A new (if small) custom Lego project: a mini-Batmobile. Many of the recent Lego Batman sets seat the Caped Crusader in an unlikely form of transport, from a Bat-Dragster to a Bat-Buggy. I used parts from both, plus others, to give him a proper Batmobile.

It’s inspired somewhat by the “tumbler” from the recent Batman films.	However, I also wanted to incorporate a pair of oversized bat-fins.	It’s not really big enough to accommodate a minifig with the canopy down, but Bruce doesn’t seem to mind!

Dave Toys Batman, Lego, original designs

I’m now on Facebook. Jesus, this thing is terrifying!

Dave Weird eeeek, Facebook

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working on a (still forthcoming) Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Over in the left hand menu bar on this page, there’s a button labeled “Verdant Vale” that takes you to the campaign’s wiki page.

Anyhow, last night I finished the map of the town of Boswin, which will be home base for my group of adventurers. I did it in Paint Shop Pro, drawing a variety of different buildings freehand, then copying/pasting/resizing over and over to create a thriving community. I thought that it turned out pretty well!

Now, I have to get around to giving proper names to some of the locations on the map. “Temple” just ain’t gonna cut it.

Dave Games blogs, Dungeons & Dragons

This is neat: a movie quiz from British publication Empire magazine that asks you to identify 46 flicks solely by a single letter cribbed from their respective posters. I got 23, though for some reason it didn’t give me credit for one of them.

I’ll give one hint: one of them is a one-letter title!

Dave Movies quizzes

Last night our board game group played Agricola, currently the hottest thing going on BoardGameGeek.com. I don’t know that it’s worth all that fuss, but I ultimately enjoyed it. I’d started off the night in a really foul mood, but by the end I was getting into the contest, raising my brood and running the smallest farm in the history of agriculture. (I had one plowed field and never grew a damned thing.)

And yet, at the end of the night, I thought “I’ve just spent the last four hours building a farm.” It’s pretty common that in playing one of those fancy-schmancy, beloved-by-fanboys, European board games, one will find oneself creating a farmstead, a plantation, a grist mill or perhaps a city district in some quasi-Renaissance setting. My friend Dave Lartigue bitches from time to time about all the cathedrals he’s constructed.

As I mulled over last night’s activity, I thought, “You know, if it had been a SPACE farm, I would’ve been all over it.” Instead of raising cattle, I would’ve had space cattle. (Space cattle differ from their terrestrial brethren by their third horn and triple-jointed back legs.) I could’ve grown space grain, gathered space vegetables, and even started a space basket-weaving business on my own private asteroid. It already sounds like more fun!

I soon realized that any number of familiar geek-friendly words could be used to turn just another damned church-building game into something to fuel the imagination and tickle the space funny-bone.

How about a pirate farm? (“Arr, these be pirate tomatoes ye be eyeing.”) A zombie plantation? (“The zombie slaves are revolting!” “You’re not looking so great yourself!”) A robot grist mill? (Erm, it’s a grist mill…THAT SEEKS TO CONQUER AND DESTROY!)

Man, I can’t wait to erect my first gorilla cathedral.

Dave Games board games, geek stuff, gorillas, SPAAAACE!

According to Box Office Mojo, The Clone Wars brought in only about $15 million this weekend, landing in third place behind the Dark Knight cash machine. That’s still five million better than The X-Files managed, but just the same, I doubt anyone at Lucasfilm is all that happy about it.

And yes, that total includes my own five bucks.

Oh, don’t look at me like that. Like I wasn’t going to go. Grow up.

It was strange to attend a Star Wars flick that began without most of the traditional trappings: the familiar theme music, the receding logo, the expository crawl or the 20th Century Fox fanfare. The latter is considered so much a part of the Star Wars experience that most of the soundtrack CDs begin with it.

Still, I got about what I expected from The Clone Wars: lots of glorious eye candy and things exploding. Since the droids and vehicles were built from the same digital assets as those used in the real Star Wars films, the battle scenes were on par with the prequels. One action set-piece arguably exceeded anything from Episodes 1-3: a spectacular sequence in which Ashoka the Jedi padawan rode atop the windshield of a Republic walker as it climbed up a mountainside.

The human characters were, as reported elsewhere, surprisingly stiff, springing into action only during the lightsaber duels. Digital Padme, I must note, did have a nice ass.

I found that I didn’t miss the original voice actors much. The guy that played Obi-Wan channeled Ewan McGregor, just as McGregor had previously channeled Alec Guinness. And at least Christopher Lee had a fair amount to do reprising his Count Dooku role.

I did find myself questioning one character choice: the decision to play the villainous Ziro the Hutt as a gay stereotype dolled up with feathers and given a Truman Capote voice. Like Jar Jar Binks–a character in the Stephen Fetchit tradition who was cast with a black voice actor encouraged to perform with a rasta accent–it’s one of those “what were they thinking?” things. Note to George: making him an alien doesn’t help.

As for the story…well, it was more a series of events than a story, which befits its origin as several kludged-together episodes of the forthcoming TV show. And I couldn’t get very invested in it. Will Anakin come to accept his new padawan pupil? Of course he will, until he kills her. Will the Republic convince the Hutts to permit military supply lines through their territory? Could I possibly care less?

Supercollector Adam Pawlus over at Galactic Hunter appears befuddled by the poor reception of the new film by Star Wars fans, but I think it’s pretty obvious. For one, this was more obviously kid-focused than the live-action films. (Indeed, virtually everyone at the 4:00 pm Saturday show I attended was a young child or a parent.) I would also point to the backlash against Lucas not only for the prequels but for the recent Indiana Jones feature.

But more important, I think, is that the fans could smell that there was no movie here. Lucasfilm has tried similar tactics before: the first Clone Wars cartoon was originally conceived as little more than a series of one-minute toy commercials until animator Gennedy Tartakovsky lobbied to make them longer and more elaborate. Prior to that was “Shadows of the Empire,” a between-the-movies, multi-media project that involved books, comics, toys and even a soundtrack, but no film. I believe that the fanboys saw that Lucas wasn’t even trying, so why should they bother?

And honestly, while I can’t say that I disliked the “movie” or felt that I wasted my money, neither can I recommend it to anyone who isn’t a diehard fan in it to see Shit Blowing Up. Or digital Padme ass.

Dave Star Wars Clone Wars, gays, George Lucas is a hack and a ne'er-do-well, reviews, shameless pandering, shit blows up, Star Wars

Friday, my peeps and I made the annual pilgrimage to the Mecca that is Gen Con Indianapolis, one of the biggest gaming conventions in the U.S. This time out I was flush with eBay cash and loaded for werebear.

Arriving about forty minutes before the dealers’ hall opened, we were dismayed to find that all of the lockers were either long since taken or jammed so full of quarters that they no longer operated. I would eventually come to regret that situation.

When the doors opened, I made an immediate beeline toward the Wizards of the Coast booth with the intention of getting one of the Heroscape promotional figures. I’ve been collecting that particular game since its inception and have all of the previous Gen Con promos, one of which now goes for three figures on eBay.

However, I soon learned that Hasbro/WOTC had decided that they would only issue 250 Heroscape figures per day at their booth. This for a convention which attracts upwards of 25,000 souls. Within five minutes of the hall’s opening, they had completely run out.

I was furious. I despise arbitrary limits that result in “haves” and “have-nots,” especially when such limits are conspicuously short of the likely demand. (Also, when I’m one of the “have-nots.”) As I mentioned, Hasbro’s been giving away similar promos for several years, and as long as one made the effort to arrive in the first hour or two there was no trouble getting one. This year, someone clearly decided that the best way to generate interest in what is admittedly a waning game franchise was to ensure that 99% of attendees went away unhappy. Never mind that this is probably WOTC’s biggest trade event, or that the cheap, plastic figures likely cost pennies apiece to produce.

Seriously, if this cost even a dime, I’d be amazed.

Backed up by a couple of fellow Heroscape fans who clearly believed I was going to get results, I began working through the WOTC employees unlucky enough to get in my way until I reached Toby. He was a genuinely nice guy who pointed out that they also had 250 figures per day at the Heroscape tourney in Exhibit Hall F. If they couldn’t help us, he probably could if I stopped back after lunch. It took a while to find Hall F, and still longer to find someone who knew what we were talking about, but we eventually prevailed. And Toby later delivered on his promise by getting an extra figure for my friend Brian.

In the end, I was still kinda pissed at WOTC, and didn’t come back to their booth until much later in the day. Ironically, one of the main things I’d been looking forward to at this year’s convention was the chance to get fired up about their new 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons releases. But honestly, the WOTC booth seemed rather low-key in comparison to previous years: there were fewer games being demo’ed, and they’d stopped their traditional giveaway in which attendees rolled a giant 20-sided die in hopes of winning one of a huge stack of prizes. Now, I can understand why the booth for Wizkids Games (a competitor which makes Heroclix, etc.) was similarly low-key; they had no new product to show and rumor has it that they just laid off a whole bunch of staff. But WOTC is fat, sassy and just coming off a hugely successful relaunch of D&D, so where was the hype?

My second stop was the Privateer Press booth, which had a sneak preview of their upcoming Monsterpocalypse game. It’s a collectible miniatures game about giant monsters thrashing a city, so it might as well have had “Designed Expressly for David Thiel” on the packaging. I wound up buying a bunch of packs, and I really hope that I can encourage one of the local game stores in Champaign/Urbana to support it when it officially arrives this October. Good fucking luck on that, I know.

Another early release was Fantasy Flight’s Battlestar Galactica boardgame, a semi-cooperative challenge in which the players are in charge of the human fleet fleeing toward the planet Earth. However, one or more of them is secretly a Cylon working against them. In light of the locker situation, I’d resolved not to buy much heavy stuff early in the day, but it was clear this one was going to sell out fast. Into the bag it went!

One that I did wait to buy until near the end of the day was E.T.I.: Estimated Time to Invasion, a surprisingly well-produced small press boardgame in which the players run companies researching high-tech projects in anticipation of staving off an alien attack. Like the aforementioned Galactica game, one of them is secretly an alien prepping for the invasion. It looks like a lot of fun!

Like many geek conventions, Gen Con has expanded well beyond its original mandate, and so I found that while there were a few folks dressed as wizards or the inevitable Imperial Stormtroopers, there were dozens, possibly hundreds, of anime-inspired costumes. At least, I think that’s what they were. I recognized a guy dressed as the main character from Trigun, but I’m not sure who all the women in punky schoolgirl outfits were supposed to be. What I do know is that when you’re tottering around on 10-inch heels while falling out of a tight, red dress, you’ve pretty much passed out of the land of animation and into whoredom.

As the gaming industry has matured, so have the services that have sprung up around it. Case in point: Geek Chic, a company displaying a colossal, wooden gaming table (called, without any hint of irony, the “Sultan”) featuring dozens of built-in storage compartments.

That’s right: $9,650. The booth guy promised me that this is an heirloom-quality piece of furniture that would not live in my basement. (In fact, their slogan is “Emerge ex Hypogaeo,” which allegedly translates to “Come Out of the Basement.”) I assured him that if I did buy one, it would still very much wind up in the basement. (After Vic bashed me in the head with one of its hard rock sugar maple and black walnut drawers, that is.)

I usually don’t buy many games on first sight at Gen Con (or many games at all, to be honest) but I picked up a few on spec this year. One was Yetisburg, a card game which won me over with its theme of the American Civil War being fought with the aid of yetis and mastodons. Love the rulebook, which includes new yeti-centric lyrics for “Dixie,” plus a pitch-perfect parody of the infamous Sullivan Ballou letter featured in Ken Burns’ TV documentary. (“I write with trembling lips that Johnny Reb has ‘skunk apes’ of his own…”)

I also bought Humans!!!, which appears to be a clever inversion of Twilight Creations’ popular Zombies!!! games, and Vineta, in which the players are angry gods out to sink an island civilization. I would’ve felt a whole lot better about that last one if it hadn’t turned out that Brian had also bought it, rendering my copy about as useful as a third nipple on a dude. (Or a second one, come to think of it.) Not his fault; just after I purchased it I’d thought “This seems like the sort of thing Brian would buy.” Ah well, it’s a handsome-looking game anyway.

By the end of the day my bag became ridiculously heavy and awkward to maneuver through the crowded hall, and I was thoroughly fried by the time we trooped back to the car. Still, I had a good time on Friday, and spent most of Saturday reading the rulebooks of my new acquisitions. Can’t wait to play!

Dave Games Battlestar Galactica, board games, Dungeons & Dragons, geek stuff, giant monsters, unholy fury

Two hundred eighty-nine figures. Nineteen vehicles. Grand total: $1,040.84. Packages going to Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Germany, Australia, and Urbana, Illinois.

While I certainly didn’t make back what I initially spent on all these toys, neither did I merely make pennies on the dollar, as I’d feared. I believe that all the homework and sorting helped goose the sales.

The new Clone Wars “movie” opens Friday, and I believe that its impending release and the associated hype provided the tipping point that led to my personal Order 66. In large part, that’s because I see it as a cynical cash-grab: it’s literally three episodes of the upcoming TV show strung together. That sort of thing is nothing new; it used to happen all the time back in the ’50s and ’60s. But I find it a bit more galling in that we’re getting all the usual pre-release parties and Happy Meal toys that would’ve accompanied a “real” Star Wars feature, only this time without the actual film. Heck, with the exceptions of Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee and the omnipresent Anthony Daniels, they didn’t even bother to hire back the original actors to provide the voice-overs. What, Hayden Christensen was too busy?

In the end, though, I think that my lack of enthusiasm about all things Clone (which I’ve previously discussed here) comes down to this: while a tragedy of a fall from grace that ends in betrayal and murder is a perfectly legitimate story, it’s a hell of a thing to base a franchise around.

“This fall, on Cartoon Network: Titus Andronicus, the animated series!”

Outside of the visceral, visual thrill of droids and starships in combat (which I’ll admit is considerable), I’ve got no real stake in the Clone Wars. Who am I rooting for? The clones who eventually turn on their masters and bring about the Empire? The corrupt Republic and its puppeteering Sith Lord? The hapless Jedi, who foolishly fall into the elaborate, and at times obvious, trap?

Besides, we know how it turns out. All those nifty Jedi? Dead. That cute, little female padawan who features so prominently in the trailers? Dead. (And probably killed by her own master, Anakin Skywalker.)

Would you like apple fries with your Happy Meal?

Updated: Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik blogs about this very issue.

Dave Toys action figures, Clone Wars, eBay, Star Wars

It took a few weeks longer than I’d originally hoped, but my personal Jedi purge is finally happening. I’ve currently got 25 eBay auctions running. I’ve still got a few large items (including the massive Royal Starship) to photograph and weigh, but everything else is on the block.

The Emperor had an army of clones to execute Order 66, but for my own sale, it’s just me. (That may be because I’m also purging my Clones!) And it took forever to sort the toys into lots, correctly identify everything, and dig through literally hundreds of guns and other accessories and match them as best I could to their respective figures. That last part was most daunting, as many of their weapons look very, very similar.

But at last the de-clone-ification is underway, and to my utter surprise, more than half of the auctions already have bids!

Update: With a little more than one day to go on the first of the auctions, 22 lots have bids for a total of $579.68! As my recent eBay experience has been that most of the bidding occurs in the last day or so, I’m floored that there’s already been so much activity. And several of the lots have upwards of 30 “watchers,” so who knows what will happen this weekend?

Dave Toys action figures, eBay, Star Wars