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Some neat Xevious promo artwork I found

Here’s the Solvalou fighter, your ship in the game.

The Andor Genesis, the boss ships you fight against. Sort of looks like the top part of a Cylon Base Star.

Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, the Terrazi looks like a Cylon Raider.

This Jara is sort of TIE Fighter shaped.

The Kapi has a sort of Millennium Falcon shape to it.

I can’t say this Grobda tank really looks like anything, except maybe a cross from the Galileo Shuttle from Star Trek and the land rover from Battlestar Galactica.

The port of Xevious on the Atari 7800 is what I put the most time into, when I was in junior high. I remember how thrilled I was when I bombed the Andor Genesis with a one bomb kill. I’ll have to give it a try on my 7800 emulator for RetroPie again sometime to refresh my memory. IIRC, it wasn’t a bad port and it even had the hidden flags you can reveal by bombing secret areas on the screen.

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My new etched acrylic Enterprise lamp

This is my most recent addition to my nerd cave. It’s a Starship Enterprise lamp made of etched acrylic. I peeled off the protective plastic wrap from the acrylic pane and plugged it into the base. Light is sent through the acrylic and catches on the acrylic etching. I can choose the color for it to shine, or elect to have it cycle slowly through colors. This lamp is USB-powered, so I have it plugged into the back of my computer monitor. It’s not an officially-licensed item. It only cost just over 2,000 with free shipping from Yahoo Auctions Japan, so I couldn’t resist.

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Dia’s Galactic Patrol ship from Mighty Orbots

I recently picked up Mighty Orbots: The Complete Series on DVD. It’s a 2-disc DVD set of all 13 episodes of this fantastic, short-lived anime show I loved as a kid. I was already a Voltron fan when this show aired, and I watched it every Saturday morning and then discussed the episode the next day with my friend in Sunday school at church. Then suddenly it was no longer being aired. Then another week went by, and I couldn’t believe that Orbots had been cancelled. It was animated in Japan for the American audience.

So now I’ve got the DVD, and I can watch these episodes that I have not seen since grade school. One cool thing I’ve noticed is the ship flown by Dia, a member of the Galactic Patrol. It’s almost like something between Macross and Lensman. Neat stuff.

Pretty badass-looking ship, I think. Check out it’s landing cycle:

That vertical stabilizer folds up and back out of the way as the landing gears extend. Pretty cool ship design.