So I guess Hasbro is doing this small line of really fancy redecoes and retools in really fancy shiny metallic packaging, called Platinum Edition or whatevs.  The first two are new versions of Energon Optimus Prime and Omega Supreme as their Aligned continuity family selves, and oy, is their big shiny metallic packaging a mixed bag.  I mean, it's very large and very pretty, but there's the thing with the box art.  They're just color-shifted versions of the original box art, which is from deep in the Horrible Dreamwave era.  I love me some Marcelo Matere, what with him being an amazing artist and all, but it looks like he was drawing that Omega Supreme while Pat Lee was strangling him. And so the otherwise very pretty (and huge-ass) box went in the trash.  S'probably a good thing, anyway.  As said, it was huge, and I don't got storage space for that kinda stuff.  The upcoming Platinum Ultra Magnus packaging (also with Matere art) will be harder to let go. (Have I praised Matere's Animated artwork enough?  Well, in case I haven't, it's amazing.  Just putting that out there, possibly for the 40th time.)

Platinum "Year of the Snake" Omega Supreme, as stated earlier, is the Energon Omega Supreme toy.  However, not only is it in more G1-y colors (gray and red and gold) but it also has some major retooling done.  He has both a new head and a new claw arm, both inspired by the War for Cybertron design of the character.  The new claw arm has some articulation, though it's pretty shallow, but it does what it needs to, which is be a huge claw thing.  The head has a flip up visor so you can see his face better, plus the neck area underneath the head is new so that the head can collapse into it for transformation.  The Energon version of the toy had a Headmaster guy, and so there wasn't much clearance for a head that wasn't removable.  No Headmaster guy this time around!  Just Omega Supreme himself.  And so that means there's some vestigial features, like the little translucent cockpit in one shoulder and the big Headmaster guy-shaped hole in the manning tower. Otherwise, Omega Supreme still transforms by ripping in half.  This process gives you a friggin' amazing space battleship and a pretty lame claw-armed train.  The battleship is almost worth the price of admission all by itself.  All of the many cannons on the front end are geared together so that if you rotate one, they all rotate together.  Plus it just looks cool.  The claw-armed train thing... is just that.  The claw-arm isn't even long enough or articulated enough to do anything in this state.  It just grasps the air pointlessly.  Maybe it's now a cannon and not a claw?  I don't know.  Either way, it's not the fun half of the toy.

You can shove the train into the ass of the battleship to make a super train thing.  And there's a bunch of other stuff you can do if you got Platinum "Year of the Snake" Optimus Prime as well, but I don't.  Also the electronics are no longer there.  The battery cover is now sealed with one of those triangle-headed screws.  Kind of a bummer. Honestly, I think I prefer the original's colors.  The bright red and yellow with the darker blue was more striking.  This new version's colors are a lot more dull (like Omega Supreme's) and I don't think the translucent yellow parts are particularly attractive.  However, I dumped most of my Energon collection a few years ago except for this guy, so I'm happy to have a version of the toy that can hang out with guys I actually still own.  I'll probably eBay the old one soon enough. Soon there's gonna be a guy twice his size.