Gunpla: the MSJ-06II-A Tieren Ground Type (HG)

 

I was at Partizan recently. Its a twice-yearly wargamers event, tending towards historical games. Its worth a visit if you're passing, and its just down the road from an aircraft museum, which is awesome. I found Partizan to be rather busy this year, and regrettably I didn't find anything I was looking for. I did however find this for a tenner.

The Tieren hails from Gundam 00, the last Gundam I remember watching before dropping out of anime for a while. Manufactured by a China + Russia + etc. superstate called the Human Reform League, the Tieren Ground Type is 00's tribute to the Zaku II. For reasons so obvious I hope I shouldn't have to list them. That said, its definitely a machine with its own character. The Tieren has a lot of tank in its DNA, like the vision slits around the collar, and maybe a bit of Armored Core or Front Mission. It looks more like a brick shithouse than Zaku-alikes usually do, and honestly would not look that out of place in my guard forces. It's very utilitarian, with almost no head to speak of, and is in some ways the antithesis of baseline mobile suit design. This really isn't designed for agility in space. Or indeed being cool. It makes the 08th MS Team look like a bunch of posers. Sadly, building this not-long after the Asshimar did it no favours.

Dating from 2007, this kit is contemporary to the series it comes from, and that leads to a common problem that you may have noticed. If you've got a UC release after the fact, you'll find a certain degree of extra effort put in. Some silliness with thrusters perhaps, but that’s the source material. Kits for that year's anime, can be a bit more obnoxious with their stickers, especially older ones. The Tieren is mainly sensible military tones, except for some orange sections on the chest and some white trim. Guess which bits are stickers. Guys, you are just making things difficult for yourselves, and you've been doing this long enough to know better. I skipped the stickers completely, breaking out the paint again. I'm just gonna come out and say it, doing those orange bits in grey just looks better, even with my brushwork. This faintly annoying situation seems to be a consequence of the runner design, which is optimised for reuse with the Tieren's garish variants, but I suppose it is rather forward thinking. In other news, sprue A did feature an uncharacteristic amount of plastic flash for a Bandai release, i.e. some. I must have got unlucky. 

 

Then again, maybe its not that great of a kit in the first place; its a low priority release from 2007. There's a fair number of hollow parts, mould lines and seams. Nothing I can't ignore or work around, but its not often you get seam splitting the top of the head. That's a shame because otherwise there's some interesting elements here. The arms for example are on the biggest forwards butterfly joint I've ever seen, the body being a large drum around which the shoulders rotate. Its legs go together in an interesting way, and Megatron style arm cannons aren't too common in gunpla. The tiny monoeye is sculpted and posable, while the shields are on jointed mounts. Posability tends towards the acceptable for such proportions, but really isn't great, and suffers for a party trick that highlights the limitations. You can arrange things so the gun rests on the leg shield, the instructions encouraging this, but you have to swap to the other arm, cheat a bit, and generally it looks awkward. I didn't bother photographing it.  Maybe the 1/100 scale version can do this better, but I won't be leaving it posed like that. Pose it like a battlemech, and you won't have complaints. There is also spare hand, and provisions for a flight stand, although I’ve neglected to find mine. I would show you the melee weapon too, except I can't seperate the hands to put it in. That's probably the ink wash I did, gumming things up, but I didn't try it beforehand, so who knows? Never had that happen before, and I'm not inclined to try forcing them open.

As you can probably tell, I've been a bit back and forth with the Tieren Ground Type. Its design lines up nicely with my current tastes, but the execution is lacking. Its like somebody wanted to make the mobile suit equivalent to a soviet-era shitbox, and Bandai ended up producing a kit that started to have the build quality of a soviet-era shitbox. People tell me that this is the norm for 00 era kits. Clearly I got out in time. Its not terrible, and the vibe does carry it, but a remake wouldn't hurt. A frustrating kit.

Kitbash: Stargrave Scavengers (Northstar)

 

This project started from boredom and a frustrating weekend, just after I finished those Chimera proxies. Real life progress had stalled, and I'd spent a few months doing various non-40k things, which was okay, if not especially deep. Nor were the IFVs, if I'm honest. So, after the local nerd shops failed to offer fresh distractions, I decided on some infantry. But what infantry? Krieg is still worthwhile even after points increases, but I'd done that fairly recently, Cadians still boring if competent, but I was leaning towards Catachans as a mini-project. Also, I’d found the following in the old 4th ed codex, which presented an argument that the modern Catachan template was a better fit than I thought. Old school Savlar Chem-Dogs got a deployment rule, a melee rule that was rather lukewarm, and liked flamers. That certainly sounds like the 10th edition Jungle Fighters unit, even if the whole "on drugs" aspect and weapon options are things that Krieg does better.

Now, my initial inclination was to get a box of the male Cannon Fodder sprues from Wargames Atlantic. You get 30 lasgun dudes for less than 10 GW Cadians, and that's a very tempting value proposition even if you have buy bases separately and kitbash some weapons. However, my research indicated they were very similar to my preferred female versions with fewer options, so decided against it, if only for variety. This led me back to Stargrave in general, and the male Scavengers sprues in particular. These actually line up with the original Savlar look a bit more than the Orange is the New Black vibe I adopted. Longcoats, laden down with stuff, mismatched kit, and so on. Its not a complete match, but this would not be a straight-build anyway. Two things clinched it. 1) The sprues had mêlée weapons I could easily give the sarges, and 2) I still had a silly amount of Cannon Fodder lasergun arms spare which would replace the projectile weapons which otherwise didn't fit my style. So, one box of Scavengers, 20 models, and if that worked out, maybe a command squad?

 

As a kit, the scavengers have a somewhat unexpectedly supernatural angle. There's parts to make zombies, and some hooded heads which have a strong cultist vibe, with the latter bit putting me in mind of the KKK. Its fairly versatile selection of bits however, and there's any number of AdMech, Necromunda, Chaos or Genestealer adjacent projects you could make here. However, by it's very nature its not a uniform bunch of guys. This is where the kitbashing comes in, and the aforementioned Cannon Fodder arms. The arms needed a bit of finagling, and the addition of green stuff mods to compensate for proportional differences. These are meant to suggest shoulder pads, but it was a mixed success at best. The heads, often sourced from the bitzbox, were modified with greenstuff gasmasks. There wasn't as many backpacks as I would have liked on the sprue, but I had plenty of cannon fodder ones. The flamers were also kitbashed by mixing Bulldog flamethrowers with GW parts. Vox units were made from offcuts, cable ties, and paper clips.

For painting, I decided to mainly browns and in batches of 10. I started with the lasguns to feel things out, favouring Vallejo English Uniform, German Grey, and Gunmetal over a Trench Brown spray. For several of these, a resemblance to characters from Fallout: New Vegas became apparent, especially with the use of GW Skrag Brown in places. The basic technique here is the same as most of my infantry, just swapping orange for brown. I still need to refine the colour choices here, but Agrax Earthshade saved the day. I must remember to trust the process...

 

These turned out all right, as a last minute, free-form, keep-me-sane-ish project. There’s a few imperfections, but they clearly tableworthy. The plan now is do a command squad as their own article, benefitting from lessons learned. After that? Dunno, there might be something in this squad+command format...

Gaming: Rambling About Front Mission 3

I've found myself playing the old PS1 game Front Mission 3. I had a long train journey, and I was bored with SRWJ, so I set it up on a portable. In the absence of a major project, I've revisited a few old habits, but I digress. As a game its pretty good, holding up well, but I have thoughts I’m going to try to express.

 

I wrote a review way back when I last played it, and while I largely stand by that, I've had more experience since, and my writing style has shifted. I've played a lot, a hell of a lot, of Super Robot Wars since then, which puts the game in a different light. First off a correction. I spent some time acknowledging the graphical limitations of FM3, but compared to the roughly contemporary Super Robot Wars Alpha, which I’ve also messed with, its a revelation. That game was still pixel art, but not well animated or creative pixel art. Graphics aren't everything, especially in a turn based game, but FM3 pushes harder in that aspect. Front Mission 3 doesn't look good these days, but it doesn't look cheap and certainly didn't back then. It plays with camera angles and visual effects, trying to be cinematic. Hell, it arguably looks better than the initial Armored Core games. I just have the suspicion that the engine can't handle more than four robots on screen at once, resorting to sprites on the map screen. That's the number of units you can field, and there seems to be a soft limit on the number of enemies of maybe ten? This feels confining after SRW, but fits the vibe. The combat is very gritty and personal, while the location based damage invites comparisons to BattleTech. I did find myself thinking in terms like "missileboat" and "brawler" with this play through. However two elements are grafted to the gameplay loop, and honestly don't sit well. Element 1 is the acquisition and use of battle skills is randomised and obtuse. I swear, there are entire skill families I’ve never seen because you'd need a FAQ to know what the prerequisites are, and it may not trigger anyway. These really needed to be controllable, but the execution instead feels like something borrowed from Final Fantasy 7, flashy but not functional. That's not a bad comparison to make, TBH, things are a bit more roleplay than tactical at times. You can't really build a strategy around them as you cannot trigger on the skills on demand, and occassionally your mecha just overperform, throwing me off my rhythm. The Internet functionality meanwhile feels ignorable a lot of the time, a way to handle worldbuilding without overloading the already lengthy cutscenes. There's stuff you can dig out here, like the best mecha in the game, but otherwise its a slow-slow-slow password hunt. Overall, there’s meat to the game, but perhaps not as much as I once felt.


As a little side note, it turns out that FM3 discourages power-levelling. I discovered that if you have a guide, you can get training maps way before you should. You'll probably die, but you can get a lot of experience that way. But if you do, you'll get marked down at the end of a mission. For a long time. Until you are where the game thinks you should be. Yay.


Coming back to graphics, that remake that just came out, or is about to come out as I write this. Let me embed some video here.

First, a longplay of the original.

Here’s the remake

There's been several remakes in this franchise recently, and while I've not tried them, something has always felt off. The remake of the first game annoyed me as it was 3D not pixel art, changing the entire vibe. That felt more like a budgetary limitation than an artistic choice, as its probably cheaper to remake the whole thing in Unity or sommat than redraw the pixels. FM3 was already 3D, so why am I reticent about this one? Well, it looks too shiny and quick. The PS1 version had very deliberate movements and a dirty look to the visuals. This was almost certainly the result of technical limitations, the console chugging away, but it was part of the game's character. That isn’t really present in this remake, everything looks too new. The remake is probably closer to the original intent, and objectively better looking, but I would have preferred the Ludicrous Edition treatment. Then there's the other changes, which seem to be AI generated for fucksake. I'm not in a hurry to play that remake.


Where am I going with this? Nowhere, really. Its a good, if old game. And it's easier to play now, at least. And I may have played it too much….

3D Print: The Turret APC B.E.A.R. Modular Vehicle (Watcorp Designs)

 

While I can't call my Astra Militarum complete, it is fully formed. Probably its comfortably close to 2500 points, but I've honestly not counted as I usually play 1k. With the Rogal Dorn completed, and the codex being a known quantity, I’ve explored a majority of elements I want to, so further additions will basically be for the fun of it. However, mechanised units are something I've yet to really try, hence todays subjects, the B.E.A.R by Watcorp Designs, a pair of 3d printed Chimera proxies seemingly created entirely in-house.

Any regular readers, hypothetical as you may be, may recall that this is not the first 3d print IFV I have built, but sadly that company stopped trading, so I had to go elsewhere. After much consideration I decided to give Watcorp Designs another try. Hopefully they'd do better with one of thier more established products as opposed to the then-new artillery I ordered from them. As for why two not-chimeras? Well, I was tempted by the Taurox, but I came to conclude that a pair of more durable vehicles with more dakka on them suited my force better. One chimera is a target, even at 1k, but two is a dilemma, especially if you present other tanks at the same time. The weapon fit meanwhile would be optimised for the Combined Arms detachment, meaning two heavy bolters to exploit the Lethal Hits rule. A pair of heavy flamers would be quite workable here, but I honestly prefer the longer ranged option, and the multilaser is a bit meh. As to why I'd not be using Mechanised Assault? Well, that's more of an elite infantrymen jumping in and out kinda thing, and not the vibe I'm going for. Combined Arms is more of an uncomplicated buff, and its stratagems help paired units like an IFV and the infantry the vehicle is fighting with...

As a kit, I'm happy to report that the Bear is generally in the "cheap & cheerful" category, with no difficulties to report beyond a learning curve and the postman playing silly buggers. There is documentation in the website but its not specific to this set, so I did make a few mistakes on the first one. The chassis here is made by four segments you glue together and then swiftly secure with a fifth, which I didn't quite get at first. Mind you, while the second hull went together much better, there's still issues with parts fit, especially with the troop compartment. You will need to do a non-trivial amount of prepwork, sanding and filling. I suppose you get what you pay for. A somewhat more pleasant surprise were the weapon options which proved to be more complete than advertised, and to an extent swappable. Magnets wouldn't hurt here, but relying on friction or a dab of blue tack isn't obviously unwise, even after painting. That’s the sort of thing that makes me more forgiving of the issues mentioned; the product seems an earnest one. In line with what was discussed above, I did kitbash the weapons, but it's not strictly necessary. Parts used include resin Ramshackle Games guns, and GW plastics, with small tokens to suggest portholes and thus the lasgun array. The models were then painted via the spraycan technique, with various weathering methods to conceal my mistakes.

Overall, these models came out ok. As vehicle the B.E.A.R feels a touch tall for a chimera proxy, although its footprint is a touch smaller, so swings & roundabouts, I suppose. Its not for beginners, you'll spend a lot of time finding out why these are cheap, but it feels quite feature complete, with it's own character. So, well done Watcorp, this one went a bit better.