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I saw all those figures yesterday except Thrust, which of coarse is the one I wanted. WFC Bumblebee looked pretty cool, but I passed. I came real close to pulling the trigger on Legends Ravage. But decided against it at the last minute. I would have if I had found Thrust.

Nowhere in your incoherent ramblings did you come anywhere close to the answer. Thanks to you, everyone in this room is now stupider having heard you. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul. -Billy Madison-

Why, oh why was my TRU the one with no signs at all about such a sale on Transformers?

Mine didn't have it posted on the isle. I didn't see the sale sign until I was passing a bargin bin on my way out.

Nowhere in your incoherent ramblings did you come anywhere close to the answer. Thanks to you, everyone in this room is now stupider having heard you. I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul. -Billy Madison-

Why, oh why was my TRU the one with no signs at all about such a sale on Transformers?

They hate you.

Spotted the other Hunt for Decepticons deluxes today, bought Ironhide and used the BOGO to pick up another Power Core Combiners 2 pack (giving it another chance), forced into Searchlight. Ironhide and Searchlight are so bad, for a few moments I felt like closing my Transformers site and selling off my TF collection because it seemed like things were never going to get any better with the existing TF design team. But more on that lower down.

Oh, I forgot, on PCC Huffer, the core mode head actually scales nicely to the regular bot mode and fits the back-set shoulders better too. Too bad it's so weird.

Thrust is good, I didn't realize this wasn't the Games of Deception version but a Japanese retool, I like this better since it's got movable VTOL thrusters (oddly packaged on the tail halves here) and the original null ray cannons, and the chrome cockpit looks good. The tails have the same odd slight downward slope of the previous Starscream molds. The removable VTOL engines have spinning fans inside, though they don't move all that great, it's cool that they tried. I wish they had gotten the engines to sit closer against the wings, but that's not a big deal, and the shape of the wings and the engines and the paint all hearken back to the G1 character (both toy and show). Like Ramjet, the robot face is totally visible on the underside of the fuselage. Watch out for the paint as best you can, I saw another with the white parts far less evenly applied, and mine has a white splotch on the inside of 1 of the tails.

Bot mode is good, the colors work pretty well in both modes, not as loud as the Japanese version, although this one's white face doesn't show the yellow eyes all that well. It's mainly the same Starscream mold variant, the chromed cockpit doesn't come through as cleanly because it's a screw section showing, so it's blurry. The wings look good, but they have to be flipped around up high instead of left low like the G1 figure. Just like the others of this mold, the null-ray cannons ram into the wings when left on the arms. The crotch on mine separates a little on its own, I don't remember this on previous versions but I wouldn't be surprised to find it there.

All in all, a decent figure, I may like it more than Ramjet and Starscream, but probably not as much as Skywarp.

PCC Searchlight with Backwind is a bad joke, though not the same type of bad comedy as Starscream's coronation. Alt mode is a cargo helicopter, the kind with 2 main rotors front and rear, rather than a main and a tail rotor. It's white, has plenty of kibble and some gaps around the back, and its main interesting feature is 1 rotor is bigger and has 3 blades while the other is smaller and has 4.

Transformation is interesting, but considering how poor the end result is, ultimately unsatisfying.

Bot mode is modestly terrible. A mishmash of kibble and wings and parts that don't seem to go anywhere. The main standouts are the kibble bustle and the shoulders that are nowhere near the body and don't lock down anywhere. The head is also doofy looking thanks to a paint job that stops above the mouth. His forearms look kinda good, but then they are the storage for the rotors so they're rendered moot.

Core mode is laughably bad, all the elegance that worked on Huffer is lost here, there's junk everywhere and doesn't lock down and is quite confused.

Backwind is garbage, plain and simple. The clear green plastic looks bad, even with the black structure within and silver face. He's got very simple sculpting and is in no way interesting. He transforms simply by rearranging his very long arms and folding his legs around unconvincingly in various ways, all of which are total crap. Connecting him to Searchlight diminishes the larger bot in all 3 ways, from "awful gun" to "awful chopper nose lights and hook and gun thing" to "awful chest armor".

Avoid like the plague this is.

HFD Deluxe Ironhide is a lesson in some big failures that plague the modern Transformers design team. Alt mode is ok, covered in seams but gets away with it by being black. There are color mismatches though in the black, and the silvery blue plastic showing in the undercarriage is a distraction. Mostly though, it's a truck and it's good enough, albeit small (the GMC Topkick is a very big truck, much larger than any standard pickup). It doesn't scale well with dlx Ratchet.

Transformation is so annoying, it starts with a rough ripping apart of a big segment from another with no nuance whatsoever, and it's difficult to tell which bits stay and which go. From there, it's a lot of moving panels, and then when you get to the upper body it gets convoluted and hard to understand because it's so bad that it seems like it has to be wrong. The instructions worsen this as they are oft to do.

Bot mode is small and covered in panel kibble. He almost gets away with the panels really, movie-verse is like that, but the arm kibble can't quite cross that line. The back actually has less kibble than the movie design, and it's put together pretty well, although also hiding sculpted detailing. The figure is stocky and short, has feet just too big to work in its favor. The chest isn't as bad as the Voyager springiness, but also doesn't lock down very well and is awkward and the head sits too low and isn't locked down and the shoulders start further back and seem a bit disconnected from the rest of the torso. Sorry for the rant, but the chest is hard to like and really bothered me the first time I transformed him.

And then there's the real dealbreaker for me, the empty space where there should be a stomach, so he's like a hollowed out robot held together by a spine. I just found out if you push REAL hard, this closes in some, but the crappy official pics and vague instructions don't make it clear, and it seems like it doesn't want to go, and from the side it's still bad, but not as bad as my first impression.

The head is the movie character but has dead black eyes thanks to another crappy light pipe, this time they used too dark of translucent blue plastic, it works if you cram a flashlight on him though. The colors are black, silver, and then a lot of blue-silver-gray plastic that, while somewhat accurate, looks not so great and integrates poorly, and worse, is on areas with bad sculpted detailing so it highlights that. The overall look feels like a scout-class level of sculpting for a movie character, which isn't a good idea usually, one of the reasons I didn't like dlx Ratchet either, now that I think about it. Annoyingly, the forearm gun has better sculpting, as do the forearm kibble bits although their sculpting doesn't match the character very well.

For articulation, standard for a dlx I guess, but somewhat annoying. The shoulders have lots of joints, 1 too many thanks to transformation really, and this often dislodges the chest panels: hello springy chest, welcome back! The elbows and knees are set WAAAAAY too high, making them effectively worthless. The feet hinge and tilt sideways quite a bit, but don't rotate. The shoulders are set back far enough that the arms barely get ahead of the chest at all.

The right arm has the movie character's right arm weapon, toned down and surrounded by kibble, but obviously the same unit, and it looks good. The left arm now has a rectangle with 2 red lights on the front, this is the removable turret with legs, and it's pretty boring but at least it's something.

The turret thing is very bland, it's got a fold-out tripod of legs and stows inside the truck mode once you fold open the right arm's gun. On its own, it's too boring to exist, but as a remote weapon or sensor package, it's good enough to be an accessory I guess.

All in all, this is a pretty annoying figure in many ways, but I suspect it'll find an audience that will dig it, especially if they liked Dlx Ratchet (which I didn't). It corrects the chest getting in the way of the head problem of the Voyager, but not so much on the chest panel stability problem nor the too-dark-to-lightpipe problem, and brings a host of new issues to the party without really adding something substantial.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

"In Brooklyn, a castle, is where dwell I"

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.

JT - re: Thrust. You don't have to transform his wings like Starscream. If you leave them down, you can pull the VTOL thrusters off and move them to the front. You end up with a look that is strikingly similar to the G1 version.

Picked up Prime and Bumblebee. Bumblebee is wonky, and doesn't fully go into car mode. Prime isn't as nice in robot mode, but looks good as a truck. Right now, Bumblebee is riding Prime.

Anyone here read Exodus? Not bad, but it doesn't fit 100% with any previous continuity, including the War for Cybertron game, from what I understand. Looks like The Fallen was given a new name, which I won't spoil.

Picked up Prime and Bumblebee. Bumblebee is wonky, and doesn't fully go into car mode. Prime isn't as nice in robot mode, but looks good as a truck. Right now, Bumblebee is riding Prime.

Anyone here read Exodus? Not bad, but it doesn't fit 100% with any previous continuity, including the War for Cybertron game, from what I understand. Looks like The Fallen was given a new name, which I won't spoil.

Thrust is out, but there's a more common case shipping to TRU with just Bumblebee and Prime in it, perhaps to coincide with the WFC game release. Pretty smart, actually. I got my Thrust and Drift from TRU.com

JT - re: Thrust. You don't have to transform his wings like Starscream. If you leave them down, you can pull the VTOL thrusters off and move them to the front. You end up with a look that is strikingly similar to the G1 version.

You can't deploy his shoulders that way, I tried. There's a sculpted stop to allow the hinge to fold the opposite way to accommodate this.

Originally Posted by El Chuxter

Picked up Prime and Bumblebee. Bumblebee is wonky, and doesn't fully go into car mode. Prime isn't as nice in robot mode, but looks good as a truck. Right now, Bumblebee is riding Prime.

Ok, yikes.

Bumblebee will go into car mode fully, you may have gotten hung up with the robot hands stopping the works, I had that. They have to be rotated in, then the forearms peg into the undersides of the shoulders, that's where I got hung up in my alignment the first time.

You guys talking about Drift bums me out, he's the one I can't find.

Ironhide still has a lot of problems, but there's something fascinating about a bad figure like this, one that almost gets things right, which I cannot stop playing with. Also, he has a tiny silver hollow Autobot logo on his windshield, I'm surprised they didn't have one in the back window of a Decepticon logo with Bumblebee peeing on it.

In terms of scale to Dlx Ratchet, that figure scales somewhere around voyager Ironhide, though not quite.

Darth Vader is becoming the Mickey Mouse of Star Wars.

"In Brooklyn, a castle, is where dwell I"

The use of a lightsaber does not make one a Jedi, it is the ability to not use it.