I have such nostalgia for the X-Men arcade game from Konami as I have lovely (hazy) memories of me and my friends teaming up and playing through on the giant multi-player cabinet at our local arcade. On the other hand, it also was over 30 years ago, so my specific detail recall is pretty low. I mostly remember a lot of jumping up and doing a diagonal attack across the screen as Nightcrawler and I had to look up a playthrough to remember a lot of the color combos for the Sentinels and some of the moves. Let’s take a look a the Sentinel Two-Pack!
The box is pretty snazzy with some great sprite artwork on the front and sides and a little figure photography on the back. The figures come in a plastic tray, but thankfully aren’t zip-tied down and come out easily. Since the box has no windows, I would have preferred the cardboard interior.
The set includes two figures with two sets of hands each (fist and claw), two sets of blast effects, and a chunk of street.
The hands swap easily and stay on well. The fists are well proportioned and the claw hands are open with blast ports in the palms so the Sentinel can fire rays from the their hands as they are wont to do.
The blast effects look familiar and fit well into the hands for laser blasts and the feet for jet boots.
The chunk of street is pretty great as it looks like a thin layer of concrete with a bunch of earth underneath. The sculpting has a lot of detail and texture and looks fantastic, mirroring the game design well, though it would look even better with some wash to differentiate the top and the bottom a bit and bring out those details.
The chunk of street looks fantastic and he looks awesome holding it, though it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to get it balanced. It seems to me that it was designed to rest on the head and look like the sprite balanced that way.
The sculpting is a pretty great match for the game sprite and I was sure it re-used some of the recent Iron Man parts for those moon boots, but it appears all new. The scale is pretty good as they are just a bit bigger than the standard human as they are in the game.
The articulation is pretty Legends standard, though the hips feel pretty gummy and the ankle movement is minimal. The neck is also surprisingly limited up/down movement that I chalk up to the barbell joint rather than the hinge and not much clearance inside the head. The Sentinel has:
- Swivel/hinge shoulders, wrists, hips, and ankles
- Double-hinged knees and elbows
- Swivel biceps, thighs, boots, and waist
- Ball and socket head and mid-torso.
The paint is probably my main concern with this figure. Even with my hazy memories, the thighs, bicep and head pink felt a bit too bubble-gum or pepto-bismal to me at first glance and looking at reference I find that I was right. The pink is the highlight color on the sprite, so I can kinda see why it might have been used, but really needed to be a bit more on the purple side.
The face print is kinda neat as it adds a bit of a 2D sprite feel to the face and highlights the main features of the Sentinel face design. One odd thing is that the cheekbone shading is on top of the cheekbone sculpt when it seems to me like it should be underneath the bone. The effect is a little bit anime-ish which makes me think they could be cool with the X-Men ’97 figures.
Overall I’m pleased I was able to pre-order a couple of these at SDCC. It was a bit of an issue getting that app to work on the floor of SDCC, but I’m glad I did as these are a fun little army to build with two packs. Man, do I wish companies would stop stacking their pre-orders on SDCC weekend. I don’t think I personally need all the other color schemes from the game, but that might be a good release for hardcore fans with a better memory than mine. I may try and tone down the pepto pink if I can find the right wash color. What I really need now is an easy way to play the game again.
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