Browsing Tag

trading cards

Community, Site News

Spark the Electric Jester Releases on Steam


With the pagies in cagies and Umbra Witches returning from slumber, today’s releases on Steam includes a platformer from the development team behind Sonic fan games such as Sonic After the Sequel.
After a successful kickstarter campaign and given the green light on Steam, Spark the Electric Jester comes out on Steam reliving the glory days of 16-bit platformers fusing together gameplay elements of Sonic the Hedgehog and the Kirby series. Spark comes with dozens of Steam features including trading cards, achievements and Steam cloud support.

Spark the electric jester is an action/platformer video game heavily based on best classics from the 16-bit era from both sides of the aisle.
You play as Spark, an electric jester frustrated by the loss of his job! On one beautiful day, robots decided to take over the world. Seeing as Spark’s job was taken by a robot, he decided this was the perfect opportunity for his revenge! Spark will have to travel through the world and be engulfed in high-speed thrills and tons of action against the robots and the one who has taken his job.

Check out the Steam sale page for the game here. Heck, buy copies for your friends and support your community! I’d say Spark deserves as much spotlight as games like Sonic Mania, Freedom Planet and Major Magnet.
 
[Source: Steam]

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Humor, Merchandise

Sega Freaks Out and I Have No Idea What to Do

As part of the work I do for Sonic and Sega Retro, I spend an inordinate amount of time hunting down rare merchandise and printed artifacts in order to improve the site. Find a Japanese Sonic Advance 3 guide, learn the official names of enemies and bosses, get a boxed copy of Sonic & Knuckles Collection from Korea and suddenly we have quality scans of a rare release, and so on. I was doing some shopping on a Japanese auction several weeks ago and saw a listing for “71枚　セガフリークス” for sale. セガフリークス, or “Sega Freaks,” is a Japanese series of collectible cards released in the Saturn era, featuring individual cards from games of the time like Sonic Jam, Last Bronx, Virtua Fighter 3, and Dragon Force. Collect all of the cards for a particular game, and the reverse side makes a large picture.

So, this auction is going for about one US dollar, and I figure I could scan the cards for the site, so I say “hey, why not?” This is where it gets a bit complicated. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Japanese, 枚 is a counter word for flat objects like pieces of paper or photographs, so I assumed the seller was selling 71 loose cards. The problem? They were using it to refer to 71 packs of Sega Freaks, each of which have 10 cards in them, so the package I wound up receiving?

Far more cards than I could ever possibly need. There are only 60 unique cards total in this entire shipment, so statistically, it won’t take me opening all of these packages to get all 60 cards. This leads to an interesting question: what should I do with all the rest of these cards? “Give them all to me!” is not what I’m looking for. What sort of interesting things could be done with this cheap bounty? The leading private suggestion I’ve received thus far is to film myself opening them all up to make collectors cry, but I’d prefer something more constructive that would benefit everyone.

(PS: Do I love misleading headlines? You betcha.)

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