Monday, August 25, 2014

Who's Goin' to Sonic Town?

Topics of the blog of the day:
Who's going to Sonic Town?
Ad rollout news
Archie Boom
Opinion Zone
Opinion Zone II

Who's going to Sonic Town?

Clearly nobody who visits SonicGear. Sonic Town is a place /store/something that I had no idea even existed. This place was discovered only this week, with a single photo as proof it exists. It looks like its probably part of Segaworld JP or something like that. It doesn't look brand new, maybe existing for a couple of years or something. It's unclear what exactly its for / what it does...there's an arcade game or something you can see in the front, but you can't see what all is in there past it.

Hopefully, however, someone somewhere has been & taken some photos of what the place is all about. What this means though, is, just further proof that SonicGear somehow got tanked in search rankings and now way less people know to visit it. The key to Gear's greatness has always been the fans. The visitor pool being big/ wide meant that there were tons of 'reporters' out there spotting stuff and taking pictures.

Japan - land of undocumented stuff
Sonic Town is just one of many things exclusive to Japan that aren't on Gear. The place is still a gold mine of probably interesting items...especially if Sonic Town turns out to be some kind of a store. (How does anyone know? Well, the first "old" Sonic store that appeared just had official photos w/models and etc, in the clothes...they didn't shoot everything the store had. Also, the "no redistribute jp-only websites full of images that used to exist...show things I've seen but can't post.)

Counterpoint - Sonic "stuff" has been less popular in Japan since probably...a little after SA2, say reports and industry type magazine articles. It's speculated that his inconsistently liked games are probably responsible for kids not soaking up tons of random merch like how they used to like to do. (Ex. mini padlocks, tiny stampers, random sewing kits...if you've seen the Japan Pages of Gear you know what kind of stuff) That and the consumers could have gotten turned off by terrible prices on Sonic X DVDs, Toy Island high import prices for those poor sculpts & nonsense toys (Space Fighters....)

Over all, there's no way to know what's up unless someone from there writes in.

Ad Roll Out-
Doing well so far. Its fairly slow mostly because there are a zillion pages and each one has to be done by hand. It should make search engines like the site better too, maybe lure in more contributors. It's going in alphabetical order and is currently on "Fan Items".

Archie Boom:
It was suspected, but now it is confirmed Archie Sonic is getting a Boom title. They SAY it will be ongoing, but that will depend entirely on how Boom actually does & how well Archie handles it. Their previous "show based one" was Sonic X, and it had to dry up when the show did...so who knows what AB will end up doing. It's launching before the show & the game...so how much did whoever's in charge of Boom tell the Archie crew?

Opinion Zone I:
CAN Archie sustain THREE Sonic titles AGAIN? Every time they try it's not for very long. Are they going to be able to keep a Boom focus without shoe-horning in batches of their own characters? They seemed to manage it ok for X. Is Universe at risk / will it be put at risk due to Boom?

My fear:
Whoever is behind Boom CLEARLY wants to push it extremely hard. The toys, the tees, the games, the show...how hard did they push Archie to do a Boom title? If it doesn't do as well, will they have to can one of their normal titles, or replace it with Boom?

Opinion Zone II:
So the Shadow & Metal Sonic Boom arts just leaked........
AND THEY DIDNT CHANGE THEM into that stupid "Boomstyle" they plastered on everyone else. WHY? Why would you not wrap Shadow up in sportstape? Give Metal Sonic a ton of extra spikes, maybe tape on some gunz or lazorz or whatever to make him "all boomish" like they're doing to everyone else. (Answer: they're not main characters and won't appear all the time so they didnt feel a need to "make it their own boom")

Ok, you want Sonic Boom. You know if you make changes to the characters that are just arbitrary stuff, people will screech and holler. If you DONT make changes, a smaller percentage of people will screech and holler because "everything is stale Sonic is stale this is stupid". Why would you do changes and make more people mad? Just leave it alone, let the "stale shouters" say its stale because they say everything is stale, and move on because you know going in that's what they're going to do.

Remaining fear: Boom starts stamping out regular Sonic stuff
Remaining relief: at least this show uses Sega characters and doesn't have a Gary Stu Mary Sue

Next week:
Old mail further clean up. I want to clean up more old mail before promoting the site again. Yes that WAS a teaser for something that could happen once the ad rollout finishes.