Categories
ToyBox

Back into the blister bubble

Beep...beep?  Must be Earth humor.It all started with this little fellow here – well, okay, not this one exactly, but one just like him who wound up getting dropped in a full bathtub somehow; this is the one who replaced him, and believe me, somehow, my mom figured out a way to make him waterproof. But, after a fashion, this was the first Star Wars figure I ever got – heck, I even remember the store where I got him: Service Merchandise at Central Mall in Fort Smith. (That chain no longer exists, and ironically, its space at Central Mall is now occupied by the theater where I stood in line at midnight to see Episode III.) Like any geek-in-training growing up, I got as many of the various characters from the first three movies as I could get my hands on. Years later, when Hasbro revived the range, I was…well…unimpressed by the grotesquely overmuscled depictions of my old friends. (I did spring for Artoo again, however, just for old times’ sake.)
When Hasbro started getting it right, though, it was like I fell off the plastic wagon. And let’s not even talk about the Episode I toys. I was standing in line at midnight in Green Bay for those. I was so grateful for the one guy who roller-skated through the store wearing Jedi robes, blasting Star Wars soundtrack music from a massive jam box on his shoulder. I felt so…….normal when compared to that, what with buying a bunch of new toys in my late 20s.
Between that and Episode II, I got married, and moved back to Arkansas, which severely tightened my budget. (It may or may not have changed since then, but the economy in Green Bay was fantastic, and it’s truly one of the things I miss most about the place.) After my successful (and extremely geeky) push to collect all of the Episode I characters, my Episode II collection paled by comparsion. And the same seemed to be shaping up for the latest movie.
As of the most recent waves of characters, however, I’ve fallen off the wagon again. I did initially pick up some “legacy” characters, so I could chronicle the evolution of Anakin/Vader, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Padme, and so on. But with the umpteenth minor revisions of the various Jedi Knights, I felt a bit irked. I’ve got four Mace Windus already (including the Episode I preview figure that I sent off proofs of purchase for, and one from a Jedi Council Cinema Scene). His look hasn’t changed significantly. Nor has Plo Koon’s, or Kit Fisto’s. I gave up. (You may, of course, feel free to consider this comedy gold from someone who happily picks up every variation of astromech droid that they turn out.) But now that we’ve moved on to less obvious characters – relatively minor characters or folks who aren’t represented in the other films already – I find that I’m snatching up Star Wars figures yet again as budget allows.
At some point, I will give it up (freeing up my cash for all those other collections I have going). I have a feeling that sometime in the next 2-3 years, Hasbro is going to switch to a more modern, larger scale and abandon the 3 3/4″ line, which probably would’ve been abandoned already had it not been grandfathered in by previous generations (literally!) of figures and their owners. At that point, as I did with the Playmates Star Trek toys, I’ll declare victory. Or, perhaps, if you want to look at my check register, defeat. But here’s the thing: I still get such a thrill out of busting these little guys out of the blister bubble. That feeling was always one of my greatest pleasures as a child, and so help me, I still get excited about it, despite Hasbro’s attempts to reduce the experience to sheer frustration by making it approximately 247 times harder to even reach the figures. I’ve found that it’s always a good pick-me-up to go buy one of these things if I’ve had a rough week, open it up, examine it closely, admire the workmanship, put it on the shelf, and then, when no one’s looking, having an all-hands-on-deck lightsaber-duel-palooza.
OK, just kidding on that last part. So far as you know.… Read more

Categories
Gaming Home Base

Game Room Remodeling Diary: Coda

Changes are afoot! As with any venture like this, there are bugs to be worked out of the system, and I’m doing my best to shake them out of the woodwork. I recently got a PSX trakball, and figured out a simple way to integrate it into my “arcade minus the cabinet” setup without having to move the big, bulky twin joystick. I simply turn a small container upside down (after washing and drying it, of course, to get any loose dust off) over some of the buttons on the twin stick, and put the trakball (a fancy little number by Nyko) on top of that. Also, I’ve found that spending more than 5 or 10 minutes standing a foot away from my monitor’s a bit hard on the eyes, so I pulled my “backup” video fader out of the box and set it up to “dim” the video a bit on a manual setting without having to mess with the monitor’s brightness control, which is set right where I want it for everything else. And here are the results of both additions, from a nice test session with Centipede. You’ll notice that the monitor’s dim enough not to flare out in the photos, which it normally would at full brightness:
PDF Game Room
Here’s a wider shot of the whole setup:
PDF Game Room
Without the upside-down container, which I used to use for newly-arrived, untested cartridges, you can see that this arrangement doesn’t mess with the twin stick buttons at all. In fact, for Centipede, I configure the game to use the player 2 joystick’s buttons for firing:
PDF Game Room
You may have noticed some “friends” on top of my monitors; I had to trade some of my “toy display” space for more useful storage space, and as such some of my toys have had to relocate to smaller, inconspicuous spaces. Some of them, like Dirk and friends here, are boldly standing guard next to the Colecovision where they’re not in the way:
PDF Game Room
(Ambassador Kosh, not seen, is on the other side of the Colecovision.) Meanwhile, others are hiding between the top of the monitors and the top of the rack:
These are the droids you're looking for
PDF Game Room
…and others are just sitting…well, wherever I can find space for ’em:
PDF Game Room
PDF Game Room
(It may seem silly, but I’m as proud of my toy collection as I am of my game collection. Gotta have at least a few on display.)
Also added one red rope light under my PC desk, which creates an eerie little glow; I had to brightness/color-enhance the hell out of the left photo to get this to show at all:
PDF Game Room
That’s all that I’ve really done in the past couple of weeks.… Read more