harsh or unfair. HLJ has built up a very good reputation for customer service here (almost literally the only retailer who will even give US customers the time of day if their product has an issue), and I don't want them to let that get tarnished. If there's a disconnect between their email support and their shipping, they deserve to be made aware, and given a chance to redress it. Someone already reported that they received a faulty product, and didn't receive the spare parts they were promised. Whether that turns out to be a fluke or a common problem remains to be seen.
  21. Chronocidal
    For lying? They told me directly in an email that they would be included. If I don't wind up needing them myself, that'll be me getting a lucky break. That doesn't mean they get to shirk their obligation to do what they told me they would do. If they had told me they were checking the legs personally, that's different, but they didn't say that. They still could include a note in the package that they checked it, and I'll be happy to call it good, since they did the necessary work. I won't find out for a couple days, since the package just hit LAX customs, but I'll be able to confirm then whether they followed through.
  22. Chronocidal
    Heh.. I just had them ship my Ivanov along with a PF Roy as well. I guess we'll see what happens when it arrives. If I don't get the parts, and my ankles are backwards, I'm going to be asking them to ship the parts out for free immediately, to back up their previous emails. If I happen to get the right ankles, and don't receive the parts, I'm not going to be demanding they ship one out, but I'm absolutely going to call them out on the email saying they would be included. That's just messed up.
  23. Chronocidal
    This really is the big question. What's the point of a clear part if you're not allowed to manually mask off windows and lights? I guess you could theoretically treat the clear parts as light-piping, but the lighting kit isn't set up that way, and relies on light reflected from the interior to leak out of the ship like a sieve. There's really no light directed into the clear parts that way. I think the problem is just that they got ahead of themselves, and produced the entire kit with pre-drilled holes. They should have half-molded the drill points on the inside, and left the plastic solid. Since they didn't do that, what we're left with is a ship pre-drilled for fibers that doesn't include any, and half a kit's worth of useless transparent plastic that's only useful if you want to add more lights to the exterior of the ship. In fact.. the guide included in the kit itself mentions literally filling in the holes in the clear parts with some other material... They basically designed this kit to be modified, not built out of the box. The entire instruction set mentions using fiber optics, but then tells you to go buy them separately. The guide goes through extensive instructions on how to modify the kit, not how to build it with the included parts.
  24. Chronocidal
    I don't think Yamato's engines were too small though. Bandai has bulked them up so much to make room for the legs underneath them. Far as the arms go, yes, they're just way too short. This is one of those changes they made that actually hurts every mode, for no discernible reason. The arms look terrible in battroid because they're too short and skinny, and they look bad in fighter for moving the tails too far forward. What's worse is that it looks like there should be plenty of room to stretch them out, because of all the extra back end they added to the fighter mode. It's really kind of impossible to know what they're going for. As much as I want them to make significant changes to the whole design before actually releasing it, I'm not getting my hopes up, since the product looks so finished.
  25. Chronocidal
    So, I actually sprung for the lighting set version since it was on sale at Amazon, and only came out to about $20 more, I think. Honestly.. in hindsight, I appreciate the lighting kit being included, but I'm still scratching my head over what they actually were thinking with the kit designs. To clarify, the lit version comes in an insanely large box, and contains extra sprues that duplicate a large portion of the kit in clear plastic.... with the holes still drilled in them.. Like.. ok, I get it, they didn't want to make two copies of the mold.. but that kind of defeats the purpose of the clear plastic in the first place, and if you want to make those parts look like they have actual windows, you'll have to literally plug all of the holes so the plastic looks consistent. They really needed to make two versions, both with and without holes, because without lights, the kit just looks like Swiss cheese. Aside from that though, I'm disappointed that all they did is drill circular holes all over the place. Maybe they're following the pattern of lights used on the actual model, which is fair, but I would have loved if they actually cut out windows in the plastic, rather than hundreds of pinholes. Maybe they just expected people to use fiber optics? Hard to say. I'm honestly tempted to go find some kind of micro-file that I can use on all those holes and cut out square corners. I can't really be too negative about it though, it's a beautiful kit, and should be a really fun build. While it's not huge, I think the size is pretty good for a nice shelf display, which I'm perfectly okay with.
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