Wonderland

Personalised Superhero doll

Here's another use for zCorp-printed heads on bodies: usually they're bobbleheads, but in this case for £80 you get a printed version of your own head, plus a basic plastic superhero doll, a tube of superglue and a set of instructions.

Yep, you have to yank off the doll head yourself then glue on the new one...!? 

While I'm all for DIY and making, this is a little expensive for what you get: the difference in texture and resolution of the ABS injection moulded body and the sandstone-like zCorp print is going to be weird (you can tell I'm working in this stuff hey :-)), but worse, fragile too: you can't play with the end result. 

Still, who's to say what value personalisation? It's such a rare thing to be able to offer, there's not exactly a wealth of comparative data. We're certainly going to be finding out pretty soon with MAKIES; our action dolls will be in the same ballpark price range but they use probably 20 times the amount of material, will be playable with, and don't involve superglue, (with luck)...

Personalised Superhero doll (Thanks Chris!)

Defiance: the Show, the MMO

This is an old idea in the world of telly-and-games, and a really, really hard one to pull off: I'm kind of both amazed and not surprised that it's taken until 2012 to get it to happen. Enormous congrats to Syfy!

Defiance is both a TV show and a videogame with plot touchpoints that affect both:

With Battlestar Galactica and Lost now distant memories, there's a gaping hole in the "epic sci-fi" category on television. Enter Syfy's Defiance.

The television series is being developed in conjunction with a massively multiplayer online game, and the two will be launched simultaneously. They'll be connected by the same overall storyline, to the point that events from the show will play a part in the game, and vice versa.

Defiance is set on a future Earth ravaged by war, and will feature human and alien cultures attempting to rebuild civilization in a post-terraformed Earth.

Eeeeh. 

The only crossover I've experienced to date (I didn't play the Battlestar Galactica BigPoint game) was an early moment in Star Wars Galaxies where you get to find the huge dead dinosaur-bone-set that R2 & Threepio meet after their Tatooine landing. I stood there for ages, taking pictures like a tourist ;-)

It was magic.