Quick note about stripping !!!!

Whenever I need to strip models of their paint, I use an engine degreaser called Purple Power.  I pick it up in the automotive section at Wal-Mart, and it usually strips the paint off of my models within a few hours.  I have left resin, plastic, and metal models in it for days on accident before, and no matter the amount of time it did no damage to the models.  It really is the end all be all for me.

That being said, it does very little to X-Wing models.

I have soaked my Scum and Villany fleet in the stuff for two days, and a few colors come off, as do certain seemingly random parts of paint from the ships, but a large majority of the paint only sees a mild fading effect.  I'm just going to go forward with the project at this point, since I don't think that anything that is still on is going to effect the final outcome much, but it's really frustrating to see two days of waiting amount to almost nothing.  As I get them started, I'll be sure to post pictures.  

X-Wing time!

So I follow quite a few painting blogs, and I came across this gem about a week ago from Den of Imaginations Facebook page.  I'm a HUGE Star Wars fan boy, and the repaints they did on some ships for the recently added Scum and Villany faction got me excited and thinking about trying it myself.  So with that in mind, I of course dove right in!

I've managed to pick up a few ships to start out, and played a demo game of X-Wing at my FLGS to provide myself with at least a limited frame of reference when researching popular builds.  After the few games I tried, I absolutely love the game and feel rather secure in my purchase.  I didn't really know what to do with the new ships though, since my experience was limited to the X-Wing and the TIE Fighter, so I looked for some lists to try out and came across this article on Fantasy Flights website.  It seemed sound enough, so I built the lists using Army Builder and bought a few more ships to fill out my roster.

I haven't picked out a color scheme yet, but I'm thinking of using a slate grey with a bright color to contrast it, most likely a green or an orange.  I've searched around on google as well, and there are a lot of pictures to reference with what everyone else has done, so I'm sure I'll figure out something.

That aside, I have been very sick and haven't really accomplished much in the scope of models or gaming.  A bunch of my friends are jumping into Guild Wars 2, so I figure I'll give that a try, and my DM for D&D is finally getting back from a 2 month trip to Africa, so hopefully I'll be able to dust off my character and continue to kill some baddies with those guys.  Once I get all my ships primered and base coated, I'll be sure to post some pictures up here for everyone.

Legion Gal Vorbak and Dragon Ball Xenoverse!

So my Legion Gal Vorbak from Forge World came in, and they are a perfect example of the aesthetic that GW in a whole needs to follow for possessed Marines.  Each one has some very interesting transformations, and their isn't symmetry with everything on the model.  One side of the power pack is fine, while the other side may be mutated, etc.  It's the little things that sets these apart from their GW counterpart.  That being said though, I really wish they were a bit more poseable, which would help for those intending to buy more than one pack of the models.  It will take a lot of work to make them look different if I decide to get another 5 in the future.

On the video game front, I have been hooked on the latest thing to be dropped in the DBZ franchise, Dragon Ball Xenoverse.  It's available on the next gen consoles, as well as on Steam for those Master Race users (like myself, haha).  The premise of the game sets it apart from all of the other DBZ games, where it starts with Trunks needing help to fix the timeline that is being changed somehow, so he uses the Dragon Balls to wish for somebody strong enough to help him fix it.  That's where you, the player, come in.  You get to make your very own character, picking your race and everything, and then you start out as a very weak nobody who is helping the Time Patrollers, a group of fighters who patrol through time and try to stop anyone from messing with the time line.  You go through alternate timelines from the DBZ storyline, and you fight through slightly altered stories and try to get them back to their original.  Aside from that main storyline, you can also play Parallel Quests that are based off of the original story, but you're fighting from a different point of view, such as Hercule's vision of how things turned out, or that of the various villains of the series.  You also level up your character, raise your stats, get better gear, etc., so it has a very MMO feeling to it.

The game is very solid, with two key things keeping it from being "great" in my opinion.  The first is one that they are working on fixing, and the problem is that the servers crash all the time.  You can play offline if you want, and all of your progress gets loaded to the servers when you connect again, but you don't have the option outright to just play offline.  You have to either disconnect your computer from the internet manually, or they have to close their servers on their end.  It gets very annoying.  The second problem is that the game isn't as balanced as it should be.  Players who make Saiyan characters get four different versions of the Super Saiyan ability, while none of the other races get their tranformation abilities, such as Majin transforming or Freeza Race being able to switch between their forms.  With Super Saiyan being such a strong ability, it puts Saiyan players leaps and bounds ahead of the others.  This is something that they company behind the game says is being fixed in future DLC, but in the mean time it gets frustrating in the late game since I'm playing a Freeza Race charctarer (and yes, that's literally what they decided to name the race to which Freeza belonged).

All of that aside, I have made quite a bit of progress on Curze and Sevetar, and once I get pictures I'll post them up.