Greetings Animusians! I hope everybody enjoyed their Labour Day. I spent my Labour Day weekend, except for Sunday, drawing. Montreal Comiccon is in two weeks and I need that weekend’s material done before I leave since I obviously won’t have any time to draw while attending the convention. On Friday, I drew two flashbacks. On Saturday I drew two mash-ups. Sunday I took it easy (more on that later). Today I drew my normal weekend allotment of two strips. I’ll need to draw an extra two strips over the course of the next two weeks along with my normal workload next weekend and it’ll be all set.

But what did I do Sunday? (See I’m getting back to that!) I played Disney Infinity which I finally picked up on Saturday. As you all know, I’m a huge Skylanders fan. When Disney Infinity was announced, I was intrigued, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest in a set of figurines for another game. The lineup of characters they announced for the first game didn’t excite me either. So I passed on it. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I saw some of what’s in store for Disney Infinity 2.0 which will feature Marvel superheroes (including the Guardians of the Galaxy which is awesome) and some of what I believe are more classic Disney characters (including my favorite, Donald Duck). I don’t think I’ll be able to resist that one so I figured I might as well catch up on the first and at least get the characters I’m interested in.

So how’s the game? Well it’s different. A lot of it seems focused on allowing players to create their own worlds a la Minecraft though with a distinctive Disney flavour in the Toybox mode. While that may be fun, it’s not what I would call a game anymore than I would call creating Pelaria a game. All of what I would actually classify as a game is a means to acquiring the tools and materials required to fuel your creations.

To be fair, there are adventures inspired by Disney movies to play through, but you can only use the characters from those particular movies in them. This is disappointing because not every movie/show theme included in the game has an adventure based on it, especially since the characters I was MOST interested in (Mickey, Wreck-it Ralph and Jack Skellington) were the ones with no adventures to play in. Honestly, who was clamoring to play a Lone Ranger adventure? This all means that a good number of characters are only playable in mini-games and in the Toybox and honestly, while you’re building your Toybox it doesn’t really matter which character you’re playing.

Note this is all based on a few hours’ play. I’ll see how things develop as I go along. I will say that the figurines are outstanding.

I prefer the ability to use any character I want at any time like in Skylanders. Imagine if Disney had gone with a Kingdom Hearts-style story where everybody can cross over into the various worlds. That would have been awesome! Leave the Toybox feature in, just give me a GAME to play along with it.

On Sunday night I went to see The Expendables 3. Now I’ve never been a big fan of 80s action movies, but for some reason, the idea of taking all these 80s action stars who never would have collaborated with one another when they were at their hottest and putting then all in one movie was interesting enough that I went to see the first Expendables movie and it was entertaining enough that I went to see the second so why not the third? None of these movies reinvented the wheel, but they’re decent enough turn-off-your-brain-explosiony romps.

So that’s the skinny on my weekend. Tomorrow it’s back to work. Have a good week everybody! Remember there’s a new mash-up theme starting on Wednesday!