Review: Small Soldiers Archer

My preference in films is a little bizarre. Fighting it out for the title of Damian's Favourite Film Ever are The Fly and The Thing. Dawn of the Dead and Alien are also near the top of the list...as are (and this is where anyone trying to make predictions might find their guesses way off) Bring It On, Transformers: The Movie, The Last Unicorn and Small Soldiers.

Small Soldiers was made by Joe Dante, the guy who made Gremlins, and they share a common theme of small creatures wrecking havoc on humans. In Small Soldiers a bunch of toys are installed with hi-tech computer chips, achieve sentience (sort of) and start attacking humans...in a PG sort of way.

If you haven't seen the film I recommend you stop reading here and go watch it. This review's not going anywhere and it will happily wait until you return.

Review: Jurassic World Hero Mashers

Companies like to copy each other. It's a big risk launching a new product, one that can lead to huge losses if you get it wrong, so if you see something that's already selling well and you can make something similar, well time to jump aboard that wagon!

At the moment the craze among toy manufacturers seems to be the multi-part mix and match figure. Playmates have their Ninja Turtles versions, Bandai have their Power Rangers ones and Hasbro has Hero Mashers for Transformers, Marvel, not Star Wars for some reason, and, most recently, Jurassic World.

Review: Visionaries Collector's Guide

80s toy collectors are really being spoiled at the moment. Within the last year or so we've had the 30th Anniversary TMNT book, the Voltron 30th Anniversary book, the Transformers Legacy packaging art book and recently the He-Man art book.

Of course these are for some of the bigger lines that emerged from the 80s. There are many, many others (I'm especially aware of this since I've recently sorted out my collection for display at our school comic con). The odds of getting big guides for these is remote.

...unless they're on Kickstarter.

Earlier in the year a campaign was launched to produce a Visionaries guide. Well, the campaign was successful and the guide is now available to everyone for the grand sum of 1p (plus postage). So is it worth it?

Review: Combiner Wars Legends Powerglide

Generally I'm loving the Combiner Wars toys. Generally. There are one or two, however, which are...how can I put this?...not so great.

Powerglide is one of them.

Review: Combiner Wars Legends Bombshell

I've heaped praise on the Combiner Wars line before and in this review I will, essentially, be doing it all over again. After a few years of being unable to walk the line between good looking robot & vehicle modes and transformations don't take a degree in transforming from Cybertron university, Hasbro have completely nailed it.

Take Bombshell...

Review: Doom Board Game

Best PC game ever? Got to be Doom, right? Running round corridors and blowing apart everything in sight. Both 1 & 2 were gaming classics and 3, well, 3 was a bit different. 3 was more slow and careful rather than running in all guns blazing. I remember the instruction manual for 3 (yes, I actually read it) said to turn off the lights and turn up the sound. So I did. And had a few monster-fighting dreams for weeks afterwards.

It doesn't seem like the most likely subject to turn into a board game. That didn't stop someone from trying.