Across the Dead Earth and Spectre: Operations goodies

In lieu of doing any actual work (although I have made progress on various painting queue malingerers) I bring you what is essentially a text version of those obnoxious YouTube unboxing videos. Mind you, everyone and their mums has done a goodies review for AtDE, I just didn't want to be left out.

The AtDE moulds are pretty good, zero flash, lines or irritatingly uneven bases. The sculpts are, overall, pretty good. The guns are pretty cartoony and there are some weird proportions, particularly with regards to the noodly arms of snipers.

And whatever SMG type thing the guy on the left is holding.

 The fellow below is the goofiest of the bunch. I don't know what that pose is, it looks like he's been startled by the photographer and is in the process of dropping his gun.

Either that or he likes the comforting knock of a gun barrel against his knees when he runs...

Despite the oddities, a pretty good haul, looking forward to whatever else they produce.

I also finally received my Spectre: Operations miniatures. Admittedly the package was missing a few items and had a few that I didn't order, but the manufacturer's been having trouble, including with shipping and I'm expecting replacements soon.

In this case, it's all about the guns. It's clearly where the majority of their effort went. They're in scale, they're very detailed and they're all very, very bendy. I think the problem with realistically scaled firearms is that the barrels are incredibly weak. While none of them have broken, I had to bend literally all of them back into position. Even so, I've never seen sharper metal casts.

Oh, and they all come in these dinky little boxes. Note to manufacturers, dinky little boxes are awesome!

I don't always fire my weapon, but when I do I blindfire my weapon. Always.

 That's not to say they're perfect. It looks like the sculptor while excellent at weapons, is not to great a faces, which range from good to 'The Innsmouth Look.' I think the main problem is the ways he's sculpted eyes with pronounced eyelids of all things, which makes them look like they suffer from something nasty.

Case in point... The figure on the right. The figure on the left is actually pretty sweet!

The rules for both systems haven't evolved since I first reviewed them. Spectre: Operations is still poorly thought out but pretty and AtDE is still lacking editorial oversight, but fun.

While Spectre: Operations came as an incredibly printer unfriendly pdf, AtDE came, as promised, as a natty little rulebook. At first I was a little underwhelmed, as I compared it to the sumptuously produced full A4 Deep Wars rulebook (which I also got through a Kickstarter campaign) then I realised that AtDE is nowhere near as bloated and rules heavy as Deep Wars, and it would never be worthwhile to produce such a large book.

My AtDE haul has also yielded a rather nice resin post apocalyptic bar - which I haven't put together as I have a moratorium on making terrain, at least until I have my own place - and a pdf novella - which I haven't read as I've just started a part time MSc which is taking up rather a lot of my time.

Not so much time, I hope, that I won't be able to knock out at least one set of miniatures by the end of the weekend, however.