stupid little toy craving

This one's for my cousin and her boyfriend who weren't sure whether I was joking or not about getting a Hot-Wheels play-set. The photo shows my freshly acquired Batman "Joker's Run" set with evidence of the take-out pizza we had and a discarded box of green-tea Pocky; so you know it's not somebody stock photo I stole off the web). ^_^

I guess I'll do a little review of the set. I'm not particularly well versed in Hot Wheels collecting so I couldn't tell you for sure, but I rather suspect this is one of those repackaged sets that Mattel threw together just because they recently got the DC-Comics license and who could blame them but to put DC characters on EVERYTHING? I also suspect the Batmobile that comes with this set is probably just a repaint of an existing "future car." But the bottom does indeed have a DC and 2007 copyright stamp. And since I haven't played with a genuine Hot Wheels brand toy car in ages, I'm highly entertained by how slick the axels are and can't help rolling it back and forth on the counter top...

The launcher is a little on the light side for my taste, I have to hold it down with both hands to make it actually work right. And it's deceptively wide-mouthed so there's absolutely no accuracy to it. You need to position the car very carefully to aim it at the ramp. Aside: the set comes with a spare elastics for the launcher.

Maybe it's my clumsy adult hands, but I'm having a horrible time just getting the car to hit the jump, never mind actually bothering with the timing. Oh, yeah, almost forgot, that "jaw" thing? It's a wind-up trap that opens and closes, so in order to hit that Joker billboard, you need to hit your jump when the trap is down. If it's open, Batman goes for a spectacular crash... well... as spectacular as a little die-cast car is going crash anyway.

Finally, the set comes with a completely useless Batman figurine standing about 1.5cm tall. I guess you could say it's almost to scale with the Batmobile... not really. All in all, this isn't any different than a cubicle toy you'd find in a novelty store. It's a little game I can play on my own so I'm thinking I'll stick it in my office for those later afternoons when nobody's around...