Epic miniatures

I came across an almost pristine copy of Games Workshop's Space Marine (1st edition of the current Epic system). I hold the game dear. As a kid, I had a good-sized Blood Angels army. I remember being humiliated by a friend's Squat (aka space-dwarves. No, really!) army time and time again.

So yesterday I evaluated the contents of the box, assembled the cardboard buildings and washed the miniatures. I set aside two vehicles and four squads. The box holds twice as many Space Marines as it does Orks and Eldars, so I thought I'd paint two varieties of Space Marines.

My first instinct was to recreate my childhood army, but frankly, the all-red force is boring, and the Ork army will most likely sport black and red as their colors. Since I always wanted an Ultramarines force but was too much of a deviant to go for the obvious choice (they're featured on the box coverart), now it's time to indulge myself.

The other Space Marine army I always wanted is the Space Wolves. Their white and grey ought to be simple to reproduce.

With these two armies selected, I began experimenting with the paint schemes. The Ultramarines were easy; just simple blue with highlights. I believe they'll look all right with little effort.

Two Ultramarines squads. These guys are really small. The scale is 6 mm, so a trooper is about the height of a regular 25-30 mm miniature's foot! Also, I'm not sure what I'll do with the base. It's a street-grey, now, but I'm thinking of making it brown and maybe adding some texture with sand.

Space Wolves Land Raider with supporting troops. This is the same vehicle that's in the post's title image. It turned out fine. You can't see it from this angle, but the doors have been accented with white, sort of like UN vehicles, with a unique unit designation - in this case, "I". I was thinking of maybe painting the guns with the chapter colors, too, instead of the usual gunmetal and black.

Two squads of Space Wolves. These are the same guys as in the picture above, but they're here in proper focus. I had a lot of trouble getting the paint scheme right. Plain grey and white looked boring. The squad on the left is the result of three attempts at a plain grey or white base, black ink and light grey highlights. Not too convincing.

The squad on the right I'm pretty happy with. I went for a straight white coat, with a black helmet as an accent, washed with brown ink, shoulders cleaned and the whole squad highlighted with white. Now they look all grimy and seasoned, as they should! The bases haven't been cleaned yet.

Fire on slopes, fighting chicks, consistent soundtracks and throwing enemies

Completely non-game-related stuff: I was going through my photo archives and stumbled upon my cellphone photos of the Makasiinit fire this summer. It was an old railroad warehouse complex, used for flea markets and concerts, which was scheduled to be demolished this same summer, to much controversy. It used to cater to young people and the fight to keep them as they were was very much a struggle between the leftist and right-wing types. We happened to go by just as the fire was picking up in ferocity. They still can't say whether the fire was intentional or not.

An unrelated, but gamer topic: more backwards compatibility experiences with the Xbox 360! I threw in Amped 2, which I dearly love, and found that it worked without additional patches. I created a new snowboarder and signed into Xbox Live. It wouldn't let me download the, well, downloadable content, presumably because it hasn't been upgraded for current Live standards. Oh well, I can live without that, I was primarily looking forward to some King of the Mountain action. No "quick matches" were to be found, so I set up my own. I had gone at it solo for one round (two minutes), when the first two guys joined me on the slope. Sweet! I was rather worried that there were no players of Amped 2 online any longer, but it seems that's not the case.

The gamer community has been vocal about the demise of E3 as we know it. Just as well. Every respectable game media I know of keeps complaining about how horrible it is, and you get hundreds of games you should care about: it just doesn't work. Please do drip the news all over the year, don't waste money and energy on catering to "professionals". I know I get a sort of "oh no, here we go again" -feeling, opening one of those E3 special editions of my favorite magazines.

Dead Or Alive 4. I've been playing the demo, thinking whether I should buy the full game or not, and I'm still undecided. The AI seems to be broken. One morning I breezed through the time attack in under two minutes, not losing once, later in the afternoon I got kicked around so hard that I was about to give up. I finally cleared the time attack in 13 minutes. Many times, I couldn't land a single blow! The AI blocked, threw and kept the pressure on faultlessly. This has been complained about in the retail game's reviews, too, so apparently there really is something wrong with the AI. Still, it would be primarily a Live game for me, provided that lag isn't a problem. Too bad I can't test that with the demo.

I played the DOA4 demo to the rhythm of Paradise Lost's One Second album. I love the 360's way of letting me listen to my own music within any game, at any time, replacing the game's (often crappy) soundtrack effortlessly. It even works with backward-compatible games, although you need to kill their built-in music manually.

They released a demo of Ninety-Nine Nights. The aesthetic design is unexciting (indeed, rather bland), but plowing through hundreds on enemies like Sauron on fast forward is good fun. I can see that it might get too reptitive in the long run and it seems to be all the same whether you just hammer the attack buttons randomly or concentrate on executing precise combos, but it's sweet that there ate literally hundreds of combatants on-screen at once and the framerate never suffers.

Update: Oh, and we're past one thousand visitors now, if my Statcounter is to be believed. Go audience! Also according to the same data, some of you are returning visitors. Go regular audience! An average of seven people comes to the blog each day, although recently we've seen peaks of twelve about twice a week.

Wallpapers

I was tidying up my hard drive and throwing out old junk, when I came across some wallpapers I did a few years back. I'm putting them up here, should anyone wish to use them.

Of course I feel an urge to make them better, but luckily for me I can't, because I think I've lost the original files.

I haven't done computer graphics like this in years. Some years ago I used to make posters and stuff, along with new personal homepage layouts every other month. I think I'm better off without. Although just recently I found my meager Photoshop skills in high demand at work, although I shouldn't need that know-how in my normal duties.

This stuff is actually somewhat videogame-related. The woman in the close-up is from a Silent Hill title, the woman with the green background is from Dead Or Alive. I'm not sure, but some of the backgrounds and effects are likely to be heavily distorted videogame views, too.

Image test

This is a test, as I haven't tried uploading images to Blogger before.

I might as well tell what the drawing (hopefully) on the right is about. Around two years ago I was playing around with Photoshop and a Wacom Volito tablet (that's the home/hobbyist size), seeing what sort of computer-assisted drawing style would fit me naturally. This is in no way a "serious" piece, I wanted to get it done in one sitting and have resisted the temptation to touch it up later.

I haven't drawn too much since then. I used to draw a lot; back in high school, I wouldn't sleep until I had finished an illustration per day. These days, maybe an image or two per year, including doodles.

So that's that.