#transformers reviews

[nautical-nauticals]

Nautical Reviews: Galvatron (Legacy Version)

NEW VIDEO OUT NOW!!! GO WATCH IT!!! IT MIGHT BE THE BEST ONE IVE MADE SO FAR!!!

[archosaur-automaton]

Astro-Second Helpings, Episode 1: The Magnificent Six

As we promised so long ago, we will be reviewing Transformers as we acquire them and build our unstoppable army of Plastic Friends. Hence, I am pleased to announce the inaugural post for Astro-Second Helpings, the archosaur-automaton blog segment dedicated to reviewing Transformers toys as we buy them!  For Chanukkah 5780, or as it’s known elsewhere “December 22-30, 2019″ we’ll be reviewing our first ever Transformers acquisition: Six-Gun! (Technically Transmetal Optimal Optimus was our first acquisition as a young babby but that is a story for a different time). 

We acquired Six-Gun while doing errands at the local Target a few weeks ago and felt an irresistible urge to Buy Plastic, and a stroll through the toy aisle left our mouth watering. Overwhelmed with options, we chose the best-looking boy they had: this red-white-and-black little chap who needs a permit for *himself* before he’s allowed in the gun show! As our Transformers neophyte brain understands it, Six-Gun’s first (and only) cartoon appearance was in the G1 cartoon episode “Thief in the Night” and cannot be said to be a major character. Regardless of the canon involved, we’ve got cannons involved to review. We’ll be using a five-star rating system in six different categories, with an overall rating at the end. The categories are:  - Coloration - Overall Design - Quality of Manufacture - Loadout - Transformations - Transformability (how easy it is to transform) Our first stop is Coloration. Here’s a photo of Sixgun sitting on our desk. 

One of the things that most appealed to us just off the shelf was his color. That tasteful contrast of white and red,  with black accents: there’s something positively [chefkiss] about it all. However, as this Six-Gun is from the “Siege” subline, he has “cosmetic battle damage”, seen on his feet here. 

Since this battle damage is really only on his feet, it doesn’t really make sense to me to have it at all, so we definitely have to dock points for that. Coloration: 4.5/5 stars. Excellent overall but the ‘battle damage’ just doesn’t work.  Next up is Overall Body Design. As we can see here, Six-Gun’s head doesn’t have humanoid eyes or mouth.

As a Robo-Lover, this is a BIG plus. A human-looking face can be nice but sometimes you just want a head that screams “yup, that’s a Robot.” His shoulders are nice and big and sharp, a little like absurd WoW pauldrons, which is also a plus. His chest is beefy and has a built-in missile launcher and looks generally solid.  In the legs department, his calves are gorgeous but the overly skinny thighs leading to his bony hips are a little bit of a turn-off. It’s a bit of a Popeye the Sailor look, which only works if you’re actually Popeye.  There’s not much to complain about but I think there were ways in which they could have made him ‘pop’.  Overall Body Design: 4/5 Stars Quality of Manufacture is a little tricky on this boy. As I understand it, he is a “parts-former”, which means that he transforms via the detachment and reattachment of his various parts. This often, apparently, leads to things being too tight in some areas, too loose in others, in ways that a non-partsformer toy might not.  His legs come off pretty easily, which is sort of expected I guess but meh. Also, his feets are a little squirrely. 

The hinges on these are very loose and the feet in general just feel like an afterthought.  I don’t have much experience to judge, but for a partsformer I think he’s more or less okay.  Quality of Manufacture: 3.5 / 5 Now, we get into the good stuff. WEAPONS. And oh boy, this guy is literally ENTIRELY weapons. Like, did you not get the memo from the name??  Now, Six-Gun isn’t just an Autobot in and of himself: his constituent parts can be disassembled as part of the C.O.M.B.A.T system to provide armaments for other Transformers! The weapons he is composed of include: Two “MTX-M2 Anti-Gravity Cannons” (his legs)

One “MTX-S2A Missile Launcher” (his lower torso/hip section)

One “MTX-50 Dual-Flank Boost Launcher (the upper part of his torso)

Two “MTX-LR Ion Pulse Blasters” (his arms + black guns)

Two “W-5 Gyro Blasters” (the little red guns)

Here’s a shot of the tech spec / booklet explaining these parts and their apparent strength, accuracy, and range. 

Clearly, the MTX-S2A has the best of all three categories, so why would he ever use anything else? Well, as a loved one once said: “These are the two great lessons of the Transformers fandom: tech specs are bullshit, and Hasbro makes mistakes.” At any rate, this is an impressive loadout of weapons, not just for Six-Gun in his base form but for use in other toys. I especially like the Anti-Gravity Cannons; if you didn’t know any better, you’d never suspect they were someone’s legs! Loadout: 5/5 Stars (or alternately, six out of six guns) Next section is Transformability. This is about how easy it is to take the boy out of the package and turn him into his vehicle mode(s).  As a Partsformer, Sixgun is remarkably easy to transform. You just pop off his arms, flip down his red rocket launcher tubes, flip up the missile launchers on “dual pack boost launcher”, cover his face with his cockpit, pop the little white vehicle part into the other hole on the lower torso section, put the arms onto the sides, finagle his legs, and voila. A boy. You’ll see what that looks like in the next section. For now, I can safely say that I could transform this fellow in my sleep.  Transformability: 5/5  So now we get to Transformations. In his original incarnation, Six-Gun did not have an alt-mode, but for Siege he got one. And here it is.

As you can see, his arms have become some sort of twin hover/propulsion blades and his legs seem to be some sort of thruster jets. Slung underneath are the missile launchers and his Gyro Blasters are primed and at the ready. So he’s some sort of VTOL, right? WRONG. According to official Hasbro materials, The 5.5-inch Deluxe WFC-S22 Class AUTOBOT SIX-GUN WEAPONIZER figure stands at 5.5 inches in robot mode and converts into a CYBERTRONIAN tank. A tank. A tank. A TANK??? This futurespace hovering gunship looking thing is supposed to be a TANK??? Hwaet.  Meshugos aside, while there’s clearly something interesting happening here there isn’t enough for it to feel compelling. I like the cockpit and the ‘wings’ of the vehicle mode, along wit the missile launchers in the position they are, but the legs and the blocky underside just make it a sort of ‘meh’ design. I’m not sure how it could have been made better, given that he’s supposed to turn into guns for other boys, but...it just feels like an after-thought.  Transformations: 3/5  Wow, our first Astro-Second Helpings article! Or since it’s the inaugural article, would that make it the Astro-First Helpings? And then the next one would be the first Astro-Second Helpings article? You know, you probably could kill Blaine the Mono with a dumb puzzle like this.  To wrap up, Transformers Siege: War for Cybertron’s Six-Gun is a pretty looking boy who turns into a lot of shooty things for other Plastic Friends to use. He’s decently built, a little prone to things being a bit loose but overall okay. His vehicle mode, however, is lackluster both in execution and failing to resemble much of anything. Nonetheless, we were enormously happy to have him and he’ll always have a special place in our heart as the first Transformer we bought with our own money. (One day, we’ll get our actual first Transformer, Transmetal Optimal Optimus back, and avenge the five year old who had it stolen/broken by a malevolent stepsibling. One day). Mathematically, our overall rating for Six-Gun should be closer to 3.5/5 than 4, but we’re going to bump him up for sentimental reasons and because in his base form he does look pretty good.  Overall Rating: 4/5

[plasticsparkphotos]

Review - Fans Hobby MB-09b Trailer for Gunfighter II

“No...No! I was so sure that the Decepticon menace was ended forever. That this fragile world was once more safe from the war we brought to it those many years ago...”

Woohoo! Finally finished up the review and gallery for the Fans hobby MB-09b trailer! Please check it out and let me know what you think!

[katieiscunning]

MTMTE #20: CAN YOU REALLY GET WORSE THAN LAST TIME? REVIEW HERE

[archosaur-automaton]

Astro-Second Helpings, Episode 2: The Hound of the Baskerbots

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Astro-Second Helpings! Today we'll be reviewing the second Transformers toy (Transmetal Optimal Optimus notwithstanding, z"l) ever acquired by yours truly! Today's boy is WFC-S9 Hound, from the War For Cybertron: Siege subline.

Hound, in the G1 continuity, is modeled after a Mitsubishi J59 Jeep, and serves as the Autobots' scout. He's seen very early on in the 1984 cartoon, being part of the original scouting mission sent by Optimus to investigate and eventually discover the presence of the Decepticons. When he isn't playing football, doggedly pursuing enemies, or using his hologram projection capabilities to create illusions to trick the Decepticons, he's enjoying the natural wonders of Earth and, as his original tech spec states, wishing that he were human. Buddy, you're barking up exactly the right tree -- your old pal archosaur-automaton sure as hell knows what dysphoria is like.

(Seriously. He plays football.)

Hound was obtained soon after Six-Gun at another expedition to Target. His blocky form and subtle-but-poignant dark green coloration were an immediate eye-catcher and thus he was acquired.

As always, we'll be using six categories (Coloration, Overall Design, Quality of Manufacture, Loadout, Transformations, Transformability) with a five-star rating system to judge this boy, even if he really ain't nothin' but a hound dog.

COLORATION

Here's a shot of Hound on our desk in robot mode.

He does have some of the characteristic Siege 'battle damage' effect on his legs, but unlike Six-Gun, it doesn't feel at all out of place or confusing, mostly because it blends so well and isn't obtrusive.

As you can see, he's a very dark green with some attractive accents of yellow/orange, white, light grey, and black, a good earth-tones palette. This is relatively true to his cartoon appearance, though his green was slightly lighter there. The white stars on his shoulders are striking, and provide a nice contrast to the overall darker coloration. The brighter yellow/orange accents are an effective way of adding a splash of brightness to him, and they don't feel at all overdone.

Hound is fairly uncomplicated in terms of coloration because honestly, he doesn't have any need for a complex paint job or go off-leash with anything fancy. He's a boy who knows where his towel is, at least hue-wise.

Coloration Score: 5/5. It's exactly what it's supposed to be.

OVERALL DESIGN

Hound is, how shall we say, blocky. Chonky, even. There's not a lot that's sleek about him -- he's mostly an unapologetic series squares and rectangular prisms. And you know what? That's honestly pretty great. He might not have HUGE shoulderonhonkero pauldrons, but he more than makes up for it in the gams department.

Seriously, look at those things. It's like two air conditioner units with feet on 'em. I love big-calved robots and Hound manages to play a mean game of fetch in that department, eagerly delivering something we feel confident calling sexy.

As per the above, he's got a pretty humanoid face, and we're usually ambivalent about humanoid faces on Transformers, but Hound is such a good fellow with those puppy-dog eyes and that sweet punim that you can't help but love.

One big bugbear we have about Hound's design could technically fall under loadout, but it's a big enough part of his appearance that it feels entirely relevant. As you can see from the shot of Hound on our desk, compared with the shot from the cartoon, you'll notice one striking difference. He doesn't have his big rocket/missile launcher! Sure, he's got a shoulder-mounted gun, but it doesn't look anything like that iconic G1 missile. That's a big disappointment -- even if it wasn't part of the base mold they could have at LEAST included another weapon that resembled that good good look we all know and love.

Overall Design Score: 4/5. Toss this boy a bone and give him the missile launcher!!!

QUALITY OF MANUFACTURE

There's not really much to tell here. His joints aren't too tight, aren't too loose. The little black piece on his back that serves as the frame for the jeep doors is a little flimsy, but it's nothing major. Everything that's supposed to snap together does so without a hassle and we never felt worried that anything would come unaligned during play. Additionally, he is not a "partsformer" which really helps with making things feel nice. There is one thing that stands out about him, which is questionably in the middle between "overall design" and "quality of manufacture", but we'll put here because why not.

To facilitate his vehicle transformation, Hound's shoulders have extra articulation that allow him to pull his arms way back in a realistic fashion. This is always a cool thing and makes him really fun to play with. You can almost imagine him delivering a nice wind-up punch right to the nose of some rabid Decepticon.

Quality of Manufacture Score: 5/5

LOADOUT

His guns are okay. The long gun has a neat little barrel which looks nicer than the mostly-flat guns most Transformers get, and none of it feels too big or unwieldy. However, he does not have his rocket launcher. When we think about that, our tail stops waggin'. Give rocket launcher. Gib rocket launcher please and thank.

Loadout: 3.5/5

TRANSFORMATIONS Hound transforms into, as previously mentioned, a Jeep.

The Jeep is a classic sort of car design and it's really hard to screw it up. For the most part, his vehicle mode is pretty great, especially once you add the guns and you get a capable, armed little scout vehicle to play with. However, there's one thing that's pretty obnoxious about his transformation:

His arms, tucked on the underside of the Jeep, are SO close to the ground that they can and in fact do impede his vehicular movement. Additionally, his wheels aren't the best on smooth surfaces which is sort of disappointing, and combined with the arms problem his usefulness as a vehicle is pretty limited. He's nice to look at, though, which acts as a moderate offset.

Transformations Score: 3.5/5. Hound should keep his armies in his sleevies, or at the very least somewhere more convenient.

TRANSFORMABILITY

It was a little hard to reason about how to transform him at first, due mostly to confusing and hard to read diagrams in the transformation booklet when it came to getting his wheels aligned. Additionally, the black jeep doorframe part on his back can bump up against and get caught on his legs, making it tricky to get everything hunky-dory.

In the end, though, once you get his transformation down the first time, it's a piece of cake -- he really wants to help you get him into his vehicle mode. Transformers fan's best friend, one supposes.

Transformability Score: 4/5

To sum up, while there are a few hairy decisions about Hound's design and manufacture, he's an overall well-made guy who gives you plenty to chew on, both visually and during actual play. We love this guy and are so happy to have him as a plastic companion to provide endless fun.

When you add it all up, Hound's aggregate score is 25/6, which when rounded down equals 4, and we're more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie.

OVERALL RATING: 4/5

[archosaur-automaton]

Good news, everyone: I just learned that inserting an Imgur link into a Tumblr post will auto-render the image. This will make formatting posts for Astro-Second Helpings a lot easier, as I can just upload a bundle of photos to Imgur and then embed them in an article as necessary. 

[katieiscunning]

MTMTE #7: More like DeciptiCAN’TS

DECEPTICONS!

We’ve already been introduced- via ominous mentions of the carnage they wreck- to the DJD, the Decepticon Justice Division. These guys are the sadists in chief: they have the job of hunting down any Decepticons who turn against the cause and torturing them to death. And now we get to meet them.

They’re currently ‘working’ on Black Shadow, a Phase Sixer (a Decepticon who’s been altered by Megatron to be world-destroying strong), whose exploits we see via an effective little montage of his past chaos, ending on how utterly the DJD have destroyed him in turn.

But while you might know what they do, you don’t yet know who the DJD are. So, without further ado:

Tarn, the leader, wears a Decepticon badge face mask to hide his real identity (all the DJD use aliases but Tarn’s is a plot point and a secret metatextually too). This is interesting to me because it implies that Transformers actually have different looking faces from each other, even if you have to be a Cybertronian to see it. I’d always just assumed they had pretty interchangeable silver vagueness going on. He can, in true scifi style, put his voice into sync with a spark and then talk it to death. He also likes music- namely a piece called the Empyrean Suite. 

Kaon, the least subtle member of the team, turns into an electric chair. He doesn’t have any eyes, but he does have a best friend, namely:

The Pet, a semi-tamed Turbofox (an animal from Cybertron) which he pretends is a Sparkeater.

Helex and Tesarus sort of go in one box together for me- they both have big horrible things in their chests that do big horrible things to robots. Helex uses a giant furnace. Tesarus has a bladed spinning hole thing. 

Vos, the scientist, speaks only in Old Cybertronian and sadly doesn’t have a torture gimmick. That we know of. 

Anyway, together, they fight crime! Or, you know, the opposite. 

After Black Shadow weakly protests that the “war’s over”, Tarn’s had enough and murders him. 

I’m mentioning this specifically because I love it. Tarn is fiercely loyal to Megatron and his ideals, and beyond that, his whole existence is tied so strongly to there being a war that he simply doesn’t understand the concept of there not being one anymore. It’s something that comes up again and again in MTMTE: that all of these characters, from Swerve to Vos, have no idea who they are now. For someone like Tarn, that means becoming worse than he was. He needs to prove to himself that the war isn’t over and he’ll do that via brutal, brutal murder. 

It also gives us what I think is the first mention of Megatron’s writing career via a title drop for his political treatise, ‘Towards Peace’.

It will not be the last.

But the DJD aren’t the only Decepticons around. You’ve seen brutally efficient, cruel and unstoppable, now it’s time to meet…

These guys are the Scavengers. They’re exactly what they sound like- robots who get by through picking over the pieces left behind by the competent. They are:

Crankcase, who is missing the part of his head which let him be happy.

Krok, a historian who’s trying to find his squad.

Flywheels, anxious and afraid.

Spinster, a surgeon who likes shooting stuff more than fixing stuff.

Misfire, who’s easily distracted and also likes to shoot stuff.

As we meet them, they’ve just discovered Fulcrum: well chinned and apparently the only survivor of a massive battle. By ‘discovered’, I mean, of course, that they were about to strip him for spare parts when he ruined their fun by waking up. The Scavengers!

Over a fire- revealed to be a still living Autobot- they talk to Fulcrum, first about the way both sides reduced their soldiers to data, and then about the war being over.

This dialogue is maaaybe the best so far? It’s skillful in dropping emotional exposition at the same time as establishing character at the same time as sounding natural. It would be so easy to turn this into an info dump: instead we get insight.

One of the best moments comes when the ‘fire’ repeats what they’ve already said and what we’ve already heard said to Tarn: that the “war’s over”. Their response is to shoot him. He’s an Autobot and, left on autopilot and without orders, all they know how to do is kill Autobots. It’s senseless and pointless and awful. Like the DJD, they can’t even admit to themselves that there’s nothing to fight for anymore.

Again, I love this. I love these idiot robots having no idea what to do now the war is done. I love that the sheer scale of the conflict is implied so well by these foot soldiers still not really knowing what happened. I love that the war isn’t over because they don’t know what else they are, because war, like any trauma, is carried long after you’ve experienced it. 

The next morning they start scavenging again. Krok annoys Fulcrum by clicking his communicator over and over, trying to get a message to his crew, but before he can completely explain that they’re both interrupted by Misfire. He’s charging across the battlefield to confront a mysterious figure he believes to be the Necrobot- a sort of post death grim reaper who supposedly shows up every time a Cybertronian dies. Of course the guy’s gone before he can get there, instead he finds what just might be a Decepticon ship.

They go on board because they’ve never heard of horror movies on Cybertron and find a few disturbing things. 1, a ceiling covered in brains. 2, half dissected cybertronians. 3, a weird wooden robot. 4, walls covered in dead, organic, bleeding tissue, and worst of all, 5, a message.

It’s not good news. 

But who’s this mystery 7th person? They find out pretty quickly.  

This is Grimlock. He’s a Dinobot, aka a massively powerful robot who can turn into a robot dinosaur because of course that’s a thing.

MEANWHILE

Back on the Lost Light, Rung is somehow not dead. His death in the last issue proper was admitted by James Roberts to be a pretty weak fake out, even if how exactly he survived a head explosion still hasn’t been revealed.

We see a couple of people visit his bedside: Swerve still horror struck at what he’s done, and, more importantly, Red Alert showing up with his recording of the hidden Overlord. 

He leaves the data with Rung, but after he’s gone a mysterious drone steals it.

I like this scene. It’s very short- only a few panels long- but it establishes Red Alert’s growing desperation without the help he needs, and continues to treat his problem as a serious one. 

Chromedome goes to visit Brainstorm, who, as he generally is, is ready to show up Perceptor. 

Domey has no time for that though: he’s brought Brainstorm a gift- Skid’s mystery gun.  He had it in his hand when he showed up, but seemed completely unable to notice it himself. Brainstorm analyses it and says, with full ominous voice in effect, that it seems to come from ‘The Institute’.

I wonder how much of a risk this issue was when it first came out. MTMTE is, after all, normally a comic about B listers and here it’s time away from them to visit the Z end of the alphabet. It feels very much like the whole focus should be on the Scavengers and the DJD- not because their parts of the narrative are rushed but because their story is so separate from the main plot of the book. Maybe it was viewed as too much to completely dump the real cast for an arc.

But plot isn’t the only way to tie a narrative together. This issue, and its conclusion next time, is all about hammering more uncertainty into the binary of Good vs Evil, as well as exposing how much the damage of our past affects us in the present. That’s clearest in the Scavengers and DJD- two very different sides to the same movement, united by their post war trauma but separated by everything else. The Lost Light gang too are revealed to have more going on than being heroes. Someone is undermining Red Alert’s search for the truth, and Brainstorm and Chromedome have a shared and ominous secret.

God, that got dark.

But then, this is a dark story. Not in terms of gore, though the DJD certainly provide that. This is a war story about what what war leaves behind, physically and mentally, and that’s summed up in one image: the abandoned battlefield being picked over by clueless losers

You can get on this fun train by buying the comics over here: https://www.comixology.co.uk/Transformers-More-Than-Meets-the-Eye-2011/comics-series/7279?ref=c2VhcmNoL2luZGV4L2Rlc2t0b3Avc2xpZGVyTGlzdC90b3BSZXN1bHRzU2xpZGVy

Written by James Roberts, Art by Alex Milne, published by IDW.