Creators, Islands of the Month, Monster Carnival Island

October Occasions: IOTM, Skinny Moon’s Birthday, & PHB Contest!

Hey everyone! Spotted Dragon here again (I know, it’s like once in a blue moon these days) and it’s October, so you know what that means…

spoopy

Well, yes it does mean it’s time to binge watch Over the Garden Wall, but that’s not the point of this post. The point is that it’s a new month and that means a new Island of the Month! And that island is…

monster-carnival-poster

Monster Carnival! And for this spoopy time of year, I’d say Monster Carnival is a perfect choice. Remember that since this island is currently featured, it gets special advantages! 😀

  • First-time finishers get 500 credits instead of the usual 300
  • Repeat finishers get a one-time 300 credit bonus instead of the usual 150
  • There’s a brand-new walkthrough (by the Creators) for Monster Carnival to help you if need be
  • Some cool IOTM lost art and/or throwbacks will be posted throughout the month on the Creators’ Blog and social media
  • The IOTM’s exclusive members-only items are back in the Poptropica Store for a limited time (including the Ringmaster costume which was previously only available during early access)

Of course, we did already figure out the Islands of the Month – the other is Mythology Island – the Creators just finally got around to blogging about it (and mentioning the upcoming lost art!).

If you are interested in any of these, head over to Monster Carnival Island right away! I’m very excited to see all this “lost art,” aren’t you?  However, that’s not all that’s special about this month…

It’s also Skinny Moon’s birthday today! Yep, October 13th to be exact, so be sure to wish her a happy birthday. From all of us here on the PHB, happy birthday, Jessica! We all love and appreciate you very much, so we hope you had an amazing day. 😉

I’ve also been told to share this video with the lucky birthday girl… (very funny ylime) 😛

Other than these cool celebrations, remember that Poptropica is celebrating Halloween in other cool ways. Plus, be sure to enter in the PHB’s very own Halloween/Fall Costume Contest!

It’s our 8th annual this year, and it’s very special this time around because… the Poptropica Creators are sponsoring us by giving a one-month membership to each of the 10 winners (in addition to the prize of being featured on the PHB)!

Now you have to enter, right? Just do it!

8thhallo-phb

Anyway, stay spoopy Poptropicans! >:)

~Spotted Trickster

Contests, Photo Booth

PHB’s 7th Halloween Competition Winners!

phb hallo win 2015

Happy Halloween, Poptropicans! It’s finally time to unveil the winners of this year’s PHB Halloween Competition, which came in two parts: costumes and Photo Booth. We’re celebrating our recent milestone of 20 million hits by choosing 20 winners; 10 for each portion. Here we go…

Part I: Costumes

Mirror, mirror on the wall; who’s the scariest of them all? Well, the PHB team enjoyed looking at the great number of ghastly garbs that dared to enter this hallowed competition, and we’ve finally narrowed it down to ten of this year’s best! These guys get the honor of being shown on the front page via this post, as well as having their costumes immortalized on the PHB’s Costumes page. Check ’em out:

Part II: Photo Booth

The Creators may have held their own Photo Booth Halloween challenge, but we were first – and we did promise to award memberships to the winners! 😉 Check out these spine-chilling spectacles created right in Home Island’s Photo Booth (with a bit of clever image editing in #2)!

If you are one of the Photo Booth winners, check your email for a message from the PHB regarding having your membership awarded to you. #1 gets a 6-month membership, #2 and #3 get a 3-month each, and #4-10 each get a 1-month! Might come in handy for the upcoming Escape from Pelican Rock Island. 😛

We had hundreds of entries for the PHB’s 7th Annual Halloween Competition, and regardless of whether or not yours made this list, thank you for participating! If you’d like to check out everyone’s entries, browse the comments section of the contest post before it’s too late. 😉

Still in the Halloween spirit? Check out the new PHB post, “Scariest Poptropica Moments”!

👻 † Happy Halloween from the PHB! † 👻
🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃

~

zomberries dancing

Dance like a Zomberry!

Contests, Photo Booth

The Creators’ Halloween Photo Booth Challenge Winners!

Heyyo Poptropicans, it’s Ultimate iPad Expert here! It’s been a little while since I last posted, so glad to be back at it again.

Anyway, today the Creators announced the winners of their Halloween Photo Booth Challenge! The Creators’ received thousands of entries from Poptropicans, and have narrowed them down to one winner and 5 runner-ups for each of the five categories. So, let’s get to the winners! 😀

Best Costume

  • Winner: Golden Typhoon
  • Runners-up: Golden Rider, Trusty Lightning, Spotted Eagle, Slippery Boot, Happy Starfish

Best Costume - Halloween Photo Booth Challenge

The first category is Best Costume, showing off the coolest of the creepy costumes. The overall winner is Golden Typhoon, with her character’s in-transformation werewolf and the addition of the awesomely terrifying wolves from on Vampire’s Curse! Here’s what the Creators commented:

Golden Typhoon didn’t just make a great werewolf costume — she also posed it mid-transformation for a dramatic photo. Look how the other wolves are welcoming the newest member of their pack! Creepy!

Great runners up, too, including characters inspired by some of your favorite movies and comic books.

Best Halloween Party

  • Winner: Speedy Knuckle
  • Runners-up: Orange Burger, Squeezy Pelican, Trusty Walker, White Toes, Brave Thunder

Best Halloween Party - Halloween Photo Booth Challenge

Second is the Best Halloween Party, with its several scary celebrations. The overall winner of this category is Speedy Knuckle! He made a super awesome party with some awesome quests including a few creators and famous monsters. I especially love the crowd-surfing vampire. The Creators are totally down for these parties:

Judging by the entries we received in this category, Poptropicans know how to get down! Please invite us to all of your future parties. Our winner was Speedy Knuckle, whose composition and character poses made for a rockin’ good time.

Special mention to the runners up, each of whom brought a fun twist to the idea of a Halloween party.

Funniest Photo

  • Winner: Tall Kid
  • Runners-up: Fast Lizard, Fast Lizard (yup, he won two spots!), Popular Flyer, Spotted Sword, Super Snowball

Funniest Photo - Halloween Photo Booth Challenge

Tall Kid brought home the top spot in the Funniest Photo section, which in itself has heaps of hilarious happenings. Tall Kid created what I can only assume it’s of some sort of condiment battle. A few monsters are chasing a guy in a hot dog costume with ketchup and mustard. I have to say it did make me chuckle. 😛 The Creators appreciated the sense of humor, too:

Tons of hilarious entries in this category. In the end, we had to give the top spot to Tall Kid, who gave us three monsters (and two bats) chasing a poor Poptropican in a hot dog costume. We always knew that would get you in the end.

You’re not seeing double in the runners-up. Fast Lizard placed twice, and with good reason!

Most Creative Photo

  • Winner: Smart Glove
  • Runners-up: Blue Monster, Brave Pear, Loud Chicken, Moody Jumper, Tall Flipper

Most Creative Photo - Halloween Photo Booth Challenge

Next up is the Most Creative Photo filled with innumerable imaginative inventions. The winner of the category is Smart Glove depicting a little Halloween get-together that seems to have been interrupted by Mr. Silva from Shrink Ray. It’s a pretty cool photo, if I do say so myself. The Creators enjoyed looking through everyone’s creative entries:

Every photo we got was creative. Smart Glove zoomed out to show Halloween from a perspective we hadn’t really seen before.

Check out the runners up for some clever and fun storytelling, too.

Scariest Photo

  • Winner: Maroon Bird
  • Runners-up: Brave Panda, Fast Lizard, Neat Hopper, Noisy Bones, Trusty Leaf

Scariest Photo - Halloween Photo Booth Challenge

The final category, Scariest Photo, shows off a certain type of terrifying talent. The winner of the most frightening of submissions is a work by Maroon Bird. The scene shows DJ Saturday Night and Aphrodite on walk with a zomberry peering in through the forest of trees. It is quite creepy. The Creators say it may even be too scary:

The Jersey Devil found his way into a lot of the scariest photos, but it was Maroon Bird’s contribution to the Slenderman tale that earned top honors in this category.

Pretty much all of these are a little too scary, though. Maybe you should scroll back up to the funny ones.

By the way, the winners of each category get to have their avatars and their photos added to the Photo Booth for the next week, so you can play around with them in the Photo Booth!


Well, that concludes the winning submissions from the Creators’ Halloween Photo Booth Challenge (wow, long title)! As for the PHB’s Halloween contests (Costume & Photo Booth), we’ll be announcing the winners tomorrow on Halloween, so stay tuned! Prizes include some Poptropica memberships, and it’s not too late to enter, so check it out!

What did you guys think of the winners and runner-ups? Comment below.

• Ultimate iPad Expert •

Advertisements, Great Pumpkin Island, Photo Booth, Realms, Timmy Failure Island

Photos to Chase after for some Halloween fun!

Hey Poptropicans! Spooky spectacles are afoot!

Black Widow has been hinting at something to come to the Photo Booth: “It might not be a bad idea to start practicing your Halloween photos in the Photo Booth. But perhaps we’ve said too much… for now.” Are the Creators trying to one-up us with a Halloween contest of their own??

Whatever’s up with that, it can’t hurt to make something cool with the Halloween props in the Photo Booth on Home Island, because it might just win you a free membership if you enter the PHB’s 7th Annual Halloween Contest! It doesn’t end ’til Halloween. Check out this PHB post for all the details!

dracula

There’s also a Magnus Chase ad on Main Street of Mythology Island. (Magnus Chase is a new book series by Rick Riordan.) To win this mini-game, just run up to the top-right corner and hop into the blue portal! Watch out for the Ratatosk and raven along the way.

When you get there, you’ll win a Ratatosk Follower and a costume (Sam for girls; Blitzen for boys)!

magnus chase

Plus, album photos for Timmy Failure Island (walkthrough here) are now available! The island came out a month ago for members without photos, but better late than never – although, why does only one picture get a caption? 😛

In other news, Poptropica’s Twitter is no longer in the hands of Poptropica CEO Jess Brallier! According to this tweet, someone else on the Poptropica team now manages all their social media. Hmm.

Another tweet from Poptropica tells us that there’s been an update in Realms: “Monsters now eat, can become nicer, and will drop Poptanium when full!” Check out our Poptropica Realms Guide for more tips and tricks about Realms!

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Be sure to check out all the recent posts below to catch up on what’s popping! 😉

Hope you’re enjoying the fall & Halloween-themed makeover on the PHB! 😀

Stay popping, Poptropicans. :mrgreen:

~slantedfish

Ghost Story Island, Great Pumpkin Island, Monster Carnival Island, Sneak Peeks, Vampire's Curse Island

Disturbing Drafts: The Conceptioning

Greetings Hawk-tropicans! This is Giant Hawk speaking, and I’ve got some spooky news for all of you.

Over the course of the past few days, the Poptropica Creators have been releasing early concept sheets from some of their eeriest islands on their Twitter. So let us journey together, if you dare, into the world of the initial and the uncanny…

Our first concept art is from the early stages of Vampire’s Curse. And as someone who loves the creepy architecture of this island, I must say – this sheet is pretty great! I find it interesting, however, that it is listed as Dracula’s castle…

PoptropicaEarlyConceptDraculasCastleVC

Our next piece hails from Ghost Story, and appears to be a preliminary representation of Prisoner 24601’s jail cell. Maybe it’s just the color and shading, but I think this is my favorite of these concept pieces. The eerie message is a nice touch too.

PoptropicaEarlyConceptJailCellGS

Next, here is an early sketch from Monster Carnival. Clearly, what we’re seeing here is some original character models for the Monster Duck Hunt Carnie. I do like his current form the best, but seeing these other possible appearances of this creature is fascinating. Which form is your favorite? Comment below with your opinion!

PoptropicaEarlyConceptMonsterDuckHuntCarnieMC

Now here’s a little something extra for you! Here we have some concept art from Great Pumpkin, which depicts the early days of a few of this island’s mini-games. To be specific, we have ‘Find the Biggest Pumpkin’, which takes up most of this art, and ‘Apple Bobbing’. I do love both of these games, so it does intrigue me to see their humble beginnings.

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On Halloween, the Creators tweeted several sketches from the spooky-themed islands of Vampire’s Curse, Great Pumpkin, Ghost Story, and Monster Carnival respectively.

So there we go! Whether or not the Creators decide to post any more of these (update: they have, and they’ve been added to this post) I must say they are all visual treats. But most importantly, they help us fans peer into the making of these islands and assist us in really beginning to appreciate the work that goes into each one. And for that alone, I sincerely believe that they are worth our viewing time.

Until next time…

– – Giant Hawk