Titans Terrors and Toys

Virtual reality (VR) has had a bumpy ride over the last few years, with various VR platforms and content types aiming to gain the attention of consumers. One kind of content has been the VR modifications of older 2D video game titles, converting flat screen gameplay into immersive experiences. One of the best VR mods was officially released on Steam last September, the mod for the hit 2004 title Half-Life 2 that was made by the Source VR Mod Team. Before going into more detail about this mod, I should be up front about my experience with the Half-Life game franchise. Until I played this mod, I didn't have any. None. Zero. Zip. I had heard about the games--even the recent 2020 entry Alyx , which was made specifically for VR--but I didn't pick up any of the Half-Life games because unless I have access to cheat codes, I suck at first-person shooter games. Thankfully, the easy setting in Half-Life 2 ably accommodated my limited shooter skill set and I was able to finish the game.

With the holiday shopping season underway, I thought I would revisit a toy line I covered before:  the Tomica Hyper Series by Takara Tomy. When I first covered this line back in 2018 , I looked at the various sets within the line that covered jets, helicopters and transportation vehicles. Today, I'll be looking at the Tomica Hyper Builders sets, which expands the line into construction vehicles. Being a kid of the '80s, I usually think of robot toy lines such as Transformers and Voltron when it comes to the subject of combining, modular toy sets. While the Tomica Hyper series does have quite a few robots in the line, the primary focus in the Hyper Builders series appears to be on the vehicles. As you can see in the pictures below, the vehicles can either be stand-alone construction vehicles or combined to form larger, more complex construction vehicles. Of course, since this is a Tomica line, the Hyper Builders vehicles includes compartments to store the vehicle toys that Tomic

In the time I've been away from my blog, I made it a point to play with some new nerdy toys. One of those toys is Adobe Aero, an app to create 3D augmented reality (AR) content that can be viewed through compatible smartphones and tablets. Most AR stuff I've seen so far has been done by people who have very impressive backgrounds in the visual arts. I don't, so I instead used Aero to re-create a toy that I had when I was a kid: Kenner's Star Wars Cloud City playset. Originally released in 1980 as a Sears exclusive, Kenner's Cloud City playset was made entirely of cardboard and packaged with four action figures from Empire Strikes Back . Sure, a playset made entirely of cardboard didn't have much to offer back in the '80s; however, I was able to use Adobe Aero to assemble high-resolution PDF scans of the entire playset into a 3D AR model. The PDF scans used in this AR model were provided by the Erik Stormtrooper's Imperial Gallery site . As you can see in

Big things are in the works for the Alien franchise, with recent announcements of an upcoming TV series by Noah Hawley and a potential movie release by Fede Alvarez. Hence, I figured that now would be a good time to revisit Alien: Isolation (2014), the franchise's best video game and only virtual reality (VR) experience to date. Isolation is a great game to play in either 2D or in 3D VR. However, playing it in VR turns the game into an experience, immersing the player into the terrifying Alien universe.  There are plenty of details that Creative Assembly gets right in Isolation , but the VR experience puts its excellent environment designs into focus that would otherwise be overlooked in flat 2D gameplay. I've always admired the set designs in each of the Alien movies, and I think that they have become just as important as the characters and monsters themselves. Along those lines, the space station Sevastopol (Isolation's main setting) is just as much of a character as the

For any of you who have been paying attention, I've been letting this blog collect digital dust for over three years, since early 2019. This was before the Covid pandemic, before the onslaught of subscription-based movie and TV services, and before Mark Zuckerberg and an assortment of other techies decided to make the term "Metaverse" a household word. In the meantime, I've been working on other nerdy things, some of which I hope to cover and link to on this blog. It's been an interesting few years and I've got plenty of new stuff to show and share with you, so please stay tuned.