- Hexbugs Warriors Battle Stadium - this was on megaclearance at Target so my mom bought it for me, the 2 included bugs are pretty neat although one of them had a leaky battery. The included weapons are mostly pretty cool, lots of action weapons in this set. The stadium uses 5 leaves similar to the Transformers version, but instead of one central hub it uses a trio of 3-arena hubs for an interesting shape and also more variety; however the leaves have a different floor pattern that causes some of the bugs to hang up on them. The 5-leaf layout in this stadium has more choke points than the TF version so when you've got only 2 warriors left in the fight they don't wander away from each other as much, however when 5 bugs are going at it the TF one can't be beat. It's also nifty that you can remove one of the hubs and have a 4-leaf stadium, remove two hubs and you have a 3-leaf stadium, or just put 2 leaves together, giving a lot of choice.
- Took my mom to see Guardians of the Galaxy a couple days ago, it was ok, we both left feeling like it was a 7/10, a little overhyped and Zoe Saldana was the worst part. I felt like the story took too long to get up to speed and we didn't really need this much origin story when we already are able to accept Groot and Rocket working together, and Star Lord's backstory is a bit cheaply laid on.
Picked up my pull list after only a few weeks to find a bunch of books in it, picked them all up but have only read 2:
- Windblade #4 - what a disappointing flop of an ending. I liked the STORY aspect of it, but the execution of it was an utter misfire, the pacing all wrong and the way it got to that ending was cheap.
- Batman '66 # 13 - surprisingly clever story, not my favorite art but it got everything across, the follow-through could have been much better though.
Finished the Star Wars: A New Dawn book - way way way too long for such a simple story. Character development halts far too early and ignores one of the main characters completely. Plot ends up a generic mess against a generic cyborg villain. Still, an engaging setting saves it from mediocrity.
BWprowl wrote:Man, where were all the people bitching about shrinking Deluxes back in Cybertron? Not only is Thunderblast positively tiny, there were plenty of others in the line (Red Alert comes to mind) who were on the small side as well.
Your memory is faulty on that one, we did bitch about Thunderblast being tiny.
See, that one's a camcorder, that one's a camera, that one's a phone, and they're doing "Speak no evil, See no evil, Hear no evil", get it?
My package from Six came in: Energon Dreadwing, plus BM Longhorn and Night Viper. Dreadwing was the main event, I’ve wanted this mold since it came out, it’s sexy as hell. Boat? Check. Badass Gundam legs? Check. Bitchin’ flip-up cannon gimmick? Check? Beautiful color scheme? Check with nifty tribal tampos. This toy rules. Random-ass Energon Decepticons are the best Decepticons. Longhorn and Night Viper are some of my favorites of the BM Basics, but my childhood copies have been out of commission for years.
I also swung by TRU to find that they had a whopping one each of Generations Rattrap and Tankorr (How the hell was Crosscut the one they were already out of?), so I snapped those up. Tankorr is neat enough, makes a good little Tankorr toy, and is nice as an arm’s-reach desk toy. Transformation is an absolute snore though, with the vehicle mode hardly being worth getting to, and the missile is a total write-off. Still the robot mode does make up for a lot of the other shortcomings, it’s impressive how much articulation and range of motion they crammed into Tankorr’s brickish design, particularly the arms.
Rattrap is also a mixed bag. There’s some things about this toy that seriously piss me off, the legs being first and foremost: They’ve just got the show-design for the legs sculpted into the front of them, with the rounded rat-kibble bits just backing them. It looks stupidly fake and pointless, it reminds me of stuff like the Animorphs or the old transforming Marvel or Digimon toys, where you’d have these façade elements of the design slapped on there just because they were ‘supposed’ to be there, with no regard to how they integrate with the transformation itself. It’s worse though, because this is a Transformer, Rattrap can look however he wants in a reinvented Generations incarnation, but they went and slapped this detail in just because show-Rattrap’s legs looked that way, (the earlier Rhinox and Waspinator had this problem too) and it’s very ill-fitting, especially on a Transformer. Also, the plastic used on some of his joints, particularly his elbow swivels and rat-feet swivels is very stiff-feeling and catches in its own joints too easily, I felt like I was going to break the swivel at first, before I worked in some shock oil to loosen things up (they move just fine now). The transformation’s also a nightmare, getting the legs and arms into position and all the kibble hooked into it is the opposite of fun (and there’s no way those side-panels are ever pegging into the spots they supposedly go on the arms). The panel that covers the gap between beast head and neck to let him stand up is nice in theory, but deploying it is impossible on your own, I had to use an extra bit (a Gundam beam saber I had lying around, in this case) to push it out whenever I wanted it, and the result isn’t entirely worth it with the robot kibble staring you in the face (the gun’s storage is especially lazy and unintuitive). This is the price you pay for trying to do a slavishly show-based figure years after the fact without considering how it’s supposed to work as a toy: It looks nice, but is un-fun in way too many respects. At least it turns out the weapons were misrepresented in the promo pics: instead of being nonsensically cast in clear colorless plastic, they’re actually a pearly silver in a decent approximation of metallics, and look pretty good. Overall it’s a decent toy of Rattrap, but very hampered by trying to be a very particular toy of Rattrap.
Then I was in the area of a Target I haven’t checked in a while yesterday, so I went there to see. First thing I saw was the new Sky-Byte on shelves and was about to fly into a white-hot rage over how much I hate that toy and everything it represents, when I realized that this meant Roadbuster might be about too, and sure enough, there he was right behind it, so I grabbed that. He’s pretty much everything I could have wanted from a new version of ol’ Bean Bandit, save for maybe some wrist swivels, but everything else is great. The decals are kind of annoying in that they don’t seem to have been thought out very well in some places, and there’s a bajillion of them and it’ll take you like a whole afternoon to get them all on, but they really improve his look when they’re on (the little text everywhere is a very nice look for this toy) and getting the option to use a Wreckers symbol was an unexpected bonus. The guns are fantastic, in the myriad ways they can combine and mount on him (love the option for dual pistols he has). Transformation is almost too easy, though the bit with the feet filling in the roof is at least something I’ve never seen before. Vehicle mode is almost adorable, until you mount all the guns on it any way you can think of and it turns into a loaded-up murder-mobile. It just has a wonderful 90’s-comics-style excess to its look that way. An all-around fun toy, even if there is a certain “It’s Roadbuster!” factor carrying it. And hey, he looks great hanging out with Springer, Sandstorm, and Whirl.
Tempted to get new Jetfire and Sky-Byte at some point just so I can violently destroy them, might get some nice-feeling catharsis out of it.
Hexbugs Nano v2 Watch Tower set - on clearance from Target, and I have been aching to see one of these little guys climb something more than a small oval. The set isn't bad, the instructions are garbage though. The actual watch tower at the top doesn't lock into place. As designed, it's a tad dull with 2 of the levels being simple ovals as well, but with the oval from my first set I was able to spruce it up quite a lot so that it goes around and through and over and under, now it's an honest robot habitrail. The plug-in gates so far have been more annoying than useful. The climbing takes a lot out of these little guys though, the black one I had before could only climb for about half an hour and now gets stuck in tubes, so I ordered some cheapo replacement batteries.
New brakes, oil change, replacement of missing lugnut - bye bye money!
See, that one's a camcorder, that one's a camera, that one's a phone, and they're doing "Speak no evil, See no evil, Hear no evil", get it?
Well it exists, for one. Yet another one of Hasbro's giant middle fingers to anyone who liked the perfectly great previous toy. Why on earth did the old Sky-Byte need to be replaced?
Well it exists, for one. Yet another one of Hasbro's giant middle fingers to anyone who liked the perfectly great previous toy. Why on earth did the old Sky-Byte need to be replaced?
Well the only reason I could thing would maybe be to get more articulation out of it. It's been a while since I've had SB, so I'm not sure if he really needed it or not. But, the more obvious thing would be to have an alt mode that isn't perpetually stuck in a particular pose. Which they screwed up with this one because it too, is stuck in a ridiculous pose, like it's a dolphin jumping through a hoop and not the most terrifying predator in the ocean ever.
So yeah, I get your annoyance on this one, it's one reason it's not on my hit list either. I just forgot was all.
Shockwave wrote:Well the only reason I could thing would maybe be to get more articulation out of it. It's been a while since I've had SB, so I'm not sure if he really needed it or not. But, the more obvious thing would be to have an alt mode that isn't perpetually stuck in a particular pose. Which they screwed up with this one because it too, is stuck in a ridiculous pose, like it's a dolphin jumping through a hoop and not the most terrifying predator in the ocean ever.
So yeah, I get your annoyance on this one, it's one reason it's not on my hit list either. I just forgot was all.
The original Sky-Byte is loaded with articulation. His legs alone have double knees and universal ankles.
This is one thing in general that Really Friggin' Bugs Me about these newer updates Hasbro's doing. Pretty much the entire point of updating the G1 guys is to get toys of those designs in some capacity that aren't bricks. But most any TF after 1995 isn't going to have that problem. There's an argument to be made for some of the Armada guys, but that's it. And given that toy design has kind of plateaued since (at least) RiD and figures are never going to look appreciably better or worse going forward, then what's the point of re-doing them? Was it really worth it to get a new Rattrap that's actually a bit less articulated than the old one when all that's different is that he's bigger, has a different colored head, and fake shins molded on the fronts of his legs? Why?
Sky-Byte's pose never bothered me that much. A posable transforming shark is a challenging proposition to begin with, so if it's a choice between boring static pose and cool action pose, give me action pose every time. And everything else about Sky-Byte's shark mode looked amazing, so.
I can see it conceptually in terms of getting more articulation than before. Yeah, most figures after 95 have pretty decent articulation but there are a lot of BW toys and even after into Classics that could use an update compared to what we have today. A lot of the BW toys had ball joints on hips and shoulders and even elbows and knees but now we have joints on ankles and wrists, and biceps and what have you, so they are a little bit better than they were. I think they can also do better with paint apps, buuuuuuut, it's pointless unless they actually do so. Hearing that Rattrap is actually less articulated than his previous toy makes me wonder why they didn't just reissue the original toy. Same with Sky-Byte. And actually, I had Tansmetal Cybershark and I do seem to recall that he had decent articulation, even with ankles and wrists and what not.
I mean, if they're gonna botch the update so horribly, then I'd rather see some of the outdated Classics molds get updated. The seekers mold is terrible in the arm articulation dept, the Rodimus mold is barely more moveable than is G1 counterpart... So yeah, I get what you're saying. Why update a figure if it's going to turn out worse?
JediTricks wrote:Because not everyone who is a fan of the character now has access to that figure. I hear the new one is a real dog though.
My point is, if you want new fans to be able to get a toy of the character, why even bother making a new one at all when the previous one is already just fine as-is? A Sky-Byte reissue would have worked perfectly in this situation; making that Generations figure instead is just insulting.
The plug-in gates so far have been more annoying than useful. The climbing takes a lot out of these little guys though, the black one I had before could only climb for about half an hour and now gets stuck in tubes, so I ordered some cheapo replacement batteries.