Amusments...

My recent pleasure has been to assemble the Halo Megablocks series of toys. There small and very faithful reproductions of the famous vehicles and minifigures of some of the series' characters. Now I know there are people around who would see such a way of spending an afternoon as childish, but I found that in doing these assemblies I really found it not only fun but cathartic, as at every step you can see this thing come together and when they sit on the desk, they're an eyecatching and rather attractive conversation piece.

I only have a small selection of models to start with. But my first set was the UNSC Rocket Warthog (its very similar to the green Warthog I once brought as a gift). In the set I had a white Warthog vehicle with a rocket launcher instead of the usual turret gun as well as a Covenant Ghost vehicle. I must have spent at least a couple of hours assembling them, complete with sticker decals and placing miniature Spartans and a Covenant Elite on to their respective machines. What impressed me was the intricacy of how the soldiers are made and how, at such a small scale they capture the original styles on the Halo game franchise. When fully assembled, the Rocket Warthog is about 12cm long and 8cm tall. The Ghost is about 9cm long and 3cm tall, and even the suspension of the car is a work of art, moving to adapt and stay stable on almost any surface.

Today I acquired the UNSC Spade vs Skirmisher playset. At around £14.99 I was happy with this small and attractive little bundle. Like the Warthog, the Spade was assembled with an abundance of specially designed parts and it came with a small box to place on the back to store additional things like guns and other parts to customise my army. Also like the other vehicle, the suspension and mountings for the wheels had to be built from scratch and are fully functional. This took me about an hour to put together, with identifying and putting the parts in exactly the right place. There were admittedly moments where I longed for the "separator" that came with Lego kits when I was younger. These things looked a bit like a bird tail and were always grey in colour, but all things aside, I was again impressed with the build and it was impressive when put next to my Warthog.

Loves
Wendy xx