TF Views

Indeed, Minicons are genuinely cool and fun, and did add some fiddle value to the figures...but at what cost?!

Mostly I'm referring to figures who outright ended up sucking because they were based around a Minicon gimmick. Half the reason Hot Shot was horrible was because of his gimmick, which is why his shoulders were all screwed up. Of course, being redesigned at the last minute didn't help things.

Of course, when it wasn't the Minicons being crappy, it was core problems with the rest of the toy. Tidal Wave is a genuinely good toy, but he'd be so much better if he had proper knees. Armada's biggest flaw was that it was created based on the fallout from Transtech with a new design team who barely knew what they were doing. They seemed to have figured most of it out by Energon, and Cybertron was a genuinely good series marred by a horrible cartoon. That's not to say that every Cybertron toy was awesome, since some of them were pretty bad--Overhaul comes to mind as being Just Okay with some horribly done arms, while Backstop is so bad that he's good. But awesome moulds like Mudflap and Menasor and Megaloplex and Crosswise and Downshift make it okay.

O6- making your arguments, so you don't have to.

*Doffs cap*

Everything is best when there's variety as a factor, a few figures in a line with a few Mini-Cons makes them much more of a novelty, Cybertron achieved this balance well. Like G says, line-wide gimmicks are suck.

-remembering a friend getting into an altercation with an old lady over BW Canine, or maybe it was Retrax.....

Well, Retrax 'is' awesome..