Power Of The Primes Abominus

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Skyquake87
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Power Of The Primes Abominus

Post by Skyquake87 »

Name : Abominus
Allegiance: Decepticon
Sub Group: Terrorcons
Function: Warrior

Bio: Abominus transforms into the five Terrorcons. Has overwhelming destructive power. Likes attacking large moving objects, climbing tall buildings and sinking ships. Has no heart or soul and is nothing more than a killing machine. Abominus carries a sonic concussion blaster.

Wow. That reads more like a dating profile than a biography. Nice job, Japan. It's been fun revisiting the old toy bios. Despite how much I like the Terrorcons, their Tech Specs have never stuck with me, so they're still largely blank slates to me. Except for Blot, whom I always remember is the smelly one. As any collector bore will tell you, that bio for Abominus is lifted from the Japanese giftset from 1987, as the Terrorcons weren't blessed with such a thing, which is why it lacks the welly of the US tech specs. No Bob Budiansky. Here we are then. The combined might of the Terrorcons.

Robot Mode: Abominus looks fantastic, like all the Ice Creams stuck together. I love these colours. They're bright, instantly appealing and a tiny bit marvellous. The gestalt itself looks pretty good. From the front at least. The shaping of the torso is really nice, breaking it away from the obvious boxiness the Silverbolt mould has. The headsculpt is good, but I do prefer the original over this more rounded effort. The set connects together neatly, thanks to the well-designed Combiner Wars play pattern (itself just an update of the Scramble City mix 'n' match cross compatibility funtimes). The limbs are satisfyingly bulky and overall, Abominus looks pretty awesome. And then you try and play with him. As a set of retools, the Terrorcons are unfortunately, hilariously wibbly. The arms cannot stay bent at the elbows with any weight placed on them – so it's a good job the figure comes with no weapons – and he does not feel very sturdy standing up, having that awkward Combiner Wars 'sway' that plagued the likes of Menasor, Bruticus, Computron and Defensor. Sadly, the limbs place too much weight at the front of the combined mode, so Abominus always wants to fall forward.

Looking at the shoulders and back of Abominus, you see why this is – although the Silverbolt mould is by far and away the best torso for these modern day gestalts, here it's fairly insubstantial as there's none of the jet mode kibble to add a bit of bracing to the torso, so it's all a bit sketchy and incomplete. I'm surprised that Hasbro didn't make each of the torso 'bots way more solid to carry the weight of the combined form better. It's been my biggest bug-bear for all of these Combiner War style gestalts. Well done on updating them from the 1980s, but shame you didn't allow a bit more of the budget for making these more structurally sound. Hearing the domino clatter of these things toppling over and collapsing in a heap is why I've shifted almost all of them on – it's just no fun.

Speaking of no fun, Abominus also suffers from the Combiner Wars problem of having no proper hands and feet. The hands admittedly aren't so bad, but just what are these tiny feeties about? They're so small and look ridiculous. I do like that Hasbro went to the effort of putting ankle tilts into these, but they're so bloody tight as to be unusable without having to manipulate them yourself if you're trying to pose this guy. Itself a problem, as his balance issues just mean he collapses all over the place. To get him looking a bit more something like, I threw good money after bad and got one of those third party add on kits. It helps, and gives him some guns (which are a bit bloody silly – look at the size of them. More like crutches than cannons), but I'd have preferred Hasbro just gave us the sort of meaty clompers and pounders that the Computron box set had. I don't need everything to tuck away or be useful to the smaller robots.

Marks Out Of Ten For The Following :

Transformation Design: If you own any of the regular Combiner Wars gestalts, you'll know exactly what you're getting. There's no surprises or invention here. 6/10

Durability: The plastics are weak and the joints are awful. Simultaneously loose and tight in all the wrong places conspiring to give you a figure that's nice to look at, but one you dare not touch in case it falls over. Keep on a shelf by itself with no other figures around. 3/10

Articulation: As with the all the Combiner Wars gestalts, he's got loads of articulation- hips, knees, shoulders, elbows, wrists, ankles – but can't put any of it to good use because his centre of gravity is four feet away from his body, so the slightest tilt means he's going to take a tumble. It's no good having this stuff if you can't use it. 1/10

Fun: The fun is in the combining and little else. You can't play with him, he flops about, the limbs are too heavy for the torso and he feels like he's missing a spine. 3/10

Price/Value: Having only the retail price to pay for assembling Abominus does take the sting out of this disappointment. 5/10

Overall: My overall feelings for Abominus are the same as they are for all the other Combiner Wars gestalts - a nice idea on paper, but let down by scrimping on materials and - for those arriving later- third generation mould retooling/ reusing which results in a floppy mess. I'm particularly disappointed that the Terrorcons have turned out so poorly, as they're favourites of mine. They look good as individual robots and that's where the excitement ends. Everything else about them has been a huge disappointment. I hope that if Hasbro turns out gestalts again, they think about maybe making them less like Those god-awful Titan Changers and more like the RiD 2001 Combiners. Something solid, durable and capable of supporting it's own weight next time, please. 3/10
Attachments
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POTP Abominus 001.jpg (190.99 KiB) Viewed 8484 times
POTP Abominus 002.jpg
POTP Abominus 002.jpg (197.52 KiB) Viewed 8484 times
POTP Abomins 003.jpg
POTP Abomins 003.jpg (208.4 KiB) Viewed 8484 times
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Skyquake87
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Re: Power Of The Primes Abominus

Post by Skyquake87 »

Pictures will follow when I can get the damn thing to stand up for two minutes without falling over.
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Warcry
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Re: Power Of The Primes Abominus

Post by Warcry »

The handfootguns are definitely the most disappointing part of the CW-style combiners. But I actually thought that Abominus fared better than the CW teams, because the tiny feet that come with Hun-grrr can combine with a spare set of hands to form something that's...well, still not good per se, but better that what the older teams have. I'd actually say that my Abominus is easily more stable than my Bruticus or Superion, but I think that's also partly because I won the QC lottery with my individual Terrorcons and they're not quite as wobbly as yours seem to be.

I know the third-party kits improve the functionality of the combined forms, but they also look so damnably ugly that I've never been tempted to get one.
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Tantrum
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Re: Power Of The Primes Abominus

Post by Tantrum »

Nice review, but could use a few paragraph breaks.

For the back, I take a narrow LEGO Technics piece that's L-shaped, put the 5-mm pegs on the extra hands through two of the holes, then balance that on Hun-Grr's tail. It fills out the shape nicely. I just have to remember not to lift him by this.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I prefer the HFGs to the Prime Armors. I don't care about ankle articulation, and the rest of the gestalts tend to have too many other articulation and balance issues to make use of it, anyway. I like gestalts to look like they're made of the bots, not add-ons, so the extra inch or so of height from the Voyager Armor as feet kind of bugs me. As does the narrowness around the ankle joint. Plus, the HFGs interact better with the individual bots.

The only exception is Volcanicus. Since all the armors are the same color, you can do as Warcry suggests and combine a Deluxe and a Voyager Prime Armor to make each foot without anything clashing. Using Slag and Sludge as legs means you can split the tail to extend down over the ankle joint.

Since the Seacons are annoying and expensive to get, I just bought an extra Blot on clearance and made a flamethrower mode for him with one of TLK Megatron's flame effects. Abominus can't support his weapon's weight, but I doubt Piranaking could either. So, he's torching the ground.

All I did for Blot's weapon mode was turn him into a leg, then fold his connector post down like for arm mode. As I was doing that, I realized that that's all you need to do to make any Scramble type limb into a weapon. It'd even work with the G1 toys as long as you had Piranaking's hand to hold it and a Seacon weapon with the post in the right place. Want Streetwise as a gun? Go ahead.
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Skyquake87
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Re: Power Of The Primes Abominus

Post by Skyquake87 »

Thanks! Added some para breaks. Took some pictures. Had to use the bathroom, as he's a bit big for the cardboard box light box I'd made, so the images aren't quite as crisp.
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Civ
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Re: Power Of The Primes Abominus

Post by Civ »

Skyquake, what service do you use to host your pictures? I've been growing frustrated with Photobucket due them being incredibly slow to the point of useless and am looking for a better alternative.
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Skyquake87
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Re: Power Of The Primes Abominus

Post by Skyquake87 »

These are just uploads from my old netbook running Windows 7. I've needed to resize images to 640dpi - something I've found hard to do on Windows 10 as their new photo software doesn't seem to have a simple resize function (mainly because Microsoft have binned Photo Editor or whatever it's called). I couldn't get my Photobucket pictures to show here at all when I tried it.

Imgur is pretty decent - Warcry uses it and I've had a bash on his recommendation. It's way less sluggish and awful than Photobucket :)
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