M.U.S.C.L.E Mega-Match!

Oh nostalgia!

This past Memorial day I had chance to rummage through my folks attic and rediscovered what is probably the first "miniature" game I ever played as a kid as well as a slew of old M.U.S.C.L.E's (the "miniatures") to go with it.

Thinking back to 1986 or so I wonder how much influence these little guys had on me moving onto collecting metal fantasy miniatures. I started collecting metal miniatures about the same time and once the M.U.S.C.L.E's dried up off the toy store shelves (they were short lived IIRC) my attention and allowance money shifted completely to metal fantasy miniatures and Warhammer in general.

Some shots of the game in action.

Team Blue is regretting their lack of hatchets.

Did I just play AoS?!!!

Have a nice weekend!

The Evil Sun

Many many years ago (1989 by my calculations) I picked up the Evil Sun banner print while on a family road trip along the East Coast.  I bought him from what I believe at the time was the GW headquarters store in Glen Burnie, Maryland.  The cloth is a bit light and chintzy and ten tears of hanging in my room faded it to a tea stain brown.

  Surprisingly I have managed to hold on to him over the years and finally decided to give him a second life. I picked up a poster frame from Ikea and spent the afternoon framing him in.

  It looks quite nice in my opinion though its hard to tell from the glare in my photos.  The tea stain doesn't detract too much and is kind of in keeping with the John Blanche look.

  He currently hangs over my hobby station but I expect to move him to the game room once the re-model is complete.

Have a nice day!

 

2014 Hobby Bust!

Well 2014 turned out to be another bust in terms of Hobby productivity, just still way too much real life crap to deal with and I expect the first half of 2015 to be much the same.
Of course the hobby itch still needed to be scratched and in loo of actually painting and modelling I turned to ebay throughout most of the year to help feed the need.
So after seeing all these fellow bloggers wonderful end of year reviews and feeling a bit sorry for myself I thought I'd rummage around the house with my fancy new cell phone, test out the camera and maybe catalogue some of my choice ebay purchases and "accomplishments" for the year.

Well this blog started off well enough with a "gaming room" cleaned up and ready to go...

But do to a couple other room remodel projects it quickly deteriorated back to its status of storage room...

Uhg! well what did I actually accomplish this year...  I did get my first unit of Half-Orcs finished which also started out as a lucky ebay purchase at the beginning of the year.

http://oldorcsneverdie.blogspot.com/2014/08/half-orcs-done.html

a poor camera picture of said Half-Orcs:

I managed to bulk out my Imperial Army with a few artillery pieces:
http://thehobbystash.blogspot.com/2014/09/imperial-army-fire-support.html

and maybe best of all I managed to find time to throw an entry into one of Chico's challenges.
http://thehobbystash.blogspot.com/2014/09/pirates-wip-5-challenge-project-done.html

From ebay I finally picked up the Throne of Bone.  This for me has always been one of those models that sucked me into the hobby so many years ago. If I ever do one of those "Top 10 favorite miniatures" posts this would be on it. For one reason or another (well actually the price) I never picked one up back in the day, but now its mine all mine...

I also picked up one more of the 3rd edition Jes Goodwin Ogres for a very reasonable price. That leaves 2 more to finish the collection, well three if you count the mutant Ogre.
The paint job, though not in my style was too nice to strip and I have no plans to do so. (pardon the finger):

I also recently picked up one of early trolls, actually six of the same one for cheap! I think that only leaves one or two from this series of trolls for me to get my hands on.

Lets see what else we have...

I managed to bulk out my Grenadier Orc and Goblin unit (few Ral Partha's in there too). It would nice if I could get these guys painted in 2015 but don't hold your breath.

I picked up this giant on a whim. One of those .99 cent bids with a fuzzy photo. I’m glad I did, he's pretty cool and very solidly caste. I have no idea who makes him (his base has no makings) but if anybody has any guesses feel free to let me know.

and recently I finally picked up the Zvevda Orcs.  I've been meaning to pick these guys up for a while and they are starting to get scarce.  Hopefully sometime this year I'll be getting around to posting a review of them.

and last a work in progress...  No old-school sci-fi gamer can be without the ubiquitous deodorant hover tank.  I've been working on this guy off and on throughout the year hopefully I'll get him done by the end of 2015.

 

Well long gone are the days of painting a unit a week but I did get quite a few things accomplished outside of the hobby world...  So out with 2014.

Happy belated New Year!!!

Merry Christmas!

I hope everybody got what they wanted for Christmas. As usual my brother knows me best and I pulled through with couple unusual collectables that made me very happy.

Turkeytrice

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Halloween or can I still call it Zombtober?

Trying to get myself into the holiday spirit before taking my kid out trick-or-treating, to help me along I thought I'd post some old pictures of my Undead army. Please forgive the lack of editorializing, this is more of an image dump.

The characters and what not:

The Troops:

Starting with my favorite Zombies ever. Made by BlackTree but sadly missing from their catalog now. I rather like the risen from the battlefield look over the usual graveyard zombies:

Just zombies:

HeroQuest skeletons converted to zombies:

Bye bye!

Imperial Army fire support.

A few recent ebay purchases.
I haven't had a chance to use these in any recent games but if I recall correctly (back 20+ years ago) the Tarantula worked quite well in its role of sniping out vehicles and such. The Rapier on the other hand looks pretty cool but if I recall proved disappointing in practice, with the crew easily getting killed.  The Thudd Gun I have little recollection of and I need to sort through my White Dwarfs and find the rules for it.

Tarantula:

Rapier:

I think something like the Ontos is what I had in mind when deploying a Rapier

Thudd Gun