Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Sonic & The Human Skulls

Ooo an odd title for this one!

This one is more fitting for halloween, but that's for in a minute. This week's update was clothing and fan-made items. I had to get the rest of the short sleeves out of the bin before it was fully into the fall 2007 season for Sonic clothes. It is already known that TopHeavy is going to do a line of long-sleeve tees with new and different Sonic images on them. The photos and info will come to SonicGear as soon as these new shirts are discovered, probably in a Sears.

The odd title of the week comes from one of the shirts that went up in the update. The light blue tribal Sonic shirt actually has human skulls mixed into the design. They're difficult to notice because they're a part of the 'echo' of the design--but they're there, and fairly realistically too.

It's no big deal, but it is kind of strange. If anyone was going to be hanging around with skullish designs you'd think of Shadow, but not this time. I also think it's unique in that it's the only item where anyone from a Sonic game appears with something like that. Sure, in the games there were levels with 'ghostly' themes and 'dia de los muertos' type skeleton prisoner/ghost decorations but all that was fake/spooky.

Still. It is interesting that TopHeavy went this way with the design. Will we see more in the future? So long as the presentation is cool, and they don't keep spamming repeat-stock art over and over (let's see some new poses! Let's throw in some more chars! Where's Knuckles, he's cool!) then it's all good.

The others are fan items, including a clever alarm and some chao theme items. The chao-theme things are good, but ST always surprised me in this area. They SO EASILY could of treated these guys like pokemon and released a whole slew of awesome Chao things like little PVCs, shirts/pillows/plushes/toys even simple stickers! You can raise SUCH a variety of chao, and players can easily get attached to their own chaos so they would want to buy something that looks similar. No one knows why they didn't.

The alarm used a relativly obscure method for its creation. It was vacume-formed. This is where you use an actual vacume cleaner, and a special rig to form heated plastic over a mould. Then, you can take the plastic off the top and you have half a 'case' or whatever it was you were trying to make. This method was partially popularized by people making Star Wars Storm Trooper armor for themselves. If you make a mould of yourself, vacume-forming is a great way to create that fun plastic armor.
If I had the space for the rig, I would also make vacume form Sonic items. It has so many interesting applications!

Next week, will be the Halloween update, so expect some costumes and scares!