YouTube: Light Strike Official ad

I'm liking it. I especially love the association advertising has with toy blasters and Parkour:)

Marketing 101: what's in a name..

"Light Strikes"? WowWee's official page

"Light Strikers" Target toy sale catalogue early lay by

One thing that has been bothering my marketing bone since Light Strike was announced is the inconsistencies shown with the actual brand NAME. The importance of branding is to establish recognition with your audience so consistency with something as fundamental as a product name should be pretty rudimentary.

I personally have been referring to the line as 'Light Strike" which seemed pretty official from the logo and press releases, but since then I've also seen the brand referred to as "Lightstrike", "Light Strikers" and "Lightstrikes" and not just in the blog world; this sort of inconsistency has been on official catalogues, price lists and even on the official Wow Wee page.  Seems like sloppy marketing. Guess it could have been worse. "Light Stroke" perhaps?:P

Light Strike official website. More intel awaits!

Oooh.. customise my blaster.. 

WowWee have finally launched the official website for their upcoming Light Strike laser tag system. The site looks good but is unfortunately at this stage full of broken links (when I checked there was no actual videos to link to or full listing of products available) and a few typos (One of the blasters is called a "DCR D23" but occasionally changes to "DCP D23" when you're customising the rifles on the cool flash demo thingy) but no doubt that'll be rectified in the following days. We've done a quick summary of intel from the site- more after the jump.

*note- videos seem to be up now, and content looks more or less complete!

Light Strike: A 'blink and you'll miss it' video feature

Target's upcoming mid year toy sale will be the last of the big retailers to do their rendition of "Australia's biggest toy sale". On the whole, it's similar to the other sales as far as Nerf and Max Force is concerned other than the variances in price, but the thing we're most interested in is they seem to (at least for the time being) have the exclusive rights to the new WowWee Light Strike laser tag line.

So far we've seen the dorky official promo vid, and we've seen various promo pics, but this "sneak preview"  from the Target VIP mail out shows just that little bit more; have to admit the blasters DO look better than I thought admittedly. As always I'm not particularly impressed by the 'enthusiasm' from the video hosts- nor do I really understand why Light Strike should interact at all with the world of Light Sprite fairies.. but hey.. any intel is.. intel:) 0:56 is where it all happens.. or watch the whole thing and feel suitably..dumber for it:)

Johnson Arms - The best looking Stampede ECS.. ever.

Oh if Nerf only had this as a new colour release..

We absolutely LOVE Johnson Arms' work. For those of you who aren't familiar with the farkin' genius of Brian Johnson, this gentleman takes something normal.. and turns it into a movie prop quality masterpiece. Today he posted an image of a Mass Effect inspired Stampede ECS.. and it deserved a post all on it's own.

Johnson Arms - Customized NERF + More

Nerf Whiteout Series: A Picture essay:P

Rainbow 6 also performed in the 90's as the Backstreet Boys..

 As you can see from my Rainbow 6 squad here, I finally picked up the last of the Whiteout series I was needing to do the full sweep. I've already done pic spams for most of them already.. but now that they're all together, I thought I'd get a lil arty and just take some pics of the best looking Nerf colour scheme to date; it's gratuitous, but then, so is having 5 varieties of Nitefinder:P Actual pics after the jump:)

Nerf Vortex Nitron. Yup. It CAN be fully auto..

Just to let you all know- I can now safely confirm that the Nerf Vortex Nitron IS fully auto. Well.. you still need to keep your finger firmly on the accelerator switch on the grip under the trigger to keep the flywheels going, but keeping the trigger itself pulled constantly will launch the XLR ammo discs one at a time in full auto glory.

There's about the same delay as an out of the box Stampede in rounds if you were wondering about the rate of fire.