New York Nintendo Sightings

My apologies to regular visitors -- I wasn't able to get an adventure post together this week, as I was in New York for International Toy Fair all weekend.  I should be back on schedule next week, but in the meanwhile here are a couple of videogame-related items spotted during the trip.

I visited the Nintendo World store in midtown Manhattan -- not all of the specimens are museum-quality, but they have a nice glass case display of artifacts from Nintendo's game product history.  The first section features playing cards, Game & Watch units, the Famicom and NES, along with the Zapper and R.O.B. the striking but nearly useless robot accessory:

At Toy Fair, Little Buddy had all of their licensed Nintendo plush toys on display.  Most of their products are the expected ones -- Mario, Luigi, Link, and their friends and enemies -- but I was pleased to see that the company is making the most of the license with a few unexpected characters.

Kirby appears in various cuddly forms:

And the company's new release lineup for 2014 includes a Professor Layton plush, Pikmin in various colors, and a broad range of Animal Crossing characters in smaller form, with larger versions of the more popular characters as shown here:

There are quite a few videogame-related toy and figure products in the works for this year, but I didn't have a chance to capture most of them -- several interesting products were still in a licensor-approval-pending, no-photos-please state.  There's lots of good stuff in the works, though, if your gaming interests extend to physical gewgaws and thingamajigs. 

So have fun, kids!  Why, when I was your age, we thought it was a great thing that we could slog through the snow to K-Mart and buy a wind-up Q*Bert toy that got its mechanism jammed as soon as we started playing with it, that is, if we managed to make it home without waiting in a long gas line while the communists plotted to brainwash us all with some kind of crazy block-fitting game...