Random Toys of the Day: Heroclix Midnighter, Apollo and Jenny Quantum

Apollo, Jenny Quantum, Midnighter

A while ago I realized that I've never shared any photos of my Heroclix game pieces outside of a few background appears in size comparison shots, so I thought I'd start to remedy that and take a few of them outside from some photo time.  They're fairly straightforward, so I won't do a full review, but I still wanted to give them some attention.

Heroclix figures are usually around 3cm in height, making them between 1/43 and 1/45 scale (also known as model railroad scale). The game that these pieces are used in is a grid-based board game - there are hundreds of game pieces available from dozens of different franchises. While I'm not a board game person, the variety of character figures that are available means that I have picked up several none-the-less.

Out of the Box: Green Lantern & Cyborg (Hero Plug & Play)

Out of the box today are the two figures that I mentioned in my Discount Shopping Adventures - two game piece figures of Green Lantern and Cyborg. As mentioned in that post, I found them at Tuesday Morning for $2.99, although apparently they normally retail for as high as $12.99 (although $9.99 seems to be the more common price).

DC Super Heroes: The Watchtower is a Plug & Play game that seems to have a similar theme to  the more well-know Skylanders or Disney Infinity games in that they involve attaching different character figures to a base that communicates with the game.  These figures are smaller and lighter than most of the ones from those other games though, and reminded me a little of Heroclix figures (although they are quite a bit larger than those ones).

Let's open up the box!

Out of the Box: Mass Effect's Tali'Zorah (Kotobukiya Bishoujo)

Tali'Zorah watches for Geth (or Cerberus, or Reapers)...

I've shared a number of Mass Effect figures from a variety of lines in the past, but one thing I've been on the fence about are the Kotobukiya's Bishoujo figures.  For those who aren't familiar with them, the Bishoujo line produces figures that the "sexy lady" version of a variety of female game and anime characters.  They have Kotobukiya's usual great level of detail, but the sexy poses always struck me as a little silly, so I passed on the earlier Mass Effect releases from the line (Liara and Jane Shepard) - but I've regretted not picking up the Liara figure since then (she is available on the secondary market, but at ridiculous mark-ups, and I'm just not willing to pay $250+USD for a figure that originally retailed for less than $80).  So when the Tali figure was announced I decided that silly or not, I'd probably pick her up.

And fortune smiled on me, because not only did I find her in stock recently, but also at a 20% discount!  She arrived on Sunday, so let's open the box and take a look at her.

A Tale of Terrible Packaging

The outer box.

This isn't quite toy-related, but it's close enough:  I've been a little weak with getting posts out these past two weeks, in part because I went on holiday (I spent a little less than a week doing site-seeing in Boston), but mostly because my entertainment time has been eaten up by the mid-November release of the latest instalment in one of my favourite games franchises, Dragon Age: Inquisition.  

The game itself I've been impressed by.  It's a solid RPG (although there are still some issues that need patching) and has plenty of lore for people who love the world-building,  but the packaging of the collector's edition was quite possibly the least competent professional packing job I have ever seen.  I'm not generally a fan of CE releases either, and this set is certainly not making it more likely for me to buy any others in the future).

The box itself looks great (and exactly like a chest that appears in-game), but upon opening it I found this:

Everything had a slot, yet everything was loose inside.

Two of the chess pieces were all broken (surprisingly, nothing else appeared to be damaged):

The damage

I'm not terribly upset by the breakage (I really only wanted the tarot set, fabric map, and the box itself, and luckily those items met my expectations), but I was shocked to see such poor package design on a release like this.

A sampling of the tarot cards.