BenSpark Family Adventures

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01708 Back when Skylanders was a big deal and back when I was working with Activision to promote the brand I was given a code to create my own Skylander. I have not played any Skylanders in such a long time. So many other games have been taking up my time and since I played through all of Skylanders, all 5 games and the Nintendo DS games as well I just haven’t gotten back into it. I am thinking about packing them all away again and using the display cases for some of my Transformers collection instead. That way I can clean and dust and then reset things. It may also motivate me to start listing some Transformers for sale. Not my originals or anything and nothing too special but probably the ones I picked up when I was doing a lot of Transformers buying in the late 90’s early 2000’s.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01577 Occasionally my Facebook memories feed comes up with photos of my Skylanders from over the past years. There was a time when I played Skylanders almost every day. Now I have all my figures in my office and I have yet to play with any of them in such a long time. At one point the Skylander pictured here, Crusher was my favorite.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01545 For a few years, Skylanders was my jam. They were the thing that I worked on all the time, playing the game, reporting on the game, collecting toys and pretty much anything else with them. Then they disappeared almost overnight. I’ve got a huge display cabinet with every Skylander ever except for one, Master Ro-Bow. That one was impossible to find because it was the very last one out. I held it in my hand once but did not buy it because I thought that Activision was going to send one to me. So instead that one is not part of my collection and it goes for several hundred dollars on eBay. I’d love to find it and add it to the collection one day but it is unlikely. I guess I should take my collection and start playing through the last game, Skylanders: Imaginators on my YouTube channel. Give some new life in these Toys To Life Toys.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01366 I’ve been sleeping in my office since Monday and haven’t been venturing outside of it for much of anything except to pick up the kids from school or to take them to their classes and such. COVID has been kicking my butt and I haven’t felt like doing much other than resting. I haven’t been thinking much about photos either. At night I do notice that I have many Glow-In-The-Dark Skylanders figures in my display case. I decided to take a photo, not a very good one, of them using Night Sight on my phone. The red is coming from the light son my computer but the figure int he back is a Skylander that Glows.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01222 My Skylanders collection is not doing much these days except for being decorations in my office. I keep talking about doing some streaming with these toys. I should really start doing that on my YouTube or Twitch channel.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01104 I think it is time to revisit my Skylanders collection seeing that I have so many of them. I have Skylanders Imaginators on my XBox so I should get going on playing this game with these figures, they are so much fun. I love how they look and how they are so different from one another.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00652 I’m gonna be honest. I did not get a photo today until real late and went with a photo of one of my Skylanders, Halloween Eye Brawl. I’m sure it has a different name but it was a Halloween themed character from the series.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00594 One reason that I love Skylanders so much is the unique designs of each and every character. There are well over 200 different characters that have been made into fully realized toys. The company designed and made these characters and toys with backstories on each one, too. They were perfect for the video game and also cartoons and comic books. The game should really have kept going but it ended up being cancelled with the 6th iteration of the game. At the time there were many other Toys to Life games out there. Then they all just stopped.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00592 Imagine being a kid and discovering a video game that you really enjoy. Then finding out that you had access to anything and everything in every iteration of that game. That is what has happened to Andy. He was just a little guy when I was running down to New York City for Activision Skylanders Playdates for Trap Team and SuperChargers and new game reveals. He even got to accompany me on two of those occasions and two additional times for the Activision Family Game Summits in 2012 and 2013. Suffice it to day, the kid has had a ton of experience with Skylanders but it never truly clicked with him until the other day. Andy helped me put all of my Skylanders into the display bookcase next to my computer in the office. As we placed them into the bookcase he helped me sort them into their respective game releases. There were 6 Skylanders games and each had a set of toys. You can tell which toys went with which game based on the color of their bases. Andy was goo...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00590 We called Eva at the Cape tonight and while we were doing the call we were all sitting on Andy’s futon and had the camera angled up. We also had the rope lights on and it gave a very cool effect. So while we were doing the call I thought, this image of us should be today’s photo of the day. Spent some time with Andy today playing Skylanders on the XBox One. He as having a great time switching the different characters an enjoying all the fun gameplay. I think that what I’ll do next is hook up the Wii U so that we can play the previous games. The toughest will be playing the first game again and having to use the Wii controllers. We’ve come a long way since those things.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00589 Let’s say that… a few years back I was a huge collector of Skylanders. I pretty much have every single one except for Master Ro-Bow. That one was very elusive to find. I held it in my hands once and put it back in case I was sent one to promote. I was not sent one but almost half of the figures in the bookcase were provided to me by Activision. That saved me a ton of money but at the same time I spent a ton to get the others. I had this idea when it was time to switch my office with Andy’s room. I decided that I was going to paint my bookcase black and att lights to it and make it a display for all of my Toys to Life figures. That was the segment of video game related toys that you could activate in a video game. Skylanders was the game that reawakened my love for video games. I picked up a Wii U and then later on a Nintendo Switch to play the Skylanders games. There ended up being six games in all and each with a new set of toys. I started off the morning ...