Hasbro has started a promotion for the new GI Joe: Rise of Cobra movie. The promotion allows you to create your own custom joe character/figure on their website. Grand prize winners will get their character made as an actual 3 3/4 inch figure.

All you have to do is go to this link and start the character creation in the wizard. After you get the figure looking the way you want it, you’ll then enter in that character’s story. The character above was the one I created, but I was too lazy to make up a story for her. This is a pretty neat idea and I’m glad Hasbro is leveraging their fairly standard gi joe body types and accessories for something cool like this.

Again, contest can be found here: http://hasbro.promotions.com/gijoecobra/

The 7th Kingdom, the top property in the FANtastic Exclusive series of polls from 2006 and 2007 has been spun out into its own line. The Four Horsemen excluded the property from the FanEx polls for 2008 because it proved so popular, they felt it could sustain its own full line.

The top vote-getter in the poll for 2007 behind the Elephant Swordsman was Queen Alluxandra of the Bloodmane Clan. She was chosen as the first figure to be released in the 7th Kingdom line post-FanEx. The sale of this figure and its variants will follow the style of previous FanEx releases. Each variant will be sold exclusively through a different online retailer, while the main figure will be exclusive to the Four Horsmen’s site StoreHorsemen.com. Additionally a full set of all 11 figures will be sold for US$220 starting Wednesday, July 1st starting at 8PM EST, also at StoreHorsemen.com. Sets will be limited to 125.

I voted for Alluxandra in 2007, so I am pumped for these figures. I will say though, there are way too many cats in this line up. Based on the numbers it looks like the 4H picked enough retailers to do a variant for each unique figure, but when given the choice, nearly all the retailers chose the cat because the Animal Kingdom was so popular, while the poor mutant was apparently not chosen and is exclusive to StoreHorsemen.com. A shame, I think the Mutant is one of the best variants along with Isadorra.

After the jump, you can see more of the Queen and each of her variants.
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This past week was my birthday. To celebrate, I have a double dose of my usual columns this week. This first part is an appendix to last week’s Street Fighter special, featuring 3 Capcom fighting games while the second part, due later this week, will deal with some RPGs. Once again, it’s my [belated] birthday, yet you get the gift. Click onward!
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2000 was a good year for Squaresoft, particularly the summer. We got several awesome games from them, each of which was special in their own right. Some gained more accolades than others, though. Alongside Final Fantasy IX and Chrono Cross, we also got Parasite Eve 2, Vagrant Story, and this little number, Threads of Fate. Even though Threads of Fate was clearly geared towards kids, older action RPG fans who own a Playstation will enjoy this too.

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The master of special effects and make-up arts Stan Winston died yesterday in his Malibu home at the age of 62, after battling for years with multiple myeloma. (a type of cancer of the plasma cells)

Winston was the wizard behind the visual effects and an Oscar winner for his ground-breaking work on blockbuster’s such as Jurassic Park, Aliens, and the Terminator series, was well as Edward Scissorhands, Pumpkinhead, as well as one of this summer’s hit movies – Iron Man.

It is yet unknown if the 4th Terminator movie was finished before Winston’s death, as he was slated as working on it for some time. He was also noted for working on a 4th Jurassic Park movie, and a future “The Suffering” movie based on the game of the same name.

Winston is survived by his wife, Karen; a son, daughter, brother and four grandchildren.

At the time of its release, this Data East-developed game was second only to Konami’s X-men game in terms of multiplayer beat-em-up action, and even today it maintains its charm. Taking control of either Captain America, Iron Man, Vision, or Hawkeye, you battle your way through various supervillians in order to make it to the Red Skull’s moon base. You’ll meet Whirlwind, the Wizard, Ultron, Crossbones, and several other familiar Avengers villains. You’ll even run into Juggernaut and the Sentinels from the x-men comics. Quicksilver, Namor, the Wasp, and Wonder Man make cameo appearences. There are even some shooter segments to mix up the action. The game’s English translation took some hits (“Why should it goes well?”) when it came over here, but the game is still enjoyable, especially when you bring along friends. There is an absolute zero chance of this being re-released in any way (primarily due to the fact that Data East no longer exists and Activision holds the licensing rights to most major Marvel properties), so you’re going to have to do some searching to find the cartridge or cabinet. If you do manage to run across the game, check it out, and it will tide you over until Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 hits sometime down the road.

Swedish developer Atod developed this 2-player puzzle game for Amiga. Publisher Seika remade this game for the Super Nintendo, and there was also an MS-DOS release. It’s gameplay can best be described as a simplified version of Lemmings with platforming elements. Although it was highly unique and addictive, it received very little attention upon its release. A shame too, as fans of Lemmings will take a liking to it. Two wizards, Hokus and Pokus inadvertently release the lemming-like troddlers, mindless little creatures that, if left to their own devices, will march to their deaths. Their boss, the grand wizard Divinus, has tasked them with cleaning up the mess and getting the troddlers safely to the exit. To do so, you’ll have to use your magic wand which generates blocks. The blocks can be used to either kill enemies or create platforms for the troddlers to walk on. You’ll also have to watch out for hazards, collect gems, and fight off various enemies. The game has 4 different modes: Training, Solo, Co-op, and competitive multiplayer. The game is backed up by a password save feature, and the Solo and Co-op modes have dozens of missions to complete. The game starts off simple, but the levels get trickier and trickier. Weather you play alone or with a friend, Troddlers is quite enjoyable. SNES players can even use the mouse to play the game. This is one of those games that need a sequel on the DS, a 3-d remake on the Wii, or even a Virtual Console re-release, but since the developers and/or publishers are MIA, (Atod was snatched up by Mace Griffin developer Warthog and I’m not sure if Seika still exists) it may never receive the type of attention it deserves. Thus, if you want to enjoy this great puzzle/platformer, then you’ll have to hunt down the cartridge.

With agents all over the world, its kind of amazing no one from Powet.TV lives in New York City. So unfortunately, we miss going to Toy Fair. But so many sites are getting good photos up, we’ll just use this space to link to them all.
And you can use the comments section to add more links you may find or discuss what you love and hate about whats revealed this year.
ActionFigure.com covers some specialty figures.
TFW2005 has extensive Hasbro coverage
ASM will be getting more photos through tomorrow of everything!
Toy News International has lots of pictures, and a huge focus on Marvel comics toys!
Wizard Universe has press and site photos
Any other sites you know with photos? Been there yourself? Leave a comment and we’ll keep Powet up to date.