Hasbro SW Rebels AT-DP with Pilot figure - got this off Amazon, I hear it's at Ross but I didn't mind spending what I would have anyway, someone made a whopping $8 before fees off my laziness. The driver is the same as the single carded, nicer paint than my single carded. The vehicle is heavy on assembly, snap in the feet at the correct orientation, snap on the chin gun, snap on the hips using plugs that require specific orientation - the design won't let you snap them in wrong, but I can see kids being stymied by it as it's not been the norm for 30 years. Then put on 6 stickers and you're good to go. The AT-DP stands pretty tall and has a cockpit that seats 1 with a rear area letting a second figure stand halfway out the hatch. It's pretty hollow, but the sculpt has detail everywhere and plugs on the false-ankles which is a nice touch. It stands quite nicely and securely; the top hatch opens and a larger panel it's sitting on opens to allow egress; the head rotates; the hips rotate but on large ratchets that makes the legs not useful for walking poses, only tilting the cockpit straight or way down or way up; the chin gun elevates down a few clicks to maybe 60 degrees, and is on a rotation ratchet which is stupid as it doesn't need a ratchet, and the gun fires a missile. Overall, it has nice paint and the sculpt of a Joe Johnston ESB design, so it's nice to have.
Onslaught Six wrote:I have plenty of software VST shit that can probably do almost everything the keyboard I have in mind can do, but there's a problem of workflow and tactile feel or something going on, I'm spending more time tweaking imaginary knobs and not getting as much result as I feel like I should, you know? Want something more immediate and real. Besides, the keyboard is only going between $150-200 right now, and we already have $125 in the band fund. I was going to buy the damn thing before the Christmas money anyway.
Having watched my mom go through bass guitars, pedals, amps, electronic drum pieces, electric guitars, MIDI controller, and every other tactile piece of equipment known to man over the last 20 years, I can tell you that once you start down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will. That said, if the keyboard you get has a MIDI interface or even USB, then at least you get the best of both worlds. For xmas this year my mom got the
B1Xon and it's pretty cool, interesting effects right out of the box, but man, it never ends.
I'm gonna be honest, fuck leg articulation. Everything from the waist up is essential, everything else, give me a hip and a knee and some ankles and I'll be fine. On these 5POA Star Wars--and I've got more than a few now so I think I can judge--I would much rather have more arm points than legs. I don't mind the legs very much because they are, generally, pretty easy to stand up--which is all most of these guys will be doing--but their arms are almost entirely useless, I found Finn to be doing much of nothing on my shelf, which will be pretty fine since he'll be behind Rey and Poe Dameron and Han Solo and ROTJ Luke the whole time, so...
"Fuck leg articulation... give me a hip and knee and ankles" uhhhh.
Anyway, I like ankle articulation more than I like knees, knee articulation is essentially worthless without ankles unless you have a sitting pose in mind, but otherwise it's dependent on the pose of the feet. As for arms, more is better and they are just being cheapskates there, especially not having more range on the shoulders via a ball-hinge.
I mean, we all know that the simpler transformations of the last few years--starting partially in 2011 with DOTM--was explicitly from parent feedback regarding ROTF, right? Hell, a lot of us STILL can't transform Leader Prime right.
I think sometimes we romanticize things from our past a little more than we'd like to admit. I bought a handful of BW stuff recently and broke out my old BW to compliment it, and good God, not only did I only have a fraction of what I thought I had (I only had like a dozen figures?! What?!) but I also forgot how downright simple many of them were. These things, no wonder they could charge $10 in 1996 and keep the price point the same for two decades, the damn things were nothing, they were making HUGE bank on this price point until at LEAST Cybertron, easily.
Yeah, they had been getting a lot of feedback on the TF'07 figures and ROTF from parents, kids, and even fans who returned to the brand only to feel they were out of their element with the complex transformations on even deluxes, much less that insane Prime.(Which I still have an affinity for, it looks like it's supposed to do what it's supposed to do. At the same time, I also like the TF'07 version for getting the soul of the figure out of a simpler transformation.)
Beast Wars had a lot of parts and paint, but was never really meant to be complicated, it was Kenner learning how to do Transformers in Cincinnati while Hasbro in Rhode Island was concentrating on lines they thought would be more successful (I couldn't tell you what that would be though, nearly every single line I can remember from '97 under Hasbro was actually a Kenner line - BW, Star Wars, DC/Batman, Jurassic Park, Vortech, Tonka, and Nerf - except for GI Joe which was in a tailspin, Action Man which never really broke out, maybe Starting Lineup although I am not sure, and Playskool.