“Go forth - none shall escape the hunt.”
While waiting for Eljay’s reviews of the G2 combo models, I got to thinking a lot about the G2 sets. Primarily about the Lord of Skull Spiders, since he is one of my favorite G2 sets and the fact he got no combiner model. Well, no official one ways. All the other 2015 sets got combined or “combined.” And while certainly debatable, the only other G2 set that did not get a proper combiner was Umarak the Hunter.
I am counting the Elemental Creatures attaching to the Toa to be a combiner of sorts. I know Umarak can have them on as well, so maybe I should lump him in as a combiner by my definition, but eh. He and LoSS are also the only two villain sets of their waves, so they have that in common. Regardless, I thought they would be good candidates for a combined form.
And I have never limited myself to just two sets before, so I thought it be a fun exercise. As for some additional clarification, I also included the extra pieces as listed on Bricklink for the respective sets. I don’t think I ended up using them, as I didn’t use all the pieces, but you can see what I had left below.
Hunting Lord:
Designer Notes: For building the guy, I originally wanted a gearbox like the 2015 sets. And while building a custom gearbox was easy with the pieces available, I failed to find a way to make them stiff/poseable like the 2015 ones. Outside of just locking them in place, which I didn’t want to do. I also made some attempts to have a gearbox for flapping wings and/or lunging spider legs, but none of those attempts worked out either.
I eventually abandoned that hopeful idea and started working on the legs. Though I mostly had an idea how I thought they would be built and little changed in that process. But I also forgot how few 3m axels I had to work with in the combiner, all of which went into the legs. That proceeded to make things surprisingly more difficult for the torso than I thought. Just not used to have such a limited supply of 3 length axels.
For the lantern gun/decapitated head gun part, that sort of just randomly came into being. I wasn’t sure what to do with the torso, so I figured I’d start building the weapon. I initially was going with a simple bayoneted rifle, but through some experimentation I thought it would look cooler as a head. And I intended to use it as the guy’s head, but realized I didn’t have any good way for connecting it. So it got converted into the item he now holds and the sword was given a random hilt. Not the most stable connection for the sword, but it held up in the shake tests.
As for the torso, I didn’t want to do Umarak the Hunter’s build. I could have, but that felt a bit lazy and I had a ton of pieces still left to use. So I ended up going more old school and giving him a more Sidorak torso build. Which did create problems I didn’t think about, both width and flatness. There were plenty of flat armor and body pieces to just slap on Technic beams in G1, but of course all CCBS needs to stick on ball joints. So any armor would have to stick out, which meant I needed to fill it with something, possibly making too thick of a build.
I think I ended up doing okay in this aspect. He may be a bit too wide, but it isn’t too horrible. Though something I did absolutely wanted to do from the start was have the LoSS chest add-on piece and the Umarak one to line up. It just seemed perfect with those eyes and mouth for an additional creepy look. I did try some attempts before when I started building the combo, but this final one just came naturally. Barely thought about it, it just clicked. Works surprisingly well in my opinion, though I’m sure if I had more parts to work with it could be even better.
Creature:
Designer Notes: After I had finished the guy, I still had a good number of parts left over. And most importantly to me, the Unity piece was still unused. Most of my earlier experimentations had that piece in the torso, especially for gearboxes, but that didn’t play well with the old titian style. But I figured if most of the Creature builds could pretty much still work without that piece, then the reverse should also be true.
Not much in way of intention for the critter, just parts mostly strapped together at random. The only real intention was to use most of the larger parts left. I think it ended up fairly cute…whatever it is. Some sort of one-eyed elephant spider monster? The front legs are stuck, due to the axel size limitation. The back ones can be adjusted to a limited extent. But, yeah, that’s pretty much it for the little guy.
Close Ups:
Extra Parts:
So, yeah. I think I did okay, given what I had to work with. Most definitely can be done better, probably other creatures that could be made from this. Let me know of ways you would have combined these two sets or other G2 sets.