mini RC madness

Could it be?? An update?? No way! Yes way!

So this isn't going to be about my trip to Asia, as I don't feel like typing up a writeup right now. I have pictures uploaded to my gallery, but I'd like to keep it sort of private for now, so if you want to see the pics, message me for the url.

Moving on to more important things.. My coworker and I recently decided to buy some radio controlled cars to race in the office. At first I was thinking of getting some Radio Shack XMods, but after a quick Googling and a quick eBay sweep, we found that the XMods of the cars we wanted were no longer in production and hard to find and/or way too expensive on eBay. Undiscouraged, we looked for a cheaper solution. My coworker mentioned some mini RCs he had seen before called Bit Char-G. Sadly, the Bit Char-G (known as MicroSizers here in the US) craze was at least 2 years ago and they are now hard to come by. After a few days of searching, my coworker came across a site that sold numerous Bit Char-G'ers, so we ordered some along with a couple packs of cones so we could make a small course to race them on in our office. Since the Subaru Impreza WRX STi is my dream car, I of course had to get one. However, upon browsing the list of available Bits, I noticed a package I couldn't resist. They had an Initial D set, that comes with Takumi's Fujiwara Tofu Shop AE86, and the RedSun's yellow RX-7. After seeing that, I just had to have them, so I ordered the Initial D set along with the WRX. My coworker got the Initial D set as well, along with the Zexel Loctite GT-R (basically a Skyline). After we placed our orders, we (im)patiently awaited delivery of our cars. The day they arrived was like Christmas when you're 10 years old. So much excitement! The cars are pretty sweet and so much fun to play with at work. Unfortunately my WRX came with a rather slow motor (micro B 1.0, which means it runs at 10,000 RPM) compared to my coworker's GT-R, which is over twice as fast (micro B 2.2). Fortunately I ordered an aftermarket motor for it which is 4 times as fast (micro B 4.2) as the default motor. Now it's so fast that if I turn too quickly, the car either flips over or rolls once or twice. They run too fast to race around a course, so we mostly just spend our time just driving them around our desks, crashing them into each other, or jumping ramps.

After that, I kind of went crazy and ordered a bunch of upgrade parts and other cars/bodies off eBay. The best purchase I made was a Mario Kart set. I already knew they existed, but they were hard to find so once I spotted the eBay auction, I jumped on the chance to own them. I ended up winning the auction. I must say they are the coolest things ever, and if you look at the pictures (1 2 3 4 5 6 7), I think you'll agree. :) Each one came with 5 banana peels, a green turlte shell, a red turtle shell, a mushroom, several cardboard question mark blocks, and cardboard cutouts of the other Mario Kart characters, including Lakitu. My coworker came up with a game to play with them which we call Mario Kart Soccer. Basically we used the banana peels to make 2 goals, then we place a turtle shell in the middle of the field and we have to use our Karts to try and push the shell into the other person's goal. It's more fun than you can imagine and I owned my coworker at it. Unfortunately I don't have a video to show you of Mario Kart Soccer. However, I do have a 300+ meg video of me driving them on my desk at work. Check it out! Yes, Yoshi is fast.

I don't have pics of my other Bits at the moment, but I'll get some before the weekend. Yes, I am a little obsessed with them, but they're just so much fun!