The Cake is Birthday Flavoured; ramblings, finished Sohei and WIP Cerberus

Well, it's been a while, but this will probably be a lengthy post, to somewhat make up for it.

I have to say, I was a bit disappointed with my start on the Sohei for Ronin. I worked on them a little bit more, but spent almost a week without picking up a brush, in a bit of a funk because of it. I think I was just a bit burned out, and needed a short break from hobbying hard.
Thankfully, after putting them aside for a week, I've now finished off the Sohei and am satisfied with them. They're far from my best work, but I have scores of models from a dozen different games all begging for attention - my inner perfectionist is almost never satisfied, and if I always insist of trying to perfect each model, I'll end up getting nothing finished - like the last three or four years! I'd rather play with fully painted, if only tabletop quality, forces, than half finished ones.

Anyway, here are some pics of the finished Sohei. Provisionally finished, at least, as I may still tweak things or tidy up flaws. The faces are particularly poor I feel. Oh well, here they are:

Senior monk with tetsubo -

Sohei monks with naginata -

Initiates with teppos and yumi -

So, in other news of the last week...

On Saturday I downloaded and dived into the Battlefield 4 beta test, pretty excited. I've only started playing FPS games in recent times, and most of that has been Counter Strike. I'm keen to move on to a bigger game with more options, and the two franchises of note are of course Battlefield and Call of Duty. I've never played either, though I enjoy watching Xcalizorz play Call of Duty. Anyway, Battlefield would certainly be my preferred game, and the beta certainly offers what looks like, to me, a pretty awesome game.
Unfortunately... it's a glimpse viewed in slow, jerky fashion. The lag is horrifically bad, and most of the eight hours I've spent in game over the last few days have involved me dying, over and over, to enemies who shoot me around corners or materialise from nowhere in front of me, several seconds after my health drops to zero. Frustrating, to say the least. Hopefully things will improve before the games launch, or else I may end up going for the far cheaper Call of Duty, which is also promising me marksman rifles, my favourite style of weapon...

TL:DR - I wasted most of my weekend playing video games. No one cares.

On Monday I enjoyed a rather low key birthday. Happy birthday to me. 22 years old. I feel ancient. Like I said, low key. Pretty much the only gifts I asked for were a couple of books, mostly Mass Effect related, including the recently published collected volume of the four graphic novel series by Dark Horse. It's an absolutely gorgeous tome, and while I've never really enjoyed comics, naturally I make an exception for anything Mass Effect related. The stories, while short, are great, and really provide glimpses of events that occur outside the games.
The upshot of reading more Mass Effect stuff is that it's served to reinspire me to chip away a little more at that eternal project of mine.
I already had a five man Cerberus squad, made of the rather nice Mantic Enforcers, assembled and undercoated. While not perfect matches for the Cerberus assault troopers, they are pretty close, and certainly the closest I can get for both an affordable price and not requiring major conversion. I currently have 30 of these, although I have another 30 odd coming as part of my Deadzone pledge. I plan on using them as Blue Suns as well as Cerberus troopers, so having lots won't hurt.

These guys are still wip, though there isn't a whole lot more once I finished the black and white. All the intricate plates are painfully slow to paint. I managed to cover around twenty years of Russian History this evening while painting. Now that I'm almost up to date with the highly recommended Russian Rulers history podcast, I need to start looking for a new one to listen to while I paint. I'm thinking Japanese history, given my woeful ignorance of the fascinating history of the Orient.

Anyway, here's the WIP Cerberus troopers, I think they're looking good so far:

Well, thanks for reading this lengthy and verbose post, sorry for rambling a little. I'll try and make my next update a little sooner. I think I'm back in the painting groove now, and I'm rattling towards 200 models painted for the year!

~Alex/Magos