darkSpyro

The series follows the heroic adventures of the Skylanders team, a group of heroes with unique elemental skills and personalities who travel the vast Skylands universe, protecting it from evil-doers and showing the next wave of Academy cadets how to do things the "Skylander way."

A wormhole has opened in Skylands and the great Aku Aku appears! He has come to announce the once-in-two-decades Synchronization Celebration--a time when all of the worlds align perfectly. All the inhabitants of Wumpa Island are having a party and they want to invite the Skylanders. But with Kaos on a quest to take over Skylands using his army of Doomlanders, the Skylanders must focus on stopping his evil plans. Never one to shy away from danger, the legendary marsupial Crash Bandicoot leaps through the wormhole to join the Skylanders in the ultimate battle against Kaos!

Based on Activision's award-winning Skylanders franchise, Skylanders Battlecast is a new, free-to-play mobile card game where players build their ultimate deck of cards, master strategic card combinations and use them in never before seen battles! Starting today, players in Australia and New Zealand can head to retail stores to purchase physical card packs to begin their epic journey to become a champion of Skylands.

Activision assembled a team of experts across video game design, physical card game design, pro card players and top card artists to develop Skylanders Battlecast. Unlike traditional trading card and mobile battle games, Skylanders Battlecast offer fans impressive graphical fidelity in the form of a 3D-rendered gameplay experience that is incredibly fun and highly strategic.

Well, everyone, it's that time of year again! As we did last year, we at mini KABOOM! are participating in the annual Extra Life fundraising event to raise money for sick kids benefited by the Children's Miracle Network. Beginning this evening, November 6th, 2015, at around 7:00 PM EST US, we and our families will begin live streaming various games, chatting, giving away prizes and in general, having a good time. This year, instead of streaming for 24 consecutive hours as we did previously, we will be streaming as much as possible across three days, Friday 11/6, Saturday 11/7 and Sunday 11/8. We will begin streaming this evening around 7:00 PM EST US and around 9:00 AM EST US on Saturday and Sunday; we will be streaming live throughout each day until the point where we're too tired to go on and will "log off" for a few hours overnight, during which the chat room will remain open and we will stream past episodes of our podcast, Skycast: The Unofficial Skylanders Podcast.

We will be playing various family friendly/appropriate games across multiple platforms and invite any/all to join us when possible! There are plans for lots of Skylanders but also instances of Disney Infinity 3.0, Splatoon, Mario Kart and others! Once the kids head to bed this evening, Matt and I plan to stream Destiny together for a while and invite anyone who wants to join our fireteam to do so! If there are any games that we haven't specifically mentioned, please feel free to bring them up and if we have them available we'll see if we can get them into rotation. In the past we've streamed Minecraft for the PC and PS4 and are still up for some group builds if there is demaned for it.

In regard to the prizes, we have so much stuff to give away this year that we'll likely need to get something out the door approximately every 30 minutes in order to be able to give it all away! We have a ton of Skylanders stuff (well, maybe 100lbs) to give away including (but not nearly limited to) two individually packaged Dark element traps, Swap Force and Giants starters for various systems and a Trap Team starter for PS4, two copies of SuperChargers (Wii U & PS4, game & portal only), Punk Shock (standard packaging), Echo, all three Spring Edition minis/traps from earlier this year and more! As a grand prize, we are giving away an incredible painting of Terrafin by jurassicskylander! This will be available to donators only, with one chance to win given for every $5 donated. All donators, no matter the amount, will receive a mini KABOOM! wrist band!

You can check out all the details as well as see a photo of the incredible painting mentioned above at http://minikaboom.com/extra-life/. From there you can see the current list of prizes, what we've raised so far as well as any updates to our streaming schedule that may occur.

So, what can you do to help? If possible, please donate what you can as 100% of donations go to Children's Miracle Network to help sick kids. If you can't donate, we understand. Instead, come hang out with us and help us and others have a great time! Even if you just idle in our channel during the stream, you help drive up our number of viewers which makes us more visible overall on Twitch and helps to bring in donations. We'll be playing a lot of games over multiple days and aim to have a great time this weekend!

Thanks for reading this far and potentially, for any donation(s) you've made. You can check out our live stream starting tonight at around 7:00 PM EST US at http://twitch.tv/minikaboom. If you sign up for a Twitch account, you'll be able to follow us and receive an email notification once we start streaming. You can also follow us on Twitter at @mini_kaboom & @megacollector or on Facebook & Google Plus under Mini Kaboom; as soon as we begin streaming, we'll be sending out notices on all services, so if you're subscribed/following, you should know right after everything starts!

Thanks again for reading through this as well as any support you can offer. Looking forward to seeing you this weekend!

-Doug

Skylanders: SuperChargers is just bursting with content, and fortunately, all of it is great fun. If you’re invested in the series, SuperChargers is on par, if not better, than the best the series has offered in the past.

Getting into a vehicle and changing the gameplay up, say mid-level or for a boss fight, is vastly more engaging than the typical elemental change. But it's really just the beginning.

The levels play with gravity, with humor, with painterly backdrops and size. There are even clever tweaks at some of gaming's tropes. Just when you think you've seen it all, you find yourself sitting back down to do something new and spectacular.

And all of these activities benefit from the sort of sheen we’d expect of an entry in a yearly franchise that has been polishing its formula for half a decade. The controls are tight, the visual presentation is terrific.

Upgradeable and customizable, the vehicles in Superchargers are much more than gimmicks. They are characters in their own right, only much more important—the entire level structure of the game has been transformed to accommodate these wicked rides.

Being someone that has played the games, but not to completion in the past, I found myself more immersed in the world this time around and I think the variety is the reason.

While the vehicles adds the most visible "new" element to Skylanders, there's plenty more here that expand upon the series' traditional action adventure (with a little puzzle solving) formula. Nearly every level and area you'll explore in Skylanders comes with a unique gameplay twist.

Activision and Vicarious Visions have seemingly done the impossible by keeping Skylanders fresh for its fifth outing. SuperChargers is jam-packed with enough content to fill at least two separate games and it’s all quality stuff.

By the third level, I would grimace whenever I saw an icon telling me I needed to place a car on the Portal of Power for a vehicle sequence. The cars are the weakest part of the campaign, and most are tied to the critical path.