In the United States, there are two major toy companies that have been battling back and forth for the number one spot for decades. The current leader is Mattel, but the number two, Hasbro, is bridging that gap by leaps and bounds in recent years. As an avid toy collector, I know quite a bit about toy history, but not so much about toy company history. Thats why today’s article H is for Hasbro.

Banner image from Consumerist.

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The spring convention season is in full swing! I’m representing Powet.TV at Anime Milwaukee this year, which looks to be the biggest yet with a projected attendance of 4000 people — twice that of the 2010 iteration of this convention

There is a “Train Your Game” Famicom Dojo panel on Saturday from 3-4pm where I’ll be going over some 8-bit tips and tricks including why Pols Voice hate loud noises, and the science of the Minus World.

Until then, here’s a reminder to keep it clean!

On February 18, Bizarre Creations officially closed its doors. Activison purchased the studio in 2007, and after 2 underperforming games (Blur and James Bond: Bloodstone), they decided to shut the group down. Previously, Bizarre had a stellar track record, including the Project Gotham Racing series for Microsoft Xbox and Xbox 360.
Bizarre can also be credited with creating the success of Xbox Live Arcade and downloadable console games in general. Geometry Wars Retro Evolved was an early hit, and at only $5 sold very well and helped pave the way for the hundreds of score attack and arcade style games that now populate the service.
There is little doubt that without Bizarre the Xbox platform would not be what it is today. Not even close. It is a shame that their move to Activision and producing for the PS3 as well resulted in closure so quickly.
(official site) (wikipedia)

The last time that the name Remedy was attached to a game, Max Payne and Mona Sax were blowing away mobsters back in 2003’s Max Payne 2. Since then, the Finnish developers have been working on this Xbox 360 exclusive. It was one of the first titles announced for the system, and then info on it became scarce, almost to the point where one would think it was canceled. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, and Alan Wake finally hit shelves last year. Although it didn’t sell anywhere near what it deserved to, it provides gamers with a unique and memorable experience. You play as the title character, Alan Wake. A struggling writer from New York, you and your wife travel to Bright Falls, a town in the Pacific Northwest hoping to get away from it all. However, things go awry rather quickly. You wife goes missing, you keep finding pages of a manuscript you’ve written, although you don’t remember writing it, and worst of all, you’re constantly attacked by a darkness which has taken over everyone and everything in your way.
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A new theatrical trailer for Thor has been released, which includes everything you wish they put in the trailer that was shown during the Super Bowl.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

It’s only a matter of time now. This week on Jeopardy! a special event took place as Watson, a sophisticated computer system from IBM, faced off against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter who are generally regarded as the greatest human Jeopardy! players. This is a distinction we need to make now as Watson pretty much completely trounced them.

Despite his monolithic appearance when seen from the front Watson is actually conveniently placed monitor. He’s actually a huge computer system on state of the art IBM hardware. We know this of course because this event was basically a huge advertisement for IBM. They clearly put a good deal of work to program this guy so I guess that was the trade off for all the viewers this event pulled in.

Watson does some crazy algorithms to determine the most likely answer and the probabilities are then shown on screen. If the chance of the answer being right is above his threshold, he buzzes in, with great speed, and shoots and answer. But he’s not always right!

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Or maybe it will go all the way. Depending on if you’re a parent, the sheer horror of the scenario might be over the top, and the soft music with the dramatic events really pack a punch. I can’t say a game trailer has ever taken me by surprise like this.

Dead Island has been in production for several years and promises an open world Zombie infection game with strong action and role playing elements. The game has a glorious trailer and if the writing and visual can match the 3 minutes above, we’ll have a game worth celebrating. That is, if you can actually play it.

Geoff from Achievement Hunter and Red Vs Blue has a similar reaction to mine, watch after the break.
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Mattel’s big news this year was that Barbie has finally taken Ken back after dumping him seven years ago for an Australian surfer named Blaine. Mattel…er, Ken went so far as to rent out gigantic billboards to get Barbie’s attention and win her back. Full press release (yes, there was a press release) after the jump.

Read Barbie’s blog entry on the matter and tell us all about it in the comments.

Source: TNI and BarbieCollector

  

I have to admit I’m a little surprised Mattel didn’t take this opportunity to make Lawyer Barbie to serve Ken a restraining order.

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