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Hillside Victorian deck (part 1)

May 6, 2012 / / 2 Comments

After completing the Hillside Victorian’s hot tub, I turned my attention to the deck. I’m using an old kit from Betty’s Wooden Miniatures. The dollhouse store had it marked down from $50 to $30 because they weren’t sure if all the pieces were there.

Since I was planning to bash the hot tub into the deck, I thought about just buying strip wood coming up with my own design, but $30 seemed reasonable for the amount of wood that came with it and a set of basic instructions to follow. Plus, there used to be a version of the kit that came with a hot tub and those instructions were included, so I figured that would make the bashing that much easier.

The first step was to build four supports, to be distributed evenly across the MDF base.

Since mine would have a hot tub in the corner, the stairs wouldn’t extend all the way across the deck, so I only built three of these.
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A hot tub for the Hillside Victorian – MBS kit review

April 24, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Since my Hillside Victorian came with a French door added to the first floor, I decided to put in a deck. The room just inside that door is the master bedroom so I thought a private deck with hot tub would be nice.

My local dollhouse shop used to stock a Betty’s Wooden Miniatures deck kit with a built-in hot tub that seems to have been discontinued a long time ago. At some point they sold out of the kit with the hot tub and all they had left was a version without the hot tub. So, I bought a separate hot tub kit with the plan of bashing it into the deck. I’ll cover the hot tub kit now, and the deck itself in a later post.

The kit is MBS brand and it’s available at Miniatures.com. I’ll start by saying that at $40, this is a pricy kit considering what you get. It’s all plastic, even the “wood.” If I’d known that I might not have bought it. The Miniatures.com description does refer to plastic siding but I didn’t make the connection. The kit comes with instructions for making the plastic look like wood, but it’s a labor intensive process… much more so than staining would have been.

The tub itself is a molded piece of plastic that looks more or less like a hot tub. They recommend painting the underside, so the paint shows through under a nice shiny finish. This would be easy-peasy with a solid color, but for “marbling” it’s problematic since you can’t keep covering up and blending until you get the effect you want… you’re pretty much stuck with whatever you paint first showing up as the top layer.

Throwing caution to the wind, I started with splotches of white and light blue, applied with an almost-dry toothbrush. After taking the photo above I added some gold, just for kicks.

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Get reacquainted with Gabriel Knight, then give his momma some money

April 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments


Grace: “I feel like there’s something else out there, waiting for us. Do you think we’ll ever find it?”
Gabriel: “Never know, Gracie. One of these days we just might.”

Two things. One: the Gabriel Knight behind-the-scenes article I wrote for Games™ last year has just been posted on their website. This is a retrospective that delves into the development of the Gabriel Knight trilogy, developed at Sierra On-Line in the 1990s, that I wrote back when the thought of ever seeing a new Gabriel Knight game was nothing but a ridiculous pipe dream. Go read it.

Two: After several years making casual games, Jane Jensen, creator of Gabriel Knight (and, more recently, Gray Matter) has gone rogue, launching her own studio with the plan to return to GK-style adventure games. She hopes to ramp up to making two or three new games a year. I’m sorry, could somebody pinch me? What with Telltale’s Sam & Max revival, then Tales of Monkey Island, then Tim Schafer’s insanely successful Kickstarter campaign, I feel like LucasArts fans have had all the breaks. Well, not anymore. At 73% funding with 26 days to go, Jane’s well on her way to bringing us a brand new adventure game by this time next year… maybe two, if all goes well. You can learn all about it here.

A new Gabriel Knight game is still a pipe dream for now, but a somewhat less ridiculous one since I wrote that Games™ article a year ago. Activision, who owns the old Sierra properties, has already shown interest in reviving King’s Quest. And Jane’s confident that starting Pinkerton Road Studio is a step in the right direction for someday making a new Gabriel Knight. (And hey, if that’s what Jane Jensen thinks, who are you to argue? Go give her money already!)

Okay, I lied when I said “two things.” Here’s one more: the Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers theme song performed by a live orchestra. It’s surprisingly moving.

Full disclosure: I helped Jane with PR for the Pinkerton Road announcement. But I’m also one of her biggest fans in the world, and I would be pimping this project no matter what!

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