Collectible: Naked Snake (Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater)

Hot Toys has a reputation -- at least as much as I can put together -- of being the top tier action figure house when it comes to source material accuracy, accessories and the overall quality of construction for figures in the 12" (or 30cm) range). It's something that was pointed out to me when J'Tonello reviewed the The Joker (The Dark Knight).

Maybe a better way to describe Hot Toys overarching mandate is that they produce the Big Mac you see in the print ads. There are no camera tricks or sleight of hand here. What you see is what you get with offerings from Hot Toys. Of course, for a little more than $200 you should be expecting as much. You don't want to be opening that box to a bunch of loose lettuce, patties that have slid sideways from a squashed bun, the cheese congealed on side of the box.

Right from the box that Naked Snake (Sneaking Suite Version) comes in, there's an attention to detail that only Metal Gear Solid fans may notice. The large exclamation point under the top flap, for one, but it's the small details of Snake that really do make this a remarkable figure.

Feature: Time Capsule - Sept./Oct. 2003

Soul Calibur II

If there's one thing the Internet is extremely bad about it's being able to just flip through random articles from months or years ago. An article sits on top of a page for a bit then seemingly vanishes, lost to the ravages of Time, which in some cases is hours after it's posted.

For those of us that hang on to magazines, I'm sure you can relate to sitting down on a rainy Sunday with a magazine four or five years old and re-reading articles or reading some of them for the first time. The Internet offers no such thing -- if you don't read something now, like, right now! then you'll probably never see it.

To combat this, we'll be running articles like this one to highlight content we've done in the past. Without further ado, here are a few links to content from The Armchair Empire that's a decade old. Maybe you won't cozy up with a coffee and donut, but maybe you'll remember briefly a time when things were a simpler and McFarlane Toys was pumping out action figures like Old Faithful.

Editorial: Baker's Dozen Looking Forward

The original 2000 Armchair Empire banner.

It's August so that means my mind starts wandering back to the origins and development of The Armchair Empire.

The year was 2000, the month August, two 23-year old guys thought it would be cool to have a website devoted to writing about video games and action figures. Google wasn't a thing and Steam was associated with trains. Happy Puppy loomed large on the video game reviews landscape. Jeff Green wasn't the Editor-in-Chief of Computer Gaming World. Nintendo Power not only existed, it was going strong, running alongside the likes of (the original) EGM and GamePro. Argon fluorohydride was just discovered by Finnish scientists. Amazon was still "new fangled." The Playstation 2 had recently launched.