Xevious Reborn: Hot Wheels RC Terrain Twister

It's amazing how something things never go away. They just appear again under a different name.

Early this year, I did a retrospective piece about Namco's classic arcade game Xevious, its sequels, spin-offs and model kits. One of the items that I looked at was a Grobda model kit, a kit based on one of the enemy vehicles in Xevious that also had its own spin-off arcade game Grobda. As you can see in the model picture below, a Grobda tank doesn't have continuous track treads; instead, it has two spinning corkscrew tubes that propel it across terrain and over the water.

The Grobda tank makes for an interesting-looking detail in a video game, but who would want to actually see something like this move in the real world? Fast forward to today, where we now have the Hot Wheels RC Terrain Twister toy, which I have pictured below. Notice any similarities?

Apparently, this toy has been around for a while. It was first released almost a decade ago by Tyco under the same name "Terrain Twister", and it has recently been re-released under the Hot Wheels license. It's advertised as an RC toy that can go through dirt, sand, grass, water and snow, although I hear that it doesn't do very well on smoother surfaces. If you're a die-hard fan of the Xevious and Grobda games, you might want to give this toy a try. Not only does it actually move, but it's also much, much cheaper and easier to find than the official R.C. Berg Grobda model kit that I posted above.