Saturday, February 3, 2018

Capsule Planet (repost)




I haven't been getting stuff from the capsule ball machines as much over the past few months, mainly because there's nothing I want to keep forever once I get it. That, and the people running the capsule dispensers decided to remove the machines they'd had from the 6th floor of Amu Plaza. But, the game and UFO Catcher arcade on that floor has been given a facelift, and they've installed a couple banks of dispensers along the walls and out into the corridors leading to the service elevators. There's still very little that I want to get, but I had my reasons this time.



First up is "Capsule de Earth-tachi" ("-tachi" is a plural suffix which can be interpreted in this case as "Earth and friends"). I have a couple students that are studying from an astronomy book on Mars, and I'd thought that it might be interesting if I actually did get Mars on the first try. But no, I got Venus instead. What's interesting here, though, is that the capsule itself IS the toy. Instead of having a separate toy within the dispenser ball that you throw away, the globe itself is wrapped in shrink wrap, and inside it is the flier and the two halves of the holder stand.



So, it's pretty big, at least 3" tall, and for only 200 yen ($1.80 USD) (some toys of this size sell for 500 yen each). My only real complaint is that the designer didn't bother developing artwork for the upper and lower shells that actually matches up properly. It's more like they made spin art and just grabbed two skins that looked vaguely alike. Then again, I doubt that anyone here that gets one of these globes is doing so for the realistic portrayal of the planets. Anyway, I now have Venus for my class.

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