I...um...what? Seriously? Literally every single one of the details you circled on the third-party toy is either the wrong colour, the wrong shape, in the wrong place or all of the above, and some of them don't look a thing like the original detail you say they're trying to emulate. Using those loose standards I could probably throw up a side-by-side of MP Prowl with G1 Jazz or Overdrive and find just as many "similarities".Clay wrote:As you can see, all of the whopping five or six points of molded or sticker detail from the front side of the original have been incorporated into the Fenrir figure. They've changed the shin ridges from silver to teal, but they're still silver on the inset molding (it's hard to tell in that picture, though).
I mean, it's not like it would have been difficult to replicate those bits and bobs more closely, because like you say there's not that many of them.
I dunno, that sounds like a lot of effort to put into being wrong.Clay wrote:I can do this for the rest of the group if you want?
Which means he doesn't look much like Blot. His chest is basically flat instead of having a giant angry nose poking out, which is the #1 thing that any toy trying to look like Blot should have.Clay wrote:Blot's beast head is his chest, yes. It just folds in to fit more flush.
...yes? Obviously they can be streamlined some, but I don't see how engineering out one of the Terrorcons' only distinguishing features is a good starting point for making Terrorcon figures. That would be like getting rid of Prowl's door-wings or Starscream's shoulder air intakes. You might be able to succeed without them but it makes the job a whole lot harder.Clay wrote:Wait, so you want giant dangly beast legs hanging off robot legs? That's not a part of the originals that you look at and say, "Hmm, if somebody revisits these figures, that's what needs to stay"?
I won't debate you over whether the toy looks good or not because that's a matter of taste (yours is bad ) but I really don't understand why you'd want him to be the same size as the other Terrorcons. The team leaders are supposed to be huge compared to their troops. That's, like, the whole point.Clay wrote:I think they nailed Hunger both in look and function. He's probably the best torso-bot yet in terms of not towering over his team while also making a proportional body for the combined mode (his alt mode being a fictional beast helps).
I had most of them myself, just not all at once.Clay wrote:I actually had the Terrorcons and Technobots as a kid, so my Serious Business trumps your Serious Business!
Obviously the problem here is that you didn't appreciate them the right way as a child.
Since you mentioned him...Quantron is an ugly, over-bulked piece of crap and the individual robot modes are so laughably bad that you'd almost think the people who designed them had never seen a Transformer before. I would honestly be a touch ashamed to own one.Clay wrote:I will agree that the individual robots for Quantron take varying degrees of liberty, but I love the results so it doesn't bug me. But the Ordin Terrorcons... I don't get it. They look spot on to me.
Ordin on the other hand appears to be a competently-designed set that'd be fun to mess around with. I just wish his designers hadn't gone out of their way to get rid of all the absurd silliness that made me love the Terrorcons to begin with. Without that, I just feel like...why even bother?
This, I'll agree with you wholeheartedly on. Though I'd go a bit farther. It's not just third-party companies doing it and it's not just the combiners who suffer. No Transformer toys these days come with their respective characters' proper weapons unless it's a Masterpiece, and even then you're likely to get screwed out of something because it's so much more important for Prowl's missile launchers to be an exclusive or for Grimlock to come with a stupid apron/serving tray/crown instead of his missile launcher. One of the very best things about G1 Transformers is that nearly every one of them came with at least one unique weapon, and I've got as many childhood memories of those weapons as I do of the toys themselves.Clay wrote:Now I will say that none of these companies seem interested in producing the complementary weapons for these figures, which to me had just as much or more character than the figures themselves.
I mean, if "Fenrir" came with an over-under pistol and a gigantic back-mounted cannon in beast mode I'd be a lot more forgiving of the mold's flaws because that alone would help the toy look a lot more like Sinnertwin. Instead he appears to wield a couple of hook-things and wears and obvious foot on his back.
I'd tend to agree on that, though I'd extend the same sentiments to official combiners as well. It's hard enough making an individual figure that I'd like, let alone a whole set of five or six that are hits at the same time.Brendocon 2.0 wrote:Yeah, I'm not really sold on any of them at all (beyond Feral Rex and Ordin, despite legitimate points observed). Warbotron's Brawl and Swindle really do it for me, but the other three Combaticons and the combined mode make me recoil. And again for all the other groups - there might be an individual figure or two for each set that I look at and think they've nailed it, but by the time I've seen the entire set and combined mode I've lost all enthusiasm.
This is where the lack of cross-compatibility and scrambleability hurts the 3P stuff, though -- because I can grab two CW Protectobots, one Stunticon, one Combaticon, etc. and still have fun throwing them together into a makeshift gestalt, but if I went out and bought five components from five different third-party combiners all I'd have is five different toys with different design aesthetics that neither function nor look good together.
(Even then I'd probably buy Warbotron's Brawl and Feral Rex's Tantrum if I had space for them.)