It struck me last night, but FOC Grimlock is like one of those gumball machine toy cars, the ones that are almost entirely hollow and have cut-outs for windows and clipped-on axles with wheels molded to them. FOC Grimlock is like that, from the front he looks like Grimlock, but from any other angle you start to see how hollow parts are, and the more you use him and the more you see him from other angles, the more hollow cheapness you come across until you realize that without his dino head shoved into his back, he's really not anything at all.
Onslaught Six wrote:Sure you wanna play this game? Because you kinda got rammed in the ass when you were saying Legends Abominus would be tiny, and then Prowl posted a side-by-side of Sinnertwin and Twinstrike...and they were they same size.
They were the same HEIGHT, not the same SIZE. It didn't take into account the lack of mass, and the fact that Sinnertwin uses merge parts not shown.
(That sounds more like an attack than it's supposed to be! I swear I meant it in good fun.)
Better keep working on that then.
the head sculpt is...soft;
This is the second time I've seen you say this about his headsculpt; what do you mean? I don't understand.
A sculpt can be rendered sharply or softly, the crispness of the lines sculpted into a design is what I'm talking about. Compare... let's see... compare the sculpting sharpness on movie 1 Leader-class Optimus to ROTF Leader-class Optimus, the former is a soft sculpt while the latter is a sharp sculpt, check out the headshots here:
http://www.tfu.info/2007/Autobot/Optimu ... sprime.htm
http://www.tfu.info/2009/Autobot/Optimu ... sprime.htm
on the latter, vents are deeper, details are crisper.
For Grimlock, see all the sculpting sharpness on the Masterpiece, all the sharp corners and fine details that show?
http://www.tfu.info/2010/Autobot/Master ... imlock.htm
Now imagine the EXACT OPPOSITE OF THAT:
http://tfviews.com/grimlock-head.jpg
(and my cellphone's flash shot there actually is pretty generous compared to how it looks in-hand)
LMK if that isn't clear enough.
Grade is D+ / C-, would be a even lower were it not for just enough poseability and personality in bot mode - not tons either, just enough to get by to a weak pass in my book. The sliding grade given is dependent on how much you like Grimlock and / or Fall of Cybertron.
I see this doesn't take into account the figure's size, either. He looks pretty damn good on that front--the only other better one I can think of is Masterpiece Grimlock, and $22-25 is a lot easier to swallow than $225. ClaGrims being as small as he is is a large part of why I sold him recently.
I'm judging the figure on its own merits, but its size comes at a huge cost of being very hollow. What grade did you give Animated Grimlock? He was also a Voyager Class, does he get props for not being a deluxe when you would have paid Voyager price?
What else is kind of pleasing is how much of him is on different sprues--compare either Soundwave colour to Blaster and see how different Blaster really is.
What? Oh, no, I was reviewing
Soundblaster, not "Blaster" Blaster. Soundblaster is a direct swap of charcoal for blue from Soundwave, every part matches identically, they even seem to use the same paint masks. As for "Blaster" Blaster, it does look in photos like the lower legs and back panel ABS is via different channels from the rest (except the black on the weapon and hands and middle arms, that's an easy swap because it's PVC instead of ABS so it's already a different channel), so it's really only 2 ABS channels: gray and red. They get by with that single alternate sprue channel and clever use of the mixing it up the other parts.
