Review: Star Trek Generations Engineering Playset

It's been rather a delightful week for me. First the Garax Swordship arrived on my doorstep, then this, the Star Trek Generations Engineering set from 1994.

The Generations line by Playmates was, well, remember the 'new' Star Trek line Playmates put out a few years ago? Well, it wasn't that bad. But it was pretty bad.

Overall the Playmates 5" figures had been very good. The likenesses were more than acceptable and the articulation, for the time, was extensive.

And then they screwed it all up.

It wasn't all their fault. Due to a last minute change in uniforms for the film (the production team threw out the new uniforms that had been designed and simply stuck to the stuff the cast had been wearing during the time of the Next Generation TV show), Playmates were stuck with making a line of figures which didn't look anything like the people in the film. There was still the main villain, Soran, and the boob-tastic Klingon ladies, but as for the Enterprise-D crew...

And then, presumably because of the uniform problems Playmates could no longer be bothered putting any effort in, articulation was reduced to a sole 5 points. Considering at the same time there were fully poseable Next Gen figures on toy shop shelves, this was bizarre.

But enough of the figures, this review is all about the playset.

Review: Defenders of the Earth Garax Ship

It's been quite a good week for me, toy collector-wise. I've finally managed to track down two items I've been hunting for for years.

I'm not saying these things are super rare; I've certainly seen them before for sale on ebay, but they've either been stupidly expensive or I've forgotten about the auction ending, or for some other reason I've failed to buy them. On the other hand they're not super common either. They're not toys that are easily available.

So what are they? Well, one you'll have to wait to be revealed at a later date (mostly because it hasn't arrived yet and I'd look stupid if I proudly named it here and it turned out to be broken). The other, if you have even the lowest level of intelligence, you'll have already guessed by looking at the title of this piece: Garax's ship.

Review: Unreal Tournament (Dreamcast)

When I started uni (and you'll be able to age me by this one), at the end of the first year - you know, when you're supposed to be studying hard for exams (except if you did Chemistry and then, due to have a test every week for the entire year, you didn't have any at the end) - we ran (i.e. taped to the ceiling) a whole bunch of network cables along the halls of residence corridor, thus allowing for giant games of Quake and, more usually, Unreal Tournament.

I loved that game! The fact that there was absolutely no plot, just running around and shooting each other, with the occasional smug cry of victory and mocking. The only thing about Unreal Tournament I didn't like was that one person, and I suspect this shows a little something about his character, would simply grab the sniper rifle, go to the highest point on the map, then sit there for the entire game and pick people off. Most annoying.

Of course there were other versions of Unreal, not on PC, but I never played any of those. You could convince your parents you needed a PC for uni to do important work on, but I'm not sure convincing them to buy a Dreamcast would be a similarly easy task.

Fast forward a few years and, using the school comic con as an excuse, I finally got round to buying a Sega Dreamcast...plus Unreal Tournament.