It’s a fire… sale!

Openfeint.com, a mobile gaming network for mobile devices, has Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing as their ‘Fire Sale’ special. Here’s how that works:

Just go to openfeint.com (must use your mobile phone) and vote for SSASR. Once the game reaches 1,000 votes it drops in price from $4.99 to $1.99!

Last time we reached this goal pretty swiftly, and the sale lasts through the weekend (plus, voting costs you nothing). A nice extra bonus for this Fire Sale: once enacted, it will last through Monday, in celebration of the three-day holiday weekend in the U.S. The sale is global (though for now the app is only available in English), so be sure to take advantage!

We had an amazing time at PAX! Thanks to everyone who came by our booth to play games and say hello to us. We love seeing old friends and making new ones… and SEGA fans are the best!

Here’s some photos and behind the scenes stuff from the show, the GameWorks party, and the great people we met.

SEGA Booth Setup

The SEGA event crew had arrived earlier in the week, and started building our booth. This was the first photo we got (and tweeted) from the show floor.

When I arrived on Thursday morning, a lot had already been done. The booth was up, the kiosks were set up, and it was just last-minute organizing and setting up that needed to be done.

Sonic Generations, Shinobi, Binary Domain, and Renegade Ops were set up in kiosks like this.

The Rise of Nightmares dungeon was mostly set up — this is the view from the inside.

When I was there, the art team was painting the finishing touches on the Rise of Nightmares area.

The finishing touches were also getting put on the Aliens: Colonial Marines theatre.

This is just some of the boxes of stuff we would be giving away over the course of the show. Those white boxes contain the Aliens: Colonial Marines t-shirts. Also in there are fliers for Spiral Knights, Rise of Nightmares, and Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown.

Teri (who hates to have her photo taken) is in charge of all of our booths and does a tremendous job. And as you can see by this photo, her organizational skills are amazing.

PAX!

If you’ve never been to PAX, you probably don’t know how epic the line can get. There is an entire holding room next to the show floor where people wait to be let in. Our booth was directly on the entrance pathway from this room, so we witnessed people streaming by our booth for a solid 5-10 minutes every morning when they opened the doors. (We may have video at some point — I know a few of us took footage.) Anyway, imagine going from that up there to the photo below in about 10 minutes.

Yeah. It’s intense.

Once people were in the show, our booth was busy the whole time. We always had people asking questions, playing games, picking up cool swag, or just wanting to chat. We also had some special guests in our booth — non-SEGA employees helping out.

If you saw our photos from E3, you’ll recognize these folks — the Colonial Marines cosplayers were back, as was Fay from Binary Domain.

We also had other professional cosplayers in our booth, like these zombies for Rise of Nightmares. Microsoft had a great contest going on during PAX — if you spotted these zombies on the show floor you could take a photo of them and tweet it with the #RiseAtPAX hashtag to be entered to win a copy of Rise of Nightmares or a Rise of Nightmares t-shirt. These zombies were at our booth a few times, and lots of people wanted their photos with them.

It wasn’t all professional cosplay though… we saw lots of familiar faces, both costumes and the people in them! Here’s one — Ulala from Space Channel 5 came back this year.

Another familiar face from last year, in the same amazing Valkyria costume.

We also saw a few Bayonettas walking around.

Our Valkyria Chronicles cosplay crew was also back this year!

It’s not all costumes though — some fans came through to show us their art, too.

There was more SEGA stuff going on in other parts of the show, too. Here’s Christine from our Standards team (they are the people that make sure your games work the way they are supposed to) helping out in the Nintendo booth on Shinobi and Sonic Generations.

Toward the end of the show, we found out that Aliens Infestation was picked by Destructoid as one of their 10 PAX Picks. We were totally excited!

GameWorks Party

The party may not have been until Saturday night, but we had been working to get everything set up for weeks prior. On Thursday, once the booth was in good order, the SEGA team all went to GameWorks to assemble all the party credentials and giveaway items. As you can see, this was quite an undertaking and took our pretty large team of people about 4 hours to complete.

The first step was rolling all of the reusable shopping bags. Each person that came to the party got a blue bag with a white SEGA logo on it, and these bags folded up into little pouches. We wanted to attach the pouches to the lanyard, so each person got a neat and efficient bundle of stuff when they arrived at the party. Unfortunately, the bags didn’t arrive packaged in the pouches, so we rolled each and every single one by hand. All 2,000 of them. This is Chris, Matt, and Dan working hard to get the job done.

Each bag was then attached to a Sonic CD lanyard.(Again, 2000 lanyards.) This is Stephen and Christine working on a pile of bags and lanyards. These lanyards were created for PAX and are similar to the ones we created last year, but instead of being black are bright green, and have different Sonic running animations on them. They were incredibly popular, and incredibly awesome.

Our two Davids (we had three Dans and two Davids at the show!) were also busy attaching bags to lanyards.

Then we had to assemble all 2,000 badges. We put a Guest or VIP guest badge in the badge holder, then slipped in a GameWorks game card and a raffle ticket. This got attached to the bag and lanyard. This is our assembly line to get it all done.

After several hours of hard work by everyone, we had 2,000 finished credentials — some of which Christine has here.

Saturday night, we opened our doors and a thousand people (literally!) flooded in for food, drinks, and games.

One of the things we had going on during the party was a raffle… for this epic hoodie. We made these in black with white stitching last year, and they were incredibly popular. We wanted to do them again, but slightly differently. So we made them in blue & tan this year. 20 lucky winners from our party will win a hoodie!

We also had a special guest show up to our party — Wil Wheaton! Julian got a photo with him on his way in.

Thanks again to everyone who came to the party! We had a blast, and we hope you did too.

Destructoid Dance-Off

About 2 weeks before PAX, we were contacted by Jim Sterling from Destructoid. Would we be interested in having Sonic do a dance-off with him during their panel on Sunday? Of course! Unfortunately, Sonic couldn’t make it, so we sent a dancer from the Massive Monkees, a Seattle-based dance crew that was on season 4 of America’s Best Dance Crew.

Who won? Well, I’ll let you judge for yourself in the footage below, but we gave Jim a score of 4.5. Hmm… where have I seen a score like that before?

Thanks to Jim and Destructoid for asking us to participate — we had a blast!

SEGA Crew

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that we love to show you the people who work at SEGA so you can get to know all of us a bit better. We are all passionate about our products and what we do, and we all genuinely enjoy hanging out together.

This is Stephen, who works in our QA department. He was helping us roll up and pass out posters for Rise of Nightmares.

This is Marcella, our Director of Marketing, playing Sonic Generations.

This is Teri (our booth manager), Dan, Chris, Matt, and Jonathan hanging out in the convention center lobby on setup day. Dan, Chris, and Jonathan work in QA, and Matt is an Assistant Producer.

This is Chris and Rey grabbing some grub. Chris works in QA, and Rey runs our mastering lab.

Thanks to everyone who came to see us at PAX! For more of our photos from the weekend, check out our PAX set on Flickr.

You may have seen these tees for sale at Summer of Sonic or around the web, but unless you live in the UK, you’ve been unable to get one for yourself. Until today!

We’re excited to announce that beginning today, all of the officially licensed Sonic merchandise from Insert Coin Clothing is also available in the following regions: United States, Canada, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Europe Middle East Africa.

In addition to the Eggman tee above, there’s a “Team Sonic” tee, seen below.

These tees come in both guys and girls styles, and Insert Coin is offering free worldwide shipping. So what are you waiting for? Get ordering and show your Sonic pride!

Out now, built specially for iOS! Samurai Bloodshow is a tower defense / card collection game, a mix of strategy and action set against the backdrop of a real historical epic, the rebellion which led to the first Samurai-dominated government in the history of Japan.

Raise an army, plot your strategy on the campaign map, and then get ready to defend in the real-time combat against the invading hordes! The game’s campaign mode takes you along the path of historical general Taira no Kiyomori as he fought for control of Japan in the 12th Century, establishing a ruling Samurai order and changing the course of history there.

You can click here if you want to go right to iTunes and check it out — or read on for more details and our launch trailer!

While the game features a deep campaign mode, one of the key features for those who really want to test their skills is Versus mode: play against a friend via Bluetooth local connection, go online through Game Center to challenge others, or challenge unknown opponents online through wi-fi play. Where the campaign mode focuses on defense and the slow conquest of Japan, the versus modes include the added wrinkle of attacking your opponents as you protect your general.

The intuitive controls of the game — drag cards into your lanes to protect your generals, flick around the campaign map, and easily add or subtract members from your army — are complimented by a colorful and engaging art style. The graphics for the game are actually derived from Emaki, a style of illustrated narrative created on scrolls from 11th to 16th century Japan.

These graphics come alive as Samurai warriors, archers, wizards, and even dragons fight and defend on your orders. Set to an excellent score you can watch as your warriors dismember oncoming enemies in flurries of combat and fountains of blood and body parts.

For a limited time the game is available from the App Store for $1.99 — you can then of course play for free or, if you wish to get ahead, purchase additional cards to build up & advance your army.

Win battles to win rare cards, plot your advance through Japan, challenge your friends, and retrace General Taira’s steps towards glory!