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Denyer
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Post by Denyer »

It's just the one screw to allow the back halves to separate slightly;

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HeavyArms
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Post by HeavyArms »

Decided to get the Studio Series Dark Of The Moon Autobot Ratchet making it the first Ratchet from any of the movies to make it into my collection.

I may also get the voyager Ratchet from the first movie as I feel a voyager fits the character better.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Studio Series Starscream
This is a fun figure I wasn't expecting much from. Reminds me of the DOTM Deluxe Thundercracker figure I used to have, in terms of its engineering. Only Voyager sized. Even if it is just that blown up to Voyager sized, it makes for a fantastic figure. The jet mode looks awesome and tidy. Robot mode is good fun and overall I'm very impressed.

Studio Series Shadow Raider
Fun repaint / retool of the SS Lockdown figure. I like this more than Lockdown (himself a great figure) if only for the bright orange colouring and the glorious green blob of a head. Great stuff!

Studio Series Bumblebee
I'd seen the reviews and wasn't going to bother with 'bee. But I picked one up because the robot mode looked good. Wish I hadn't. No only am I saddled with the roof dropping off like everyone else, but mine has come with two right or left shin pieces, so can't properly transform into his Camaro alt mode. So a double-whammy of disappointment.

Masterpiece MP-42 Cordon
Christ, this is an engineering feat and a half. Vehicle mode is nice, the detailing and paint apps are fab. I like that you can switch out the turbo tuning intakes for a regular roof. I've got the guy into robot mode and he looks beautiful. I love the grumpy face and toy detailing that the Sunstreaker version of this toy lacks (and looks worse for, IMO). However, I cannot get the damn thing back into vehicle mode! The clearances are so tight, I'm worried I'm going to force something and snap it. I've already had the wing mirrors pop off trying to reform the doors and that was enough for me to leave this alone. He is a great figure, but perhaps a little too clever for its own good. It took me the best part of an hour to figure out the robot mode, and I don't know how long it'll take to go back and whether I'll want to try it.
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HeavyArms
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Post by HeavyArms »

Cyberverse Bumblebee.

SS Grimlock - Part of a lay-by I needed to pick up.

G2 Dreadwing and Smokescreen - I had these two many years ago, so while I was at a Transformers group meet-up today I decided to pick him up.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Was in a branch of TK Maxx recently and picked up a couple of TFs

RID Combiner Force Bisk & Saberhorn
Fun plug and play combiners that slot together to form Saberclaw. It's a bit of a shame Bisk is a one-colour bland out as next to the more considered Saberhorn, his bright orange jars to much to make the gestalt mode look any good. The individual robot modes are decent, if lacking in any articulation because of the spring loaded fun going on. Bisk redeems himself in vehicle mode by being the only TF with these shitty clip on wheels that actually rolls, which is a first.

RID Warrior Class Windblade
Poor Windblade. Her RID figures are cluttering up the shelves everywhere. Largely due to having two versions and being packed in two different waves. I picked up the masked version as sometimes, I just feel bad for unloved toys. And she's really good! I had the Generations figure but sold it on because it just wasn't up to much. Here, in RID's more cartoony stylings, she actually looks great. She's one of the few figures from the line to have some paint and different tones of plastic. She transforms well and the jet mode looks good. The sword is a bit ridiculous though and looks suspiciously like the Generations one, just cast in solid black.
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ganon578
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Post by ganon578 »

NBK Devastator KO (Not GT Gravity Builder): Came in the mail yesterday, and I had a bit of time between last night and this morning to fiddle around with him. A few weeks ago I had gotten a KO OS Hulkie which is very nice for simplicity reasons, but just a bit undersized for my collection. The NBK Devy is more in line with the size I should have gone with from the get-go. The Hulkie figures, even though they are OS are still slightly smaller than your average Deluxe, making the combiner a head or so shorter than CW/PotP Combiners. I feel like Devy, being that he's all construction equipment, should be bigger than that as well. As it is, the Gravity Builder 'bots are all Voyager sized, making for a much larger Devastator, though not as big as the Hasbro CW guy.

I'm really happy with the NBK version. The size is right (and the price was too), and the individual bots, though a bit stylized and also simplified, still look close to their respective characters and have a good range of articulation. All of them are a touch back-heavy, but have enough foot range to compensate. The mix of green, purple, silver and orange is OK to me, though the orange is a bit of an odd choice. The green (which is hard to tell from most pictures) is bright enough but a bit on the duller side. Personally, I think this works a touch better than the neon-ish green that Devy typically is - kind of like a nice blend of the traditional colors but teetering into the yellow of real life construction equipment. Quality is pretty good overall, though mold flash is found here and there.

I'm really liking the combined mode, and he's surprisingly sturdy for a KO. The shoulder joints are a touch weak but work well enough. The rest is really solid, and his visor even lights up with a tiny LED. I didn't have much time to tinker with the range of motion while combined, but at first blush I'm pleased. Now I just need some Decepticon symbols to flesh out details.

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Tantrum
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Post by Tantrum »

Studio Series #21 - Starscream Like Ratchet, SS Starscream is a reworking of the DotM Deluxe, released in two decos. This is the tattooed version. The deco is similar to the DotM deluxe, but not identical. The stripe pattern is different, and my SS Starscream lacks any tattoo deco on his right thigh piece. It looks good in bot mode, but causes one of the jet mode stripes to have a gap. Also, the panel that covers SS's head is solid, while the Deluxe was painted to fit the deco. There are several improvements to the mold:

New chest panels manage to fill in more (but not all) of the gaps between the cockpit chest and the broad shoulders. Having two thin panels where DotM had one thick panel means SS's panels fold more compactly under the wings in jet mode, resulting in one of the most aerodynamic jetformers I've bought in quite some time. It's not perfect, since the arms stick out from below the plane more than a jet would, but this is pretty minor.

Better arm articulation. DotM's ball jointed elbow are replaced with hinged elbows, upper arm swivels, and wrist swivels, giving SS even more arm articulation than the Deluxe that could scratch his own back. If you want to pose SS and DotM together, pinky to the mouth all, "I will call him Mini-Me" style, you can, though DotM can't quite pull it off as well as SS. On a related note, SS has solid forearms instead of the hollow ones DotM has.

Hex holes for mounting to flight stands in both bot and jet mode.

Scupted thruster detail. This is a minor improvement, but appreciated. The thrusters end up in the back of the bot's knees, looking like they help him leap Fortress Maximus in a single bound.

This does bring up my main concern with this figure. The legs aren't straight when the bot stands. This means that the weight is supported by the hinges of the knee joints instead of plastic resting on plastic. DotM had screws here; SS has screws in one joint, but pins in the other. It's possible (and maybe intended) to bend the pinned joints all the way back and pose the legs accordingly. But, this results in a shorter, more awkward looking bot. I'll do this if the hinges don't hold up, but hope not to have to.


Siege Battle Patrol and Air Strike Patrol These are 2-packs of rdone Micromasters. The bot and vehicle modes homage G1 figures, now with ball jointed shoulders and hips, and knees that function for articulation as well as transfromation. One even has elbows!

Highlight: Topshot's rotating turret and hinged barrel aren't just useful in vehicle mode, but allow the barrel to fire over the bot's head, like G1 Bombshell. Lowlight: Pegging Storm Could into jet mode is harder than it should be.

They also have combined weapon modes, but I'm not too impressed. Topshot's face is clearly visible, and Flak makes a decent gun without him, just with a short handle. Visper and Storm Cloud's sword mode is too thick to be a passable sword, but is a better combined jet mode than the PotP deluxes could pull off.

At US$10 per 2-pack, they're $5 each, the price of a Prime Master or Titan Master. Although there's less play value in a figure than in a *Master and accessory, these are better made, and appear far superior to the $6 Seige Target Master type figures I've seen that have very little paint and come with clearish weapon fire effects. Seriously, those things look awful.
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ganon578
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Post by ganon578 »

Stopped off at Target yesterday, found a few Siege items that I've been wanting. They had the Micromaster sets, all the Deluxes, and the boring Battlemasters. I was tempted to get Blowpipe and Firedrive just to have the Targetmasters for TR Triggerhappy & PotP Hot Rod, but couldn't bring myself to drop $12 on those (yet). As Tantrum mentioned, they really don't seem worth the cost.

Sideswipe, Hound, Race Car Patrol: All are fun, and really solid. After the same-y engineering of the CW, TR, and PotP lines, it's refreshing to get things that are different. Both Sideswipe and Hound manage to be intuitive and simple, though the transformations are different enough to feel very new (Hound in particular). I hadn't realized it until I opened Hound, but all four wheels end up on his lower legs. I dig the half-Cybertronian/half-Earth modes they have. Not too keen on the sporadic 'battle damage' thing they have going on, but at least it's well applied when it is used (really just on the shins and feet). The Race Car Patrol is pure nostalgia for me, as I had the original team when I was much younger. It's truly amazing to have modern updates to these, with some proper joints. They're both a bit back heavy though, and the weapon modes are laughable. Oh well, it's nice to have true Micromasters back, and it's nice to have some fresh engineering!
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inflatable dalek
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Post by inflatable dalek »

The Chaos on Velocitron set!

So glad to get it at a sane, indeed great price for six toys after it was going for stupid money before hundreds washed up on British shores.

Nautica is a great, fun toy that fits nicely on the Team Rodimus shelf.

Laser Rod Prime looks great as a robot, but he's a bugger to get into truck mode.

Flastlane is cheap and nasty really. The main weak link.

Quickswitch is the perfect Quickswitch: Ludicrous.

The Rodimus head sure is a Rodimus head.

All in all though, a fun set that would have been amazing to get as a kid.
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Warcry
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Post by Warcry »

inflatable dalek wrote:Laser Rod Prime looks great as a robot, but he's a bugger to get into truck mode.
If you only care about the truck and not the plane, the little mod that Denyer talked about a few posts up really makes the robot-to-truck conversion a lot smoother since you're not cramming wings inside all the truck parts.

Or so it seemed in the five minutes I had to play with Prime afterwards before my son made off with him to vroom him around.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

RID 2015 Blurr
Another surprise hit from a line that hasn't been that great. Good robot mode, fun transformation and a cool looking vehicle mode, although the blue wheels do just scream 'toy'. Can't imagine black ones working though, given that paint is a foreign country to TFs these days. Has some cool light piping and I like the translucent gun too!

Siege Sideswipe & Hound
Before I totally write the line off in a curmudgeonly fit of old man moaning at yet another G1 rehash, I thought I'd at least check out two of the early figures that I thought looked quite good. In hand, these are what I'd always hoped for from the Generations line - good, solid, well built toys with some nice paint apps to make them feel a bit like the specialist collector figures they are. Sideswipe is excellent, and I really like his robot and vehicle modes. The battle damage (if that's what it is) looks nice. He has a decent weapon that can split in half to form a pistol and shoulder cannon. Only major downside is that the wheels don't have enough clearance to actually allow the car mode to roll, and it just sort of scrapes along on its chassis. Hound is bloody fantastic. He has all the bulk and boxiness that made his original toy so charming, he has some fab paint apps and tampos, plus some great weapons and a clever transformation. I also like the packaging, annoyingly shaped though it is. Haven't seen much else from the line that's interested me so far, so if this where Siege starts and ends for me, I'm very happy.
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HeavyArms
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Post by HeavyArms »

POTP Evolution Optimal Optimus - Possibly one of the more sought after figures from the line and very hard to find where I'm from.

SS Dropkick (Bumblebee movie) - Just released in time for the movie in a couple of weeks, kind of wonder why the figure doesn't have a Decepticon emblem on it's nosecone when I think official photos do have it.
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Warcry
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Post by Warcry »

I decided to dip my toe into the high-end KO pool and pick up an MP-10VB. That's basically a downsized MP-10 Optimus in Nemesis Prime colours. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from it, because I've never owned the original mold and I wasn't at all sure how it would stand up to downsizing. And with it being a KO on top of that...well, suffice to say that I was expecting something that looked neat and was far too delicate and fragile to ever actually play with, and probably with some obvious paint or QC flaws as well.

What I actually got was something else entirely. In spite of being shrunk down to around half the original size, the figure feels very durable. None of the moving parts felt fragile, and even the smallest pieces felt safe to handle. My understanding is that this isn't quite a 100% faithful down-scale, but that some of the more delicate bits of the transformation have been either smoothed over or removed entirely (the one that I definitely remember hearing was that the side-view mirrors folded into the torso on the original. The paintwork is flawless as far as I can tell, and the joint tolerances are...well, less than flawless for sure, but certainly within the range that I've come to expect from official product. The plastic feels pretty high-quality, and has a glossy finish that keeps it from sticking out too badly alongside the painted die-cast (which IIRC, this figure has more of than the official one?).

As an action figure, honestly, it's amazing. The truck mode is...well, lets say less than convincing, but the transformation is really intuitive and fun so I'm willing to forgive that. The robot mode is nicely articulated and comes with a ton of accessories. And this might just be me, but I definitely appreciate it more at this figure's more-or-less Voyager-class scale than I would have at the original scale. The bigger MPs I own are too big to enjoyably handle, while this figure is the perfect size.

All in all...very satisfied with the purchase, and actually pondering tracking down the mold in G1 Optimus colours one day too.
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Tantrum
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Post by Tantrum »

Walmart.com had the G1 Hot Rod marked down to $12.97. I went to my local Walmart to pick one up, and he rang up at $29.99. I showed the cashier the ad, he had his supervisor check on-line for himself, and I got the mark down.
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HeavyArms
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Post by HeavyArms »

Earlier in the week I finalized a lay-by that contained these two figures:

POTP Evolution Optimus Prime
&
POTP Evolution Rodimus Unicronus.
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Tantrum
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Post by Tantrum »

On March 30, Tantrum wrote:I spent most of Saturday afternoon hitting 2 TRU, 2 Targets, 2 Walmarts, and a comic/toy shop looking for PotP the next state over, only to find Bludgeon and Thermidor instead.
It only took about 9 months, but I finally opened that Thermidor. He was in my small pile of unopened figures that I hadn't gotten around to yet, since I keep getting new toys. After a frustrating time getting Hot Rod's stickers lined up, I wanted something simple, so I cracked him open. I'm still not a huge fan of Bisk's shade of orange, and Thermidor's weapons slide in and out of his hands a bit easier, so I'm glad I got him. Plus, now I can take this photo:

"All hail Zoidberg, the king with the box! Now it's my turn, maybe?"
"The box says no."
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Post by DDog »

Loose Deluxe Class Animated Soundwave (without Lazerbeak sadly). The paint's rubbed a bit off though.
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HeavyArms
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Post by HeavyArms »

I was able to get POTP Sinnertwin, Terrorcon Blot and Terrorcon Cutthroat from Myer with 20% off, these were basically the only wave 3 figures I've been able to find locally except for one lone Cuttroat at a Target.

I was also able to get the Bumblebee Cassette Pack (w/ Bumblebee (AOE One-Step Changer), Frenzy, Buzzsaw, Howlback (All TR repaints)) and Bumblebee Then & Now 2-Pack which includes VW as well as the second Premier Edition Bumblebees both with slightly different paint decos from their original releases; from K-Mart.
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Denyer
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Post by Denyer »

Snagged a studio series Dropkick online and was pretty impressed it turned up this side of Christmas. Quite looking forward to opening -- the box art seems to have very little to do with the actual figure though.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Kapow's Black Friday sale is still on - a rather depressing sign of the general slowing of retail this year - but I was pleased, as I always manage to miss the sales, so snagged:

Siege Skytread
Nice, if unremarkable, update of Flywheels. Just bought as I had the original, so have some attachment to the character and everywhere seems to be sold out/ asking a premium. Happy to have got this with a few quid off, but aren't as impressed as I thought I would be, given the general positive reception the figure's got. Probably because it's just a straight update, and not as inventive as the recent Battletrap figure, which took an old idea and added something new to the mix.

MP11NT - Thrust
Hard to say no to a Masterpiece figure at half its RRP. My first go on the tweaked Seeker mold which had a retool to (belatedly) give us the Coneheads (and also get rid of those planks of fuselage the older molds had swinging off their hips. Robot mode is nice, the kneepads making him look like he's off to play cricket and there's a bit too much wiggle in the torso for my liking. Love the sneer he's got on his face, too. Although the white is a bit much against such a subdued palette. As with all the MP Seekers (he says, only owning one other - that Skywarp one from 2009ish) the articulation feels a little bit nixed by the wings and awkward feet. Transformation is nice and the jet mode is lovely and I've enjoyed swooshing it around. Shame he comes with no display stand, which feels like an essential thing for these MP toys and I don't get why TT don'y include them at this price bracket. They can't add that much to the price. Speaking of which, there's no way this would have felt good value at full RRP. So I'm happy with the price I paid for what you get.
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