Hey motherf***ers, it's Mace Windu here, the most important guy in all of Star Wars.  Well, it's about time this hoody motherf***er reviewed Mace Windu. Been a long time since he reviewed Star Wars. Uh, uh, Mr. Windu?  I'm sorry. I'll save all your f***s.  I'm sorry, Mr. Windu. Why's my lightsaber blue? I'm sorry, Mr. Windu, but, uh, Mr. 788 is reviewing Mace from G.I. Joe, not Mace Windu from Star Wars. What? Mother f***! Hello everybody hooded Cobra Commander 788 here, it's time for another vintage G.I. Joe toy review. We have a new patron. I need to give a codename to Alan O'Keefe. Alan told me he likes Beachhead and Frostbite. Very difficult to combine those two things, but after much deliberation I have decided Alan will be known as the Snow Ranger. Thank you for your support Snow Ranger, it's much appreciated. Speaking of patrons, not long ago I gave patrons the opportunity to vote for a review of Mace, an unsung figure from 1993.   I'm also a little worried about how much time we're spending in the 80s this year. There's still plenty to review in the 90s, and if we don't get to it soon, the last few years of this project are going to be a real drag. The 1990s was a mixed bag, we got a lot of really ugly G.I. Joe figures, we got a few really great ones, I try to point out the best of the 90s when I can. But today we're not going to talk about the good or the bad, we're going to talk about a rarer animal, the mediocre 1990s figure. HCC788 presents the guy who's so undercover you probably forget that he exists, 1993s Mace. This is Mace, G.I. Joe's undercover operative from 1993. This figure was available in 1993 only, it was discontinued for 1994. This figure came very late in the G.I. Joe toy line, the line was ended in 1994. Mace was intended to be part of DEF, but it was issued in Battlecore instead. DEF, which stands for Drug Elimination Force, was a subset of G.I. Joe figures issued in 1992. There was to be a 1993 DEF lineup, but it was canceled and the figures were folded into Battlecore. Mace is a Battlecore figure. Battlecore has a unique origin, as told in Mark Balomo's Ultimate Guide to G.I. Joe 3rd Edition. Hasbro had a planned subset for G.I. Joe called BattleScan, and the figures would have had an audio player in them that would play sound clips. But BattleScan was canceled, the technology didn't work out, it may have been too expensive to produce. Most of the figures planned for BattleScan were issued without the audio technology and the set was changed to Battlecore. Battlecore didn't have any special gimmick, other than the spring-loaded missile launchers which had become pretty standard for G.I. Joe figures by the time. It was the core set of figures for 1993. Figures for other canceled sets, like DEF, also became Battlecore figures. That's why the 1993 Battlecore lineup was so huge. There were 38 carded figures, that's not including vehicles and vehicle drivers. As an undercover operative, Mace would be part of the intelligence wing of G.I. Joe. There were a few previous intelligence, counter-intelligence, and undercover agents. These were the spies of the series. In 1982, Scarlett was the counter-intelligence officer. She was the spy hunter. In 1984, the Baroness was in charge of Cobra Intelligence. Also in 1984, Zartan was the master of disguise. His siblings would also fill that role. In 1985, Lady J was in charge of covert operations. And in 1987, Chuckles was the undercover agent. He had exactly the same job that Mace has in 1993. In 1989, Scoop was sort of a spy. It wasn't his specialty, but in the animated series, he started out as a Cobra agent spying on G.I. Joe. In 1993, we had new versions of Scarlett and Zartan that was the same year that Mace was introduced. Espionage was not a big part of G.I. Joe, but there were a few spies in the line. I have the full card back for Mace, and that's a nice way to see how this figure was marketed at the time. We have some card art that is acceptable, but not exceptional. It's pretty typical of 1990s G.I. Joe card art. And a big step down from the classic card art of the 80s. Looks like this figure was $2.99 at Toys R Us. We have the G.I. Joe logo, then we have the Battlecore logo. I don't really consider Battlecore to be a sub-team. It's really just the main line of G.I. Joe figures for that year. Looks like he has his giant missile launcher on his shoulder, but it is not on his shoulder. We will talk about that later. The figures were numbered for some reason, Mace's number 29. Behind where the figure was on the blister, we have instructions for how to use the battle stand and the spring-loaded missile launcher. Flipping it around to the other side, we have the cross-sell with the other figures that were available at the time. We have an advertisement for a couple of the other sub-teams. We have a flag point. Then we have the file card, and we will take a closer look at the file card a little later in this video. Let's look at Mace's accessories. I have his helmet and missile launcher off. I will demonstrate those later. Let's look at the others first. Almost all of these accessories are reissues. There's very little new here, and most of the accessories came on a plastic tree like this. Kids would have to cut them off themselves. Only the helmet and the missile launcher did not come on the tree, and all of the accessories are this marigold color, except for the missile launcher. He came with more accessories than he can carry, which is a pet peeve of mine. He had rifle number one, which is a long bullpup style rifle. And this is a reissue of the rifle that originally came with 1990 ambush, looking much better in black. He came with rifle number two, looking a bit more like a submachine gun. This is a reissue of the weapon that came with 1992 shockwave version two. Again, looking much better in black. This looks very similar to the submachine gun that originally came with 1988 hit and run. But side by side, you can see they are quite different. That is not a reuse of the same mold, though it does look like they were trying to recreate the same weapon. The file card calls this an automatic street sweep assault rifle. Whatever, I think this is a Colt SMG. He had this oversized pistol looking thing, and this is a reissue of the weapon that came with 1990 updraft. It is very similar to the pistol that came with 1985 Tomax and Zemot. But side by side, again, you can see it is not a reuse of that same mold. It is quite different. The file card calls this a rapid fire steel plated short rifle, which makes absolutely no sense at all. He came with a knife, a very small knife in that yellowy marigold color. This is a reissue of the knife that came with 1991 low light. And don't all of these accessories look really great in black? Let's not forget the figure stand. Always the best accessory on 90s figures since 80s figures did not come with them. Mace had a helmet. I am not sure why an undercover operative needed a helmet. Especially a very strange looking helmet like this. It will fit on his head, but it's a tight fit. It is hard plastic, so it doesn't give very much. It has one eye cut out, so you can kind of line it up and see his eyeball through there. And it has this very large tab on the right side. The strangest part of this helmet, the missile launcher attaches to it. That's right. You're supposed to put this tab in this slot on the bottom of the missile launcher. Slide that in and there you go. He now has a helmet mounted missile launcher. Oh good.  That's right. He has a head mounted missile launcher. It does not have a grip. It does not have an alternative way for him to hold it. Someone designed it and another person approved it, and nobody in the production process stopped it before it happened. Why does it fit into the helmet? I'm developing a hypothesis that all these 90s spring-fired missile launchers were made of styrofoam. That's the only way they could exist in universe. All of them are oversized for the figures, but the figures all hold them one-handed. This one supposedly fits on a helmet without breaking the guy's neck. Of course, if you attempted to launch a rocket from a styrofoam launcher, it would disintegrate. Which leads me to believe these missile launchers were for intimidation purposes only and never to be fired. The missile launcher itself is black. It has a yellow trigger and some detail on it. The file card calls this a missile firing stealth gun with built-in silencer. Well, those certainly are words other than missile firing that does not remotely describe this object. The figure came with two yellow missiles and I'll show you how to fire them now. Place the missile into the launcher barrel with the notch side up. Press it all the way back until it clicks. And let's test it out with our favorite target Dr. Meinvender. Just press down on the yellow trigger in the back to fire. Aim and fire. That's a really powerful spring in this one. And of course you have two shots in case you miss. Why does an undercover guy need this? Where is he going undercover that this would be appropriate? You know what accessory I want my undercover guy to have? A pistol with a holster. You can keep all this other stuff with the exception of maybe the knife and just give my guy a pistol and a holster. Let's take a look at Mace's articulation. He had the articulation that was standard for GI Joe figures well before 1993. He could turn his head from left to right and look up and down. He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow that allowed him to bend his arm at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep that allowed him to swivel his arm all the way around. This was an O-ring figure meaning the figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could move his legs apart about so far. He could bend his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and bend at the knee about 90 degrees. And yes that knee joint is really tight on this one. Let's look at the sculpt design and color for Mace. And I can say he is made of all unique parts. Nothing is reused from earlier figures. And that was unusual for 1993. On his head he has blonde hair. His eyes and his eyebrows are in a light brown color which is fine. At least they didn't give him blonde eyes. It's always weird when they do that. Some have commented on the odd shape and look of Mace's face. And yeah it is an unusual face sculpt but I can't say too much negative about it because he kind of looks like a guy I knew in high school. On his chest he has a black jacket with a yellow undershirt. He has a yellow pistol in a yellow holster. On a yellow strap with a yellow pouch. That is a harness that has yellow painted straps that go around his back and over his shoulders. And he has what looks like some kind of communications microphone and a cord that runs inside his jacket. That's a nice detail but he doesn't come with any other communications equipment. Maybe a communications backpack would have been appropriate. This color on the chest of the figure does pretty closely match the color on the accessories. So I'm sure that's why they went with this color for the accessories. But that is a very bright kind of a loud color. And you know what other color would have gone great with this figure? Black. Black accessories would have looked just fine. On his arms he has black sleeves for his jacket and black gloves. There is no paint on the arms at all. The arms are very plain. On his waist piece we have an extension of that black jacket over khaki trousers that covers his belt so we don't get a detailed belt or anything like that. Waste piece is very plain. On his legs we have those khaki trousers. On his right leg we have black grenades with a black strap that goes around his thigh. We have an unpainted pocket on his left leg. The legs are otherwise pretty plain. There are some sculpted in seams on the trousers. That's not bad. It's a little touch of detail but not very much.  This figure top to bottom is remarkably plain. Plain is the best description I can give for this figure. It has sparse paint applications and few colors. Despite this I like its understated quality. It's a nice contrast to a lot of what we got in the 90s. They could have done something else with this figure. Does Mace remind you of anyone? What about Chuckles? He has the same specialty, the same hair color. He fills the exact same role on the team. Take away all the weird accessories. Give him a slightly different head sculpt. Yeah I admit that face doesn't look much like Chuckles. But Mace could have been Chuckles version 2. Which we did not get in the vintage line. As it happens there was a planned Chuckles battle scan figure. But it was never released. We had a shot at Chuckles version 2 but we didn't get it. But just make Mace Chuckles version 2. It would have been a nice update. Let's take a look at Mace's file card. This is a 90s file card. So it's a little different from what we were used to in the 80s. Instead of a file folder shape. It is a rectangular file card with rounded corners. There is a copy of the artwork on the front of the card that has a list of the features on the figure. And I'm not going to go over those. I already talked about some of those when we looked at the accessories. Then we have a closer portrait of Mace here at the top. His code name is Mace. He is an undercover operative. His file name is Thomas S. Bowman. His primary military specialty is undercover surveillance. Secondary military specialty is intelligence. His birthplace is Denver, Colorado. And his grade is E8. It has a quote here. Presumably from Mace himself. It says, I always had the last laugh on Cobra criminals right after I locked them up. That has to be one of the least interesting quotes on any file card. This paragraph says, After years of undercover work gaining the trust of high-level criminals, Mace has managed to infiltrate some of the largest criminal syndicates in the world. While concealing his true identity, he leaks valuable information to his battle core partners who use the information to raid crime warehouses and bust unsuspecting Cobra villains. Every day, Mace stays undercover. His life is in jeopardy. But to him, no risk is too great to continue the war against crime and to protect the innocent. From the Colorado Rockies to the shores of Tripoli, Mace is always ready to fight for what's right. This file card is super dull. It doesn't hold a candle to Chuckles' file card. It also reads like it was adapted from an earlier DEF file card. Like they wrote a DEF file card for Mace first, but when they discontinued DEF, they just changed it for battle core. This doesn't sound like a Larry Hama file card. I was hoping it would explain why he's called Mace. Is that a nickname? Taking a look at how Mace was used in G.I. Joe Media, well that is brief. He had no appearances in the animated series, and he had no appearances in the comic book series to my knowledge. Looking at Mace overall, there's nothing outrageous about this figure. There's nothing glaringly bad, but it's a bit bland and boring. The head sculpt is a little weird. Despite that, maybe because of that, I really like this figure. It just feels right to me. It's not overdone in an era when they used to overdo everything. The accessories, forget about the accessories. Other than the figure stand, I could lose all of them. This is a figure that needs a pistol and a holster. That's all he needs, and he didn't come with either. The character, like the figure, is a bit bland. His file card is less colorful than Chuckles, his most direct predecessor. I don't think this file card was written by Larry Hama. It reads like it was written by a marketing guy, not a creative guy. I can't give a figure a lot of credit for being plain and not having a lot of paint apps, even if I personally like it. Can I save it from the bottom tier? I think so, but just barely. Mace's understated color scheme makes him stand out and rise above the majority of the figures from 1993.  And that makes him special. The one thing that keeps me from moving the figure higher is the missed opportunity of not making this figure the second version of Chuckles. If this had been the second version of Chuckles, this would not be a forgotten figure. That was my review of Mace. I hope you enjoyed it. Hey, we gotta look at all of them, and they can't all be snake eyes. Next week is the five-year anniversary of the channel. I have a special review planned. It's something rare, so it fits with our theme this year. I invited viewers to send in video clips to be included in that anniversary video. The deadline for that has already passed. I'm sorry if you missed it. By the time you see this, I will already be putting that video together. Thanks for five amazing years. Thanks for all the friendships and the fun and the support. Someday this project will end, but I hope many years after that, I will still be calling a lot of you friends. For now, we still have a lot of GI Joe to review. If you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel, please consider doing so and hit the notification bell so you don't miss any videos. Please give this video a thumbs up and share it with your friends. You can find me on social media, on Facebook and Twitter, and I have a website, hcc788.com. I'll be back next week with a special GI Joe toy review, and until then remember, only GI Joe is GI Joe.


So in Tears of the Kingdom, there's a lot of new we have learned over the last month, including obviously all the previews yesterday. But there's one thing from the previews I wanted to give extra attention to. It is something that I don't think is getting enough individual attention. And we're talking about how Tears of the Kingdom has actually improved things from Breath of the Wild. And we're not talking about like the new abilities, fusing, Ultra Hand, that stuff is awesome. And that's new. We're actually talking about issues that maybe we didn't complain that much about in Breath of the Wild, but probably should have. And how Nintendo flipped it on its head, realized it was a problem, and made it better in Tears of the Kingdom. Now before I do that, I gotta remind you, we do have a giveaway going on right now for a Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Nintendo Switch OLED Edition. Picking that one up tomorrow for you guys. We also have the Tears of the Kingdom Collectors Edition we're giving away and a pin from PAX East. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate all the support. We're on our road to 133,000 subscribers right now to match 133 years of Nintendo. So I would appreciate it if you would go ahead and hit the subscribe button and maybe hit the bell icon. Well, you're at it. Now, Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece. It is my favorite game of all time. I have put more hours into that game this generation than any other video game in existence. I am just, I've always been a massive Zelda fan. And while before Breath of the Wild came out, my favorite game of all time was Secret of Mana. Breath of the Wild overtook it pretty quickly. Now I got to actually go hands on with the game back at E3 2016. So I had a pretty good idea. The Breath of the Wild based on hands on impressions had a chance to become my favorite game and it pulled it off. And this is despite the fact that missing several traditional Zelda things that I love, but also it introduced so much more that I love even more than what I thought I love Zelda for that I ended up really enjoying the game. But that doesn't mean there weren't little annoyances or minor things that could have used an improvement. And just looking at quality of life in general, Tears of the Kingdom has taken a lot of those minor annoyances and just completely eliminated them. So first off is the improved menu system, right? Now instead of using our right stick and just jamming it left and right, one of the multiple pages of materials and stuff to get to where we wanna be, you just use R and L and the inventory then just expands vertically instead of horizontally. And that alone just makes inventory management so much easier even after sorting your inventory over and over in Breath of the Wild. It just is a little minor annoyance. I think it's something most of us just got used to. We just accepted this is how it works, but it still was just not really that intuitive. And obviously when you see things like how awesome this new menu system is, it makes you wonder why Nintendo can't seem to figure out better navigation and better content suggestions and things like the eShop. When they have people like the Zelda team just walking in, taking a system that functionally worked but was a little clunky and deciding we're gonna completely overhaul that menu system and just make it so much better. Now, one thing that did remove from the menu system, of course, was your quest log, your activity log, right? Where you're gonna see what you need to do next. They were smart about this actually and put that in the map section. So again, this just goes along with how they have redesigned that UI and allowed us to just put the quest where they should be because oftentimes, quests give us markers on maps and help tell us where to go. So it makes sense for the quest log to be tied to the map area. And obviously in the map area, it mostly just works, the map basically works exactly the same as it did before except now you can go between the sky and the ground because there's different maps in different regions. Now, what I also thought was really cool for a quality of life improvement and this is one I didn't think that much about but actually makes a lot of sense because again, it's one of those things we just got used to in Breath of the Wild. But when Nintendo Life went and showed us how we can just quickly drop and pick up new items when our inventory is full. So essentially you can go pick up a weapon and it'll be like, oh, your inventory's full, right? And then you have to go into your inventory maybe to see the item level of your weapons or you'd have to go into your quick select menu and just pick a weapon and then throw it. It was a little clunky, right? Like we'd all just got used to it and accepted that's the way it was. Well, that's all the team was like, that doesn't need to be the way it is. So you pick up a weapon and it instantly will pop up the little quick select menu showing you your item levels and letting you quickly drop one and pick up the new one. I just find this to be really intuitive and it is something that Nintendo, you know, just took breath of the wild and said, you know what, we can do that better. It's just a nice quality of life improvement. And then in general, they did this thing to cooking, right? So yeah, we have the new cooking pot and everything and that's cool. And that's a quality of life improvement just to allow us to cook anywhere with an actual cooking pot because that's the one thing we couldn't carry with a cooking pot rather than we could start fires when we couldn't put our own pot on top of the fires. So having a portable cooking pot is a nice quality of life improvement. And I liked that it's limited to a one-time use because it makes it more strategic in how you use it.  I'm good with that. But, and you can collect multiple of them, right? So it's not like, hey, you can only cook one meal. Well, if you collected like 99 of these things, you can make probably as many meals as you need. What I do find interesting though is what they did with the recipes, right? So we technically had recipes in Breath of the Wild but it was clunky. It wasn't great. It wasn't fun to use and it was a little weird to go through it. And a lot of people probably never even realized that there were recipes, right? Like, it just wasn't very fun to use. And what they did is they expanded upon that recipe system, given us full images, much easier to digest, much more pleasurable to go through and apparently just easier to find.  Now, one improvement I wish they would have added is when you open up the recipe menu, if you have the ingredients and want to make that recipe, they should have put a one button press to just cook that recipe if you have the needed ingredients. That is one improvement I wish they would have put in here. They didn't do it. Who knows if they do a third game in this Breath of the Wild style, maybe that's something they can look and do for a future quality of life improvement but they still stepped the game up over Breath of the Wild and it's still a much appreciated addition. Besides that, they did another quality of life improvement that I think some people are either gonna take or leave, I don't know. And this has to do with shooting arrows in slow-mo mode. So you know when you jump up in the air and you consume stamina and you're in slow-mo shooting arrows? Well, now your stamina only gets consumed if you shoot an arrow and it appears to be about a third, a quarter to a third of your stamina wheel gets eight. So if you have just one stamina wheel, you could fire three, maybe four arrows before your stamina wheel is depleted. So your stamina wheel isn't just like you're slowly falling and it's depleting your stamina the whole time. Nope, it only gets depleted if you fire the arrow. If you re-put the arrow in your quiver, you don't lose that stamina. And I think a lot of this was the combat sky combat because also what they did with this arrow ability is we've only got like a single screenshot of it but you can now that that whole diving and shooting arrow thing that we saw in the patent, that's real, that's a thing. And that's just an improvement to bow combat and bow aerial combat. And I feel like they changed how this worked because we are falling from such high heights. We don't wanna waste all our stamina when we're necessarily in combat. You only want that stamina wasted in the sky if you're fighting something mid-air. It makes a lot of sense to handle things in the way that they chose to handle it here. So I also think it just happens to be an improvement in general, whether it is something that they did different than Breath of the Wild and that is just stupidly exciting for me. Now maybe there's some other quality of life improvements you guys noticed in the previews. I don't remember there being a whole lot besides the stuff I mentioned. Everything else seems to just be brand new mechanics, brand new things in the world. But you guys let me know what you think about all this stuff down in the comments below because to me, that's the stuff that kind of stood out to me so much in these previews. It wasn't the new. We knew the new was gonna be there. It's that they took the old and they said, we can do that better. I like that. Thank you guys so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video.