Tag Archives: Collectibles

This Attack on Titan Blind Box Has a $25 Gamepad You Won’t See Coming

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Blind box collecting has always run on a specific tension: you hand over money, you get a sealed package, and you don’t know what’s inside until it’s open. The appeal isn’t just the object, it’s the ritual, the anticipation, and the drive to complete the full set. That formula has worked for figures, keychains, and accessories for years. The Drakong PixelByte applies it to a gamepad.

The PixelByte Controller is a keychain-sized Bluetooth gamepad from Drakong, a gaming hardware brand under the Hyperkin umbrella. Each unit comes sealed in a blind box with no external indication of which character design is inside. Alongside the controller, every box includes a matching Chibi character charm and a collectible card. The first series is fully licensed around Attack on Titan, covering seven distinct designs across the lineup.

Designer: Drakong by Hyperkin

Those seven designs include Eren, Mikasa, Levi, Hange, Sasha, and Titan, plus an ultra-rare variant that appears in only one of every 30 boxes. Standard designs arrive at 1:6 odds per box, and a full case of six comes with no repeats across the common lineup. The ultra-rare replaces the common counterpart in those boxes, which means completing the set involves genuine unpredictability even when buying in bulk.

The controller works across iOS, Android, PC, Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, Mac, Steam, Linux, and Raspberry Pi via Bluetooth. Three switchable modes let it function as a gaming controller, a hybrid mouse-keyboard for productivity tasks like advancing slides or triggering PC hot keys, or simply as a fidget device between sessions. The D-pad can be remapped to replicate a thumbstick, and Turbo Mode is built in for rapid-fire inputs.

Battery life runs to approximately 12 hours per charge via USB-C. The integrated keychain loop clips onto bags, belt loops, console cases, or a set of keys, making it as carry-friendly as it is functional. The Chibi charm included in every box extends the collecting experience beyond the controller itself, giving fans two separate pieces to display alongside or separately from the hardware.

Drakong has confirmed additional series beyond Attack on Titan, spanning anime, games, and TV shows, without revealing which licenses come next. That open-ended roadmap is as central to the product’s long-term appeal as any single series. The blind box format was designed for repeat buying, and each new theme brings fresh character designs, new pull odds, and a fresh reason to try your luck again.

The Attack on Titan PixelByte Controller is priced at $24.99, or €24.99 and £19.99, and is available for pre-order through Drakong’s website, the Hyperkin store, and Amazon. That price point sits well within impulse-buy territory, which is almost certainly the point. For a collectible that clips to your bag and plays your games, the only downside is not knowing which character you’re taking home.

The post This Attack on Titan Blind Box Has a $25 Gamepad You Won’t See Coming first appeared on Yanko Design.

MSI Just Made a $7,000 Gaming Laptop You’d Want to Display on a Shelf

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Gaming laptops have spent years trying to close the gap with desktop performance, and for the most part, they’ve gotten reasonably close. The better ones can handle demanding titles at high settings, and a handful at the premium tier now approach desktop territory. But most of them still look and feel like what they are: portable tools dressed in aggressive angles and RGB trim. They don’t particularly feel like anything worth keeping once the next generation arrives.

The MSI Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Draco Epic doesn’t approach the laptop-as-product category the same way. Released as a 40th anniversary special edition, it’s built around the mythic narrative of Draco, the dragon constellation stationed near the North Star, and every element of the design carries that theme deliberately. The lid features five-layer silk screen printing, a Dragon RGB logo, and “Dragon Edition” lettered in Greek, with the 40th anniversary mark worked into the body. It comes with a limited-edition collector’s coin and a numbered Dragon Edition Mousepad and gaming mouse. It’s being positioned as a collector’s item first, and a laptop second.

Designer: MSI

That said, the hardware inside is no joke. The top configuration pairs an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU carrying 24 GB of GDDR7 memory, running through 270 W of total power via MSI’s OverBoost system. The RAM tops out at 96 GB of DDR5 at 6,400 MT/s across the retail SKU, with four SSD slots supporting SuperRAID 5 at up to 18,000 MB/s sequential read. In practical terms, that’s a machine that can run high-end creative workloads, handle 4K video rendering, and play anything currently available without compromise.

The display matches the hardware ambition. The 18-inch UHD+ Mini LED panel runs at 3840 × 2400 pixels, refreshes at 240 Hz, and hits 1,000 nits with full VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification. It covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color space and is per-unit calibrated at the factory, which is the kind of detail that matters for anyone doing color-sensitive creative work and not just gaming. The panel also supports G-Sync, making the 240 Hz meaningful in fast-paced games rather than just on paper.

Cooling runs through a vapor chamber design with a dedicated PCIe Gen 5 SSD cooling pipe, keeping the thermal load from the processor, GPU, and storage from competing with each other in a confined space. Connectivity is equally generous: dual Thunderbolt 5 ports offer up to 120 Gbps bandwidth, HDMI 2.1 handles external 4K output, and Wi-Fi 7 with Bluetooth 5.4 rounds out the wireless stack. The keyboard is a Cherry Mechanical unit with per-key RGB across 99 keys, which gives the typing experience a quality that most gaming laptops avoid investing in.

The bundle includes a copy of Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, a detail that adds a lighter counterpoint to the otherwise heavy mythology surrounding the machine. The full package, laptop, mouse, mousepad, coin, and game, comes in a premium color box. At $6,999, it’s clearly aimed at a very specific buyer. Practically speaking, it delivers desktop-replacement performance in a form factor that’s also been designed, for once, to sit on a shelf and look like something worth keeping.

The post MSI Just Made a $7,000 Gaming Laptop You’d Want to Display on a Shelf first appeared on Yanko Design.

Die-Cast Cars Grew Up: Meet Parksible, The Ultimate 1:64 Smart Motorized Parking Garage by Fun-Tech-Lab

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Parksible is a premium, smart motorized display garage created by Fun-Tech-Lab specifically for 1:64 scale die-cast cars. It replaces standard acrylic display cases with an automated vertical lift, app-controlled parking, gallery-grade adjustable lighting, and built-in environmental sensors, making it the ultimate interactive centerpiece for high-end desk setups and car-themed man caves.

Die-cast car collecting has come a long way from the days of plastic-lidded shoeboxes and bedroom shelves. Today’s collectors are far more deliberate about how and where their miniatures live, treating their 1:64 scale cars more like curated objects than childhood toys. Desks and personal workspaces have become the new display floors, and the bar for what a good display solution should look and do has risen considerably.

Designer: Fun-Tech-Lab

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 $528 (24% off). Hurry, only 377/500 left! Raised over $428,000.

That shift is exactly what Parksible is designed for. Built by Hong Kong-based Fun-Tech-Lab, it’s a motorized vertical garage for 1:64 scale model cars that combines automated parking, adjustable ambient lighting, app control, and environmental monitoring in a single desktop tower. It takes the hobby more seriously than most display solutions do, and the result feels genuinely new for collectors who’ve long outgrown ordinary shelving.

The core idea is surprisingly satisfying in practice. You place a car onto the entry tray, pick a parking slot from the app or the physical knob on the base, and let the motorized lift carry it into position. What used to be the mundane act of putting a model away starts feeling a lot more like parking a proper car in a proper garage.

To bridge the gap between physical collection and digital management, Parksible integrates several standout features:

Industrial Tower & Motorized Lift: Measuring 274mm x 400mm × 723mm, the transparent tower holds 14 cars on individual 90mm x 40mm trays. The permanently visible motorized lift mechanism turns the act of parking into a captivating desktop attraction.

Cinematic Gallery-Grade Lighting: Adjustable brightness lets the garage shift from a soft ambient glow to exhibition-grade illumination, providing cinematic lighting that perfectly highlights the paint details of your 1:64 collection without tacky RGB effects.

App-Controlled Digital Archive: The companion app turns your smartphone into a proper control panel. Assign parking slots remotely, switch display modes, and manage a digital counterpart of your physical inventory that you can browse from anywhere.

Parksible PRO Vision: The PRO model features a built-in recognition camera that identifies each model by shape as it’s being parked. It instantly syncs the car to your digital garage inventory and includes an exclusive 360-degree viewing feature.

Environmental Sensors & Local Control: Built-in temperature and humidity sensors monitor your valuable collection around the clock. Even without a phone nearby, a 2.79-inch on-device display and a physical control knob handle all operations locally, backed by power-loss protection to keep parked models perfectly secure.

At 723mm tall, Parksible is a substantial piece of hardware that’s meant to be seen rather than tucked away. Its 14-slot format works best as a rotating gallery of a collector’s current favorites rather than a comprehensive inventory solution. It’s an approach to model-car ownership that has a lot more in common with how people style a living space than how they fill a storage box.

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 $528 (24% off). Hurry, only 377/500 left! Raised over $428,000.

The post Die-Cast Cars Grew Up: Meet Parksible, The Ultimate 1:64 Smart Motorized Parking Garage by Fun-Tech-Lab first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Totaled “Not Wheels” by MSCHF is an unexpected addition to the Hot Wheels universe

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Ever since its inception, Hot Wheels changed the dynamics of toy car models that were cooler and performed better than any other toy back in the late 1960s. Even after more than six decades, the iconic brand has the same enthusiasm for a set of Hot Wheels.

Some early models are now prized collectibles since they were created only in a handful of units. While every car lover has had his/her collection of Hot Wheels cars ranging from hot rods to supercars, the brand has thought out of the box this time to create a Not Wheels sedan.

Designer: MSCHF and Mattel Creations

The idea comes from the creative pool of MSCHF, a streetwear brand known for its off-the-wall designs. It’s their first-ever Hot Wheels collectible, and going by the packing labels and text, it seems this is certainly not their last. The beat-up car inside the clear packaging carries the label “HW Normal Cars” on the front, hinting there could be more coming. This heavily used car look is inspired by the 1990s Japanese import scenario when worn-out cars were the norm.

This “Not Wheels” car has a missing wheel and two Real Riders classic tires, ensuring it doesn’t roll like any other Hot Wheels. To complete the busted look, the car has a yellow spare and a rusted hub. The rugged look continues onto the body with dents, incomplete repairs and dents scarring the exterior. MSCHF wasn’t going to stop there and went all in with a cracked windshield, hanging seat belts and dirty-fogged rear window with “WASH ME” finger inscribed to complete the theme.

There are cheap fix-ups dotting the bodywork including, mismatched doors and taped-on taillights. If you look closely, the cracked windshield has a yellow parking ticket hooked onto the wipers. Definitely, this car has been ditched for a long as the headlights are all fogged up. The $30 totaled vehicle scale model is all set to be released for buying on August 30 and this one will sell like hotcakes for its exclusivity. You could sport it in your post-apocalyptic diorama, industrial-themed desk or even shoot a short movie with a couple of these Hot Wheels mixed along with the more exotic ones.

 

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