As the Balkan Powder Keg is on the verge of bursting, the 8 Eyes of Calamity are seized by the Dukes of Hell, who have turned their home nations into living nightmares. Hellish swinemen run amok in the hills of Spain. Hyena men and fire demons are razing the African jungle. A mechanical army spreads across Germany like an iron plague. Vampires and ghouls are devouring Arabia. Italy has become a pit of perverse decadence and wanton murder.
Due to the brewing war in Europe, the College of Arms can’t afford to launch full scale attacks on eight different countries. The only hope to defeat the Dukes of Hell and prevent hell on earth is to utilize stealth, secrecy, and a lone agent with occult powers and a talking raven.
8 Eyes is a Hexen mod for Gzdoom, and a horror/dark fantasy remake of the NES “classic” of the same name. Access 8 unique realms from a single hub map, navigate atmospheric nightmare realms, solve vexing puzzles, and wield an arsenal of melee weapons, firearms, magic artifacts, and grenades against the most nightmarish monsters ever seen in a Doom engine game.
You choose which order to defeat each map, and which order you collect your weapons. Do you start with the easier maps and work your way up? or slog through the harder maps with nothing but your sword and raven, to access the most powerful weapons from the get-go?
The crown jewel in my collection of homebrew Megos is my girl She-Hulk. The custom hair job really brings it all together.
I was unsure how to outfit her, but then I remembered she was in the Fantastic Four for a while, so she seemed a natural addition to the Fan Four lineup!
Just spotted these on ebay: generic real-life-based space exploration sets. Looks like one is a moon landing diorama, another a shuttle launch, etc. Always love discovering new sets like these. Sadly lacking the eldritch horror element of Mighty Max, but it’ll do.
I don’t remember which RPG system we used for this. Probably something from Apocalypse World or something. We played a campaign where we were part of a crappy guild run by goblins that were always mismanaging things and screwing over their members with magic contracts that forced them into subservience. I missed the second session, and this is the recap I came back to the following week.
“Last time, the guild caravan stopped to gather supplies and forage for food, and they collected a large crop of delicious berries that everyone partook in. Then they crossed into a treacherous swamp, where the majority of the caravan came down with a severe disease similar to malaria. Everyone was in a coma, including your character. The other party members were the only ones well enough to explore the marsh for a witch they’d heard about who might have a cure. In the process of exploring the marsh, the party were attacked by undead horrors dwelling in the swamp water, and giant mosquitoes lurking in the trees. The tank almost got eaten by a giant fire-breathing serpent with a weird duck head, which he defeated single-handedly in mortal combat.
“Eventually they discovered the witch’s eerie house, but upon entering they plunged into the underworld and had to find their way back to the land of the living. Narrowly succeeding, the witch congratulated them on their endurance and awarded them with special mushrooms that could counteract the swamp malaria the others had come down with. On the return trip, the marsh came alive, and the party found themselves fighting the landscape itself and losing.
“It was here that the psychedelic effect of the berries finally wore off, and the heroes realized they hadn’t traveled more than ten feet from their caravan. The witch’s mushrooms were just regular mushrooms they’d found in the swamp and had been stuffing their faces with, and the tank was still covered in the vines he’d mistaken for the fire-breathing serpent. Basically the entirety of the second session boiled down to, ‘the heroes tripped balls and did nothing productive for several hours.’ Everyone is now awake, still suffering from malaria, and now ALSO suffering a hangover from the wild berries. Your party members are additionally sick from the wild mushrooms. You are all still in the swamp. What do you do now?”
I’ve been working on a graphic novel of Day of the Toys for several months now and have finished the script and begun thumbnails. The sketches make me pretty excited.
I love Ray Harryhausen movies. They’ve always been a favorite since childhood, and the Sinbad films are no exception. Each one is good in its own right and brings something fun tot he table, but no Sinbad portrayal was better than John Phillip Law. And no Sinbad Girl was hotter than Carilone Monroe as Margiana in the Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
JPL brought a likeable humanity to the character that was lacking in the other films, and he looked the part more than anyone else. It’s impossible not to like this incarnation of Sinbad whenever he’s onscreen. And every time I see Munroe in those Arabian outfits I swoon a little.
So I decided to pay tribute to them both in Mego form! Sinbad’s head is a repainted (thanks Metalhead Minis!) Gideon from the Bible Greats line, and really resembles JPL well. The costume is cobbled together from a variety of sources to match his costume in the latter half of the film, and an Aladdin sword from Mattel rounds him out nicely.
Margiana is a real prize, with a Zica Yvonne body and a vintage Demo Girl head that sort of resembles the actress herself. I added the eye tattoo on her hand myself, and the badass costume was made by O. T. Puente based on movie stills. They look amazing together, and all that’s missing is a monster for them to fight.
The title is actually a joke. EVERY toy line in the 90s went the Mighty Max route, from Power Rangers to Ninja Turtles. You name it, there was a micro-playset of it. One of the coolest was the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek: TNG!
This recreates the bridge of the Enterprise in vivid micro-detail, though I wish it came with a lot more figures. I had to grab a few extras from elsewhere. While the bridge is the main draw, there’s a few other nicely detailed areas like the brig, the captain’s ready room, and the bar!
I always wanted one when I was a kid, and managed to get one long enough to take some ridiculous photos.
Tigra’s milkshake brings all the nature boys to the yard.
Tigra is the latest purchase for the Mego collection, a very impressively detailed doll based on a very impressively sexy superlady I may have to start reading up on. Rowf.
The Shadowmobile is the latest addition to the Mego collection, a cool convertible coupe made from a Dick Tracy getaway car.
This is easily near the top of the list of my most grueling custom projects to date. It seats two Megos: one in back, one in front. You can also hide small items in the spare tire case on the back of the coupe. All I need now is to figure out how to get the doors to stick shut when I close them, since the roof of the Dick Tracy car was largely responsible for that.
Welcome to the Arkista’s Ring series, turning Heretic and Hexen into a sci-fi & sorcery epic with a pulp fiction vibe and a pretty elf with a smart mouth. Each mod comes with a readme file with a detailed breakdown of the story, characters, weapons, items, and lore to help immerse the player in the setting. If Heretic and Hexen feel too stale or tedious, you’ll find this series gives them both a shot in the arm!
This series began as a reboot of the fantasy-oriented NES game of the same name, reinvented into a pulp sci-fi fantasy in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Andre Norton with a hardboiled edge.
Click the link below to download the series in a single convenient package!
Read on to learn the details of each mod, listed in order of release!
For Heretic
Requires GZdoom & Heretic
A hillbilly space elf named Christine is arrested for collaborating with a despotic Shogun who is conquering the galaxy. After having a bomb installed in her skull, Christine is given a chance at redemption by braving a treacherous planet in search of a powerful artifact.
Arkista’s Ring is a nonlinear sci-fi fantasy adventure where you choose your path through the game. Doors open via single-use keys, and some paths to the end are easier than others. Wield a vast array of sci-fi weaponry and fantastical artifacts against the strangest creatures in the galaxy.
A follow-up that turns any Heretic mapset into a space n’ sorcery adventure with ray guns, undead space dwarves, killer robots, and evil winged babes.
Optimum Security visits Jarro, planet of the dwarves, to rid their ore-rich moon of an infestation of ancestral ghosts and rogue robots, which turns out to be the doings of a cult of winged lunatics, led by a former underworld chum of Chrissy.
Other mapsets beside the original Heretic maps essentially detail further adventures on Jarro after the events of DDD.
Requires GZDoom & Heretic
ALSO INCLUDES REVISED VERSIONS OF THE FULL MOD FOR USE WITH
MASTERS OF CHAOS
&
FAITHLESS TRILOGY
(Run the revised mods instead of DDD when playing MoC or Faithless.)
REQUIRES GZDOOM AND HEXEN
A follow-up that turns any Hexen mapset into a hardboiled sci-fantasy epic with new classes, weapons, monsters, textures, sounds, hud, you name it. Unlike Hexen where you have to assemble the pieces of your superweapon before you can even use it, MoM has you collect upgrades for your main weapon to make it more powerful the further you go, so you get an instant benefit rather than having to wait until late in the game. You also can find Arkista’s Ring to power your starting weapon for the duration of the hub.
When they chase black marketeer Schloss the Red to the technophile planet Ydos, Optimum’s leaders Durrante and Chrissy run afoul of an A.I. called Medusa, which acts as the planet’s BIOS and the deity of the brainwashed inhabitants. Chrissy and Durrante team up with Schloss in order to kill the false god and escape the dying world before they become the latest members of Medusa’s mindless flock.
Mapsets other than Hexen’s base maps basically chronicle the trio’s further attempts to escape Ydos.
Also includes music compatibility for Vicerus, Kaiser 28, & Cyrgoth Manor!
What started as a remake of Angst: Rahz’s Revenge ran away and became its own thing. After angering your woke bosses at the Global Insurance Company, you are deported to Lunica City, the only tourist trap/prison on the moon, to suffer the rest of your days in cubicle hell. A few days later the GIC’s experiments turn the moon city into a nightmare: dinosaur-like aliens have invaded, and the city is in chaos. Maybe now is a good time to find a way back to earth before the city falls?
In my quest to find a good car for the Shadow, I ended up finding a way to make the only interesting Phantom adversary that wasn’t a cookie-cutter yellow peril bad guy: the Baroness, leader of the Sky Band, a group of lady pilots who are also lady pirates!
Since there isn’t much for pictures of her online, I went with her only appearance in the Defenders of the Earth cartoon. I cobbled her portrait together from three different screenshots, and also borrowed that version’s the Sky Band emblem for the decals.
The plane is a Tri-Wing Terror from the Talespin toy line, which is a dead ringer for the style Mego used for their vehicles back in the day. All it needed was open space under the dashboard so the doll’s legs could fit (i did this myself with a dremmel).
She’s an awesome and stylish addition to the collection, though I had to replace her crappy FTC jacket before it completely disintegrated completely, sacrificing the cool fuzzy collar. For a while she was sporting a sexy low-cut pulp bombshell look before I finally got a decent jacket.
Initially I didn’t care to own Mr. Mxyzptlk, but after the ordeal of trying to clean tobacco stink out of a rare Type 2 (and only partly succeeding), getting a spare head, and finally cobbling my own version together out of spare parts, he’s kind of grown on me.
My Mxyzptlk is unique: he sports the arms and legs of a Lion Rock soldier dude, making him an impish 7 inches tall. He actually better resembles the character this way when compared to the others in the line.
So despite my dislike of Superman characters, I’m actually glad I added this one to the collection.
I’m a sucker for both the cute and the creepy, and that’s probably why I had a ton of these toys as a kid, yet never watched the show. Krumm especially steals the show in this toyline with his amazing sculpt and supreme weirdness. He somehow manages to be scary, gross, weird, and endearing all at once. He’s right at home on my shelf of oddball crap.
The toys were designed by toy designer Mel Birnkrant, whose website chronicles the creation of an awesome line of monster toys that eventually became the Aaaahh Real Monsters figure line. This probably explains why the characters from the show were somewhat half-baked feature-wise when compared to the other, more fully fleshed-out designs. While the Gromble probably has the sculpt that comes most alive out of all of them, Krumm is definitely the best all-around of the cast members that were rendered in plastic.
Mike's Toybox 