Robots and Rebel Scum!

It's not been easy to arrange a game of Imperial Assault for a long time now, largely as huge swathes of my weekends are devoted to study.  But to help keep in touch at least, I decided to dip into the box of miniatures for a quick painting fix that wouldn't intrude on assignments, which led to a handful of Star Wars models being finished.

First of all one of the Blink and you'll miss him bounty hunters that gained a second life in the books and comics; IG-88

"...if I only had a Heart..."

Oh he's on screen in Empire for what? fifteen seconds?  And you never see his lower half.  As with all my models to date though, I went back to trawl for stills from the original movies or production shots to decide on the paint scheme.  A 50/50 mix of gunmetal and copper gave a nice authentic dark burnish to the metal.  As you can imagine this was not a particularly taxing model to paint!

 The brass torso pistons are a little off script but it needed something just to give a little definition.  The orange 'headlights' are on the money though.

Not wanting to just at to the villains of the piece, I also cranked out a set of Rebel troopers:

Pew, pew, pew!

Canonically, you will of course know that these are in fact troopers operating in the Rebellion Navy, as seen at the start of A New Hope.  I don't think I'm going to blow anybody's nerd mind with that information.  The fantasy flight art shows the uniform much bluer than this, but again going back to restored source photo's it was clear the shirts were more of a grey.  I think these are still too blue, but they look the part.

On a Star Wars theme as we are today, I of course saw the Force Awakens back a few weeks.  I for one loved it; yeah it does rather retread elements of the first movie, but I feel it was 'destined' to do so, in part to show the cyclical nature of the ways of the force, but also to make it perfectly clear that we weren't going to have to endure three hours of CG trade negotiations.

It certainly went a long way towards washing the bitter after taste of the prequels out of my mouth.  I had the dubious fortune to watch (half heartedly with the sound off at a dinner party) the Prequels on a 4K tv recently too; and oh boy, have they aged badly!  The visual effects really do not stand up in a digital screen environment, cinema quality computer effects of just over a decade ago now look like cut scenes from a PS4/XBox One game.  Given the acting for the most part is flat and wooden these three films have nothing much left to commend them.  By comparison the mainly physical effects of episode seven felt like a breath of fresh air.

Enough ramblings about movies though, this is a gaming blog.  Plus I have work to do, on a Friday night.... wooo.