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Showing posts with label Space Crusade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Space Crusade. Show all posts

Thursday, 18 November 2010

Space Crusade: Chaos Goes Clank - Part 2

Image property of Bordgamegeek.com used under fair usage rules

In the first part of this article I had a look at some of the marines and the weapons from the Space Crusade boardgame and in this part I want to take a moment to mull over the mechanical minions of chaos that populated the game. These were the biggest bad in the chaos player's arsenal in the form of the Dreadnought and the Androids.

The Dreadnoughts were so awesome and scary that they even got their own expansion: "Mission Dreadnought"...or "Missie Durfar" if you lived in the Netherlands and played "Starquest" (the Dutch version of the box seems to be the only one on the net!). The expansion allowed the chaos player to churn out dreadnoughts and androids faster than UK china factories are currently producing tat in anticipation of the upcomming royal wedding.


Now the original Dreadnought was a towering hulk of plastic that sported two heavy weapons and a pair of chained bolters, but then the expansion introduced this monster with a whole extra pair of weapon mounts. In response the marines had access to a tarantula weapon platform, but they must still have been filling their pants looking down the barrels of six weapons.


No amount of desperate rummaging has been able to turn up my own version of the impressive four-armed Dreadnought, so you'll have to make do with the standard version that I painted back when I was at uni in the late 90s.


At the time I painted this I was pulling together a selection of odds and sods to make an Imperial Guard penal legion squad and the Dreadnought got painted in their colour scheme. As far as I'm aware, this design for a dreadnought was only ever used in the Space Crusade game and bizarrely in the epic scale Space Marine game. No other GW dreadnought, chaos or otherwise, that I've seen has been but humanoid in design.


The Android fitted in somewhere as being more deadly than the Orc, but not as scary as the Chaos Space Marines in the game. To me they always seemed to be somewhat like the Fimir in the Hero Quest game, an odd addition to bolster the ranks. Perhaps they were so evil because they violated the taboo in the Imperium about AIs that imitated humanity?


It was only when I was stripping and repainting these miniatures for this article that it struck me they bore a striking resemblance to the Necrons in terms of their poses and design.


I wonder if someone went on a bit of a scavenger hunt when GW was looking for a new 40k race back in the late 90s?

I'll be trying to wrap things up in the last part of this article and have a look at the Chaos Marines, some more of the bad guys and some of the marines themselves.

Tuesday, 31 August 2010

Space Crusade: Warhammer 40K's Poor Cousin? - Part 1

Image property of Milton Bradley and posted under Fair Usage

When GW decided to team up with Milton Bradley to come up with the board games Heroquest and Space Crusade, they really had something potentially massive on their hands. They managed to invade that seasonal trench of marketing that makes so much profit every year and at the same time elevate themselves and their products out of the crowd of rpg manufacturers and actually break into the mainstream. Suddenly it seemed as though everyone had either one or both of the games and was in love with the plastic miniatures that filled the boxes. Now you might look at the stuff that was packed in there and wonder what passed for quality at the time, but you have to remember that most of the kids who got their clammy little hands on them had never seen anything of the like.

I was lucky enough to have both of the games and still have most of the miniatures in various tins and boxes hidden away in my study at home. Some of my first experiences as a GM were from behind the screen of the Heroquest set and in some ways that game has fared better with the passage of time than Space Crusade. Perhaps that happened due to the fact that GW were so successful in breaking into the mainstream that the subsequent generations that took up 40K and adored the newer space marines were quick to distance themselves from the more primitive offerings in the older game. Some people openly deride them and seem to have nothing but scorn for those dogged little marines, but they have their place in history all the same.

When I was starting out collecting there was something to be said for the fact that I had twelve marines and three sergeants right there waiting for me in the Space Crusade box. That's one entire 10 man squad with some marines left over right there and so they formed the first part of my space marine army and have been there ever since. I love to think that those marines that have been with me from the start are still there, making up the numbers in the background alongside the generic marines from the 90s. And so taking into account my own nostalgic love for these marines, I wanted to post something on the miniatures from the Space Crusade box and some of the ways in which I have tried to use them in my modern collection of marines.


The sergeant was of course the most iconic and impressive of the marines that graced Space Crusade with the best choice of weapons and the most bling on his power armour. Although I always though that the white colourscheme on the box was striking, I could never bring myself to use it. Over the years I've used this type of miniature as a sort of testbed for whatever techniques I was trying to master at the time. In this case I was experimenting with aged gold effects and sculpting basic additions from modelling putty for the loincloth, which when combined with a sword from the chaos warrior sprue to replace the somewhat tame version on the original, gives the miniature a different character to the standard Space Crusade sergeant. Of all the marines in the box, this is the only one that I will snap up if I come across it in a bits box as the guy is just very useful and a nice simple miniature to modify and paint.

In one of those strange but welcome coincidences that happen only every so often in this hobby, the plug weapons that came with the Space Crusade marines are an almost perfect fit for the modern solid marines. Here the addition of a bayonet to the bolter just adds a bit of variation to the marine.
Dull, wet and cold weather? Fear not, with the Space Crusade heavy flamer, it's always barbeque season wherever this marine goes! Hope you like your heretics well done.

Here's one for all those old-school gamers who hate the tubular rocket launcher; one that looks and feels like the ancient RT era monstrocity with a dirty great big ammo clip. Am I the only person who thinks moounting that clip on top and at the front of the weapon would mean it blocking your line of sight and also over-balancing the damn thing? Ah well, who cares.

And finally on the catwalk today we have boring 90s marine sporting the "Emperor Knows" cannon which due to the fact I threw away all the non miniature related elements of Space Crusade, I have no idea what it's supposed to be.
Anyone have a clue, because I don't?

In part two I'll be looking at some of the other miniatures in the box including the dreadnought and something that looks as though it was in the idea cupboard when GW went to raid it a few years back. I might even let some of the actual Space Crusade marines in on the act if the ugly little brutes behave themselves and don't break the camera lens with their horrible visages.

Tuesday, 3 August 2010

What's on the boil?


Sometimes I feel like the old RTB01 marines look at the side of their modern counterparts: battered, confused and always bending down slightly as if in need of a toilet stop. At the moment I'm an agonising one miniture away from having everything I need ready to put up a special post that I've been working on regarding Space Crusade and at the same time suffering from some kind of rather vile stomach bug that means I'm never more than dashing distance from the toilet.

In other news it seems as though Forge Wolrd have responded to the fact that there are so many people out there making Pre Heresy conversions and companies offering parts for "Steam Knights" and the like, that there's money to be made. To this end they are about to crap out a pretty impressive looking series of marine parts featuring earlier mark power armout components and weapons styled after the original RT era bolters and heavy weapons.

Seems as though there's still some love for the classic marines in the GW collective consciousness that goes beyond a paltry amount of bits on the standard tactical sprue after all. Of course the new parts are a more beefy version of the originals to be in keeping with the fact that modern marines are more like demigods than the rather more humble originals, but these more chunky versions certainly look nice.

I'll hopefully be able to post something more useful soon, but until then the toilet beckons.
 
 

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