Another Rant about Takara Tomy Transformer Distribution.

After my last post about the distribution of Transformers for Earthrise and my concerns about the amount that appear to  be Takaratomy mall exclusives rocking up, a new, perhaps interesting turn of events has reared its confusing head.

Yearly Wrap up 2018

As is the usual way of my blog lately, a few posts throughout the year and then I bust out a whole list of crap I picked up during the year.

It’s been an odd year for me, as it turns out there were a heap more Legends Transformers came out than I expected.  Work was a tricky taking my precious precious time away from toys and a couple of ripper video games also doing that too.

Toy wise, I naturally enjoyed the Transformers, although I got the definite feel that bot Hasbro  and Takara were phoning it in with Power of the Primes.  The mix of half-assed Pretenders (I actually like proper pretenders) and a random mish mash of combining other figures makes them feel like left over ideas from Combiner War/Legends.   It also feels like a lot has just been holding the fort until the Bumblebee movie toys come out as well.  

Here in Japan, the Bumblebee movie doesn’t come out until April 2019, yet the toys are flooding the shelves, the POTP figures are disappearing (will I be able to get punch/counterpunch??) and the timing of the Siege line (of which I have some interest) starts in February 2019.  Shelf space seems to be limited and I suspect that the movie toys won’t do so well right now, but will pick up when the movie comes out, but will have run out of steam by then, leaving the Transformers shelves in a rather sorry state.  They already take only a small section of shops (assuming they have a section at all) as it is.

Bottle of Halloween Disappointment

Halloween, crazy “celebration” time of the year.  I don’t care for it myself but it is fun with some of the crazy crap that comes out.  This year while out and about travelling I picked up an interesting looking item, a humble little bottle of Pepsi.

The reason this was interesting?  Well, how can one refuse such an enticing name, such as

Pepsi Ghost.

It gets better, at the bottom of the bottle, it states rather proudly:

Mystery Flavour

And it has a picture of a pumpkin ghost thing eating stuff like dough nuts and something orange.

“Wow,” I says to myself while looking at this.  “ This could be fun or gross, but I suspect both!”

And thus, I bought the drink.

It sat in my fridge while I forgot about it, but today, I finally got around to opening the sucker up.
I had a sniff.  Man, it was sweet.
And gross. (yay, this is what I wanted)
But familiar….  Hrm, I was sceptical…. 

As a result, I passed it around to those around and asked them to see if they could work out what it smelt like, no-one was terribly sure.

Hesitantly I took a small sip….

Then I swore.

Disappointment swam throughout me as it flowed from the bottle into my mouth. 

On the positive side of things, it was as I expected, quite disgusting.

On the negative side of things, and this was what I was most saddened about, was it was just shitty normal cherry cola flavour.

Bloody hell Pepsi!  What the hell are you doing?  This isn’t a mystery flavour!  It’s just a shit flavour that has been around with various colas for ages.  Pepsi could’ve chosen anything, Pumpkin flavoured Pepsi.  I hate pumpkin, that would’ve been disgusting, but also interesting because I’ve never had Pumpkin cola before.  Strawberry, so sweet I’d be diabetic after one bottle.  Sweet potato, also disgusting, and possibly popular with Japanese tastes.  Hell, I’d even be happy with Natto flavoured Pepsi.

But cherry?  GAWDAMIT! You go with the lazy arse disgusting choice of shitty bloody cherry.

Where’s my dough nut flavour?  Cheesecake?  Banana?

Cherry.  Sigh, might as well have given me a bottle of Dr. Pepper instead.

I can see the board meeting right now.

“So, what do we do with this cherry coke syrup we bought from Coke in the 80s?  We still can’t get rid fo this shit!”
“Let’s market it in a bottle for Halloween, call it ‘Mystery Flavour’ and chuck some pictures of Doughnuts and shit on the label, then people will buy it thinking it’s something nice and fun instead of piss boring cherry coke”
“Mwa ha ha ha ha! Mwa ha ha ha ha <cue Doctor Evil like laughing scene in the boardroom>”

Arseholes.

If they bother doing this again, I can guarantee that I won’t be buying again. 

Going as south east as I have ever been.

Generally every February/Marchish time of year I try and take the better half for a little getaway.  We’d been to Busselton a number of times and this time decided for a change.  We settled on going to Esperance as neither of us had been there before.

Free mobile gaming forces bad game design.

With the rise of mobile gaming on phones and tablets, there is a very strong market for games that contain microtranactions. A ‘microtransaction’, is when a player buys a virtual product to be used within the game. It could be anything from a continue, a new character to play as, or even passing the time quicker (as in the case with some farming games).
This stems from the marketing technique of providing the game for free, or for very little and the company makes their profit from people buying things within the game for the game.
Continuing on from some of the criticisms I levelled at Sonic Dash, I am going to aim my sights at Activision.  I know, I know, it’s a pretty easy target, but here it provides a pretty good example of what I see as a rather significant fault in the microtransaction model of gaming which I think is having a detrimental effect on mobile game design and to a lesser extent home gaming.
 
For the purpose of this argument, I am going to focus on mobile gaming. I first encountered this problem when I started playing the endless runner version of Pitfall! I enjoyed the game quite a bit with its simple controls, nice music and casual gameplay. However since I have been playing it for a while, I have encountered an odd situation.
 
 
As the game progressed, it naturally gets a bit harder and when you fail at a challenge and ‘die’, you either have to continue by using a ‘macaw token’ or start from the very beginning of the game. Now when I first started playing, I had access to some tokens and was also able to gather some during gameplay. Naturally being new to the game I was a bit bad at playing it and therefore used my tokens up.
Which brings me to an odd situation now. I am able to get quite far into the game, but have not been able to acquire anymore tokens to continue at all through the game itself. In fact whenever I die I am reminded by the game that to continue, I should go to the store to buy some. I am therefore stuck with having to start the game from scratch every single time I play.



Which then brings me to the point I wish to make, have we started seeing games that are designed to unfairly hinder the players to the point that they are forced to purchase items for the game? Sonic Dash in particular had a terribly bad setup of obstacles that just seemed impossible to predict or react to, thereby guaranteeing failure at that point. If this Pitfall! game had the same impassable setup, one would be forced to buy the Macaw tokens to pass that section. Unscrupulous game design. As it is in Pitfall! the section I often get to has an obstacle that I often never pick up on. In fact I believe I have yet to pass this obstacle as my attempts to pass it have failed, from either not seeing it, or my swipes were not correct. It is not obvious what the motion to do to pass is and that is part of the problem as well as the obstacle being hard to see.
 
In this type of simple game, everything should be easily recognizable and the solution obvious. After all mobile gaming is aiming for the casual user. Easy pick up and play is the key to this demographic.

 
In this case success is not and I wouldn't be surprised if it was designed to be this way, just like the “dot-point-death-combo” of Sonic Dash, it could well be to coerce the player into buying tokens to pass a deliberately impossible section.

The shop Screen for Pitfall! Note how expensive the Macaw tokens are.

If this is the case then that equates to bad game design, which I think will hurt gaming in the long run if it catches on as it will turn people away from games, or even worse, become the norm resulting in having to pay for the game as well as having to pay to finish the game.

Gameplay should be challenging, but it should also be able to be passed without external aid. Once a player has succumbed to buying ‘items’ to pass a section that can only be passed with the aid of those items, then the game becomes pointless as skill is no longer needed and lacks the most important ingredient, fun.

From Club to Toy Store

 

Back when Fun Publications took over the running of Botcon and started up the Official Transformers Collector’s Club in 2005 I joined. 

 

Why?  Because the blurb I had read mentioned how they were the official Hasbro endorsed club FOR THE WORLD.

 

Why?  Because the blurb I read had advertised how their relationship with Hasbro and being THE Official Transformers Club gave them unprecedented access to toy news and information.

 

Why?  I expected to see lots of cool information on the making of Transformers from designing to toy.  Lots of prototype pictures of figures that would be released and interviews with core members of Hasbro’s Transformers team telling us what plans they had for the brand and sneak peaks at the next series, whatever that may have been.

 

Of course, this was to be relayed by The Official Transformers Collectors Club magazine which came out every 2 months, packed full of exciting news.

 

Or was it? 

 

When the club first started pumping out the mags, there wasn’t that much in there.  Half the mag had a pretty crap comic, bios and occasionally a bit on toys.  Of course, being in Australia it meant that by the time I actually got the magazine it was old news anyway.  I still don’t understand why it seemed to take a month for a letter to get from America to Australia.  But I let that slide.  After all, I was part of the Official Transformers Collectors Club and it was new.

 

Surely it will get better.

 

But it didn’t.

 

Every year the Botcon came around and we were faced with a batch of 6 toys in a set, plus a bunch that could only be nabbed by going to the Botcon.

 

Still the Magazine didn’t get better.

 

But they sure pushed a lot of toys.

 

No new news, very little information on toys.  Some articles with people related to Transformers appeared and in one case wasn’t even related to Transformers.

 

But we had plenty of toys chucked our way.

 

It was at this point I saw a pattern.  The excitement over the Botcon toy sets had changed the essence of the Club.  It was becoming less and less Club and more exclusive shop.

 

This year after they got the website back online again (after how many months???) they set up a subscription service.  6 Toys are in the subscription.  5 toys for the Botcon Box set.  Another 7 or so toys available for pickup at Botcon again, totalling about 18 toys.

 

Now what I find interesting here is a sharp focus on exclusive club toys…  The Magazine now is just a half-arsed piece of rubbish with a horridly drawn comic and ho-hum story.   The latest issue actually had an interview with the designer of Sunstreaker, so an article on a toy!  Rare.  However it was done by a fan.  NOT by anyone at the club.

 

They devoted two pages to pushing 2 toys in the subscription service.  They certainly didn’t need 2 pages but if they hadn’t they would probably have just put in another word search.

 

So with a huge increase in the amount of toys they are producing and looking at how the website has been handled after the crash.  The board still isn’t up to my knowledge.  But they certainly got the Shop up and running all right.  Leads me to look at the Official Transformers Collectors Club not as a club, but just another source for toys.

 

And not a good source either.  I had a look at the subscription charges and as far as I could tell, it would cost me $40 postage each time a toy was sent out.  That was the cheapest option.

 

Nice one guys.

 

As a result,  after almost 8 years of being a member I will not be renewing my membership.  This isn’t a club anymore.  At it’s zenith it was a badly run ‘professional’ club run by a bunch of fans.  A bunch of G.I Joe fans that is.  At it’s lowest point it was a twitter account.  Now it’s somewhere in between, but no longer a club.  I see they are far more focused on hocking exclusive toys to Transformer fans.  In America.  Despite holding the license for the whole world, they focus all their attention on the US.  Sure most of their members are probably in the US, but that is beside the point.  As license holders for the whole world, they have a duty to cater for THE WHOLE WORLD.  I guess you could say they do, but they don’t do it very well.

 

I have had enough.  I will no longer pay  my yearly money for the crap magazine they vomit out every 2 months.  I don’t care about the exclusive toys (especially judging by this years lacklustre Botcon set) I think that the prospect of producing so many toys will lead to poor choices and execution.  Lets’ face it, some of the subscription figures are strange choices.  I look forward with evil twinkles in my eye at the theme for the 2013 Botcon.

 

I was previously determined to go to a Botcon one day, but now I just don’t really care that much.  There is no club feeling to this club and since all they want to do is sell toys which are overpriced I am going to move on and leave them to their own devices.

 

Goodbye Transformers Collectors Club Shop.  You won’t be receiving my money anymore.

K-Mart Slave? Not I!

So the other night I trotted out to K-Mart to buy some stuff.  After finding it easy enough, I headed off to the checkout.



Since the good people of WA don't quite get the late night trading concept, it was very quiet.  Approaching the checkout, I saw that all the checkouts were closed, save the self-checkouts.



I have an objection to the self-checkouts as they reduce customer service, but donft offer any compensation for that fact.  As a result, I refuse to use them.  However that night, I had no choice.  There was one staff member in the returns section, who was busy doing some stuff.  The express checkouts are in the same section as the returns bit, but they were all closed as well.



I noticed that other customers were going through the self checkout.



I left my intended purchases on the nearest flat surface that wasnft the floor and left.  I refuse to do the job of a K-Mart employee for nothing;  I think it would be logical to assume that all employees of K-mart get paid a wage or salary for their time at work, so I donft see why the customer should have to do their job for free.  Customer service is bad enough in Australia and most prices on goods are quite high, so why should we, the customer, have to put up with another drop in the level of service?



I could have asked to have them open a checkout but considering the staffing level at the time, I suspect they wouldnft have had anyone available anyway.  Aside from that, the point is; I shouldnft have to ask.  That is part of customer service isnft it?  To assess and provide for the customerfs needs.

Surely the next step in this process is to allow customers access to the store room and have us stock the shelves as well?  Where will the madness end?



  I think I see why there werenft that many customers in the place.  Surely I am not the only person bothered by this?



Disgusting attitude to your customers there K-Mart.



 I have since emailed K-mart with my thoughts on this situation and look forward to their response.

In an update to this situation.  K-mart quite admirably attempted contact me for quit a while (I can be irritatingly hard to get sometimes) and I ended up chatting to the manager who apologised and said it wasn't their intention to force people through the self-checkouts.  He was going to look into the approximate time and see what the deal was.

I must admit I am impressed with the efforts they went to to address my concern.  However, the discount idea for non-staffed checkouts was not mentioned...

;)

Crazy shopping.

 

Man I love it when out and about and some crazy weird stuff that makes you say “What were they thinking?” crosses your path.  I’ve found dodgy badly done toy labels, strange celebrity endorsements and totally truthful information. 

 

Please have a look and ponder this;  How did the Human race come to this.

 

Chrazy Christmas Decorations.

So, I have been a bit quieter this Christmas compared to the last.  Obviously the horror of the Advent Calender chocolate has slowed me down.

Oh and work has been crazy as well.

Today though I would like to add some strange Xmas trinkets I spied whilst wandering the shops. Most of these are various baubles for hanging on the old Chrimbo tree, what struck me as odd was that not many of them had a Christmas feel to them…

Thundercats Hoooooooe! Actually, Noooo…

 

Awesome! New Thundercats cartoon on the TV.  A quick DL later and I am watching.  Not too bad I think to myself.

 

I remember back to the San Diego Comic Con.  They had an exclusive Lion-O which looked pretty cool and articulated.  Wonder what the toys for the new cartoon are like…

 

A quick google later and I am on Big Bad toystore’s site having a look.  Oooo, general release 1980’s Lion-O, that’s convenient since I didn’t watch the cartoon, but liked the character design, I want one of them for less than the SDCC version.  Even some of the characters from the new show look cool.  Hello Cheetara, wink wink!

 

But alas, BBTS have a disclaimer saying that Bandai has told them these toys are for America only and any o/s orders will be cancelled.  I trotted off to another site, they had the same thing!  WHAT THE HELL?

 

So I did some more googling and found that generally Funtastic distribute Bandai’s goods in Australia.  No Thundercats on their website though, so I emailed asking what the go was and they replied saying they don’t necessarily do ALL of Bandai’s toys (which is fair enough) and that TC wasn’t on their list!  

 

Booo! That sucks.  I now have little idea as to who is likely to do TC for Australia.

 

How am I gonna get my hands on these buggers then?  Even though I was willing to assess the Australian situation, I didn’t want to pay our stupidly ridiculously high prices for what they will probably come out as.  Still, I guess eBay would be cheaper than local retail anyway.

 

Thunder, Thunder, Thundercats, NOOOOOOO!( T ) for Australia!

 

Might email US Bandai and see how that goes hey? All this effort for one (maybe two) classic figures…

Dark Of the Moon figure price RIPOFF!

 

Ok, I know for a fact that in Australia we get gipped on prices for pretty much everything, games, toys, lately food.  It’s all seriously priced up over other countries, but I have to say that I was shocked when I saw the pricing for the Dark Of the Moon figure assortments.

 

Let’s compare with our friends in the U.S.A (which is nice and easy due to the Aus Dollar being so close next to it). 

 

US $ and Australian $ Price Comparison of ‘Dark of the Moon’ toys.

Class size:	Legion	Commander	HA Basic	Action Playsets	Deluxe	Voyager	Leader
US  Dollars	5	8	10	16	13	24	50
Aus Dollars	8	18	19	19	29	50	89

 

So bearing that in mind, and the fact that the Aussie dollar has only (!) been about equal to the US dollar for the last 5 or so months, I will convert the Australian Prices into American using the current rate of $1 Aus gets you $1.06 US.

Australian Prices Converted into US dollars and compared with US prices.

Class size:	Legion	Commander	HA Basic	Action Playsets	Deluxe	Voyager	Leader
US  Price	5	8	10	16	13	24	50
Aus Price changed to US dollars	8.50	19.17	20.23	20.23	30.87	53.22	94.76

 

So in essence, although the Legion and Playsets are pretty close in price scale, the HA Basics, Voyager and Leader sizes are pretty much double what those lucky chaps in America pay.  I should also add that as a standard price, $89 Aus is deemed cheap for a leader as they usually retail for $99 Australian (equivalent to $105.40 US).  I believe there are a number of stores that intend to charge that price as well.

 

Really it seems ironic that with the stronger Aus dollar, retailers have been whinging that they are losing sales to online/overseas stores.  Well here’s an idea BE MORE COMPETETIVE!   The service is bad, the range is bad and the prices are bad.  No wonder people are buying online.  I know that if I want more DOTM figures (of which there are only about 5), I will be going online.  So far the ones I am after I can get for about $150 including postage I suspect.  And yet here in Australia they expect me to pay that for a leader size and a voyager alone!

 

That my friends, in the words of Penn & Teller, is Bull S**t!!

 

Size comparison and a examples of toys follow:

 

 

Poppy seeds メー！

The better half and I went out for a lovely bike ride on a day off.  We decided it was appropriate for some hotdog lunch to be made.  However I was out of buns, so I zipped to the shops to get some.  The only ones left were ones with poppy seeds on them.

 

I would really like to slap the dick head who thought that putting poppy seeds on top of bread was a good idea.  It’s not!  They just make a mess all over the place.  I really hate them, well on my bread anyway.

 

Behold the results!!

Companies condoning child labour?

Hmmmm,  Oates telling us to  put our kids to work hey?

Subway? Wagyu? Wow!

Recently Subway have been busting out some Wagyu subs.  I wonder what they are like?

Could be quite yummy, after all Wagyu beef is ridiculously expensive, although tasty. 

What's up with the 'next blog' button?

Occasionally I like to have a gander at fellow bloggers blog's, I check out what to see using the followers buttons, and once that's done I go ahead and whack the 'next blog' button.

And I end up touring quite a few blogs about

• Religion
• Quilting

?  Surely there is more interesting stuff?  Well I am sure quilting and religion is interesting, in fact I will say I end up generally having a good old look to see whats up, but rarely do I manage to crank another gaming bog, or a toy blog, or even a movie related blog.

Weird

While I was grocery shopping

I went to buy some groceries last week, as we had no food after having to cancel our trip.  I knew that some places of Japan had empty shop shelves due to the earthquake interrupting supplies, but I didn’t realise that the effect would carry on over half the world and affect my local supermarket’s supply of ice cream.

 

 

Oh hang on, it wasn’t the earthquake, it was just the same piss poor service that we have to put up with in Australia all the frikkin’ time!

 

What ridiculous ‘specials’ they have too!  Who really needs to buy 3 of the same icecream at one go???? 

A hidden Gem. Calpis Water

Some of the things that I got addicted to on my first trip to Japan; House of the Dead 2 with guns, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 and Calpis Water.  Game, Game, game, drink.  That’s right.

A box full of goodies!

Weee hee hee heee!  A lovely box of Sonic goodies arrived today.  Just wish my parcel from Japan would hurry up and get here, I have been waiting since just after Christmas (like the 27th of December) all I know is that it has left Japan…. Sad face… 

 

At leats my ears will stay warm (in this 36 degree heat)

Christmas has just finished and….

Wow.  I took this photo on the 4th of January at the local shops.  Christmas had just finished and some of the shops were trying to convince me to buy their ‘bargains’ at their supposed ‘after Christmas sales.’

Workplace Philosophy.

When I got to my current place of work, I saw this amusing piece of work on the side wall.  At first I thought it was just funny, but now I am beginning to see some truth to it.