Shut That Hate Hole, You Harpy
March 17, 2008 |
Star Wars Q&A, Figure of the Day Updated at Galactic Hunter
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 Galactic Hunter has posted a Q&A column this week! Be sure to click through and read up on the latest!
But Figure of the Day has been updated! The daily feature on figures you might have but might not-- either way, here's what you've been missing! Spanning from the original Power of the Force series of 1995 to the latest of the 30th Anniversary Collection, it's almost like a history lesson!
From left to right: Captain Panaka, Meena Tills, and Darth Bane. Go to Galactic Hunter for the next update, with the 667th installment in our ongoing series!
--AP
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VC Impressions: DoReMi Fantasy: Milon's DokiDoki Adventure
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 As predicted, we broke down and bought DoReMi Fantasy: Milon's DokiDoki Adventure for the Super Famicom NES over the weekend. To give you the shortest possible review: it's about as fun as Super Mario World with the difficulty of Kirby's Dreamland and a little less variety. And now for the long version...
Because we're suckers for obscure Super NES and Sega Genesis gems (look at the name of the site), we snagged DoReMi Fantasy: Milon's DokiDoki Adventure on the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console. How could we pass on a sequel to the God-awful NES game Milon's Secret Castle? We spent a chunk of Saturday and Sunday playing it. It's good. It's a Super Famicom game from 1996, so basically this is one of the end-of-the-life cycle games. What's neat is that this game came out around the same time as Mario 64 and after Donkey Kong Country-- and yet, you're getting old-timey hand-drawn sprites. We quite like it. It's incredibly easy-- we haven't even seen the game over screen yet. It's divided up into multiple worlds (we're on #6), each with six or seven stages per.
If you happen to like the Kirby's Dreamland or Kirby's Adventure games, this is worth getting. It's like a cross between Super Mario World and... uh... pretty much any given game Nintendo made from 1991 to 1995. But it's from Hudson. This ridiculously named game is 900 Wii points (US $9) and a game we would refer to as "a renter." If this was $5 or less, we'd suggest it to absolutely anyone that can sit down and enjoy a Super NES-era game for a few days. At $9, well, if you aren't a fan of the era you probably won't dig it. But as we love the format, it's hard not to suggest you go try it. (It's almost a shame this wasn't ported to the GameBoy Advance.)
Oh yeah-- you need a Wii "Classic Controller" or a GameCube Controller to play this game. It's not that it's difficult to play with the standard Wiimote, but it simply will not play without one of the other controllers. So you may as well cough up some money or dig one out of your game hardware morgue. Seeing as we bought a 2000 Wii-point card in 2007 and had only bought one other game before this one, well, yeah, we like it lots.
--AP
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Star Trek Impressions: Exclusive Communicator
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One of the highlights of our day job is the fact that we can get to help develop, approve, and yes, review nifty exclusive toys. This is one of them. We reviewed it on the podcast at work last week, but here's a print review for you too.
Basically, it's a pretty neat example of toy-meets-prop replica. If you bought the one from Playmates Toys in the 1990s, you'll notice that this one is vastly improved. The antenna/lid/whatever is now metal, and not merely covered in vac-metal paint. The little holes in the lid are actually holes, and not indentations. Heck, you can stick a magnet to this thing and it'll stick.
The round thing in the middle of the "face" now rotates. When you open the lid, there's a motor in there that switches on. It feels a little bit like it's coming to life, it whirs, it vibrates a little, it's like a futuristic piece of old analog technology. It's almost quaint. In addition to the movement, there are three lights which activate too and blink for various reasons. Under the lights are two buttons which activate three unique features. The button under the red light, when pushed in, will cause the red light to blink. Hold it in for a few seconds, and then close the lid, and it will "call you back." The comm will start beeping, at which point you flip it open and Spock will ask if you want to beam down an armed party. It's not bad.
The button under the blue light will either randomly play one of several phrases, or if you hold it in, it will cycle through all the dialogue that this button can activate. If you want to hear them, we included them in the podcast review here. As a prop replica, it's pretty good. As a toy, it's pretty good. It's a bit on the smallish side, but then again, so was the original. We'd suggest picking up of you liked the phasers or are a fairly hardcore sci-fi fan. It's definitely the best communicator based on this design we've ever seen, and short of integrating some sort of cell phone or walkie-talkie technology, it's probably as good as it will get for the foreseeable future.
If you want to buy one, please click here and then do so as it's $29.99. We get like forty cents if you buy one, and we really could use a new bag of penny candy.
--AP
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LEGO Factory: Space Returns!
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 LEGO essentially retired their old fantasy-driven Space range when they brought on Star Wars, but it seems it's going to make a return with a few fan-made items in the limited run, collector-oriented, and oh yeah-- damned expensive LEGO Factory range. The guys over at The Brothers Brick (which is a freaking amazing LEGO blog, read it) have pictures of some of the items coming up plus interviews with the fan designers. There's a "good guy" and a "bad guy" set, and they look really cool-- if LEGO continued evolving Space Police and its Space theme, this seems like exactly what we would have expected to see today. LEGO.com indicates these are coming in April, and we're seeing information which hints the sets will be about $99.99 each, and they'll be stuffed with lots of medium and small sized vehicles. So if this is true, you're essentially buying an entire theme rather than just another set. We're impressed.
--AP
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