mikeszekely

So, yesterday in the official Transformers thread I reviewed Year of the Rooster Optimus Prime, aka Hybrid Style Convoy, and I concluded that "there are much better options for a Legends-size Optimus Prime at lower prices available today."  And to illustrate that, here's a look at Magic Square's MSB-18 Light of Justice, which is basically a Legends-size version of their MS-01 Light of Freedom.

Two things immediately jump out at me when I look at this figure with YotR/HS Prime.  The first is that YotR/HS Prime actually looks like the more premium figure with diecast parts, chrome, translucent windows, and plenty of paint, while Light of Justice has minimal paint and is mostly that soft-colored nylon plastic Magic Square likes to use (apparently because it's extremely durable, so I guess there's that).  The second thing, though, is that while it doesn't have that premium look, the actual sculpt and design of the figure is much more refined.  In fact, the overall proportions and design are nearly identical to the MP-scaled MS-01.  And that's really because, aside from a few simplifications, Light of Justice actually shares almost all of it's design and engineering with it's larger sibling.  In robot mode, the most obvious of those simplifications are the front of the pelvis being a single piece with molded and painted yellow marks instead of translucent plastic, smokestacks that are separate pieces with less detail and no sliders, unarticulated hands, no chrome, and the windows on his chest are simply molded and painted instead of being separate translucent parts.

He comes with more accessories than Light of Freedom, though.  You do still get his iconic ion rifle and energon axe.  To make up for the lack of articulated hands he comes with a pair of fully closed fists and a pair of pointing hands.  He also comes with a pair of open hands.  Now, the other two pairs are a right and left, both blue, but the last pair are both right hands, and one is white.  You'll notice that they actually fit together, and I believe the white hand is actually for Magic Square's Legends-sized Ultra Magnus, so you can have Prime and Magnus shaking hands.  You also get a trailer, Roller, and a small black part.  I'm not 100% on this, but I think the black part is an adapter for Magic Square's Huffer, so he can pull the trailer.  Finally, in the box Light of Justice doesn't have any smokestacks installed, so he comes with two pairs.  One is a little shorter and has an angled tip, the other longer with a flat tip.  I personally like the shorter, angled tip, and whichever you choose they simply tab into the sides of his shoulders.  I'll note here that neither set seems to stay tabbed in very well.  Although it forces me to commit to one set, I'm considering gluing mine in.

Here's a quick comparison of the opened trailers and rollers, with YotR/HS Prime's on the left and and Magic Square's on the right.  Magic Square's trailer is a little bigger and a bare gray plastic.  There's unfortunately very little detail inside, and no room for storing Light of Justice's accessories.  Plus the claw on the drone doesn't work.  While Roller can carry Light of Justice's gun, the wheels don't swivel like YotR/HS, and it doesn't have the gas pump.  YotR/HS Roller can carry Light of Justice's gun, and I thought about stashing LoJ's Roller and replacing it with YotR/HS before realizing that I'm probably going to stash the entire trailer and it ultimately didn't matter.

Light of Justice's on a hinged swivel, so he can look up and down a reasonable amount and turn his head but he doesn't have any sideways tilt.  His shoulders rotate and extend out from his torso to get about 60 degrees of lateral motion and a little backwards butterfly.  His biceps swivel, and he's got a double-jointed elbow that curls almost all the way to his shoulder.  His wrists are simply pegged on, and can swivel on their peg.  He can swivel at the waist, and like his larger sibling he has a very good ab crunch but it breaks the sculpt.  His hip skirts are hinged, although as noted the front is a single piece, to reveal ball-jointed hips that can move forward and backward about 60-75 degrees and laterally 90 degrees.  His thighs swivel, and he's got double-jointed knees that bend about 60-75 degrees.  His feet can tilt up and down a little, with some extra bend at the toes, plus he's got 90 degrees of ankle pivot.

Either the default hands or the closed hands can hold his ion rifle.  To swap hands, or to use his axe, you simply pull out the installed and and peg in a different hand/axe.  Only the closed hands can remain attached for transformation, though.

Oh, and I forgot to mention it with the accessories, but you can open his chest and there is a little Matrix in there.  Unlike other larger versions there's nothing grabbing the Matrix or its handles.  Instead, there's actually a little tab on the bottom of the Matrix that fits into a slot in Prime's chest.  Due to how the inside of Prime's chest transforms into part of the truck's bumper though, you have to remove it and set it aside for transformation.

OK, diecast and paint or not, YotR/HS Prime looked bad on its own in truck mode, but it looks absolutely terrible next to Light of Justice, because again Light of Justice is extremely similar to Light of Freedom.  Again we have the simplified smokestacks, the solid windows, and the lack of chrome.  The other major difference is that, due to the arm transformation being a little simplified, there's no cab doors and wing mirrors, so the spot where the side windows would be is just red.  Very forgivable at this scale.  I'm impressed that the leg transformation is actually the same as the larger version.  The only minor difference is that you don't flip around the vents on his shins (which didn't seem to serve a point on the larger figure anyway).  I was a little concerned that applying that sort of engineering to a figure this small might make him a little fiddly, but aside from the smokestacks falling out I really didn't have any issues.

The trailer is a real case of one step forward, two steps back.  The step forward, of course, is that he comes with a trailer.  It helps complete the alt mode look, even if it'll sit in my closet while Light of Justice is in robot mode 90% of the time.  It's a feature that's missing from the MP-scaled Light of Freedom, which isn't even compatible with MP-10's trailer.  And sure, it might not have dedicated storage spots for accessories like YotR/HS, but there's nothing stopping you from tossing those hands, axe, smokestacks, and Matrix in the small plastic bag they came in inside the box and tossing that whole thing back into the trailer.  Steps back, well, even though it comes with this figure and is for this figure it doesn't actually connect to Light of Justice.  There's a small nub of a peg on the underside of the trailer, but nowhere to plug it into Light of Justice.  You just kind of set it on and pretend.

So, yeah, there are a few things I wish were different with this figure.  And I don't have figures like Dutch, Sky Pillar, or Generation Toys' build-a-figure Prime to compare Light of Justice with, so it's possible that you might like one of them better.  However, I said before when checked out Magic Square's Blaster and Sideswipe that I feel like Magic Square's Legends figures are like tiny MPs.  Nothing exemplifies this better than taking their MP-esque Light of Freedom and scaling it down.  Even with the few simplifications Magic Square had to do to pull that feat off you're still getting the same proportions, 99% of the aesthetic, and 90% of the articulation and engineering.  If you're building a Legends-scale collection then this is a fantastic choice for Prime that I strongly recommend.  And even if you're not, this mini masterpiece is a perfect bite-sized Prime for leaving on your desk at work.

6 hours ago, anime52k8 said:

Do you guys think The MP-10 mold is worth picking up for the first time at this point? BBTS has MP-10SG marked down to $80 and it's kind of tempting.

I thought that MP-10 was amazing when it first came out.  It seemed so much more dynamic than MP-01, and I still prefer the blend of cartoon and real-world details over the super Sunbow thing that current MPs are doing (which is also why I like MS-01 more than TE-01, and both better than MP-44).  That said, the design is a little dated.  The use of flaps to cover most of the rear wheels without anything even attempting to cover the wheel wells bugged me long before the 2019's crop of new Primes, his articulation is a little limited, and he's got long gorilla arms.  His rifle is a little small, too, due to the folding and stowing in the backpack gimmick.  His alt mode is, perhaps, still the best of the bunch, although it doesn't fit together as neatly as MS-01's.

I know you already have MS-01, and for people who already have MS-01 or TE-01 then I don't think you really need the vanilla MP-10.  But I do think it's still good enough that, yes, it's worth checking out the variants like the SG version (although TE-01 is coming in SG colors).  MS-01 is displayed with my MP Autobots, but I still have the Year of the Horse version in a detolf with various other random Optimus figures I've picked up.

So, from mid August until Labor Day weekend I was in Beijing visiting my wife's family.  We weren't doing anything touristy and I wasn't actively shopping for anything, but there's a mall near my in-laws' place (We-Life in English, 未来广场 in Chinese) with an indoor playground that we'd sometimes take our four year old to play at.  Naturally there's toys for sale at the playground.  With some vacation pocket money left over at the end of my time there I decided to splurge on Transformers Platinum Series Year of the Rooster Optimus Prime.

To the best of my knowledge, Year of the Rooster Optimus is a totally unchanged Hasbro release of Hybrid Style Convoy, a toy first released in 2006, the same year as the original Classics Prime and a good five years before MP-10.  As you can see from my comparison with New Age's Bumblebee, this version of Prime is basically Legends-size, and borrows heavily from MP-01 for aesthetics.  He's full of diecast, silver paint, and even some chrome on the grill, smokestacks, and fuel tanks.  I actually remember really wanting this thing back in the day.  I guess back then a figure that looks basically like MP-01 in a sub-Deluxe size was an impressive feat, and if I'm being charitable I don't think YotR Prime looks too bad, especially given his size.  That said, there are other options for a Prime at this scale, and I'm not sure this one has held up.

Prime comes with his trailer, a flight stand shaped like the Autobot insignia, a jetpack, Roller and his little fuel hose, his ion blaster, his energon axe, and some alternate fists- open, semi-splayed right and left hands, a pointing right hand, a grasping left hand that's angled a bit for holding his rifle with two hands, and a pair of fists that look closed but have little notches in them.  The notches are for posing him holding the Matrix.  That's right, if you open up his chest there's a tiny Matrix inside.

The trailer does what Optimus trailers do, for the most part.  It opens up, and when you do geared teeth will push the supports out on the sides.  The repair drone can unfurl, and there's the cutout in the top of the trailer so you can do that thing where the trailer is closed but the drone's on top. The drone's cockpit even opens, although there isn't really room for anything inside with the silver-painted molded detail, and it lacks the missiles of the G1 toy. 

Something I like about the trailer is that there's spots for Prime's rifle, axe, and even compartments for the extra hands.  There's no place for the jetpack and stand, though, and curiously not really one for Roller.  I mean, sure, you can set him in there, but there's nothing really to lock him onto and no way to launch him.

Prime's head is on a ball joint with fairly limited range.  His shoulders can rotate and extend laterally about 90 degrees, plus the joints can extend from his torso a bit and give him a bit of a forward and backward butterfly.  His biceps swivel just above the elbows, which bend 90 degrees.  His wrists are ball joints for rotation and a little but of tilt.  I'll mention here that the ball joints are pretty tight, tight enough that I didn't feel comfortable pulling the hands off and changing them with other hands or the axe. His waist swivels, and because it's basically a ball joint he's got some sideways/backwards tilt and a very slight ab crunch.  His hip skirts don't have hinges, so he can only move his hips about 75 degrees forward or backward and about 45 degrees laterally.  His thighs swivel, and his double-jointed knees get well beyond 90 degrees.  His feet can tilt up and down, and he's got a somewhat limited ankle pivot.

He can use the jetpack by sliding his arms through the straps and plugging it into his back.  The stand has a little tab on it that fits into a slot on Prime's undercarriage.  His ion blaster fits into his default fist, with a second handle further up that folds to the left or right like the RX-78 Gundam's for a two-handed grip.  And, and I love that this is an actual feature, the smokestacks and fuel tanks can rotate 90 degrees to work as guns.  There's even gatling barrels molded onto the fuel tanks.  Now, these parts don't move on either of my reissue G1 Primes, but I distinctly remember the smokestacks on my G1 Ultra Magnus turning back in the day, and even though I don't recall Prime or Magnus doing it in the cartoon you better believe that my seven year old self was totally convinced they were shoulder guns.

I guess, at the time, a tiny, well-articulated, (mostly) G1-accurate Prime that transformed at all was an impressive feat of engineering and we were just supposed to overlook the fact that this alt mode is trash.  The windows overhang the grill and headlights, it's gappy, and Prime's legs don't collapse at all.  I can't get the little tabs on Prime's arms to line up with their sockets, either, which isn't helping with the gaps.  It's a mess, although it does sort of remind me of the old Classics Deluxe-class Prime that came in the two-pack with the green tank Megatron.

As bad as the alt mode is, it does have rubber tires, which is pretty impressive.  And it can pull the trailer.

If you can't tell from looking at the truck mode, the robot mode is definitely the star of the show here.  And again, I don't think it's bad.  The paint and diecast give it a feel that reminds me heavily of old Gobots toys, and he's got pretty good articulation.  However, the ball joint in his waist makes him feel a little floppy there, and the pieces with the truck headlights on his forearms that fold up over his fists are simply held on with tension.  They have a tendency to pop off when you're manipulating him.  And however impressive he was at the time, the MP-01 aesthetic feels a bit dated in 2019.  Combine that with an awful, awful alt mode and a reduced price tag that's still around $75 (I actually paid ¥799, or about $112), and I really can't recommend him.  There are much better options for a Legends-size Optimus Prime at lower prices available today.

I'd asked Mike why he went with THF instead of IT because everything I'd heard about the KO Megatrons was that IT was the way to go.  But I've personally zero interest in the MP-36 mold, so I don't have any opinions or insight to offer.  However, Ben of Ben's Collectibles (or Ben's KOllectibles) has reviews for MagTen, THF, and IT.

So all the usual US stores got theirs in, shipped 'em out, and BBTS is somehow selling extras at a significant markup, but I'm still waiting on eknight...

Went to Walmart the other day, and I finally found a copy of Deluxe-class Siege Refraktor... and then today I got my Siege Refraktor Reconnaissance Team set delivered.

I don't have any major aesthetic complaints, aside from the fact that he's a little hollow when viewed from behind.  The size is right, and he's certainly cartoon accurate.  In fact, I think I like the colors on him better than my Maketoys MP-scaled Reflector.  The only other thing I'd point out is that the green doesn't quite fill his whole chest, due to how his transformation works, but that's pretty minor.

Of course, in the cartoon there were three of them, and only one had the shutter tummy.  And if you feel the need to buy three copies Hasbro's got you covered, as the shutter is removable- indeed, it has to be removed for transformation.  The peg on the other side is smaller than 5mm, though, so you don't have a lot of other options.  If you don't want to store them in the box there's a spot on his butt that you can plug the shutter into.

Refraktor comes with an odd-looking gun and an odd-looking shield.  We'll touch on why they're so odd in a bit.

Refraktor's got pretty good articulation for a Hasbro Deluxe.  His head can swivel and he can look up, but he can't really look down.  Shoulders rotate and extend laterally 90 degrees.  His biceps swivel, and his elbows are double-jointed and can curl nearly the whole way up.  No wrist swivel.  His waist can swivel.  His hips can move forward, backward, or laterally on universal joints.  His thighs swivel, and his knees can bend 90 degrees.  His toes can point down, and he's got 90 degrees of ankle pivot.

His gun has a 5mm handle as well as 5mm pegs on either side of the back of the gun.  His shield has two 5mm pegs, one perpendicular to the shield for plugging into his arm or shoulder, and one parallel to the shield for holding in his hand.  In addition to said hands, he's got 5mm peg holes on the outside of his shoulders, on the outside of his forearms, on his back on the outside of his shins, on the inside of his shins, and a pair on the underside of each foot.

Aside from bot-mode hollowness, if there's one thing I'm going to ding Refraktor on it's his alt mode.  Just like with Soundwave, it seems Hasbro's content to lay him down with his head and arms folded away and call it a "spaceship."  His chest unfurls to hide his thighs a bit, his shield hides the gaps you uncovered when you moved his chest, and his gun is pinned between his toes, but it still seems like pretty lazy engineering.  Partsforming is even involved, as you have to remove the shutter tummy to fold the chest down, then you relocate it to a peg hole that's revealed when you fold in his head.  Fortunately, it's not your only option.

While you could buy three retail copies of Refraktor for maximum cartoon accuracy, the easiest way to get three Refraktors is to order the Siege Reconnaissance Team set from Hasbro Pulse.  This set is based on the G1 toy, though.  While there aren't any changes to the mold, so they all have the same flat chest window and same bullet-shaped helmet and face, the trio come in different colors that help make it easier to tell which one is which.  Specifically, the red one is Spectro, the one with gray arms and blue legs is Viewfinder, and the one with blue arms and white legs is Spyglass (and in my Siege head-canon the retail Refraktor is simply a fourth Refraktor team member named Reflector).  Since they're toy-based the shutter on Viewfinder's tummy is black instead of silver.  There are shutters for Spectro and Spyglass, too, but I have them on their butts.

Like the retail Refraktor, the Recon Team comes with the odd-looking guns and shields, one for each member, done in black instead of silver like the shutters.  As an added bonus, though, you get a camera flash, three bits of "armor," and a rubbery little Kremzeek.  Kremzeek has little holes in his feet that fit over the tiny pegs used for effects parts on any Siege figure.

Two of the armor bits fit onto Viewfinder's shoulders, and I love it.  It really adds to the toy-style look and helps him feel a little more unique than just being Reflector except blue instead of purple.  The camera flash has two pegs on it, and while the instructions show it pegging into Spyglass' shoulder I like having him hold it like another weapon.  The last armor bit is for Spectro, but no matter where you put it on him it looks really awkward.

Now, if you have three Refraktors, retail or the three in the Recon Team, you have another alt mode option.  You can stick the three guns together and use one of the shutters to make a tripod, and the shields combine to form a telephoto lense.  Then you can transform your Refraktors into cubes instead of "spaceships" and stick them together so the middle one is facing one way and the two on the ends face the other way to form a camera.  The peg on the shutter lets you plug the tripod into the base, and the telephoto lense plugs into the belly of the middle bot.  It will fit over the shutter if you left it on.  As for the third shutter, I like to leave it on top of Spectro, pretending it's a shutter button.

The advantage the Recon team has over three retail Refraktor, though, is the extra parts.  Spyglass' flash plugs into one of his feet to become the camera's flash.  Viewfinder's shoulder armor tabs together than slides over the top to become the camera's viewfinder.  And Spectro's armor sort of makes that grip bump that a lot of SLR cameras seem to have, plus it's got some extra molded knobs that don't move or turn but do help sell the idea that this is a camera.

Of course, because the Refraktor mold itself is unchanged the Recon Team is still perfectly capable of turning into a trio of "spaceships."  Do note, though, that I couldn't find any way to stow Viewfinder's shoulder armor at all and no decent way to stow Spectro's camera kibble armor.  Spyglass' flash can plug into one of the peg holes on the top of the ship, in front of the chest windows.

I recommend Refraktor... in fact, I recommend three of them.  And unless you're really a cartoon purist, I recommend the Recon Team over the retail figure.  The extra pieces really help with the camera mode, and I like being able to tell the three apart from one another at a glance.  Or maybe do like I did and grab the Recon Team and just one of the retail Refraktors.  That way you have a cartoon-accurate one, but you have four uniquely-colored versions and you can still make one camera.

16 minutes ago, anime52k8 said:

god damn that looks hideous.

I don't think that the robot mode looks so hot, but I love the chibi alt mode.

ToyWorld's Bii is where it's at for me.

There's still things I like better about the HasLab Unicron, but Zeta's definitely got a cleaner robot mode and will sell for half the price, so I think I'm going to go with Zeta's.

33 minutes ago, David Hingtgen said:

Thing is, most companies have gone beyond "pants-formers".  They're now "overalls" or even "wrestling singlet".   They're neck-to-knees half the time.  Very similar to G1 Magnus---the "torso" bot, really just holds up the head, and nothing more.  Just fold it into a box, attach the head, then hide it away inside the 'real' robot body.    They're no longer "adding a waist-section to improve proportions/articulation", they're pretty much starting with a ginormous armless/footless action master, then selling 5 more bots to "fill in the gaps".  

With the current crop of Menasors coming out it's getting even worse, as they all look to be nearly complete without any Stunticons. 

The next logical step is for 3Ps to nix the arm/Lego/torso mode for the team members, and sell the gestalt separately as a 20” complete robot that doesn't come apart.

49 minutes ago, tekering said:

Not in this day-and-age, man!  Anything can be found and reacquired on the secondary market, with enough patience and capital.

Either that's just not true, or I'm not patient enough. I've been searching for a copy of Fansproject's Pinchar for weeks. Even let it be known in a few places that I'm willing to pay over retail. Had a couple people offer me the black convention version, but I can't find a normal red one to save my life.

Out of curiosity, why THF and not IT?

22 minutes ago, sqidd said:

So, because they would only give you some you chose to go with none?

You can get set up to get replacement value. That of course doesn't do you any good of there are zero available for sale. But how often is that?

 

Just an offhand guess, but I'd say less than half of my collection could still be found at retail.  Even some stuff that was released this year, like Fans Toys' Roadking (a third-party Masterpiece-style Motormaster), is already super hard to find.  So no, once most of this stuff is gone, it's gone forever.

But that's me (and maybe @Valkyrie Hunter D), and I'm not saying that you shouldn't get insurance just because I haven't bothered.  Maybe your stuff is more readily available to replace, or was more likely to go up in value.  Or you live somewhere where the likelihood of losing your collection to crime or some sort of natural disaster is higher than where I live.

Youtube personality Bobby Skullface did a video about this.  You might find it informative.  Or not.  I didn't watch it myself.

$100 a year doesn't sound too bad, I guess.  But I don't know, I guess it's not just a money thing.  I mean, part of the reason you have homeowners insurance or car insurance is so that if something happens to you'll have money to replace your stuff.  But, especially since a lot of my collection is 3P Transformers stuff that had smaller runs, even if I got money from an insurance company I wouldn't be able to replace a lot of what's in my collection.  So I've just never bothered.

When ToyWorld released Constructor many saw it as a game-changer.  Through the use of extensive partsforming a combiner could be more than simply the sum of its parts, the gestalt could have more natural proportions, and having dedicated hips, waist, and knees seemed to provide more stability in combined mode.  And while there are those who have derided what's now often called "pantsforming" in the TF community there were plenty who bought up Zeta Toys' version of Bruticus just for the size of the combined mode, myself included.  Even the biggest supporters of Zeta's pantsformer will tell you, though, that the individual Zeta Combaticons were kind of junk, covered in folded-up kibble panels and often sporting inaccurate alt modes.  So when MMC announced that the Combaticons were coming to their MP-esque Ocular Max line I was definitely interested.  If nothing else, I figured they'd be more accurate to display as individual robots.  But the real bombshell MMC dropped was that not only would they not be using pantsforming, their Bruticus wouldn't use any partsforming at all.  It seemed ludicrous to me.  I mean, even stuff like GT's Devastator or TFM's Motormaster that found uses for all of the parts were still technically using some form of partsforming.  The last time someone tried to make a combiner with zero partsforming at all was Hasbro's Fall of Cybertron Bruticus, and it was really bad.  Could MMC really pull this off?

Well, the jury's still out on the combined mode and probably will be for some time.  But we can take a look at their first Combaticon, Impetus, aka Vortex.

Well, we're off to a good start, at least aesthetically.  I don't think it's worth even mentioning Zeta's , but Impetus is cleaner and more accurate than Unique Toys' version.  His forearms have (mostly) more of the rounded shape of the cartoon, and his torso is less busy and greebly.  The one thing that stands out to me is that Impetus doesn't have the Starbucks cup-looking intakes on the sides of his shoulders, but I'll note that there's just enough molded detail on the sides of his not-quite-square shoulders to evoke that missing detail.  And he's even got windows on the sides of body, like the cartoon model.  He's missing the black shin stripes, but I'm honestly not sure how you'd pull off that detail without messing up the alt mode.  So I guess my only real complaints are how his torso is narrower at the top and gets wider toward the hips, and how flat the front of his torso is vs the cartoon model.  I can live with those things, though.

Impetus comes with just three accessories.  He's got a very cartoon-accurate rifle, and two smaller guns that fit into his forearms for robot mode.  Unlike UT's all-black arm guns Impetus' are cartoon-accurate with blue with black barrels.  Also unlike UT, these ones fit snugly.

Impetus has good articulation, especially when you consider what MMC's trying to pull off here.  His head is on a double ball joint, and the lower ball socket is on a hinge, so he's got some fantastic range there.  He can turn his head, tilt his head up, down, or sideways, crane his neck forward, recoil in horror, you name it.  There's only two things I'm not a fan of regarding his neck.  The first is that you really only want to swivel his head on the upper ball joint to have him turn his head, but it's toleranced much more tightly than the lower one so you often find him swiveling at the wrong joint.  The second is that it's extremely easy to pop his head off entirely at that lower ball joint.  I'm finding that it's almost easier to pop the head off, swivel his head at the upper ball joint to the position you want it, then push his head back on.  Moving along, his shoulders rotate and can extend laterally 90 degrees.  He has bicep swivels, although his right shoulder has a protrusion that gets in the way.  Curiously, his left arm doesn't have that protrusion.  His elbows are double jointed and can curl almost the whole way up  His wrists swivel.  His thumb is on a ball joint, and all of his fingers are individually-articulated with a base hinge at the bottom.  There's no other joints in his hands, though, so his fingers are still molded into a curl that kind of makes me wonder why they didn't simply mold all the fingers together, like an MP car.  His waist can swviel, and he's got about 45 degrees of ab crunch.  Moving his hip skirts out of the way, his hips can go forward 90 degrees and backward under 90 on ratchets, and 90 degrees laterally on friction joints.  This thighs swivel.  His knees can bend 90 degrees on another ratchet.  His toes can tilt up, and he's got a little bit of ankle/mid-boot pivot, although it's a little restricted due the combiner hand stuffed into his legs and the flaps on the inside of his lower legs that try to cover them.

As previously mentioned, the little guns fit snuggle into ports on his forearms.  As for his rifle, it has a little tab on the back of the handle.  This tab fits into a notch in the base of his hand.  It's a little unconventional, but I dig it, and he holds his gun securely.

I find it interesting that Impetus looks quite cartoony in robot mode, but not as much in alt mode.  Not that I'm complaining!  You see, his cartoon alt mode was kind of a generic helicopter, but the G1 toy was meant to be a Kaman SH-2 Seasprite helicopter, and Impetus transforms into a fairly accurate Seasprite.  The landing gear placement (and how it retracts) is accurate, and it's got the bumps on its chin in front of where the landing gear folds.  The windows are all accurate, and it's even got molded-on wipers and tiny rearview mirrors.  The engines appear to be accurate to at least the SH-2G variant.  You can't see it from my pictures, but it's even got the search radar on the underside of its chin.  For the sake of cartoon accuracy Impetus does have the blue stripe on the nose, though.

As impressive as the alt mode is, the engineering is the real star.  Unlike Zeta, who left most of the tail just chilling on the back, or Unique Toys, who tried to emulate the G1 toy and form the tail from the robot arms, Impetus' arms are actually the engines.  The entire tail is folded up and stuffed into Impetus's mostly-hollow torso.  Meanwhile, the main rotor blades slide over themselves to expand.  While it can take a little finagling to make sure everything is lined up right to store properly or to move the halves of the tail around his backpack it ultimately feels extremely clever and extremely satisfying to transform.

The arm guns can plug onto the base of the tail in a manner very like the G1 cartoon, which I approve of.  And the nose can be flipped down to reveal a peg hole.  You can fold the rifle's handle in, then plug the back of it into the peg hole.  I'm not a huge fan of this look.  For one, although it's tight enough not to fall out, the rifle does spin kind of loosely in the peg hole.  For two, the G1 toy had a smaller gun for the nose, and the cartoon's nose gun was smaller still.  Jamming Impetus' rifle into his nose seems like a half-hearted attempt to find somewhere to store the rifle and give him some kind of nose gun at the same time.

I don't normally bring up the combined modes until the end, when I review the combined mode.  But I did want to show you that MMC's got some interesting ideas .  For one, MMC seems to be using Impetus' hips and knees for combined elbow, ala Combiner Wars or old Warbotron stuff, but they've designed Impetus' hips to collapse and his thighs to lock together so the elbow is solid and gapless.  Essentially, MMC's Bruticus will have (at least on Impetus) double-jointed elbows with much better range than UT or Zeta.  Another thing is that I tried to line them up so that the bases of the combiner ports are in a line to give you an idea of the relative sizes.  While Zeta's is clearly the biggest, you'll note that from combiner port to wrist Impetus is similar in size to UT's, it's just the hand that's significantly smaller.  That makes sense, since I'm hearing that MMC's Bruticus will be close in size or a little taller than UT's and a bit shorter than Zeta's.  I'll also point out that while the materials on Impetus feel much better than UT's Impetus is still the lightest of the three Vortices I have here.  While some may decry that (along with the lack of a painted finish) as lacking that MP feel, I think it should be extremely beneficial in balancing the gestalt.

So, yeah, I bought Impetus largely to replace UT's Vortex in my display of individual Combaticons, and on that note he's a smashing success.  The engineering is brilliant, his robot mode is cleaner and more cartoon-accurate, his alt modes is more realistic, and the materials feel better in hand.  He's fun to pose, and he's fun to transform.  And he does all this without looking out-of-place with the other four UT Combaticons.  What's more, MMC seems to have delivered a figure a triple-changer with integrated combined-mode parts that has minimal concessions to any one mode.  The end result is so good and so intriguing that even though my intention was just to replace two or three of UT's Combaticons and not worry about the combined mode that I'm now planning on picking up all five.  Impetus ultimately isn't perfect, but he gets a strong recommend from me.

Not going to do a full review on repaints, but I picked up the Siege Rainmakers, the Siege Phantomstrike Squadron, Siege Thundercracker, and Generations Select Red Wing.  For my in-depth review of the mold, check out my review of Siege Starscream here.

From left to right, that's Red Wing, Skywarp, Thundercracker, Starscream, Nova Storm, Acid Storm, and Ion Storm.  As far as I know, Red Wing is a Target.com exclusive only sold to holders of Target's credit or debit card, Skywarp is available in an Amazon-exclusive Phantomstrike Squadron bundle, Thundercracker is a regular retail release, and Nova Storm, Acid Storm, and Ion Storm are available as a three-pack in Target stores (at least here in the US).

Very little has changed from the Starscream mold.  The robot chest doesn't fall off of the others as easily as it did on Starscream, so that's a plus.  Thundercracker and Red Wing also sport a new smirking face.  I myself am probably going to swap Thundercracker and Starscream's heads, because if anyone should be smirking it's Starscream.

Other than that the only real difference is the colors.  So just a few quick thoughts:

I really dig Red Wing.  Those colors just work for me.  Reminds me a little of Armada Starscream.

Thundercracker is Thundercracker.  I've really nothing else to say there.

So the Rainmakers are, apparently, based on this scene from the cartoon.

Which is fine, I guess.  I mean, I love that they're not trying to work any camo deco or grays or whatever onto Acid Storm.  He's unapologetically a solid block of lime green, and I love it.  It's the other two that I'm less enthusiastic with.  Ion Storm is just too close in color to Thundercracker, like he came from a scene were they actually meant to use him but the animators were too lazy to color him properly that day.  The color breakup would have been better if they'd gone with purple Hotlink instead another blue.  And while I do like the the bright yellow of Nova Storm, ever since he had an arc in the old Dreamwave comics Sunstorm is a much more popular yellow Seeker, and one I'd rather have instead.  But of course, Sunstorm and Hotlink weren't part of the Rainmakers, they showed up in a different episode alongside a third blue Seeker, now named Nacelle.

So... do I buy a second pack of Rainmakers and repaint them, or hope for another three-pack...

Finally, Skywarp isn't actually black, he's kind of a dark gray.  He's also the only one with a large swath of alt-mode that isn't in his primary color.  Not sure how I feel about that.  As previously mentioned he's part of the Phantomstrike Squad, which means if you want this last of the three main Seekers you have to buy $50 pack that includes three extra Battlemasters.

There's nothing exactly new going on here.  On the left we have Shrute, a purple and gray repaint of Aimless (who himself was a slight remold of Blowpipe).  I think he's supposed to be Hairsplitter, one of Spinister's Targetmaster partners. Terror-Daxtyl is a repaint of Pteraxadon in colors that match Shrute.  And Fracas is a recolor of Firedrive, and I use recolor lightly here.  If you look at the box, apparently his colors were supposed to be inverted, but what you get in the box is basically Firedrive with limbs that are a slightly darker gray.

So do I recommend them?  Depends how much you like the Starscream mold, or how many Seekers you actually want, because there's really nothing new here.  Personally I thought that the Siege Decepticons were a little outnumbered, so I'm in favor of a little troop-building.

Having settled the issue of which Grimlock toy I'm using with my Siege figures, and having earlier covered Gigapower's fresh release of their MP-esque Superator, you might think I'm done talking about Grimlock for awhile.  And... well, not quite yet.  You may recall that the reason I wanted a Siege Grimlock in the first place was because I like the symmetry of having the same character on both my Siege and Studio Series shelves.  And it turns out that DNA Design reissued some of their upgrade kits, allowing me to pick up their DK-06 upgrade kit for Studio Series Grimlock.

Inside the box, you'll find two parts of a handle and two halves of the maul weapon that I can't recall if Grimlock actually had in the movies, but was seen in promotional images and was wielded by the old Voyager-class version from Age of Extinction.  You'll find a mace on a flail, a dinosaur tail, a dinosaur tongue, a replacement right arm, and a replacement left hand.  The head of the mace, the head of the maul, the new tail, and the new right arm all have that same paint wash that the figure itself has, so the new parts blend right in.

Installing the new left hand is as easy as pushing the original hand off the mushroom peg and pushing the new one on in its place.  The big difference is that the new hand has some extra articulation, with the thumb able to move up and down on a hinge, and all the fingers now hinged at the base with the index finger being separate from the others.  Installing the new right arm is a only slightly more difficult.  You have to pop the elbow pad off of the old arm, then push it off a mushroom peg at the bicep.  The new arm goes onto the mushroom peg, and you finish the job by putting the original elbow pad onto the new arm.  The hand on the right arm enjoys the same added articulation as the new left hand, but the more immediate benefit is that it's actually a hand in the first place, as opposed to the mace on the original.

Now we can arm him up using the new parts.  The halves of the maul's handle push together, then the halves of the maul fit over the t-shaped top.  Then you simply unfurl the spikes.  It takes a little bit of force to get it to go; I think the fit is a little off.  You can see that both the upper part of the handle and the inside of space it fits into on the lower part wound up with stress marks.  Plus, the halves of the maul don't fit quite right on my copy.  They push each other apart, making the whole head of the maul want to pop off of the handle.  As for the flail, the head can be removed.  There's a peg inside that fits into either hand.

You can just have him hold the head of the flail, giving him the mace-hand that the toy originally had and was seen in promotional images.  The flail is actually pretty great, though, as the base of the chain can swivel and there are a number of hinges along the chain.  The friction in the hinges is strong enough that you can pose Grimlock mid-swing, which I love.  What I don't love, though, is how poorly he holds both the flail and the staff.  See, the new hands have little tabs on the inside of the fingers.  The instructions make it look like you use slots on the weapons' handles to push onto those tabs, but that's not quite the case as closing the fingers will push the tabs out of the slots.  You kind of have to line up the slots and tabs as you close his hands, then push a bump on his thumbs into little peg holes on the sides of his index fingers to lock everything into place.  However, the tabs are small and the slots/peg holes are shallow, and in practice a slight breeze will knock his weapons loose.

But what about the tongue and tail?  We'll get to the tongue in a minute.  As for the tail, it has a long peg on the underside.  And you can use that peg to have him hold the tail in a manner that's extremely similar to the original Deluxe-class Classics Grimlock.  The tail also has a trio of tabs on it, one on each side and one on top.  One tab goes into a slot on his back that's usually for locking his hips in place in dino mode.  The others allow you to hang his maul and flail using slots on their handles.  This allows you to store all of his accessories in robot mode.  Be advised, though, that the DNA made the tabs slightly too large for those slots, or they didn't make the slots big enough, take your pick.  And as a result you can see I got more stress marks.

So far, these upgrades have added a lot of utility to Grimlock's robot mode, but we still want our Transformers to transform, and how these upgrade kits affect transformation is always a concern.  I mean, you'll recall that I really liked DNA's upgrade kit for Titan-class Fortress Maximus' robot mode, but I wasn't as impressed with how they integrated into his alt modes.  

Well, Grimlock's new left hand still tucks in the same as the old, so no big deal there.  However, the old right arm's mace hand unfolded to form half is tail.  With the new arm, you get half a tail with a fist at the end.  Finishing the tail simply requires you to slide the peg on the underside into his fist, which covers the fist in the process.  I think what you wind up with is a partsforming requirement, which isn't ideal, but ultimately gives you a more accurate tail that even has a pair of hinges for a little sideways curl, in addition to the benefit of having an actual hand in robot mode.  I think a little partsforming isn't a bad deal for that.

One half of the maul's head has a square rod that feeds through the fist curled up into his dino neck.  the other half fits onto the end of the rod, allowing the maul (with spikes folded in) to fill out his torso a bit and hide the fact that his neck and chest are mostly his robot arm doing  a curl.  A little more partsforming, but again I think the payoff is worth it, especially if you have him carrying the maul in robot mode anyway.  As for the maul's handle, as well as his chain flail, they again use some slots to fit over tabs on his tail.  It's not the prettiest, and I'll probably just leave those accessories off to the side when I have him in bot mode, but the option is nice.

Which just leaves us with the barely-mentioned tongue.  The tongue is ball-jointed to a flat piece with a notch cut into it.  The notch slides over a bit of structural plastic in the bottom of Grimlock's mouth, and the ball joint and a hinge give you some tongue posability (although, on my copy anyway, it always looks a little off-center.  The fit of the notch around the plastic in Grimlock's mouth also isn't great, and I wound up with yet another stress mark.

Just as Grimlock's new robot arm/hands had an effect on his dino mode you might find yourself wondering if this tongue affects his robot mode at all.  After all, unlike the other new parts a dinosaur tongue doesn't really have any utility, just an aesthetic boost.  You're probably less likely to suffer any problems it causes, then.  But I'm happy to report that the impact is minimal.  The tongue folds around to kind of lie against the back of his bicep while in robot mode.

The DK-06 upgrade kit continues what I'm starting to see as a pattern with DNA.  The kit is full of great ideas that add a lot of improvement to the base figure, but the materials are a little questionable and the tolerances are a little off in a way that feels a little sloppy.  New weapons are great, but only if he can hold them.  And tabbing one part where it's meant to go on another shouldn't be causing stress marks, especially when both the tab and slot are on DNA's parts instead of slotting DNA's parts onto Hasbro's tabs.  Still, I think this kit does enough for both modes that it's definitely worth checking out.

OK, I can finally finish this "which Grimlock is the best for Siege" nonsense by diving into Fansproject's Lost Exo Realm series and taking a look at Severo.

Out of the gate, there are some things I definitely love about Severo.  He's got a stronger G1 influence than Planet X's Vulcan, for one, with but with Fansproject's usual anime-influenced spin.  This gives him burly arms, high shoulders, a broad chest, and big lower legs but thinner thighs and a narrow waist.  I dig the little spikes on his hands, his little toes, and (at first) the exhaust pipes on his shoulders that remind me of Dreamwave's War Within design.  His head is G1 Grimlock with exaggerated details- ears become horns, a little crest becomes a big one, his cheek vents are more prominent, the top of his mouth plate come up a little higher and makes his visor look more like eyes without actually being eyes, and the mouthplate itself isn't as flat.

The one thing I'm really not a fan of, though, are his wings.  Instead of his dino chest just opening outward the split halves fold down then roll backward.  No matter how you arrange them they just never seem to look right.  Plus, while the arms that they're on lock into his backpack, the wings themselves still have swivels where they connect to those arms.  Those swivels rely on friction that's a little too loose to stay perfectly in place.  And even when they are in place there just doesn't seem to be a good way to arrange the dino arms so that they're not getting in the way of the exhausts on his shoulders when you're posing him.

Size-wise, while shorter than MP-08 (or GCreation's Wrath, whom I no longer own) or ToyWorld's Grimshell, he's very close in height ot Planet X's Vulcan.  Much like Vulcan, then, he's arguable a tiny bit shorter than I'd like for scaling with Siege Optimus, but while MP-08 is often cited as good for use with CHUGs I'd suggest that he's a little too tall.  You kind of just gotta go with what looks right, and I guess I prefer Severo and Vulcan's size.

Anyway, Severo comes with quite a few accessories (more if you get the Deluxe version, which I did not).  You get a traditional Grimlock rifle, two big gatling guns, a sword with a little more crossguard than I'm used to on a Grimlock sword, a little dude that the box tells me is named Kottav (and I have to go by the box, since my copy didn't arrive with any instructions), and a backpack for said little dude.  If you get the Deluxe version you also get a crown and throne, plus a second identical little dude.

Little is, I suppose, relative, as his quite a bit taller than a Maketoys Headmaster, a Siege Battle Master, a Siege Micromaster, or one of Fansproject's own Headmasters.

The backpack has a tab on it that fits neatly into a slot on Kottav's back.  You'll note, though, that one side of the backpack has a peg.  You can pull that side off and give it to Kottav to use as gun.

As for articulation, Kottav's head is on a hinged swivel that can look straight up and down a little.  His shoulders use a ball joints for rotation but hinges to move laterally just shy of 90 degrees, plus a transformation hinge gives him a backwards butterfly.  His elbows are double-jointed and can curl almost the whole way up.  The upper joint is a hinge, but the lower one is a ball joint that doubles as a bicep swivel.  His waist can swivel, but due to transformation he has an ab crunch.  His hips are ball joints that go forward, backward, or sideways 90 degrees as long as his backpack isn't in the way.  His ball-jointed knees can bend 90 degrees and pull double-duty as thigh swivels.  His ankles are also ball joints, so they can swivel, and tilt up, down, or inward a little.

As for Severo's own articulation, his head is on a ball joint with a little up, down, and sideways tilt.  His shoulders are on big ball joints for rotation, but the socket in his shoulder is hinged.  Still, he can only move his shoulders about 45 degrees laterally.  Plus the rotating gray parts of his chest used for transformation don't lock in robot mode, and have a tendency to move when you're manipulating his shoulders.  His biceps swivel.  His elbows, despite being double-jointed, can still only get about 90 degrees of bend.  At least both joints are ratcheted.  His wrists can swivel, and a pin through his base knuckles allow his hands to open and close.  Due to transformation he can even bend his wrists downward, which is useful for posing with swords.  His waist has a ratcheted swivel, and he's got a little ab crunch plus he can arch his back significantly.  His hips can move 90 degrees forward or backward on ratchets, but again only about 45 degrees laterally, also on a ratchet.  That's about three clicks.  His thigh swivels are ratcheted.  His knees are ratcheted and fall just short of 90 degrees.  And then his ankles are just big ball joints which give him ankle swivels, a little upward tilt, tons of downward tilt, and a little over 45 degrees of inward tilt.  The friction of those ball joints can struggle to support the figure a little in mor extreme poses.  Not the best articulation then, even at the time Severo was first released.

He holds his gun fairly well.  He holds the sword securely enough, but there's a reason other Grimlock's don't have this wide crossguard on their swords.  He's forced to hold it turned a little one way or the other, because the dino claw on his wrist is in the way.

He can hold the gatling guns, too, but they don't feel as secure, and while my copy held up fine I could see them wearing down the ball joints in his shoulders.  As for Kottav, he turns into a pointy brick.  Meanwhile, you can pull his backpack apart and reconfigure it into a kind of stick with a peg on one end that fits into a peg hole on Kottav.  And it's a mace... kind of.  Sort of reminds me of the mace that came with the old Voyager-class Age of Extinction Grimlock.

All of his weapons have storage in robot mode as well.  There are peg holes on both of his hips that fit a peg on the sword, and peg holes on the backs of his wings that work with pegs on his gun and on the handle of his Kottav mace.  Meanwhile, the gatling guns have these t-shaped protrusions that, in theory, slide into gaps on the back of the wings.  In practice the fit is off a bit, so they don't go in all the way.

You can see where Fansproject was going with Severo's dinosaur mode.  It's heavily G1-inpsired, with the hexagonal dino cheeks, skinny, three-clawed dino arms, bulbous, round hips, and a mostly gray torso sandwiched between his gold pelvis and gold neck.  The alterations mostly serve to make him a bit more accurate compared to a real T-Rex.  His body is more parallel to the ground, with his tail held up behind him.  His legs have more of a digitigrade appearance, with a more accurate three toes in the front and dewclaw off the ground in the back.  As with his robot mode, though, there are some aesthetic.  His legs are a little short, and his tail is way too stumpy.  Plus his back has a sort of permanent arch going on.

At least Fansproject tried to give the dino mode a little more articulation than most Grimlock's.  The jaw can open, revealing an overly large, overly plain black cannon inside.  He can't quite close his mouth, though, and I suspect that the cannon actually has a bit to do with that.  At the top of his gold neck is a hinge that let's him move his head up/down a bit.  A large ball joint at the base of the gold neck lets him turn his head and look sideways a little bit.  His dino shoulders are ball joints for rotation and lateral movement.  His elbows are hinged and can bend about 90 degrees.  His dino wrists can swivel, and the claws, although molded as one piece, are hinged at the base to open and close.  Weirdly, he's got peg holes on his dino palms, but I'm not sure why.  The pegs on all his accessories are a little too small, so he can't really hold anything.  His robot arms become his dino legs, with his shoulder, bicep swivel, and elbow becoming the hip, thigh swivel, and knee of the dinosaur, complete with the same range of motion.  Some hinges allow him to bend his foot up/down a little at the ankle  The toes in the front also have a hinge to bend up and down, plus a swivel that lets to fake some dino ankle tilt.  His stumpy little tail does have some hinges as well, so he can bend it left/right a little.

I was able to store his sword and gun on his dino hips, although the fit is tight (maybe they're just meant to be screw holes?  Again, missing instructions here).  The handles on the gatling guns fold up and they tab together.  The combined gatling guns are meant to use recessed pegs near the barrels to fit into peg holes on short posts on his back.  The fit is very poor, though, and they'll fall off immediately if you tilt the figure.  As for Kottav, I was under the impression that the Lost Exo Realm guys are supposed to be in bot mode and ride the dinosaurs, but I can't see any seat for him or any way to fix him into Severo's back.

Severo is not a bad figure, but he's not a great figure, either.  He's just kind of ok.  I don't think I'd go so far as to recommend him.  I mean, Fansproject's Lost Exo Realm dinobots had to compete with ToyWorld's Dinobots, which I think were released shortly before, and especially Planet X's, which were released around the same time.  Just my observation, but I think most people went with Planet X over the Lost Exo Realm, and from an objective point of view Vulcan is the better figure.  He's got more articulation in robot mode, and his dinosaur mode blows Severo's out of the water in pretty much every way.  I find myself really wishing Fansproject could have mirrored some of Planet X's engineering, in the way that the the dino chest wraps around the dino head on the backpack, in the crazy articulation of the dino neck, and in the way the forearm expands and covers the hands to elongate the dino legs.

All that said, I think my final choice for Siege Grimlock is Severo.  We'd already ruled out the Generations one as far too small, and the Titans Return toy as both too small and too compromised by the combiner gimmick.  ToyWorld's (reviewed here) is close, with a strong G1 aesthetic and the perfect height, but also suffers from compromises made to combined mode.  MP-08 is a little floppy and slightly too large for my tastes.  GCreation's (reviewed here) is similarly too large, and with the worst engineering of the bunch.  It really comes down to Vulcan and Severo (no point considering the official Fall of Cybertron Grimlock when Vulcan does everything so much better).  And while Severo is the better toy, one that actual does get a recommend from me, I like Severo's stronger G1 resemblance and I think it's a better fit with the other Siege figures.  Plus, I think Severo is arguably more playable than Vulcan.  Neither are particularly difficult to transform, but Vulcan does have the one tail armature you have to bend to force past his thigh, something that doesn't feel comfortable and keeps me from transforming him too often.  Severo, on the other hand, is even less difficult and you don't have to force anything.

1 hour ago, RichterX said:

Reminds me of this guy, turn it inside out

I have one of those!  I actually bought it for my collection of Primes, but it doesn't exactly stand in a detolf.  I wound up letting my daughter have it.

On 8/31/2019 at 4:41 AM, Negotiator said:

curious what the back of that thing looks like.

Zeta's will be around 40cm (18 inches,  has almost no kibble (and no partsforming), and Zeta is saying the suggested retail price should be under 1500 yuan (around $200). A lot of people are complaining that it's too small, but IMO it doesn't matter how big or small it is it's never going to scale with other figures so it doesn't really matter.

I like plenty of official toys, and I enjoy talking about them here with you guys. But as a rule I never, ever go to the official boards at TFW2005. I mean, the entire forum is full of tribalism and people looking for confirmation bias on crap they like as they argue about scale, but the 3P boards aren't nearly as bad as the official ones.

As for MP-44, I'm just not a fan, regardless of price. I believe that everyone is looking for some degree of cartoon accuracy, but it's possible to go too far and MP-44 does.

Well, now we know what happens when Hasbro can't get a HasLab project funded. They move the goalposts.

Ok, I'm being a little snarky, but honestly I think this is a smart move because the original deadline was pretty short. I think a lot of people who were interested weren't able to put together $600 on such short notice. In my case I had basically two weeks before leaving for China, and I just couldn't do it. But now I can look into moving some funds around when I get back and might still back it.

4 hours ago, Tking22 said:

I might bite on Warpath, I never got the BadCube version, but easy pass on Brawn, I'm plenty happy with BadCube Brawny, he still looks good and is a charmer IMO. 

Exactly the same here. FT's Brawn doesn't look like a huge improvement over BC's, but I don't have a Warpath yet.

I'm a white guy with hazel eyes myself, and I rarely go outside without sunglasses. Even if it's cloudy it's usually bright enough that I'd rather wear them than not, and if it's sunny I'll get headaches if I'm not wearing sunglasses. I had a nice pair of Oakley's for years, then replaced them with Ray Bans that got swiped after less than a year, so my wife won't let me get nice ones again for awhile. I've got three pairs of polarized Sketchers I got for under $25 each. One pair is in my car, one pair is in my wife's car, and the third I keep in the house in case I'm going outside and either staying on the neighborhood or someone else is driving. That pair traveled to Beijing with me. It's weird, I didn't even think about the fact that I'm the only one wearing sunglasses when I go out here until @tekering mentioned it. I don't know if the notion that their eyes are more capable of handling the sun than Caucasian eyes is a widespread one, though. My mother-in-law actually does wear sunglasses occasionally (though not like I do), and my father-in-law just says he doesn't feel comfortable wearing them.

3 minutes ago, tekering said:

Japanese people rarely wear sunglasses, and only for dramatic effect; it's a fashion statement, not a practical choice.  In fact, most Japanese people believe their dark brown eyes provide natural protection from the sun, and that Caucasians are much more sensitive to light...  

Nonetheless, on sunny days, it's not uncommon to see cyclists sporting sun visors like this one:

But sunglasses?  Only celebrities, usually.

I don't know if there's the same rationalization behind it, but I can confirm that here in Beijing it's hot and sunny but no one around here wears sunglasses. I can't even find a place to buy them, despite there being a shopping mall within walking distance. Too bad. I was hoping for some KO Ray Bans to replace the real ones that got stolen.