Skyquake87 wrote:Aww, I'm jealous of your white Prowl. Over here he came out as a black/ blue variant colour and its just far too dark!
I had the white version of Prowl as a kid (well, teen anyway) and never even knew the darker one existed. Now whenever I see pics of it, the black-and-blue Prowl just causes my brain to scream
wrong and I don't know why. Other repaints from that era have the same impact on me, or at least Bump, Sandstorm and Double Punch, who are rececos of toys I owned as a kid. I don't understand it...repaints from any other era don't do that, but for some reason I just can't cope with some BW ones.
Skyquake87 wrote:Beast Wars Scorponok
My first BW purchase (along with Inferno) and is now loose as hell. He's the toy counterpart for the Predacons of Polar Claw, with his launching Cyber Bee and tail slashy action (which works in robot mode too!). The gimmicks here work a lot better than on Polar Claw - which I put down to the choice of beast mode. The nice black and red colour palette is lovely too!
He was one of my first beasties, too! I don't have a very high opinion of him, because I found him very top-heavy and his joints (on mine at least) were too loose to do much posing. I do one day want to repair his broken tail, though.
Agreed about the gimmicks though, his were way more fitting than Polar Claw's.
I lavished praise on Insecticon a few pages back, so I won't do so again. Suffice it to say I think he's great. The original Cheetor has a certain charm to it too, in spite of being fairly primitive.
Heinrad wrote:RTS Jazz
His paint job (or lack thereof, really) was a downer for me, but the mold is great and I love it after I painted the rims and grille.
Heinrad wrote:Generations Wheeljack: Or possibly RTS. I still don't know why they did this.
They thought it'd help them get all the molds out before DOTM hit, not that it turned out to do much good since so many of them went straight to clearance/never showed up in some markets at all. I'm quite fond of the Wheeljack mold, as proven by how I own five of them (and really need to get around to painting them...)
Recently, I pulled out my video game toys...
(Most of them, anyway...I seem to have disassembled Soundwave for some reason and can't be bothered to pull out that horribly complicated-to-transform Prime.)
I'm not a huge fan of the video game design style, to be honest, so I was surprised to find that I was actually pretty impressed by these guys once I put them all together in a group!
Shockwave is a really nice take on the design, and probably the closest to his original self. I do think he's too small, though, because he (unlike far too many modern Shockwaves) actually replicates the original's slender legs and arms. When he's taller than everyone, that makes him unconventional but imposing. When he's the same height as your average Autobot car, he just looks delicate. It's a shame that Grimlock and the tapedecks had the FoC Voyager slots locked down, because he would be improved immensely by being bigger (and, er, not using that odd gritty plastic). He's wonderfully poseable and looks cool, though, so I guess he can go menace some Cyberverse guys?
I actually do like
Starscream, but he's a terrible Starscream. The design looks so little like his traditional character model that I couldn't tell who it's meant to be if you'd done him up in random non-seeker colours. And since all the other video game models are just beefier/spikier versions of the G1 designs, Starscream really doesn't work for me. He's got a cool transformation, good articulation and great accessories, though.
As much as Hasbro tell us "the video games are in Prime continuity", it's pretty clear that both the game designers and toy designers are referencing G1 and movie designs a lot more. One guy that fits in nicely with Prime stuff, though, is
Kickback. He doesn't look like a G1 character
at all, but his minimalist robot design and big, burly bug mode fit what was on the TV show quite well. I like the robot mode quite a bit, but insect mode has never worked for me. It's just a mess, doesn't really look like anything and doesn't
do anything in spite of having lots of joints.
Brawl is a bit of a disaster, as others have chronicled in this thread already. Although I really liked his game design (which draws both from the G1 and Movie characters) and I really like how his tank mode turned out, but the robot mode with its huge backpack is pretty dire. I wish they'd made a version of him for the first game, so that they hadn't needed to worry about making him combine with anyone and could just concentrate on making a good Brawl.
Ratbat is adorable but essentially an ornament.
The real gem of the group, however, is
Megatron. I like that he's an off-white instead of the flat grey that they often use, I love the freaking gigantic fusion cannon, and I love how the design melds the G1 and movie versions of the character into a nice, cohesive whole. He looks dangerous, threatening and imposing, just like a bad guy should. I like his alt-mode, too -- the design emphasizes the cannon, really playing up how powerful it is. The only thing I'm not sold on are the forearms, which transform awkwardly, have a strange angle to them and result in hands that aren't very useful.
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