Cheap sci-fi alien bugs!
The other day I went to the Dollar Tree, looking for a few things.
As per standard protocol I took a stroll down the toy aisle just to see what was available I could use, and ran into exactly the reason that's part of the protocol!
Alien toys! A whole wall of 'em.
I looked through the whole thing, and ended up leaving with 15 packages (but of course, I didn't remember to get any of the things I actually went in there for in the first place...)
They're a toy line called "Final Faction". Some are the regular human soldiers, the Good Guys I presume. And the others are the aliens. Some of the aliens are humanoid, and do look rather cool, but of course they're huge as they're action figures. As a giant it might work, but it's not what I was interested in.
No, what I cared about were the other aliens. The bugs!
Here is what I bought that day. ( I since went back and got a few more, and my Wife got some from a different Dollar Tree.) There's a scorpion like one in the middle left there, I have a few of them. The green parts are all from the Accessory Packs. I figure the right two would look cool as crawling bugs, and the twisty once in the center there are destined for use as carnivorous plants in many settings.
The mech turret thing on the left I have no use for, but it's 4 robot legs and a gun system for $1, so it can sit in the bit box until I need it.
The main star though, are the bugs up there in the back. Those are awesome!
And they come 2 in a pack! That's $0.50 per bug!
You can see one here, confronting a 28mm figure. So they're big, but not prohibitively so. And man, I just really love the look of them. The design is excellent, and the sculpting is really good too. Because of their leg design, as my brother pointed out, they don't actually need bases. They stand fine on their own.
They do need a shot of Krazy Glue into their joints to freeze the leg in position, but that's easy. The mandibles too, they move if not glued.
Here's a side-by-side of one right from the package (left), and one after I repainted it.
The color is kind of off here, I think it was the blue countertop that affected the tone for the camera. You can still see the difference though.
I spent a while trying to figure out how to paint them (colors, not physically how...). I settled on this brown carapace and yellow/brownish/white skin. I think it works to give them a real but alien look.
The eyes are red because the originals had red eyes, and my Daughter said I had to do that too.
Here's the 3 I had done at the time of the picture. Two of the regular bugs, and one of the Scorpion types. For the scorpion, I removed the working launcher thing from it's tail, and pinned on one of the parts from the "crawling bug" accessory pack I talked about up above. I like the look of it.
There's a third bug type I haven't painted yet, it has three legs, is much bulkier, and seems to be something along the lines of an anti-tank gun or other type of Heavy Hitter.
And, of course, the photo at the top shows these bugs confronting some of the Dangerteers! They're 28mm Hydra Miniatures for size reference.
They also had a number of Accessory Packs for the human figures, so I picked up some of those as well. They contain all sorts of cool things that will be useful bits for future builds, even though i have no use for them at the moment. $1 for a pack of bits is not a bad deal at all!
The human team has some robots, battle suits, and even a dune buggy thing that someone might find a use for, but I wasn't really interested in them.
This is why "check the toy aisle" is always a part of the store visit protocol. You never know what you're going to find!
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