Fit For Natalie

Impossible Toys is doing a very G1 Arcee, and photos of the prototype have appeared here and there, but we've heard very little since late last year. Fans Project would probably want to avoid Wheelie and Galvatron given Hasbro made them recently.

I picked up ROTF Bludgeon the other day. I like.

He needs bigger and more guns. Anybody have any suggestions for generic looking guns that would fit in his hands?

Here's some inspiration:

I am told that Don Figueroa loves Roadbuster.

Anybody been reading IDW's Wreckers comic? I'm in a Wreckers mood, so I'm also wondering if anybody here has had experience with CM's Corp's Mugen Calibur? That discounted one at HLJ could make a good stand in for Roadbuster.

Robotech introduced me to Japanese animation and was one of my favourite cartoons when I was much, much younger, especially when they were re-aired in the mid 90s.

Thank you, Carl, may you rest in peace.

And not to be one of those "How can you like that??" guys, but I do have to say I'm surprised at how much of a postive reaction there is to the combiners. After getting such excellent and creative lines from Animated, Univers/Classics and even the films, I kind of thought most people would look at this new line as a huge step backwards and say, "Really, Hasbro?" But a lot of people seem to really dig them. Which is fine, I'm not trying to question anyone's tastes. I just never expected so many people would be so excited for an Armada/Energon revisit.

Probably because the line looks like toy-fun, with the mix and matching, the auto-transformation limbs, the triple-changing targetmaster partners and what-not. I am pleased that evidently the Transformers fandom can still appreciate kid-appeal gimmicks/design.

Too bad they didn't actually use the real Steamrunner class design in the game, and instead used some weird one which missed the point entirely about having that pod in the back of the ship between the nacelles. By moving the navigation deflector array to the front, the pod thing at the back now serves no visual purpose.

Bad ship designer! BAD!

Borg ships are wanderign around as Deep Space Encounters. Klingon players are now wandering around Federation space, but they're being slaughtered by spawn campers.

Anybody in the beta event right now? Borg have overrun spacedock.

There are no Del Tacos in western PA that I know of.

There is a guy who is offering to provide the codes to people (sans cup, of course) for a paypal donation of $3.50USD for the cost of the cup and his drive.

He's also going to give away a retail copy of STO via the retailer of the winner's choice. For every code you buy, you get 1 entry:

http://www.minotek.com/os/news.php

So there, for a couple of bucks you get a pet, 2 days of game access (promotion ends Feb 15, I think) and a chance to win a copy of STO.

Is anybody here going to visit Del Taco to get their Type-8 shuttlecraft code?

I kept running into the dreaded "Random Rebooting" problem STO has with a fair number of players, judging by the topics and posts about it on the STO forums. As such, I cannot do a mad grinding rush to get my beloved Defiant class.

So, this will be my last beta ship.

Happy Australia Day.

I mean - are Transformers such a passing fad and is the Transformers fandom composed of people with such a horribly short attention span that every year you need to "re-boot" the comics and cartoons?

That's annoying. It doesn't happen with other series. Why does it happen with TFs?

....

Nowadays, it seems that 12 months is the upper limit of people's attention spans - then you need to "re-boot" everything to make it "fresh."

....

But no - nowadays Transformers is just about Optimus Prime battling Megatron on Earth for SOMETHING (energon, minicons, the Cube, the All Spark, kicks and giggles) - and the story arc always revolves around introducing us to the concept of Transformers, to Cybertron and to some core cast of characters that we (who have been with Transformers for 25 years now) KNOW already.

The problem is you are assuming that the fandom, and people our age are the target market for Transformers. For the most part, we're not. Hasbro has admitted that they market TF mainlines the way they do because children abandon toys at younger ages now than they did when we were children (due to the more attractive allure of things such as video games), so they constantly refresh lines to target new groups of children who have entered the age group that will most likely have interest in Transformers. It's not the most desirable practice for those who desire a more coherent fictional universe, but thus far, it has worked for the past decade, and anybody who sticks around and becomes a fan beyond Hasbro's expectations for a line to last in terms of audience/market and retailer interest is not really on their radar.

Adult fans are appreciated as a small segment of their market, large enough to be listened to, but hardly enough to base strategies upon. And you'd better bloody hope they never have to depend on adult fans for the line's viability, because a children's franchise losing the support of children would be a critical blow, as seen in Japan.

I guess my problem with Transformers nowadays is that... nobody really remembers the original G1 or cares much for it. All discussion is Bayformers focused, or the latest TV series and the most popular toys are the modern ones...

Well, there's a lot of TF fiction and toys from 25 years to discuss. For some of the older TF fandom members, particularly the ones from the usenet and newsgroup days, G1 talk has kind of been tapped dry (aside from new G1 fiction such as comics, of course). From my observation, people who tend to talk about G1 subjects tend to be people who have recently returned to Transformers (because of the movies), while old hands tend to talk about new stuff. Then there's new fans who are excited about whatever new series got them into Transformers and are curious about the original series, so I think there's more than enough talk and interest about G1, especially if you look at how older fans want new Universe Classics (or whatever the next iteration will be named).

Most mainline Transformers are relatively low cost mass-market children's toys. If you compare a mainline Transformer with a collector's model toy that is fragile and is not meant to be played with, then yes, the Transformer will come off looking second or even third best. However, VFTF1, you're grossly exaggerating there. They don't look THAT bad.

A leader class TF will always cost less than Yamato's Macross stuff, so if you want a fair comparison, compare it against a sentai power ranger type toy in a similar sort of market category.

It's awesome but the missle is ridiculously huge

It's the law, isn't it? Firing projectiles need to be at least a few inches long.

The types of weapons used are faction-themed. In the NEST-themed line refresh, the Autobots have guns of some sort, while the Decepticons have melee weapons. Kind of a reverse of Animated, where the Autobots used melee weapons but the Decepticons mostly had guns.

Is Skystalker based (roughly) on a Horten Ho-229?

Given the size of the SW vehicles and Hasbro's output of large vehicles these days, I wonder how collectors can cope with the space they take up. I mean, they just released a retooled version of the standard TIE. What if you're one of those who bought the previous releases (or hell, a squadron of them)?

I'd love to get an AT-TE, but now I have absolutely no space for it.

It seems like all the engineering effort went into the new leader prime and this starscream. Though to be fair to jetfire, he had to transform into a robot and a jet and combine with prime.

Jetfire would have been better if he was a parts former for combined mode (split into parts to form the armour, like the movie). The combined robot would be a hell of a lot better if Prime's legs weren't (essentially) connected to his backpack.

Wonder if the arms hide the gatling gun and the missles of if they just hide the peg holes. The former would be great.

It looks like the rotary cannon and missiles are hidden inside his arms. In some images you see his left arm panels are closed, but in others the missiles are exposed and the hinged panels are folded to the sides.

Nice clear pics of ROTF Leader class Starscream, from the ROTF blu ray, I assume.

No jet mode pics, though.

Hi TF dudes, here's my mini project on the ROTF deluxe class breakaway

loved the mold, hated hasbro's paintjob, took the matter into my own hands

hope you like the results, and thanks for viewing

What's funny is Breakaway's original colours technically weren't even Hasbro's. Breakaway was, like several first-wave toys, a movie character concept. For some reason the character had those blue and green joints, though they weren't quite as loud as the toy's colours

Hmm, somebody else has informed me that the worst Google can do is ignore the links for the purposes of ranking, and that if Google did demote sites based on sigs, then people would be "advertising" their competitor's sites in their sigs.

It turns out posting using signature links for my website was counting as spam which penalises my Google ranking massively.

Also linking a review from Digg was doing the same.

My website in the last week has fallen off all the front pages of Google.

Any tips for fixing this?

Whoa, where did you hear this from/how were you alerted of this? I'd like to know so I can ask the TF Wiki's overlords, as most of the regular contributors have been advertising the wiki via forum signatures.

Cheers!

The reason I think this is a preview of what the production toy will look like (other than Takara, and perhaps all Japanese toy companies striving to be faithful to their previews) because there's actually a lot of paint detail missing that customs, including Hasbro's hand-painted prototypes, would have painted in. For example, all of the gold/copper detailing on his limbs, hands and exposed machinery, the Autobot symbol on his chest, and the blue bands with red flames on his biceps.

Looks like Sideswipe fell over, though But that's understandable.

I *HOPE* that's what the production paint job will look like, I mean, generally Takara doesn't usually use the "hand painted prototype promotional images" trickery that Hasbro resorts to (though sometimes Takara does), that is a hell of a lot of paint.

Just LOOK at that paint job! They even outlined the flames silver! We can guarantee Hasbro won't be doing this for their release (though I would be pleased if they did. Would be cheaper than importing.)

Hey David, have you seen the latest Peterbilt truck to be done up in Prime's paintjob and bling?

Revenge of the Fallen Optimus Prime Replica For Sale

Be awesome if Peter Cullen buys it and drives it to BotCon.