Archive for the ‘New Releases’ Category

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New “XTREME” Pringles are anything but.

June 23, 2009

On sale this week, XTREME Extra Pepper Pringles.

XTREEEEEEEEEEEEEME

XTREEEEEEEEEEEEEME

Holy crap, look at that Pepper machine gun beating the hell out of that dumb old bowl! These just HAVE to be awesome, right? Right?

Not at all.

I was suspicious of these as soon as I saw that they were “pepper” flavored. There have been at least three various of pepper Pringles within the last year or so, and they have basically all been just regular Pringles with some pepper sprinkled on. These are no exception. I thought the chips would be blackened by the Xtreme amount of pepper added, but alas, I had to actually look very closely in order to see that there was, in fact, pepper on these chips.

To make matter worse, these aren’t even the most “peppery” Pringles I’ve had, and they certainly aren’t “Xtreme”. I forget which of the two pepper Pringles won in this review, but they had much more flavor than these failures do.

It seems that “pepper” Pringles are the very definition of lazy when it comes to snacks. At this point, from my Xperiences, I’ve comes to Xpect little out of these sad Xperiments in marketing, because, not once, have they Xceeded my Xpectations, or even met them, which is  actually an Xceptionally easy thing to do. InXcusable.

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Three new flavors of Pretz

June 23, 2009

Within the last couple of days, I’ve run across three new Pretz flavors.

Apple and Cheese Pretz

Apple and Cheese Pretz

The cheese ones taste just like many of the cheese-flavored crackers back in North America like Goldfish and Cheez-Its.

The apple ones are very sweet, but taste strikingly accurate. I was pleasantly surprised. They mimic the tart yet sweet aspects of an apple’s flavor.

LEE Curry Pretz

LEE Curry Pretz

These ones are inspired by LEE brand instant curry that advertises itself as being “10 times spicier” than regular spicy curry. These taste a LOT like curry and are very addicting if you like curry-flavored things. They’re not as spicy as they’d like you to believe. In fact, they’re not spicy at all, but they are very delicious.

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More “drink” snacks: Ramune KitKats

June 17, 2009

It looks like KitKats are also getting in on the “snacks that taste like popular drinks” bandwagon. Their drink of choice? Ramune.

Ramune KitKat

Ramune KitKat

The artwork on the bag suggests that these are the special flavor for Tanabata, but I don’t really see the connection. If memory serves me correctly, the Tanabata flavors for last year and the year before that were both banana, so yeah, I have no idea. I’m guess that it’s just because it’s being released around the same time.

As shown on the bag, the KitKats themselves are light blue. They have kind of a strange smell to them. A friend of mine said that they smelled like “erasers”. Luckily, they don’t taste like erasers, but pretty much like Ramune. Unfortunately, they taste more like Ramune candy than they do the actual drink. The chocolate itself tastes a little bit like Ramune, but it’s not very pronounced. They unfortunately didn’t mimic the carbonation effects from the cola caramel corn snacks.

The real flavor comes from a powder that they mixed in with the cream that’s inside of each stick. They mention that it’s supposed to be “bubbly” and taste carbonated, but it really just tastes like they crushed up the Ramune candies and mix those in with whatever cream they put inside. It doesn’t really mix well with the rest of the KitKat. That’s not to say that it’s bad, but you just end up noticing the two flavors separate from each other. At first, you taste the outer chocolate, and then, after chewing for a while, you taste the candy/powder but it’s as if you just put some of the candy in your mouth and not like a “ramune KitKat”.

If the cola Caramel Corn hadn’t beaten them to the punch, I might have been more impressed with these. I don’t feel that the powder was necessary, because it just tastes like you’re eating two separate things rather than one well put together one.

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Snacks that taste like drinks.

June 17, 2009

There’s a snack in Japan called, simply, “Caramel Corn”, and it’s a cross between actual caramel corn and a cheeto. It’s cheeto-shaped, but is very light and crispy. The normal flavor is, of course, caramel, but there’s always new flavors coming out. There are two special flavors that just came out for the summer: Vanilla Shake and Cola.

caramel_corn

Vanilla Shake and Cola

The vanilla shake ones taste like a vanilla version of the caramel corn, and that’s very good. I remember the vanilla bean KitKats being one of my all-time favorites. It has a hint of the standard Japanese “milk” flavor in there, but not enough to make it tase much like a shake. It’s fine as it is as a vanilla-flavored snack.

The cola ones are a bit more interesting. They have a powder on them that instantly dissolves as soon as it touches your tongue, and it does a really good job of replicating the feeling of carbonated drinks as you drink them. I’ve given samples to a whole bunch of people over the past couple of days, and every single one of them has had the same “Whoah!” surprised reaction upon tasting them, myself included. The flavor is also pretty spot on. If I had to choose, I would say that it tastes close to Coca-Cola if you were to get it from a fountain machine. The flavor itself is very sweet and, combined with the carbonated effect, does a really good job of tasting like cola. This is something I didn’t expect from a “dry” snack.

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New Cheetos, Pringles, and Koalas

June 14, 2009
Spicy Salami and Cheese Cheetos

Spicy Salami and Cheese Cheetos

Unlike the BBQ/Chili Cheetos Combos, these I just found in a regular convenience store right next to:

Cheetos mix: Wild Cheese

Cheetos mix: Wild Cheese

The full name is “Chester Cheetah’s Cheetos mix”. It looks to be a combination of regular Cheetos sticks and those shaped like paws. I’m pretty sure this is the first time they’ve used Chester Cheetah in Japan. On the bag, they have a little biography in which they state that his birth date is February 2nd, 1986. The starburst says that these are “Wild Cheese” flavored, and the text above Chester says that they use red pepper to spice things up. If I hadn’t been disappointed so much in the past, I might still cling to some hope that these will taste like Red Hot Cheetos.

Beef Kebab Pringles

Beef Kebab Pringles

These Pringles are based off of the, apparently, Turkish beef kebabs. There are small shops and trucks that sell these all around Tokyo and throughout Japan as well. Imagine slices of beef, lettuce, tomato, and some sweet sauce in something close to a pita, and that’s what these things are in real life. You might hear “kebab” and expect pieces of meet on a skewer, but that’s not what these are.

Milk Pudding Koala's March

Milk Pudding Koala's March

Lastly, are the new Milk Pudding Koala’s March. These taste milky and somewhat creamy, but I didn’t taste anything resembling “pudding” and the texture did lend anythign to that area. They are still yummy without it.

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New Assorted Snack Flavors

June 11, 2009

So there’s always new and exciting products being released, and I’ll try and list of a couple that caught my eye recently.

Soft packs of Pretz

Soft packs of Pretz

Here we have three flavors of Pretz: Purple Potato, Tomato, and Asparagus. While these have been around since last fall, I still think they deserve some recognition. These are also the only flavors I have seen in these “soft” packages.

Hai Chu display

Hai Chu display

“Hai Chuu” is a pretty popular snack similar to taffy. They just started releasing a bunch of flavors under the “World Fruits” banner. In the above picture, you can see the new “Dragon Fruit” and “Blood Orange” flavors.

Koala's March

Koala's March

“Koala no March”, known as Koala Yummies in the U.S., just came out with these two flavors: Strawberry & Milk (with honey) and Banana Crepe.

Almond Pocky

Almond Pocky

The new Almond Pocky seems to put the almond flavor in the cream itself rather than sprinkle the real thing all over it like the Crush Almond Pocky did.

Mitsuya Cider Zero

Mitsuya Cider Zero

I always tell people that Mitsuya Cider is a much cheaper, more available, and usually better tasting alternative to Ramune. Now, there’s a zero calorie version of it as well. It certainly does taste like a diet drink. It still kind of taste like the regular version, but, as you would expect, it’s not as sweet, and there’s a strange aftertaste that you don’t get with the regular stuff.

Baby Star Gyouza Chips

Baby Star Gyouza Chips

I like Baby Star, and I like gyouza, so this seemed like a sure thing. The chips themselves are like little wafers that are like the kind you’d get if you were a Christian and took communion at church. Unless those, these smell exactly like gyouza. Unfortunately, that’s their strongest point. They don’t really taste as accurately as I had hoped and they do have kind of a strange “cardboard-y” taste that lingers as well.

Teriyaki Chicken Pizza-La Doritos

Teriyaki Chicken Pizza-La Doritos

Finally, there’s a new flavor of the long-running “Pizza-La” Doritos: Teriyaki Chicken. I’ll be doing a video review for these, and I hope that they taste better than the recent regular Teriyaki Doritos.

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Neon Genesis Evangelion Snacks

June 11, 2009

So the newest Evangelion movie is scheduled to be released later this month, so to celebrate, they’ve released all kinds of products with Eva characters slapped all over it. Two years ago, for example, you could get special cans of UCC coffee:

Eva coffee (missing: Rei)

Eva coffee (missing: Rei)

This time around, you can also get 500ml bottles of coffee, and they come with little cell phone straps as well. They also released some Eva-themed snacks.

Garlic Ramen Snack

Garlic Ramen Snack

First up, there’s the “Garlic Ramen Snack”. These just look like they repackaged a standard snack similar to Baby Star, possibly gave it a new flavor, and stuck Rei on the bag. I do like how Unit 00 seems to be wading through a giant pool of the stuff though. I was more interested in these:

AT Field Snack

AT Field Snack

Here we have the “AT Field Snacks”. There’s no indication on what flavor they are on the front, but I just like how they’re kinda shaped like little AT Fields themselves.

Well, kind of.

Well, kind of.

How do they taste? Apparently, AT Fields taste like Funyuns covered in black pepper, which, may I add, is extremely good. I thought I was going to just taste a couple for this post, but I soon found myself inhaling these things like they were going out of style (note: Eva will never go out of style in Japan it seems). For $1 a bag, these are a very good deal.

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Green Tea Diet Coke

June 11, 2009

Well, this caught me by surprise. I simply went to the store from some milk, and ran across this:

Coca Cola plus Catechin

Coca Cola plus Catechin

I would guess that the full name is “No Calorie Coca-Cola plus Catechin”. What’s catechin? According to Wikipedia:

Catechins are polyphenolic antioxidant plant metabolites.

and

Catechins constitute about 25% of the dry weight of fresh tea leaf, although total catechin content varies widely depending on clonal variation, growing location, seasonal/ light variation, and altitude. They are present in nearly all teas made from Camellia sinensis, including white tea, green tea, black tea and Oolong tea.

When I first took a sip, I didn’t taste anything particularly special, but it was not as chilled as it could have been, so I put it back in the fridge for a bit. During the second tasting, I still didn’t taste anything close to green tea, so for those who are waiting for a diet carbonated green tea drink, you still have some waiting to do. On the plus side, it didn’t have the normal Diet Coke aftertaste that I’ve come to expect, and not even the kind that’s in Coke Zero. So, while it’s not as sweet as regular Coke, it taste better than the diet varieties, but if there’s anything related to green tea in here, I really can’t taste it.

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Mountain Dew Max Air 3

May 25, 2009

What good timing. I was starting to get jealous of everyone back in the U.S., because I’ve heard nothing but good things about Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback. I’m also interested in how Pepsi Natural tastes. Things were looking pretty lonely on the drink front. NOT ANYMORE!

Max Air 3

Max Air 3

For the third year in a row, there’s a new Mountain Dew “Max Air”. The first one tasted like Mountain Dew, but a little more “crisp”. Max Air 2 was so “crisp”, that it pretty much lost its flavor. You can watch my video review of Max Air 2 here.

As for Max Air 3, it definately has its flavor back. It’s been too long for me to remember what the first Max Air tasted like, but this seems like regular Mountain Dew to me. It doesn’t seem as carbinated as Max Air 2 was, which is what I felt its main problem was. When I make a video, I’ll compare it to the regular Mountain Dew that you can still find in vending machines, and see which tastes better.

The gang's all here.

The gang's all here.

In anything else, you can bet that there will be a Max Air 4 coming out around this time next year. Pity I won’t be in Japan to get some right away.

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Lemon Vinegar KitKats. Finally!

May 24, 2009

It only took a couple weeks to track them down, but I finally found a few bags of the lemon vinegar Kitkats.

Lemon Vinegar KitKat

Lemon Vinegar KitKat

I’d like to get this reviewed, as well as the ten or so flavors of chips that I have yet to get taken care of in the last couple of weeks.

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