darkSpyro

And then we've got the Minis as well, finally available for sale in shops.

"Oh yeah! AND they're full Skylanders. And because we haven't brought out a new Spyro or Bash this year, this is just a fun way, if you really like Spyro, to be able to play as him again. But these are just sooooo cute, and in game they speak with high pitched voices and exaggerated animations."

I think for the Giants and things, they tend to appeal to the boys more, because they're big, bulky, massive and smash things - I mean, they're the ones I end up playing as, whereas Sarah tends to prefer the smaller, littler ones like Wrecking Ball, Trigger Happy and that rainbow-shooting dragon. What's the name of that one? Whirlwind.

Ah, Whirlwind. I like Whirlwind too. We do try to make strong female characters - a lot of us have daughters and we don't want to just have one particular way of working the female characters. So we have Forge who was a blacksmith and turned her bellows into a flamethrower, and she's rather confident. And we have Headrush, who is sort of this giant, singing Valkyrie.

Now I'm itching to see the new magic moments of Eon's Elite Spyro and Whirlwind.

Eon's Elite characters will have a special Magic Moment? Now that's some exclusive thing that they've never done before. And at least it's confirmed they changed the animations for the Minis, Hijinx stood out like a sore thumb with how excited she seems compared to Hex.

It's one of those things I was wondering about. Is there going to be a risk of there being too much this year? As when it's a fairly small range of new toys people might try and collect them all if they think they can stretch to it, but with the Minis and Trap Masters and the 50 new figures you said about as well - and then all the traps to buy too - it ends up being so much, it may be too much choice?


Well, it's interesting. I mean, we're a collectable toy line. As action figures, we're the most successful around, about twice as many as the Star Wars toys this year. So we also look at what other great collectable toy lines have done, and they offer big ranges. So whether you're looking at Hot Wheels or other great character toy lines, they really offer a lot of choice, and we found that it's hard to, if you don't have a lot of choice, you're going to end up not offering enough to serve the fans. So that's the route we've take, and we'll sort of see how people respond to it. Like in Giants, we had a much smaller set - I think we had only 16 characters. We had eight new core and eight new Giants and a bunch of reposes. This year we've very much shrunk down the number of reposed characters - so really most of them are coming out in Mini form - and we've got a lot of new characters. And you know, we'll see how fans like that and sort of respond in the following years from that.

One of the things I wanted to ask about was the new trap figures. I was expecting these (traptanium weapons) to glow when they're on the portal. I mean, it's a really nice effect, so...

Oh, thank you! Well, you know... they glow in the game when you're fighting villains. The lightcore itself was a fun technology. Each year we sort of decide what features we're bringing in - we don't want to just make a sort of kitchen sink approach of sticking everything in. I think you're right; I love those lights. So, let us know and who knows that'll happen next year! Actually, the whole light core [idea], when we created it, not many people talked about the use of broadcast power and, just from a technical standpoint, the idea that...