Friday, December 16, 2011

Wave the Swallow Seen at Last & Female Figures Talk

This week turned out to be a really big update.
With 2 new country pages joining in, plus a giant load of regular stuff, there was certainly plenty of things of interest to see this week. The mail still isn't much better, but it is slightly improved. If things keep going well, more new stuff/features/pages can be added.

Item of the week:
Wave the Swallow FreeRiders action figure.
I was honestly worried that "The Girls Curse" was affecting Wave. The term is apparently some old action figure term, based on a totally bogus premise which seems to be something like "Nobody likes girls, so no one will buy a figure of a girl, thus, we should never ever produce girl character items because they won't sell."

Of course that phrase sounds so stupid and obviously untrue. So why does that bad 'attitude' seem to persist despite all the contrary evidence? That's why they call it a 'curse', I guess...real curses don't exist either, so it makes some sense because it's a bogus belief based on a premise that's false too.

But look how JW has been treating the girls!
They've promised Rouge the Bat for....like well over 9 months now. Where is she? WHY is there no single-card Amy, modern OR classic? Why is Wave the last of the Babylons to be released? Where is Cream? Where is Blaze the Cat?

You can totally overlook Cream because she's not super significant to anything and doesn't have a mega fan base. It's understandable that they'd put Cream on low priority. But how the hell did Big the Cat get out before Rouge the Bat? Even Blaze the cat! It's no secret that Big has few fans...and Rouge has tons, so what's going on? Do they think people hate Amy so much that you have to force a buy by putting her in with Sonic or other figures at ALL times?

It just seems weird to me.

Off Topic Zone!
So how about that Casino Night level?
I finally got my codes sorted (Gamestop printed out an xbox receipt with the code on it, while giving me the ps3 version of the game...whee--they did fix it though to set things right) and with the TV fixed (hopefully for good this time, Samsung!) I could input the code to get the special stage. REMEMBER! Do this by Dec. 31, if you're gonna! Otherwise you'll have to pay 2 dollars.

Is it worth 2 dollars?
(What did you expect...this is a merchandise blog) Yes. All it is, is a pinball game with 1 main table. There's loads of gimmicks though, like a slot machine that takes the polygonal coins, spins & dispenses rings like it did in Sonic 2, there's the classic music, nice graphics, and plenty of replay value while you try to get all the gimmicks out of the game. Yes, theres 2 dollars worth of fun in here.

Not without problems:
Some of the extra upper flippers seem to just kill you if you use them. He can glitch and fall out of the table too, one time he was let back down 'normally' from an upper table and fell on the outside of the far right extra launch slot, sat there for 30 sec, then spontaneously fell out and died. Also, could the board be any BUSIER? I know it's pinball but did it HAVE to be blue while your 'ball' is also blue? It makes the table annoying to look at and him hard to track. Nitpicks, mostly.

Next week:
More Japan things. Not yet finished with the 'big grab' of images that came off the anniversary thing. Brazil will likely be getting a page if all goes well / stays calm. Wave review will appear whenever she shows up in stores (so, patience, I guess...) Phone Cards should also get a page coming up.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Israel & Korea Added to SonicGear

2 New pages join SonicGear this week!
It's Israel & Korea. These pages have been meant to be added for quite some time now, but floods of other stuff kept them away. There's interesting stuff to see at both! Which starts the question....

Why only now?
Why are these pages turning up with several items only now in 2011, and not around the time of Sonic X when a lot of the stuff was clearly made? (Most of it is X devoted) To further add questions...Gear DOES have a translation button for Korean, so it SHOULD show up in their searches. But as of yet, no Korea person has ever turned up with an item, or ever written to Gear. Israel is understandable because there's no button for Hebrew and the Arabic one is generally on the fritz. (Both of those are it's official languages)

Almost all of the things you see there were discovered by SonicTeam.
During their 20th Anniversary retrospective thing (in Japanese only site) They highlighted a bunch of rare and interesting merch they'd gotten their hands on. That's what the pictures are from. They were archived & added to Gear because who knows how long that anniversary special page will be left up, and such a cool image stash shouldn't be wasted by being taken down. It should be preserved for the fans to see it forever.

HOPEfully more stuff for both of these places comes in.
The stuff is varied, cool & good quality looking. And if there's that much...there's likely more.

There will be another update for the week.
An abundance of bootlegs kept the new regular stuff away for a bit. What should go on next?
Wave Swallow MIB
Tails Free Riders turn arounds
Bunch of Japan stuff
Fan stuff
Anything else that fits in the amount of time

With the holidays coming up it's also important to try and keep the Gear Store in top shape as well to help stamp out the fakers by providing links to as much real stuff (that's not sold out!) as possible.

Hoping also to do a review on the Archie big Sonic book thing/foil cover whateverness coming up for the blog. Keeps getting put off due to abundance of stuff/still trying to catch up with the mail.