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Brawl shipped with the other Voyager in this wave, Amalgamous Prime. Which means, for those keeping score, we got the first two Deluxes over two weeks ago, then the Leader and both Voyagers right before Christmas, so we're just waiting for the other two Deluxes. Compared to some of the other Primes, Amalgamous has little source material to pull from. Some Primes, like Alpha Trion and Prima, were sort of established ancient Transformers before the concept of the Thirteen and were kind of naturally slotted in. Others, like Micronus and Quintus, were created to fill out the Thirteen's ranks after the concept was established, and were used to explain or tie together bits of Transformers lore, like "why Minicons?" and "why Quintessons?" But thing thing with Micronus and Quintus is that, for one, they had fairly clear designs in The Covenant of Primus, and two, they both eventually appeared in Transformers media, with Micronus being a sort of mentor to Optimus in Robots in Disguise and Quintus' Emberstone kicking off the creation of Terran Transformers in Earthspark. But then we come to Amalgamous. He's an important part of the lore, now... his artifact, the T-Cog, is the template for every Cybertronian's T-Cog and the reason why Transformers can transform. But on the other hand, he really hasn't appeared in anything outside of The Covenant, where he's described as constantly shifting forms. And the one picture of him is an almost Bayformer-esque collection of mechanical parts and crackling energies arranged in a multi-limbed monstrousity with something that might be a head at one head. I'd say that this toy owes less to The Covenant and more to Transformers One. I think they all have four arms and digitigrade legs, but the TFOne version seems to be where we get the color scheme, and AOTP Amalgamous' head seems to be based on details from TFOne's stomach. Maher and Yuki coaxed the design into a something a bit chunkier and a bit more greebly, to better match the aesthetics of the other ten Primes released so far, and with his mono-eye you can bet that they were thinking of characters like Shockwave and Whirl when they were deciding how different characters are descended from different Primes. Even still, the deviation from a more typical "humanoid" design makes him stand out a bit from the others. Amalgamous' weapon his a scythe. In The Covenant of Primus it says that his weapon was constantly shifting, but at one point was indeed a scythe, and he's depicted with a scythe in Transformers One concept art as well as in a hologram in a scene in the actual film. The blade can fold over, and the rear can be removed to reveal a little pistol, which I guess fists with the shifting nature of Amalgamous and his weapons. A translucent orange bit comes off the end as well. It's designed to look like the T-Cogs seen in Transformers Prime. But is that bit the real Transformation Cog, THE artifact of Amalgamous Prime? See, if you open up his head, you can pop out his mono eye, which turns out is just the 5mm port on the end of what appears to be a more traditional T-Cog, like the ones seen in Transformers One, in various IDW comics, and most originally of all, like the one Starscream's ghost had to steal from Trypticon to give to Unicron in the G1 cartoon. Anyway, Amalgamous's articulation isn't the best, likely due to his non-traditional design. His head's on a pair of hinges, as much for transformation as actual articulation, that lets him look down as his crotch but no real upward or sideways tilt. His head can swivel, but only insomuch as it's actually pegged in. The back of his head collides with his "neck," limiting him to about 30 degrees or so to the left or right. His shoulders swivel, but he's only got one shoulder for both arms on either side, so moving one automatically moves the other. They can at least move laterally independantly, and around 180 degrees at that. His biceps have swivels both at the shoulder and just above the elbows, which may be useful given that his biceps have a weird bend to them. Speaking of elbows, they bend 90 degrees. His wrists swivel, and they can bend inward. His waist swivels. His hips can about 90 degrees forward, backward, and laterally. His actual anatomical knees have swivels, but no bending; they're permanently set at a 90 degree bend. There is a joint below the yellow knees that bends from not-quite-straight to over 90 degrees forward, and a joint below that that goes from slightly forward to about 60 degrees backward. Foot tilt, I guess? His ankles pivot 90 degrees. Amalgamous can hold his scythe, his pistol, or the T-Cog in his face in any of his four hands. You'll also find 5mm ports and pegs in a variety of places all over his body. There's a gimmick we'll get to in a minute. As Transformations go, you can take the entire robot and turn him into this sort of walking tank without partsforming anything but his weapon. Open the front of his back and stuff the back of his back inside. Swivel his waist 180, and fold his upper body up. Swing his legs back and scrunch them into the space you emptied out of his back, and tuck his head into the space between his upper and lower body. Then just spread his arms out and balance him on his fingers. To complete the tank look, peg his scythe into his back so that the pistol on it is pointing forward. I mean... it's a thing. I'm not going to judge an alien robot with an infinity of transformations too harshly on "this is what they designers could come up with on a Voyager budget." The little boosters on his back are even a nice touch. I think my biggest complaint is his obviously tank-tread feet chilling on the top rear while he walks on his fingers. But as I mentioned, Amalgamous is supposed to have infinite alt modes, a sort of constantly-shifting form. How do you get that out of a Voyager-class toy? Well, I don't know if it's the only or even the best way, but the team decided that their way was going to be the Weaponizer route. Yes, you can transform Amalgamous without partsforming... but you can also break him down into these constituent parts and re-arrange him however you please. Though the instructions do include a number of suggestions. For starters, the front arms have wheels and the back arms have winglets. Bend the elbows up and you can connect them together into a sort of truck. Fold out the wings on the arms, stick them together, and you've got a little jet. You can also stick one of the shoulder-eye-thingies between them and make bits that look like drones. Get his legs and weapons involved, and you can build a little tank that kind of reminds me of a Zeon Magella Attack tank from Mobile Suit Gundam. The thing with all those "official" configurations, though, is that they just use Amalgamous' limbs. I messed around with him for a bit to try to work the body in, too, and wound up with something that looked a bit like a Magitek Armor from Final Fantasy VI, but I'm feeling like his best moves are probably to either stick with his standard non-partsforming alt mode or to not transform at all. Ultimately, my biggest problem with Amalgamous isn't really how weird he looks with the more humanoid Primes, his nowhere near infinite alt modes, or the fact that the handful of alt modes he does have aren't very good. My biggest gripe is how poorly his limbs and head are pegged in. Even when you push them in all the way, on my copy at least, simply trying to get him in a decent pose is likely to cause one or both of his legs to pop off, and I can all but promise you his head is going to come off, likely multiple times, when you don't want it too. His fighting with Quintus for me for the worst of the Thirteen so far; I feel like you can do more with Amalgamous so he's less outright boring than Quintus, but Quintus is just a boring Deluxe while Amalgamous is kind of a frustrating Voyager. If you're in for all thirteen of the Thirteen, well, I don't think there's anything here that's so egregious as to outright dissuade you from your mission. But if you're not committed to ALL of the Thirteen, Amalgamous is one you can probably pass on.

Personally, I don't think we need likes at all. Maybe I'm old school, but I always felt that likes (or reactions) have been an unnecessary addition. This kind of also ties back into that 'social media vs discussion forum' topic that appeared a month or so back. Likes are arguably one of the worst aspects of social media, as it removes part of the incentive for communication (E.g. someone becomes motivated enough to type in "I agree with your post, and...", and furthers the discussion). Never mind the potential of creating slop merely to generate likes, let alone the bullying/harassment aspects of the downvote feature... So yeah, MW is a discussion forum, and the passive interaction of 'likes' is kinda antithetical to that. It's a shame that Invision introduced it, and even more of a shame that they haven't also added the option to completely disable that so-called 'feature'.

Loving the green color way.

Specifically, I was thinking of Macross Plus: Movie Edition and the wreck of Isamu's YF-19. When we see it being brought in for repairs, it's in pretty bad shape. The nose and left wing have broken off and are sitting on the hangar floor, the canopy is cracked, the canards are bent 90 degrees, there are several external panels and control surfaces that are entirely missing, the landing gear cover is deformed, the rear-facing laser cannon is bent, at least one of the dorsal intakes is crushed, etc. All of that and Shinsei Industry still has her flightworthy again in short order. The YF-29 we see at the end of Sayonara no Tsubasa (we get a clean view in Tenjin Hidetaka's Valkyries: Third Sortie) isn't exactly in fantastic shape itself, but the damage is a lot more limited. It's covered in grass stains, the horn on the monitor turret is bent or broken, the starboard wing and canard are both broken off about halfway along their length resulting in the loss of the No.4 engine, the port stabilizer is completely sheared off, and the port wing is bent with some nozzle damage on the No.3 engine, but that's about it. (Which I guess is just what you'd expect from a VF with twice the armor and four times the armor strength of the VF-25 or VF-27 with no mode limitation on energy conversion armor usage. It won't bounce, but even an uncontrolled crash landing after a bailout at Mach no-thank-you isn't going to wreck it. They just have to go find whatever hillside the No.4 engine ended up in and they can probably just replace the wings and fly it again.)

IIRC, the reason that the Likes are anonymous is that the Reaction pane/Like button is the last surviving piece of a long-since-deactivated upvote/downvote karma system that's built into Invision's board software. It was originally a pure upvote/downvote system, and Invision later expanded it to include custom Facebook-style "reactions". The admins disabled the upvote/downvote feature back in the 2010s because people were abusing it to harass and bully each other. So now the Facebook-style reaction pane, bereft of any custom reactions, is all that's left of it.

https://fb.watch/EgpEkelbyv/?mibextid=wwXIfr&fs=e Completed 1/48 RC USS Nimitz.

DNA DK-38.

I saw this and here's my review: Easily the weakest of the three and it feels like a big missed opportunity. Yes, still visually brilliant and not a bad popcorn action flick but kind of frustrating. The female antagonist is excellent and so full of potential. There is an amazing movie here that didn't happen where the humans drive a wedge between the Na'vi and they battle each other. In this hypothetical movie, the humans would barely be present which would have made the movie feel fresh and new. Jake would need to solve the problem not by being the warrior king but by unravelling the machinations (or someone else could do that). Instead, they immediately supplant the female big bad with the same old bad guy we've been dealing with, go back to the same old human locations, and then basically re-live the end of the second movie for an hour.

Looks like me trying to get to the last piece of frozen chocolate cream pie.... ...those brussell sprouts in the freezer can be deadly! O.o

Try having Trip lower the command chair by one centimeter...

Oh, are the replacements going to fix the articulation?

🙄 I suppose I just can't understand the mentality of some people 🙄 I mean, honestly . . . Why?

MIssing paint app's on Weyoun's alternate head have been reported. The skin tones don't match at all. Also, rumor has it the figures aren't articulated enough to sit down properly... at least, not Jonathan Archer.

AMAZING !

Credit where credit's due: Stan Winston's team was responsible for the engineering and fabrication of the puppets, but he'd always maintained that the design was entirely James Cameron's work.

Yeah; they've had worse:

Here are my design adjustments so the center part could sit flush on the right shoulder with the antenna (air brake could be installed in it) or slide down into position to form the crotch section in GERWALK and Battroid mod

Design proposal: my biggest pet peeve of every Legioss toy since the Gakken 1/32 is the door that swings over from the center with the sensor array connected to the bottom of it. In the line art, there is no door laying over the right shoulder. I think that center panel should flip backward or recess. The sensor array should rotate from facing the nose of the plane to facing thrusters and then the arm the array is connected to should pivot laterally and vertically to move the sensor to the right shoulder. As a bonus, this mechanism would also help with the creation of a Dark Legioss (you would simply delete the array and have no doofy looking door with nothing on it). Edit - Looks like the team may have thought the array would be stored in the chest?

It can be done! I’ll need detailed hard-surface panels for the inner frame, along with well-designed missile hatches. I’m open to any suggestions or design proposals.

ThreeZero Robo-Dou Voltron Lion Force x 2

Progress from today.

Thanks!

I just wish HG wasn’t so big in blocking everything. There’s so many cool items like toys and models and even licensing deals they could make some cash from if they were more lenient on their take home pay. As far as Fasa, that was just grabbing designs and renaming things without dealing with the licensing. I still remember the classic Macross and Dougram designs that made the backbone of their games. Oddly their original designs weren’t necessarily terrible even though they were somewhat derivative and if they had just stuck to making their own thing then they probably wouldn’t have had the tarnished reputation that they gained.

I believe that, just as happened before with Tread, as explained above, HG might force them to put their seal on the packaging. After all, Dark Legion has been sold recently in the West, and we know how picky they are about their supposed properties (as happened at SDCC 2013).

It doesn't feel like they should but maybe they need an agreement with Toynami to distribute internationally and that's the hold-up? The Tread already has the Robotech license on the back of the box like the latest Legioss reissue. They originally didn't bother with international licensing because they felt the international sales wouldn't be large enough to warrant the headache of dealing with other companies but that may have changed with such a low demand item like the Tread. I could just imagine it being like "Hey, let's pay the 5% and get the HG license so we can sell this wholesale through international channels" and then they get the license only for HG to tell them "Oh, and you have to use Toynami and they want 5% also" and that being where the wheels come off. Who knows though, I don't have anyone left at the company to ask