Its consistently hot, I am spending most of my time sweating hard!
In my studio its really hard due to being in an attic with a ton of tech and the weather keeps raining hard, so I can’t even have the window open to relive myself with some fresh air and have to have two fans on all the time!
I can’t wait for the coolness of autumn!
What I Am Modelling
I started off with a Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun for my Ork, really lovely model to stand beside my resin one.
Ultramarines Sternguard Veterans x 5 & Victrix Honour Guard x 4
T’au Fire Warriors x 10
Termagants with Spine Fists x 20
Stormstrike Charriot
Blood Ravens Terminators x 5 & Terminator Captain
Mandrakes x 5
Ultramarines Ballistus Dreadnought
What I Am Reading
I finished The Martyrs Tomb by Marc Collins, which was a fun story, felt a bit disconnected from the rest of the series, but still good.
I then listened to Spare Parts by Marc Platt, a fantastic Doctor Who audio drama about the genesis of the Cybermen, and is one the best stories that Big Finish have done.
I am slowly making my way through Secrets in Scarlet, slowly but surely.
What Tabletop Games I Am Playing
I played Blood Bowl on Saturday, against Black Orcs, and yeah, I lost, and lost a couple of players 🙁
A few more games were added to the library, starting with Bully, cause it was 99p, plus I got Quake Live and Crumble in a £1 mystery bundle on Fanatical!
I got a couple of bundles, first off Humble Choice, which got me
As with most years recently, other than 2023, I am going to paint this weekend for 24 hours,this time to try and paint a Drukhari Combat Patrol in 24 hours!
I am aiming to raise £100 for the Willow Foundation, a charity that’s very very close to my heart.
I am going to be painting this weekend from 10pm on Friday night to 10pm Saturday night, so it would be great if you could drop by and hang out, and if you believe in the cause, drop a few quid in.
The Willow Foundation is an amazing charity that does special days for very ill young people, and made my friend Lees last days very happy, and his family and friends continue to raise money for the charity with LeeStock, an amazing festival in Suffolk.
But let me let the Willow Foundation tell their story in their own words.
At Willow we believe in quality of life and quality of time. Willow is the only national charity working with seriously ill young adults aged 16 to 40 to fulfil uplifting and unforgettable Special Days. This year we hope to fulfil 1,400 Special Days – a day to anticipate, to share and to remember when happy memories really do count. Sadly for some, it’s a last chance to fulfil a dream with the people that really matter. Thankfully for many more their Special Day is an important opportunity to put much-needed normality back into living.
To give to my fundraiser, visit this link, and you will be able to follow along on Twitch.
What I Am Modelling
I started off by painting the Catacomb Command Barge for the Necrons
I finished listening to The Helwinter Gate by Chris Wraight, got to admit the trilogy started off rough, but was absolutely phenomenal by the end, I hope to hear more from the pack in the future!
I took a lot of injuries in the game, like 4 players got taken out of the match in the end!
At one point I had only one players on the field!
What Video Games I Am Playing
Mostly The Witcher 3, I finished Hearts of Stone in it and am now working on Blood and Wine.
What I Am Creating
The latest episode of Edge of Empire has landed, both in audio and on YouTube!
What I Am Winning
Won a prize on Twitter, a new Western Digital 1TB M.2 NVME SSD, along with a Genshin Impact mousemat and a muscular bunny who looks a bit like my bunny Angron, Eater of Cables!
I am also backing the Jon Hodgson Backgrounds Book campaign, but undecided if I want to go with the Sci-Fi book or the original book, very torn on that one!
Not only have I spent most of it unwell with a nasty tummy bug, but the flat has turned up a few issues.
We were in the process of having a water damaged cabinet replaced, when it was discovered that due to some missing airbricks, there were some geet big holes in the wall letting in moisture!
So we are having to have the plaster removed, get airbricks put and, so a damp treatment and then replaster.
Anyway, due to a shortage of available tradesman, it’s gonna be after Christmas before it can actually get done so that’s annoying, as it was the cabinet with the kitchen sink in it!
Ah well, life does love to throw some curveballs at you!
What I Modelling
I started by finishing off a pair of Necron Tomb Blades.
I am now currently working on an Imperial Fists Tactical Squad.
So what’s up next?
Imperial Fists Tactical Squad x 10 & Officers x 6
Kataphron Breachers x 5
Oruck Gutrippas x 12
T’au Crisis Suit Team x 3
Imperial Fiats Contemptor Dreadnought
Ultramarines Intercessors x 10
Silver Tower Heroes
Blood Angels Repulsor
Templar Brethren x 10
Hobgrot Slittaz x 20
What I Am Reading
Finished up listening to Kasrkin which has been an enjoyable listen.
And a little progress has been made on Zachareth, but not as much as I would have liked.
What Tabletop Games I Am Playing
Sadly none at all.
What Video Games I Am Playing
Sadly not a thing, which I am quite upset about, the ill meant I really struggled to sit down to play anything.
What I Am Creating
Nowt I actually did myself, but I did go on Bez’s daily show.
What I Am Backing
I am in on the Steve Jackson Games Campaign for some Car Wars STLs.
What I Am Winning
I am not entirely sure who this was from, it just came with a plain white piece of paper saying “congratulations on your win”, but I won a black Playstation 5 DualSense controller, which is brilliant.
It might have escaped your attention, but I really love the plethora of mini consoles released in recent years.
Well the consoles themselves are cool, and offer a great way to transport some awesome games to play very easily.
I much prefer emulation via RetroArch, but the mini consoles usually bring something with them, as close to original controllers as possible.
I mean you try and get a PC Engine controller outside of the box containing the CoreGrafx Mini!
There is just something so much nicer about playing with controllers that are basically like what we had as kids, and often the knock offs just aren’t as good.
But that leads into another obsession, controllers and that’s a subject for another time!
But the consoles themselves are pretty cool so let’s take a look at what’s in my collection!
The C64 Mini
The C64 Mini (note not the Commodore 64 Mini) comes with 64 classic games for the Commodore 64 and VIC 20.
The design of this one is just so adorable, yeah the keyboard doesn’t work, but it doesn’t need to, and they even got the discolouration right.
The joystick however, is to be honest, rubbish, I hear that the standalone one is better, and I think I may invest in one.
I never had a Commodore 64 as a kid, but plenty of friends did, and I remember wasting plenty of time playing Speedball and Impossible Mission.
The most irritating thing about it was to have it load up, only for it to fail at the last second meaning you had to rewind the tape and load it up again!
This particular console is great, but I wish I had grabbed the Maxi or the VIC20 for the working keyboard, but that would have taken up so much more space.
NES Classic
Now living in the UK, the NES wasn’t that popular or common. We mostly had the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, and when a console did get big, it was the Master System.
I never saw a NES in person until I went to university, but the GameBoy was very common.
I got this when it first came out on release day, and it’s kinda cool, but I guess, the games in it, don’t have the same nostalgia kick for me as they would for others.
I mean I have played a fair few of these games, either in the arcade or in later rereleases down the years.
The big issue with this controller is the puddly length of the controller cables, you can’t use it in the average living room without extension cables.
And the connector itself is a Wii Nunchuck port, so the controllers themselves whilst being very very well built and almost perfect replicas of the originals, they require an adaptor to use them with PC.
Mega Drive Mini
This is my main nostalgia kick, my first console that wasn’t borrowed from a friend, the 16 Bit masterpiece that was the Mega Drive.
My parents got me and my brother one with Sonic the Hedgehog, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, and a three pack with World Cup Italia 90, Columns and Super Hang-On.
It also came with the Master System Convertor so we could swap games with our friends who owned the earlier system, as well as buy our own games for that system.
It was far and away the best system of the era, the software was great and there were so many fun games on it, I even saved up the money from my paper round for 6 months to buy Virtua Racing for it, cause it cost an eye watering £100 back in 1994!
The mini version is grand, comes with a lot of the big hitters, but sadly missing Sonic 3, the controllers are just *chefs kiss* but a part of me kind of wishes that they bundled the six button controllers simply because games like Eternal Champions and Street Fighter II work better with them.
PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini
The PC Engine was a weird console, it was technically an 8 Bit console, but it’s 16 Bit GPU, and the lateness of its release meant most people considered it part of the 16 Bit era.
The PC Engine was super rare in Europe, but I did know one kid who owned one, that he imported from Japan, and we did have a lot of fun playing bullet hell shooters!
The mini version is a bit of an oddity, carrying both Japanese and English language games, and there are times in here that I am rather upset didn’t get an English version, Snatcher being the biggest disappointment.
Always wanted to play that game, but the lack of a modern release, and the only English version is for the Mega CD, and that was massively censored.
But there are plenty of other games on there, and even Japanese ones which require little, if any reading.
This is a great little console and the only way to get CD Engine controllers in USB, I know 8 Bit Do have released some similar controllers, but they lack the turbo switches and instead only have a turbo button.
A500 Classic
I had an Amiga A500, our best friends had one as well or in some lucky cases, an A1200, I even had a friend with a CD32!
The Amiga was the dominant platform that wasn’t a console for a very long time, and the versatility of what it offered was wonderful.
We used to have just as much fun with Deluxe Paint, as we did with Lemmings, Sensible World of Soccer, Alien Breed and Zool!
This platform was fantastic and the death of Commodore after the failure of the CD32 was devastating to me, but it did essentially allow to IBM PC platform to become the dominant force it is today.
The A500 Mini is the most recent addition to my collection and thanks to the developers awesome system, I have a 32GB USB stick, with every game ever published for the platform on it, including all of the CD32 games.
My only criticism is that the game pad, whilst clearly taking inspiration from the CD32 controller, is quite a bit different, but I guess I can live with that.
SNES Classic
Being British, the SNES, well it wasn’t as big a deal as it’s Sega rival was to us.
I did have a friend with one and there were some absolutely killer games released in the platform. The Mario games are up there as classics, for a long time it was the only way to play Street Fighter II at home, and Mario Cart made its debut here.
The SNES Classic is one of the best mini console offerings, the controller cables are a bit longer than those offered by the NES Classic, but are still rather short.
Playstation Classic
This is the dud of the collection, Sony looked to jump on the bandwagon and put together this offering which in all honesty, just missed the mark, by a long shot.
Ok you have some classics, like Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII, but so many games that should have been on here aren’t.
No Gran Turismo, Wipeout, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Bandicoot or Tomb Raider to name a few.
The controllers are great, but it really feels like Sony just couldn’t be arsed with this one.
The modding scene around it is great, and it’s something I should probably consider, but this is technically Lindsay’s as I bought it as a birthday present for her, so she would need to approve any modding!
What Next
Well there are other options out there, the main one I really want is the SNK Neo Geo Arcade Stick Pro, which will combine my desire for an arcade fighting stick, and a Neo Geo games machine.
An Atari Flashback 9 or better is also wanted, as well as the Mega Drive Mini 2, but that looks to be out of production after only being released in October.
But beyond that, that would be it, unless a Master System Mini or a Dreamcast Mini hits the market. I really cannot see a PlayStation 2 Classic, due to the poor response to the PlayStation Classic and the technical issues would probably prevent development of a Saturn or N64 Mini.
I already have a PlayStation 3 and a Wii, which can play GameCube games, so realistically the only think I want that’s not a mini console, is a PlayStation 2.
What I Am Modelling
I painted up a unit of Sicaran Infiltrators to add to my Adeptus Mechanicum army.
On Saturday, myself, Lindsay and Megan played a game of Ticket to Ride London, and I lost, really badly, Megan blocked a route which ruined my whole strategy, but that’s the game!
And I replaced the little drawer I keep my USB sticks etc with a new one.
My beloved fridge, that I have had since I started university in 2001, has died, it was a fair few years old when I got it, and it’s lasted for 21 years with me, at times having to serve as the houses main fridge.
The last 10 years it’s been exclusively for the storage of pop, snacks and medicine, and since we moved was kept in my studio.
But last week it ceased functioning all together, and we had a look on eBay and Facebook Marketplace and found this London themed Husky fridge for £50, and we picked it up on Wednesday night.
Adding this drive we found sealed and unopened on Facebook marketplace, for a killer price, had allowed us to expand the server space to 13TB in total.
For Dropfleet Commander, I grabbed some Nickar Class Hunter-Killers for my Scourge fleet.
