Shooter History in Your Hand - SP Edition

Thanks to them, the universe is safe once again.

Shooter fans most likely already know about the Shooting History Gashapon toys from Yujin. Back in August, NCS (National Console Support) made sets of the five little ships available for pre-order. Now (via Kotaku) they have an offer for the new Shooting Game Historica Collection SP. The SP collection now has nine ships instead of five. The extra four are color variants of four of the others, but shooter pilots always need second-player ships right?

The SP collection includes the R-9A Arrowhead and variant from R-Type, a red Silver Hawk and a blue Silver Hawk from Darius Gaiden, the OF-1 Daedalus and variant from Image Fight (also in R-Type Final), and the Metalion and variant from Gradius 2. The one ship to not get a variant is the original Vic Viper T-301 from the Gradius series. In true Gradius fashion the Vic Viper and Metarion have an option trailing behind. The R-9A has the popular Force power-up in front with support bits above and below. The Daedalus has its support cannons and the Silver Hawks just look cool. The ships are 7cm long (that's just under 3 inches for all you Western folks) and have display stands. They also look to be very detailed for their size, but that's a given since they're from Japan, the miniature masters of the world.

NCS put up a pre-order for a case of the SP collection which includes twelve ships. They mention that the case should, and I emphasize should, include all nine different ships plus three duplicates. Hopefully when the cases are unboxed they actually will have all nine so there won't be any rare ones. You can pre-order the SP collection case or a set of the first five at NCS. Play Asia also has the regular collection up for pre-order, available randomly or in a case. The ships will be released sometime in February. There isn't much of anything in the way of merchandise from shooters, so I am all over these. I'm sure if these are successful enough (which I'm positive they will be) we'll be seeing another series of small shooter ships.

- Shawn - 11/30/07