When asked by my editor to review the new line of STIKFAS action figures, I first thought, “Yay! I get to play with toys!” My next thought was, “Wait a minute, what the hell is STIKFAS?” Then, I was introduced to the revolutionary world of fully posable, interchangeable 3-D chaos, an acid trip where Lego meets The Matrix, thanks to Mr. Ban Y.J. of Singapore and now Hasbro.

These small bundles of joy and ass-kicking are snapped out of plastic framework like the model cars you used to put together when you were young and lived in Wyoming. Built piece by piece, you can either fashion the figures to look like they are “supposed” to—which would be something not unlike if the antagonist robot with a drug addiction in Robocop 2 was forced to go clean and do 30 minutes of cardio a day on those video game machines where you dance to save your life, via the life-giving force that is Korean techno. Or you can alternatively play God and devise them according to your own sick, deranged interpretation of the Alien universe, and perhaps put together several little headless torsos or heads attached to legs, tormented, begging to be taken out of their misery.

“Geared for a new way to play?” The motto of the STIKFAS line. Obviously referring to the endless panorama of possibilities inherent in the new medium of fully rotational, lifelike motion, left to your mind to build and rebuild as you see fit. Not so obvious to me, as it were, for when I first heard this tagline, only one “new way” sprang to mind, and I followed its beckoning call: freebase cocaine. This should also explain the world’s longest sentence in paragraph 2. And the murders.

Doped up and delighted, I was ready to review the notorious toy line. Not really knowing what was expected and anxiously ready to kill the demons taunting me in my head, I decided to test them out in the best way my diseased brain knew how.

You see, when I was in high school, my best friend Jason and I had an idea. It was an idea about how to live the perfect life. Rather, what the perfect life would entail. Such a life included living on our own tropical island. We would tend the fair land, and spend most of our time in paradise with our hot, busty wives. And we would fight the bad guys.

Simple logic. If an Eden-esque island exists, and you are the sole proprietor of the island, there will be hot women; therefore, there will be bad guys. If you have paradise (island “A “and babes “B”) and you have bad guys “C,” you must protect “A” and “B” from “C.” It is the natural order. Your women will not want you if you do not earn your bones. So, you must fight the bad guys. And you must not lose. Because then, they will conquer your island and your women. And it’s back to Woodstown, New Jersey you go.

What does this have to do with action figures? Easy. If these tiny black robots were going to be the evolution of boyhood toys, then they were going to have to prove themselves. To prove themselves, yep, you guessed it, they would have to take out the bad guys.

It was time. I called up Jason, explained the situation to him, and we booked a flight to Antigua. We wouldn’t technically own the island, in a strictly Biblical sense, but we were confident that by week’s end, we would own the island, in the same vein that skinny guys own each other on internet message boards.

We had assembled the figures on the plane, in about 15 minutes. This was a plus. We were instructed to use “the tool” included to smooth the edges of the plastic and to disengage the parts from the framework. Doing this, we felt like “tools,” since this was the only “tool” we could use, considering that bringing any other “tool” onboard the plane would get us deported to Camp X-Ray.