u/WolfySimRacer

As some of you may have seen, I’m a huge fan of the Viper Element soft tip darts. I bought 2 sets (one was knurled) when I had a cheap plastic dartboard. Yes…just one set of the darts cost twice that of the board. That board broke after a couple of months so I went with a custom made Autodarts setup and never looked back.

With that said, I couldn’t sacrifice my Viper Elements so I converted them to steel tips, added a 1g weight to each, and used cheap Winmau flights because the Viper flights were too small. Sadly, the teeth on the aluminum shafts got bent so the flights were loose and the flights themselves were getting pretty beat up.

I decided to stick with Viper for the shafts and got the in-between carbon fiber versions. And, since I liked the cheap Winmau flights, I went with a nice set of thicker Winmau flights made of better materials.

I found upon testing them the back half of the darts were too light so I had to add another 1g weight. My first test throw was a triple 20 and after a few more tests, they fly just right. However, they are much longer than the previous configuration so I’m still getting used to that.

On an aesthetic note, the weights are not flattering looking. The pre-existing ones are tarnished from use so they don’t even match the new ones that came from the same set. And, they just don’t look good. I’ll probably buy a set of black 2g weights to replace them but that’s not a priority.

I’m playing Shock Troopers 2 on my AES and I’m finding it more and more fun. I’ve been a huge Metal Slug fan since the first time I played it on a red cab at the arcade in the mid-‘90s. I even own 1st Mission for my NGPCs and Metal Slug Advance for my GBAs. However, Shock Troopers 2 is growing on me pretty quickly. I played it a lot back in the day, too, but playing Metal Slug quite a bit lately, the variance in gameplay is refreshing. The major downside, of course, is the damn slowdown but even with that, I’m loving it.

Would it be sacrilege to say Shock Troopers 2 is a better game overall? Even more than Metal Slug 3?

I was gifted this like-new 7800 years ago from the original owner. They played it maybe 3 times and then boxed it up and put it away. I haven’t even touched it since I got it. It even has the plastic bag for the console itself. Not a single scratch.