The 8th passenger / Le Huitième Passager

Deuxième sujet du jour ouvert pour réparer un oublis: je m’aperçois que je n'ai jamais posté la peinture terminée du huitième passager.

I realized today that I forget to post about my finished Alien for the "one-day-to-be" project Nostromo. So here is he, the 8th passenger:



I got the minis from the Guardian of the Temple: a French co-blooger, very generous with his pair. Thank you again Morikun! I will make merits in your honor at the temple  ;) 

Le 8eme passager donc est une figurine de la collection personnel du Gardien du Temple. Excuser du peu. Il a du beaucoup combattre pour la récupérer et vous trouverez un resume de ces aventures sur ce post.

 The paint job is really basic as I actually followed the process described by Morikun on his blog. I thought his job was awesome so why not simply copying it? The recipe is as follow:

1. black undercoat with low zenithal spray of grey and then top zenithal spray of white.
2. Wet brushing of Warcolours Brown 3
3. 3x Washes of black ink + water-based uncoloured wood-stain + tesco screenwash.

Done!

Pour la recette j'ai suivit les conseils avisées du Gardien donc mais en changeant les tons et les produits: a la base c'est donc du brossage de marron 3 de chez Warcolours avec 3 lavis de lasure a l'eau incolore mélangée a de l'encre noir et du liquide lave-glace. 

Je m'en faisait toute une histoire mais y'a pas plus con qu'un Alien a peindre. Presque je me prendrait la boite juste pour peindre la multitude d'Aliens dedans :D .

Sauf que voila: Prodos oblige, y'a ce detail idiot de la queue qui se monte a l'envers (Sérieusement? C'est quoi votre problèmes les gars? Une forme de déficience mentale?) et donc bien évidemment je vais m'abstenir de donner mon obole a cette boite :P .

I was seriously pissed with the tail of the thing: it was designed in the reverse position (seriously? WTF?) and mine was kind of soft so I had to cut it in 3 different places to correctly positioned it. Outside of this I must confess that I was amazed by the level of detail of this mini. Incredible, really.

Plus sérieusement la figurine est (en dehors de cette queue donc) d'une qualité irréprochable. La encore je vous renvois vers le Temple si vous voulez avoir une revue complete des défauts et atouts de cette gamme.

A new Hope and the Nostromo's Crew: the Quest!

I am resuscitating this old blog mainly due to sharing problems that emerged with the new version of G+. I was surprised this morning to see how the interface of Blogger have been streamlined since my last entry. Who knows, maybe this will be the start of a new peregrination. I expect to be posting mainly in English but from times to times I may switch to French or do both, we will see.

First ticket thus will be about a new quest. The Guardian of the Temple offered me a few weeks a good a very nice mini produced for the Alien VS Predator Game by the infamous PRODOS.

I am literally amazed by the quality of both the sculpt and the molding. After seing this I am wondering if Games Workshop can still pretend to be the first in term of quality when it came to produce plastic minis.

To honor Sama Morikun I have been thinking of a new light-hearted hobby project. To be realistic it had to be simple and cheap as I try to keep my hobby budget under reasonable limits until better time are coming.
So I decide to start a quest for finding acceptable minis that could represent the original Nostromo's crew.

I fully understand why PRODOS would not/could not undertake the original Alien but I still think it is a nice installment and a thriving base for a boardgame with minis.

My first idea then was to go for the two brand that are actually doing 'un-official'' Ripley miniatures: Crooked Dice and Hasslefree.

The crooked Dice version of Ellen Ripley...

Signee, the hasslefree version.

The second does not feel like Ripley at all when the first one, despite the very enlarged flamethrower, do the job. Sadly, none of these brand have good or correct proxy for the rest of the crew. Crooked dice presents some minions that can be used to represents some cargo's space-crew but there is no female and their weapons are very modern by design:

''Hey dudes, were are the missy?''

Hasslefree have a group of 5 Spe Ops that could fit a ''What if'' version of a bad-ass Nostromo's crew but I am not convince by this idea and it would ask some considerable conversion to be done correctly.

What if the Nostromo's crew were all hardened veterans from colonial wars?

talking about colonial marines CP Models have a very nice range of Scouts that could represent perfectly the crew:

They have switchable heads & backpack and various weapons options.

Nice but once again no female. You could easily find female head-swap from Victoria Games for example but these are ridiculously costly and I do not want to multiply orders.

The one in the middle is just perfect for Ripley but at 8$ the 5 heads, it is definitely not an option.

So what? Well the increasing numbers of boardgame featuring minis offer us some nice options but, again, boardgames are not cheap and quality is not always there.

Space Cadets painted by Carmen Painting

Except in the case of the Mc Vey fiasco, Sedition Wars Battle for Alabaster that offer us a very cheap option if you are looking for a good game and plenty of nice minis for just a dime.

You can find it online right now for price next to nothing

The last option, my favorite one at the moment, came with the Space Inspectors from the Heresy miniatures Brands. When it come to Heresy you have to love or hate the cartoon aspect of the sculpt:

A very nice deal with some sweet sweet sculpt.

Personally, in that case, I loved it and I feel that the Ripley's Crooked Dice (the one I like) would perfectly fit in the middle of this crew. It is not a perfect fit as the inspectors are way too homogeneous in their outfits to represents the very heterogeneous crew of the Nostromo but still they have different body shape and there is something in the aspect of that crew that I find very attractive.

What do you think? Which options would you choose?