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All Star Weekend has gone from a place where key players got a fairly hard-to-obtain Nike footwear upgrade to a marketeer and designer's wet dream. Nike Basketball are dropping gems at performance level (the spaceage theme, where key players got their own planets really works on the NSP-KB24 Kobe 8 System) with some good creative work from Eugene Rogers and Erick Goto, as the intergalactic concept reflects the event's Houston location this year, but what about the Sportswear side? With last year's host city and this year's both having NASA affiliations, that's an excellent opportunity to build on the Nike space program that the Galaxy releases sent into resale orbit just over 12 months ago.

The All-Star 2013 Nike Sportswear releases continue the brand's habit of getting high concept on the storytelling side of things as well as exploiting the insane colourway options their output allows by taking the story to earth, where alien footwear lifeforms exist in the little-known Area 72 (presumably a reference to Nike's birth year) and turning some old favourites into extra terrestrials, each linked by an insane galaxy lining and the resurrection of the Nike Raygun logo. There's some uniquely patterned and textured Nike Lunar Force 1s, Blazer Mids and the Vandal, but this quartet is really about the upgrades of some of our favourite Charles Barkley silhouettes.

The Air Force Max 2013 upgrades the 1993 classic, 20 years after its debut, with some interstellar speckling across the midsole and upper, plus a red air bag, but the Barkleyposite Max is the wildest of this collection, merging the Foamposite with the Air Max 2 CB 94, 3M on the patterned upper and a glowing sole. Will these cause as much mayhem as last year's Galaxy drops? Probably not, but some hype is an inevitability. All four Area 72 shoes drop in Quickstrike numbers in the Crooked Tongues store in a few weeks to coincide with All-Star Weekend on the 15th of February.