Do You Want To Live Forever Apes?!?

With my Centauri fleet ready to go it's time to check out figures for the other big event of the day; the Starship Troopers Miniature Game, also by Mongoose Publishing and also long out of print which is a shame in my opinion... but I'm getting ahead of myself.  First lets look at the minis.

And here they are in all their glory, MacFeegle's Marauders of the Mobile Infantry.

"Do you want to live forever apes?"

The scary thing is that this is not all of the MI that I own.  Heck this is less than half of all the apes I can field but this is the portion that is fully assembled and painted so I'm going to focus on them.

These are two different types of walkers used by the MI; M9 Chickenhawk on the left and the M8 Ape on the right.

For those of you who might not be familiar with the SST mini game setting, it actually follows the CGI series The Roughneck Chronicles more than either the movie or novel.  This series was released in 1999 as a Saturday morning cartoon which means that they had to tone down the violence and gory from the movie.  Even so I still think they did a really good job with the series and I'd definitely recommend checking it out if you haven't already.

Unlike the novel (which features heavy exo suits) or the movie (which features flak vests and helmets), the Mobile Infantry in the Roughneck Chronicles are equipped with a form of light power armor that also has a built in jump pack.  This gives them some protection and greatly enhances their mobility without having them all look like lumbering anime mecha gunning down the bugs.  Mongoose Publishing did eventually incorporate the other two styles into the mini game but from the start it was the CGI power armor that really held center stage and were the focus of my own collection.

The miniatures for the suits were done as multi part plastics which gave you lots of options when you assembled them... once you figured out where all the bits went anyway.  Each 28mm trooper consisted of no less than thirteen pieces, some of which were ridiculously fiddly.  Still, I loved how the minis looked and honestly the game system was a lot of fun as well.  Rather than the typical "I go, you go" mechanic, SST has a more dynamic feel as you had the opportunity to react to your opponents actions during their turn.  For example, lets say you are being charged by a swarm of bugs looking to rip your head off.  Are you just going to stand there and wait for them to kill you?  Heck no!  Beating feet or opening up both seem like much more viable options to me and this game let you do either of those.

Unfortunately this was a game that eventually went the way of the dodo.  Between problems with the factory in China and problems with their license from Sony there were just too many things stacked up against them in the long run.  Mongoose officially pulled the plug on the game in early 2008 but it does still see some play at various conventions around the country and rightly so.  This was a game that deserved much better than the ignoble end that it received and I can't wait to get it back to the table again, even if it is just a one time thing.  Until next time...