Monday, July 01, 2013

Birthday Week Finishes & PSO2

The birthday week got out of hand.
You'll probably notice that its last update only appeared completely today, well after it should have. It's because all the updates that week plus other stuff going on, and scheduling got out of hand. Just couldn't get the time to finish it on time. This week will have an update as well, it'll dig into older mails.

Over all though, the week was a success.
The mail count is now way lower than it was before, and lots of interesting stuff went up. There's more to go, for sure , but so long as there's not a major release of tons of big stuff all in one go, I'm thinking the build up of old mail can be cleared out even better. Is 2013 the year the mail clog ends?

Item of the week:
The first Augmented Reality Sonic item to be actually released and photographed. This innocuous looking shirt beats that UK Annual book thing because it is out now and that book is only a pre order. Who knows what the shirt actually does, hopefully someone finds the thing and uses a phone on it. It's still very interesting and seems very futuristic to me.

The UK Sonic Annual AR Book:
My Recommendation? Go buy this thing. It's 10 bucks with FREE WORLD shipping. So there's pretty much no excuse to not be pre ordering it or whatever from the link on the page. Will another AR item beat it to release? Probably, but kind of so what. It's super that it has free shipping to anywhere even though it's a Europe type item. This is a rare feat. I'm going to buy it since I am curious and the price is reasonable.

How about that birthday cake?
There were lots of cute cakes made for Sonic's big day. When that one was submitted, they were pretty sure it was 'the official cake'. I'm fairly sure too, it does look good. Hopefully nothing comes along and proves it wrong. I also think it's real because who would bake a cake and then put it in a plexi box.

What is PSO2?
You'll notice the biggest pic load this week went into Virtual Items. They were all from Phantasy Star Online 2. Ever since ST got a hold of the PS license, it's always tributed Sonic in some way or another, which is pretty cool. The section needs work though. I think PSU "Jaggos" (an enemy that looked on purpose like an ugly chao) are still missing. 

PSO2 is currently being mis-handled by Sega as they refuse to bring it to world release, OR say anything about why/why not. The fans of the game stepped up and translated it. However, that's only the hardcore people. A casual user, a new-try-er, a busy person, or someone who wants to test it to get hooked on fun will not bother with such things. 
They promised the game earlier, (release in 1stQ 2013) but with that long past, the hype train they built up has derailed and their biggest advocates peer to peer advertisers, word of mouth spreaders grow uneasy. The fact that nobody knows why they clammed up so suddenly only adds fuel to the fire.

It's no secret, I've been loyal to this game since the ancient first version.
I picked it up because "Sonic Team Made It", but it was good solid fun. I've had every game of it they made since. I would recommend it to anyone (certainly it's customization enough for characters, and the setting is atypical--as in not sword n sorcery but space n' guns n' swords n'...robots yeah) If you feel like doing a good deed this week heckle Sega about releasing it to the world.

Next update:
Not sure. Hope it's old mail. The image bins are lower on stuff now which is great, but less predictable.