Found a NECA 18-inch Chief…and a Gipsy Danger in the same store. That’s gonna be an epic fight.
Anyways, does anyone here know just what the hell happened with McFarlane? I know a lot of their stuff pegwarmed at retail in 2012, and I don’t know for sure if the line’s officially dead or not.
> 2533274916717050;1022:
> Found a NECA 18-inch Chief…and a Gipsy Danger in the same store. That’s gonna be an epic fight.
>
> Anyways, does anyone here know just what the hell happened with McFarlane? I know a lot of their stuff pegwarmed at retail in 2012, and I don’t know for sure if the line’s officially dead or not.
They actually just released two Master Chief figures a few weeks ago. They’ve got a new Halo 4 series coming out next Spring. It’s not completely dead, just very slow going.
Just gonna go ahead and leave these here. This is about 1/4 of my collection. A lot of the Mcfarlane toys are still boxed up, sealed and havent seen the light of day in a LONG time. I also have a box of opened McFarlane figures that I got doubles of. Hope you guys enjoy:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/313142_10150382860387927_1826000212_n.jpg?oh=30325f8a64f922f47b74ab664f839e59&oe=551F963A&gda=1428037941_29bea916e839ee42aead82923b56914a
> 2533274807452282;1024:
> Just gonna go ahead and leave these here. This is about 1/4 of my collection. A lot of the Mcfarlane toys are still boxed up, sealed and havent seen the light of day in a LONG time. I also have a box of opened McFarlane figures that I got doubles of. Hope you guys enjoy:
>
> https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/313142_10150382860387927_1826000212_n.jpg?oh=30325f8a64f922f47b74ab664f839e59&oe=551F963A&gda=1428037941_29bea916e839ee42aead82923b56914a
>
> https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/t31.0-8/s960x960/1397339_10152449236607927_4967577241249093724_o.jpg
That’s -Yoink!-. I’m just now starting my collection so wish me luck lol.
I’m still trying to get more Halo toys for my collection. Either McFarlane or Mega Bloks or even the Play Arts. So far I got 5 Mega Bloks Spartans, A Promethean Knight of the McFarlane line and my two favorites of all my collection: Master Chief and Cortana from Halo 4 of the McFarlane line.
hi
I am really happy to see how many people have recently come to the Toy Thread. Sorry I haven’t been around. Saying that I have been busy is an understatement. Thanks to everyone, and, of course, Cyanades, for contributing to the thread. Long live the toy fans!
> 2535453464044488;1027:
> I’m still trying to get more Halo toys for my collection. Either McFarlane or Mega Bloks or even the Play Arts. So far I got 5 Mega Bloks Spartans, A Promethean Knight of the McFarlane line and my two favorites of all my collection: Master Chief and Cortana from Halo 4 of the McFarlane line.
McFarlane is better if you want more accurate yet affordable displays.
Play Arts is very accurate but not as affordable.
Mega Bloks is for those who enjoy building, collecting, playing, and other small reasons. It just isn’t accurate.
If you can spare the money, I would definitely get the Play Arts if you want have a masterpiece in your collection.
> 2533275028804937;1026:
> 2015 Mega Bloks sets images!
>
> http://www.badasstoysforbadassboys.com/hamebl-2015.html
@-@
Stop trying to make me spend my money. This is killing me!
> 2533274983431281;1029:
> I am really happy to see how many people have recently come to the Toy Thread. Sorry I haven’t been around. Saying that I have been busy is an understatement. Thanks to everyone, and, of course, Cyanades, for contributing to the thread. Long live the toy fans!
if anything, I should be the one thanking you.
Okay, sorry for the long wait, but I’ve finally come to give my thoughts on NECA’s eighteen-inch Master Chief monster.
The first thing to note about this Master Chief toy is obviously its size. I bought mine on Amazon and I was astonished when the box was almost too large for the post man to actually deliver it. It was lucky I was at home at the time. Even the figure’s box itself is huge - if you’re familiar with NECA’s other 1/4 scale figures, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not familiar, I’m talking about having trouble storing this toy’s box under your bed or in your closet because it’s so huge. And yes, I obviously hang on to toy packaging when the price is this high and the box itself seems collectible.
The figure itself is a stunning likeness of the Master Chief at a glance. NECA seems to have gotten all of the details right - all of the little curves and contours in his modified Mk. VI MJOLNIR are present and accounted for here and I did compare the figure to the in-game John-117. On closer inspection, there are a few weird spots that NECA didn’t quite nail. The most immediately obvious irregularities are the shoulder pads. It’s absolutely worth noting that, really, no figure of the Halo 4 Master Chief so far has completely nailed the shoulder pads. McFarlane’s five-inch figures place the shoulder pads a little too close to the elbow and they hug John’s arms too closely. The Play Arts Kai Halo 4 Master Chief did something similar, opting to make the character’s shoulder joints look like huge balls of muscle underscored by high elbow pads (I may be exaggerating a bit, but that’s the one thing about that figure that bugged me). In my opinion, without having held the figure in my hands yet, the upcoming ThreeA Master Chief figure seems to have the shoulder pads correct finally, but with a price tag upwards of $200, it better.
With all of this perspective, I want to note that NECA put in an admirable attempt (and the best attempt yet) to get these shoulder pads correct. They are the closest we’ve come yet in a figure. What they’ve done is they’ve opted to attach the pads to the Master Chief’s arms with a small piece of green plastic towards the bottom of the pad. That’s that. Note that they are not detachable - the piece of plastic is permanently attached. Now, I’ve paid attention to the in-game model of Master Chief in Halo 4 and, in my opinion, this interpretation of attaching the pieces to Master Chief’s arms with a simple piece of linking material, rather than just having the pads hug his arms, seems to be accurate to the game model. That said, it just sticks out here as wrong. The pads don’t reach as high on John-117’s arms as they do in the video game. To boot, the pieces of plastic holding the pads to the Chief’s arms are actually flimsy and pliable. If the figure falls from a height onto one of these pads, I could see them coming off easily under the Chief’s immense weight. That’s a shame for such a high-end piece.
Another part of the figure that just seems under-detailed and out of place is the “seams” between the armor and the undersuit. I understand that this armor plating is supposed to be thick and sturdy, but with this figure, we’re talking about his armor plating jutting out a decent half-inch or more from his undersuit. It looks hugely disproportionate. It’s especially bad around the thighs. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if NECA had added some detail to it, but they just painted it solid green. It blends in at a glance, but sticks out once you’ve gotten some hands-on time with the figure.
Articulation is also a bit weird in this one. I understand that, with a figure this size, you’re kind of trading articulation for that statue quality. That would be fine with me if the Master Chief wasn’t eternally contorted into some weird positioning. I’ll go over the good first. The hips are really good. For those of you that collect the Play Arts Kai Halo figures: imagine the hips of the Halo 4 figures, but on a much bigger toy. That’s essentially this figure’s hip articulation. His legs can fully twist, bend, etc; he’s fully pose-worthy at the hips. I even got him to kind of manage the splits. It’s excellent. The knees are similarly excellent. Again, the articulation is very similar to the Halo 4 Play Arts Kai figures, with that double joint working its magic to allow the Master Chief to crouch and kneel if you want him to. Surprisingly good for a figure of this scale.
It gets a little bit weird at the ankles. At least on my figure, the ankles don’t seem to have joints at all. They cannot bend. They have a full range of twisting motion and the toes can also twist to allow the figure to stand more readily in a variety of poses, but the ankles themselves do not seem to bend in any way. That is a huge disappointment, though I can venture a guess at a number of reasons why. My main theory is the figure’s weight. This is actually another one of my small complaints about the figure. I would say it weighs a good ten pounds; perhaps just a bit under that. It’s a huge, heavy figure. And its joints are surprisingly stiff, allowing it to hold poses. However, the ankles of the figure are relatively small compared to other, bigger joints, like the hips or knees. I wonder if adding a huge variety of ankle articulation would have compromised the figure’s ability to reliably stand under its own weight. It’s already a bit shaky. I’ve left the Master Chief standing on my dresser since I’ve got him - just a relatively straightforward standing position. He’s fallen over four times, without warning. It’s usually a day or two after I post him there. He seems sturdy enough initially (I bump into the dresser as a test), but he just falls over on his own after a day or two. I haven’t really determined the cause of this yet, other than simply a heavy figure.
The arm articulation is pretty much what you would expect, with joints at the wrists, elbows, and shoulders. The shoulder articulation seems to be mostly for show; it doesn’t give a huge range of motion. The elbows and wrists are where the reliable poses are at. Similarly, the head swivels with a pretty good range of motion. The Master Chief can look pretty far up, down, or to either side.
One of the issues I’ve been having with my figure is the torso articulation. It seems to me that there is supposed to be some sideways movement there. I can get my figure to move side to side at the torso, but he always reverts back to his front-staring gaze when I stop applying pressure. And I apply a lot of pressure, too; it feels as though I may break my figure. But the upper torso does seem like it’s supposed to be able to move independently, so I don’t know. The thing that bugs me is that my figure is stuck with his upper torso slightly off-center, to my right. In the game, the Master Chief’s chest plates line up, centered with his codpiece, and it looks all pretty and symmetric. My figure is permanently skewed to one side, unfortunately. It’s not a huge deal, but kind of annoying for what seems like it should be a display piece.
Since I’m running out of character space, I’m going to double post. Keep on scrolling if you want more.
Okay, I’m going to cover the small details, the paint job, and the accessories in this space. Then I will try to take pictures within a couple of days and come back to post those.
Small details first, then. Here I’m talking about things like the braille 117 on the front of the Master Chief’s chest plate. All of the instances of braille on the character’s armor seem to be fully intact to me. That’s sweet. That scar on the Chief’s chest plate is both molded into the figure itself and painted to look as though it’s a piece of twisted metal from a car wreck. It’s a small detail that looks awesome on this huge figure. The undersuit is another awesome, small detail. Unlike the smaller McFarlane figures, the undersuit on this Master Chief toy features that cell-like dot structure detailing. It’s featured so prominently that you can run your finger over it and feel the texture and yet the figure doesn’t seem to be boasting it - it’s a small feature that you won’t notice right away, but it’s awesome. Oh, and the figure’s hands. It has absolutely beautiful hands. The hand plate with the three weird lines is fully intact, as is the finger armor segmented into three parts all the way down to the figure’s finger tips; except on the pointer finger, which is unarmored - this is one-hundred percent accurate to the game model. The hands also have the alternating segments of that weird bumpy textures with what seems like smooth leather - also accurate to the in-game model. It’s just a thing of beauty.
The visor is a thing of its own to talk about. It doesn’t quite capture the vivid and deep oranges of the in-game model, but it does its best to approximate them. It’s got all of the details, like the layered black inlay, the lines that indicate where some of the HUD features go, and that beautiful honeycomb effect that McFarlane utilized for that huge Halo 4 Master Chief statue that I couldn’t afford. Overall, the visor is one of the best-done features of this figure and, since it’s such a prominent part of the character model, that was an important thing to nail. And nail it, NECA did.
About the paint job: it’s really hit or miss. I find that in some places, like the lower legs and feet, it looks really awesome. The shade of green is the correct dark shade from Halo 4 and they’ve washed it out with a darker silver, giving it a very handsome metallic quality. It’s quite effective at giving the paint job some beautiful character, especially in the arms and feet, where the silver makes it look as though to the suit is so worn that the paint may be coming off. The same can’t be said about the helmet. In Halo 4, we get many very good close-up profile shots of John-117’s Mk. VI helmet. It’s clear that it’s taken a beating since leaving cryonic sleep; it’s been shot at and dropped into a giant metal planet with only a piece of scrap metal to shield it from the fall. Paint is chipping and the edges are kind of worn down. The game does a very good job at detailing this. The figure does not. The paint job does a nice enough job of giving the helmet a worn metallic feel, but it’s immediately obvious to anybody who paid attention to the character in Halo 4 that the helmet paint is a mere approximation of the genuine article. That’s a shame, because a great paint job all around would’ve been a huge asset to this figure. Instead, the paint job seems simply passable in most places and kind of cheap in others.
As for accessories: this figure has a small number of them, but, given its size, that’s okay. The Master Chief comes equipped with his handy Pistol and Assault Rifle, straight from Halo 4. Both weapons are beautifully-painted and mostly accurate to the in-game models. They both feature removable pegs to allow them to be holstered to the Master Chief. There are small details on both that are off, like the Assault Rifle completely lacking that ammo counter and compass display it has in-game. That’s just been painted over with that metallic gray. The weapons also don’t seem as sturdy or hefty as the figure himself. They seem to be two halves simply glued together - they seem cheap and hollow. They’re huge, but they’re not terribly sturdy. They hold up well enough, but they’re obviously not meant to be exact replicas.
The figure also comes with a number of exchangable hands that had me scratching my head. The two hands that are attached to the figure are meant to wield the weapons on either side. One of the hands you can switch out allows the Master Chief to reliably grasp the barrel of the Assault Rifle. It’s a nice touch, given that the stock hand would’ve looked awkward doing such a thing. The peculiar thing is that NECA also chose to include a fist, presumably to allow the figure to look awesome while holding just the Pistol. The strange thing is that the fist hand is the figure’s right hand, meaning the Master Chief has to wield the Pistol left-handed in order to pose with this closed fist. As far as I know, the Master Chief is not naturally left-handed, so this is a strange choice by NECA. I can’t imagine it would’ve been too difficult to make a fist sculpt for the left hand, too. Oh well.
One thing I feel like noting before I bug out is that I really struggled to get a weapon into this figure’s hands. The hands meant to wield weapons are almost completely closed-fist, meaning you have to bend the fingers back and squeeze the handle of the weapon into them. Since the weapons feel so cheap and the Master Chief’s fingers aren’t exactly huge, this feels like a huge risk on such an expensive figure. I did finally manage to get a Pistol into John’s right hand, but it was a careful struggle. I don’t know if I plan on removing it or replacing it. I just wanted to make a note of this.
So that’s pretty much all she wrote. If I had the opportunity to buy this figure again, I wouldn’t regret it the second time. With that said, there are some major considerations you should take into account before slamming $100 for this guy. He’s haunted by problems like phantom falls, cheap accessories, a bit of poor articulation, and a relatively cheap paint job in some places, but, on the whole, he’s the spitting image of the Halo 4 Master Chief, one-fourth the size of a real person! You really can’t go wrong with that, so I would definitely recommend this figure as a display piece or as a collectible.
> 2533274811563426;992:
> > 2533274814347059;990:
> > Can we all agree that as awesome as the McFarlane figures were… they should just give up the rights to small-scale figures to NECA? I would love to see Halo figures in-line with their Predator series or other figures in that scale.
>
>
> No, I already have three full shelves of the things. It would not look good at all. We have Series 3 coming and if Halo 5 does well they might focus their attention on that.
See I would usually agree with a sentiment like yours, but the McFarlane figures are all out of scale… they really messed up on that in my opinion. The Halo 3, Reach, 4, and Universe lines have no coherent scale. I know because I had them integrated together but then had to separate them because the Reach figures were larger than the 3 figures and so on and it bugged the heck outa me. As for the next “series” of McFarlane figures… while I am excited for the figures, I can’t condone 3 figures as an entire series. We should be getting those soon and Halo 5 does not come out until next year. Factor in production time and whatnot, we’re looking at a year and a half wait until the Halo 5 line… I don’t want to wait to that long.
What I want is a new series of Halo figures that are all in scale with one another. A Spartan-III would be smaller than a Spartan-II, Marines and ODSTs would be smaller than Spartans, Elites and Brutes would be a bit larger than most figures, and so on. These figures would span across every Halo game as well as Halo’s extended universe. Imagine having obvious figures like Master Chief or Agent Locke, but also getting obscure figures like an SPI Spartan-III or the Prototype Suit as a special large-scale boxed-set? How cool would that be? Imagine being able to collect every iteration of Master Chief? Halo: FUD/Package, Halo: CE, 2, 3, 4, 5 all in their re-mastered editions so they can be placed next to each other without one looking out of place? I really think NECA would be the best choice for this to happen. Their Assassin’s Creed line was absolutely amazing coming with many accessories as well as alternate hands. The same goes for NECA’s Predator figures. I also love the size of these figures. They’re larger than McFarlane’s but not as large as say Play Arts figures. Best of all is that NECA’s figures are just as affordable as McFarlane figures. Anyway, I would gladly start a new shelf if something like this happened. I mean I have a Joyride shelf, Halo 3 shelf, Reach shelf, etc. I have no problem starting a new one. Oh also the NECA 18-inch is absolutely amazing, much better than the 12-inch from McFarlane.
I like the McFarlane Halo toys. I collect their Assassins Creed and The Walking Dead figures as well and I am very impressed. Sure the NECA AC figures were better but we literally got two characters, one Altair and a billion Ezios. I like McFarlanes line, and hope they continue. I have John, Blue Team, Black Team, Grey Team, Red Team, and almost every character they have put out. (Really want the Halo 3 co op pack.) They are good with even putting out some of the more obscure characters I am a bit shocked yet very delighted that we got. (Ur-Didact, Kelly, Fred, ect.) I love the figures, but wish they would focus on canon characters more then multiplayer Spartans and Elites. I at least got figures to make a rather inaccurate Black and Grey team. How nice would it be to actually get Halsey or Miranda though? Lasky and Locke are definately two current wants. I love my Halo figures, and have faith in McFarlane to keep satisfying my tastes. 
I only have one Halo toy, it’s an unopened Halo Actionclix set with the Chief
My 5 year old got so excited last weekend. His mom took him to the store to pick out a small gift from him to me. He picked out the Halo 5 master chief where he is in the cloak. My first Halo toy. Granted I am 31. Lol. My son was so excited to give it to me, right after I opened it he took it from me to play with it. Lol. I think he mostly wanted it for himself. Really made me what to get more Halo toys for collecting. They are so damn detailed.
Not gonna lie…that NECA review was off the chain! I ended up buying one of my own.
Lmao Ive never seen a halo toy up close I gotta get one!
> 2533274798228138;1038:
> Not gonna lie…that NECA review was off the chain! I ended up buying one of my own.
Neca?
> 2533274817288279;1040:
> > 2533274798228138;1038:
> > Not gonna lie…that NECA review was off the chain! I ended up buying one of my own.
>
>
> Neca?
Halo Toy producer that created the 18 inch MC figure reviewed above. My bad for not further clarifying. Essentially, the 18inch fig is incredible.
