So here's my bit of fanon.  In Robots in Disguise, the Commandos (who combine into Ruination) are reprogrammed Autobot protoforms, just like the Predacons did to Maximal protoforms in Beast Wars.  But who were these Commandos before they got Decepticonned?  Because of this new Ruination, I've decided that the Commandos used to be the RIDverse iterations of Impactor, Whirl, Roadbuster, Topspin, and Twintwist.  Man, RID Topspin's gotta be pissed his name is Movor now.

But seriously, guys, WRECKERS COMBINER DUDE.  This is usually the stuff of bad fanfic, but I'm allowing it.  For one, there's no accompanying fiction to remind us all of The Beast Within.  (No, that job's being filled by the current Monstrosity digital miniseries.)  And technically these guys are all from the Aligned continuity family, and those versions of the Wreckers can combine if they wanna.  They can even combine into a weird homage to RID Ruination, apparently.  Roadbuster can be a green and orange offroad vehicle like Rollbar, Topspin can be a white and orange shuttle like Movor, Twintwist can be a blue tank like (America's) Armorhide, and Whirl can be a dark blue and orange helicopter like Ro-Tor.  Impactor does his own thing.  He's like the wind, baby.

(Sorry about the comparison photo -- I only have the Japanese-version Baldigus, who has some color differences with our Ruination.)

The individual guys all come with additional weapons, with one or two based on real weapons from the Fall of Cybertron game.  Everyone also comes with the weapons that came with the original versions of the molds, and there aren't really any good ways to integrate both sets of weapons into any mode.  And unlike the first set of weapons, the new set of weapons don't combine.  They're just there to be value-adding and package-filling, I guess.  The newer weapons are all pretty hefty, too, which is unfortunate due to the weak balljoints of most of these dudes' arms.  Dang.

And, hey, good news!  Apparently the Transformers Collectors' Club wants to redeco Roadbuster as Ironfist as one of next year's Subscription Service guys, so, hey, later you can have a slightly different line-up of Wreckers to combine into Ruination if you want.  And who knows, maybe we'll get Whirl done as Rotorstorm or Twintwist done as Guzzle or Topspin done as... uh...Verity Carlo?

Anyway.  Wreck and rule.

I've nurtured a boner for these guys as soon as we learned about them from last year's Comic-Con.  I'd expected them to come out last spring, but after a few-months delay instead they arrived on my doorstep (via BBTS) the afternoon after I left for BotCon.  THE AGONY!  And I've really wanted to talk about them since, but I made myself go through a bunch of BotCon stuff first.

I'm gonna focus mostly on Impactor today.  He's the first toy we've gotten of the character since he debuted in the pages of Marvel UK's Transformers comic over 25 years ago as the soon-to-be-late leader of the Wreckers.  He was more of a tough-but-noble guy then, mostly because it supplied an impossible standard to live up to for the next Wreckers leader, Springer.  Like Dinobot, he came back as a shadow of his former self while still managing to save the day one more time with yet one more sacrifice.  Again.  Impossible standard.  Sorry, Springer!  He was reintroduced to Transformers in Last Stand of the Wreckers, where he was recast as an example of what millions of years of war can really do to a guy, especially one charged with leading a bunch of violent under-the-radar misfits like the Wreckers.  He's a stubborn and broken dude, having snapped, committed a war crime, and landed himself in Prison For Super Evil People.  He's supplies a different standard for that continuity's Springer to measure himself up against.

One of the reasons we haven't gotten an Impactor over the years is that he's a purple Autobot.  Hasbro's not big on purple Autobots.  So I guess this one's orange and dark blue!  Problem solved?  He's also a retool of FOC Onslaught, which is a double-edged sword.  It means his arms are kind of meh (the ball-joints are weak) and his alt-mode is double-meh (just meh all over) but it does mean that he forms the torso of a super Wreckers combiner.  Oh baby.  Seriously, he's the center of a fangasm made plastic.  Impactor has a trademark weapon arm (usually a harpoon), and this toy tries to duplicate that best it can with the materials provided.  Without any weapons attached, he's just got two normal arms.  He comes with a giant harpoon missile launcher weapon which he can hold, but that's not quite there yet.  HOWEVER, you can snap Onslaught's gun and the harpoon weapon together around the fist, concealing it, giving an impression that he does have an arm that ends in a weapon, albeit a very large one.

As a special and sort of weird bonus, the head of the combiner is based on Emirate Xaaron, the diminutive former politician and Autobot Underground Resistance Movement Figurehead who advised the Wreckers in the Marvel UK stuff.  So... if you waaaaaaant to, you could pull out that head while Impactor is in robot mode and pretend you have a big-noggined Xaaron toy with scoliosis.  You could!  If you wanted to!  Two former toyless guys get a toy all in one go!

Also of special note is the Wreckers faction symbol on the combiner mode's chest.  The blue hammer-headed Autobot logo hasn't seen the light of day since 3H's Wreckers comics over a decade ago.  You have no idea how happy its resurgence makes me.

So, hey, who wants more Seekers?  Everybody?  All right, let's sell these out in record time.

These three dudes (purple, orange, and teal dudes seen in front) are based on the flame-throwin' Seekers seen in the first episode of the original Transformers cartoon, who fire on the Autobots on Cybertron as they drive by.  Sunstorm got a toy long ago, but his two pals (and a very obscured fourth dude nobody ever notices or talks about) had never achieved that same status -- until now!  They are Bitstream and Hotlink, and they are nerds.  Like, they script programs and play MPORGs.  They get their names from characters from the Transformers: Exodus book, where they were cast as Starscream's IT dudes before the war.

For the past few years, the BotCon troop builder three-pack has been three of the same toy (though last year split up the three across the produced mold's three included heads) , and this is the first year BotCon has done the troop builders in three different color schemes.  The way this was possible -- or at least more financially viable -- is that only one plastic color is changed across all three.  All other plastic colors and deco are the same.

I'm happy with them, but I do wish they'd swapped the black and the white plastics to make Sunstorm more accurate.  It wouldn't have made the other two any less accurate, really, and we have a more concrete idea of what Sunstorm looks like.  Also, don't worry about how old and reused this mold is, because Hasbro and Takara have spent a lot of time keeping this tooling fresh as a daisy.  These guys feel good as new and nice and tight.  The only bit of oddness is the white parts seem a smidge too large, and so it's a little rough to get their torso parts compressed together in robot mode.  But I'd rather things be a little too tight rather than too loose.

The "Rainmaker" label is an error.  They were meant to be "Air Warriors," but the Rainmaker thing sort of slipped into internal use by accident and made its way to the polybags and comic book program.

Here's all of the non-Beast Machinesy Autobots.  From left to right we got Mirage, Hoist, Sandstorm, and Electro.

Hoist and especially Sandstorm are victims of some of the absolute worst timing.  We're getting "Classics" versions of both of them this summer/fall, and I think that kind of puts these two iterations of their characters out of the limelight.  Hell, it was just  week or so ago when I got the Prettiest Fucking Sandstorm Toy Ever for $25, and about three days later I was paying twice that for this olive green and caramel thing.  Admittedly, Pretty Sandstorm is a retool of a toy I already had and BotCon Sandstorm is a redeco of a movie toy that I'd never owned, so at least the latter was a new experience to me, but pretty goes a long, long way, man.  (Also, Sandstorm is the only toy from the original Machine Wars I never bought.)

And while Hoist is getting a G1y version of himself sold in stores for $15, I don't think that's the worst news about the BotCon version.  Both he and Electro, who share Kup's Generations body and a new head, suffer at least one if not two misassembly errors, depending on your specimen.  The first, an interior misassembly that keeps you from transforming the torso all the way, is fairly easy to fix, and I have.  The second, a bicep misassembly which keeps their arms from being able to fold all the way down, is not easy to fix, if not impossible.  So many pins.  My Hoist suffers from this, but not my Electro.  I don't think I care that much.  Hoist is probably going back in the box soon anyway.  (Also, I didn't notice this until I got home because I only took out Hoist out of the box long enough to look at his shoulders, but man is the black stripe down the middle of his torso so not actually in the middle.  Oof.)

Electro I appreciate if only for his cyan and magenta paint apps.  He is super 90s.  I never owned an original Electro, and I recommend that none of you try to own an original Electro, as that guy will crumble to dust.  He suffers from Gold Plastic Syndrome, you see.  He's the GPS poster boy.  And so I'm happy to have this newer version that hopefully will not suffer the same fate.  He's gold plastic, but it's not the swirly glittery kind that chemically falls apart after a few years.  He's the only guy in today's group of folks who I don't have any sort of toy of, so it's nice to have a guy I hadn't owned previously.

On the flipside, that Mirage tho.  I can't believe how much I dig this Mirage.  I've got a lot of Mirages, including the original Machine Wars Mirage, and BotCon MW Mirage is so so so so so damn pretty.  He's not the dark teal of the original, instead being more of a sea foam, and goddamn do I love him.  He may replace my Classics Mirage on my shelf, because aw hell yeah, this guy.  He was worth buying Thundercracker for.  I just want to put him in my mouth.

So in the first two pages of BotCon 2013's comic book story, the Autobots commit a war crime.

If it were lampshaded as something terrible to do (especially since the folks directing them to do so are villains hundreds of years later) it wouldn't bother me so much, but instead it's played as if disguising yourself as a non-combatant to facilitate your sweet ambush is an amazing and awesomely clever thing to do.  Sure, Cybertron doesn't have the Geneva Convention, but the Geneva Convention has some pretty common sense stuff in it to help protect the innocent, like, say, not teaching your jerky enemies that they should fire on random civilians in case they might be you in disguise.  Heroes one and all, these Autobots.

Anyway, it's more important to the story to point out that Obsidian and Strika are hilariously obtuse when giving out orders, rather than point out, hey, maybe not commit war crimes maybe you guys.  You are supposed to be Cybertron's greatest (obsessively rule-bound) generals, right?

Which is not to say I dislike having these guys as toys.  Pre-Beast Machines bodies for Obsidian and Strika have been on my want list for a while, and these aren't terribly-realized versions of them.  Strika, in fact, is pretty damn amazing.  I like her a lot, and wouldn't have considered Warpath for her until being shown how perfect his toy is for her.  She may be the best toy of this year's entire set.  Obsidian isn't quite as on the mark, since I think RTS Lugnut would have given him the proper gangly arms and bad posture, but using Highbrow/Powerdive for him isn't awful.  He's at least got propellers on those tiny ineffectual arms of his, and his new head is impeccable.

In 1997, in the middle of a years-long focus on Beasts who War, Machine Wars was an oasis of vehicles.  It wouldn't be until 2000 that Hasbro would give us vehicles again, and so this strange KB Toys-exclusive line of  redecoed European toys and unused G2 stuff was all the game there was to be had, if you were into stuff with wheels or thrusters.  It was also the only place you could find Autobot or Decepticon symbols or the names "Optimus Prime," "Soundwave," and "Starscream."  And as the one of the first real departures for these characters from what they're "supposed" to look like, it was an exotic thing.  It became less exotic as time went by, and doing weird things with older characters wasn't terribly special.  Optimus Prime's been both a shoe and a baseball cap by now, so an Optimus who transforms into a truck with some slightly different colors isn't as eyebrow-raising as it used to be.  And oh no, he had an exposed mouth!  ... and so has nearly every Optimus since 2004.

However, despite all this, Machine Wars still had some unique things going for it, which called out to everyone that "this is Machine Wars."  For example, it had two new characters!   The first was Hubcap, who shared a name with an older character, but was written to be nothing like him.  The second was Megaplex, who was a decoy for Megatron.  Like, he was literally an exact copy of Megatron's body so as to confuse the Autobots.   His entire existence was based around him being target practice for someone more important.  Another interesting thing about Machine Wars is that Starscream was the tallest toy in the line.  He was massive, while Megatron (and his decoy) were pretty small.  How did that work?  How did Tiny Megatron keep Giant Treacherous Starscream in check?  There must be a story there.

Well, I guess, too bad.  BotCon 2013's toy set went off in a completely different direction entirely.  Megaplex is no longer a decoy, he's a clone, and so he doesn't look anything like Megatron anymore.  In fact, everyone's clones.  Skywarp and Thundercracker and Starscream are also all clones.  The entirety of last year's magazine comics were also about repurposing toys from the Nineties as clones of the guys they have the names of, rather than being the real guys themselves.  It was annoying last year and it's annoying now.  And Starscream's now shorter than his Megatron, aka Megaplex, the clone of Megatron.  There's not much here that resembles Machine Wars to me any more, at least not the parts I found memorable.

And my love for Machine Wars is pretty nil enough already to have what slivers of stuff I found remarkable about it be ignored.  Excitement level... pretty low.

So, uh, hey, here's your normal-sized Starscream who's not really Starscream, or whatevs.

*half-hearted thumbs up, forced smile*

Let's see.  From Fun Publications:

• Machine Wars Termination box set + Starscream attendee freebie


• Unpainted Blastcharge custom class toy


• Mirage/Thundercracker souvenir set


• Electro/Sandstorm souvenir set


• Rainmakers souvenir set


• Machine Wars Termination Kreon 5-pack


• Machine Wars hat

And from anyone else:

• MOTHERFRIGGIN' METROPLEX


• Transformers: The Ride Evac, brought to me by Monzo


• Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated metal sign, brought to me by Swift and signed 3 seconds later by Derrick Wyatt


• Transmetal Megatron custom by Cheetimus


• Some Batman stuff brought to me by my BotCon Santa


• Flipsides (and Twincast I guess) to finish off my nonDinocassette Recordicons


• Animated Black Convoy to finish off my Animated characters (with Decepticon Reprolabel)


• Weird Ratchet Micron dude what turns into a wrench or something


• Scorpion Micron dude what turns into a tentacle


• Prime Hot Shot (brought from home) signed by Jason Jansen


• Orange G2 Devastator Kreon free from Hasbro booth

now to put this stuff away before maggie sees all this on the couch

"These Decepticons scatter like cowards."
"Til all are one."
"Metroplex heeds the call of the last Prime."
"Foolish Decepticons."
"Decepticon deactivation commencing."
"Target synchronizing initiated."
"Target obliterated."

Unsure of how to start this damn post about Generations "Thrilling 30" Metroplex, I thought I'd start with a quote from his electronics.  Apparently there's a lot of quotes, so I wrote out all of them for you!  As these cycle through, the sentences alternate with mechanical sounds.  Two AA batteries (not included) fit into the small of his back (screwdriver also not included), and once you start pushing down on his collarbone, he starts chattering.

But let's get the most important and obvious thing out of the way first.  Metroplex is two feet tall.  He's the tallest Transformer ever made, including 1987's Fortress Maximus, who he has a very slight edge over.  (Mine is in the basement and kind of an unsightly yellow, so, uh, use your imagination for height comparisons.)  He's so big, he's packaged in his box with his arm detached so that the volume of the box takes up less shelf real estate in stores.  Of course, once the arm goes in, the arm doesn't come out, so don't expect to use the box to store him later.  It's the same deal with the recent huge-ass Millennium Falcon and probably lots of other similarly-sized toys.

So of course, when you get to BotCon and Cheetimus points out to you that, dude, Big Bad Toy Store is here for the first time in years and they brought frigging 240 Metroplexes a month or two ahead of its expected release date elsewhere, your first thought is OH MY GOD I WILL BUY IT IMMEDIATELY followed by OH SHIT HOW DO I GET THIS THING HOME???  I ignored the second all-caps exclamation and went ahead and bought the damn thing.  Once I got my artist alley table set up, I stared longingly at the box.  I could just, y'know, open it and take a look inside!  I can still put it back in the box if I only pull out the cardboard tray!  Oh, and I can probably remove Scamper, his little included car dude.  Oh, hey, look, I've removed his detached arm and played with it OH GOD NOW HE'S COMPLETELY REMOVED AND HIS ARM IS PLUGGED IN HOW DID THAT HAPPEN????

shiiit

In the end, it turned out removing him from the box actually helped me get him home.  Since BotCon is in San Diego, as are my in-laws, and Comic-Con is in three weeks, I was able to keep most of the contents of my suitcase (posters, prints, bookmarks, etc) in Maggie's closet at their house for the duration, allowing me to stand up Metroplex inside my suitcase and pack him in tight with all my clothes and other BotCon swag.  Glad I bought that new 2-foot tall suitcase a few weeks ago!  So I just checked my suitcase with Metroplex inside and all was well.  I threw away the box.

Metroplex is... well, Metroplex.  He has a robot mode and then two modes which are extrapolations of that.  He transforms very similarly to the original in either non-robot form, just with some smaller extra steps.  For battlestation mode, he still sits down and unfolds the front of his legs.  This is my favorite non-robot mode because I love the new black runways.  "Aircraft carrier" is a more fun alternate form in my view than a battle station.  His city mode is also basically the same as the original's but with a pretty important improvement -- you can actually drive cars all the way down through his legs.  The original Metroplex unfolded his legs open in much the same way, but they formed very obstructive streets.  His knees and feet were in the way of driving cars through them.  But on the new toy, those feet and knees lift and tilt out of the way of the roads.  A car can go all the way from inside Metroplex's chest, down the ramp, and out to his toes.  ...well, his knees, due to how the legs open up.

He comes with a sticker sheet, and it's enormous.  Like, legal paper size.  And most of the stickers aren't terribly large!  Each arrow going down the runway is a sticker, as well as anything written anywhere in Cybertronix or any set of hazard stripes.  It's a lot to sticker, and it'll take a while.

The only problem I have with getting Metroplex to function is the deal with his face.  You're given an option between normal eyes or red shades to fold down over the eyes, because one is toy accurate and the other is accurate to Metroplex's cartoon portrayal.  And so if you tilt Metroplex's helmet forward, his shades will flip and click forward into place.  But these shades can get out-of-joint pretty easily and I've had to put them back into his head a number of times.  It's kinda annoying.  But it's really the only part of him that annoys me.

Well, and I think like three stickers are mis-numbered in the instructions.  Oof.

If you have room for a two-foot robot, I recommend him.  He's massive and fun and all your smaller dudes can play inside him in various ways.  If you don't have room for a two-foot robot, buy a bigger house.  There's gonna be an SDCC version, so you can look out for it, but I'm plenty fine having the "normal" version.  I really don't like the SDCC Metroplex's chrome nor do I have any desire for the little decoys he comes with.  A second gun would have been all right, but it's not a dealbreaker.  If you don't care for any of that stuff either, the normal Metroplex is due in stores within a few months.

Both Springer and Sandstorm sold in 1986, and both were car-to-helicopter Triple Changers.  Both were not great Triple Changers.  Springer was designed as a cartoon character first, like most of the new Transformers The Movie characters, and so his toy was kind of a robot who becomes this vague vehicle thing that's two vague vehicle things if you squint at it.  Sandstorm, on the other hand, was designed as an actual Triple Changer, more in line with the other four Triple Changers sold that year.  He's everything Springer's original toy wishes he could've been.

And now he IS Springer's toy.

When you've got two car-to-helicopter Triple Changers and Hasbro makes one of them, there's a good chance they're a headswap and a redeco away from making the other, especially when the other guy isn't nearly as well known, meaning you can take more liberties with his design.  But apparently Hasbro was all, yeah, okay, we could do that, but what if we also heavily retool him to give him different vehicle modes and a different transformation?  Like a boss?

At a glance, Sandstorm seems like he might be an entirely different toy.  Much of the toy's engineering and parts are the same, but between all the new parts and the strikingly different color scheme, they could be confused for different tooling entirely by casual buyers.  Sandstorm's land mode is now an offroad dunebuggy thing with a wire-frame bumper and oversized hind wheels, the latter of which flip to become VTOL engines for his new hovercraft mode (instead of the traditional helicopter mode).  You like his new hovercraft tailwings?  Well, they fold over to become his roof and armor up his windows in land vehicle mode.  The VTOL engines and the tailfins also change the robot mode's silhouette significantly.  All the new parts are used pretty efficiently.  You can fold the kibble that pops up behind his head if you want, and it fits snugly into his back, but I'm fine doing it the instructions way since I think of Sandstorm having kibble up over his head like on the original toy.

Like Springer, Sandstorm has a gun (a completely different one) that hooks up under his cockpit in ways unexplained by the instructions.  And also like Springer, you kind of have to start shoving stuff everywhere until you find the elusive groove that snaps into the elusive slot.  His gun has one firing missile instead of Springer's two, and because Sandstorm isn't a helicopter anymore, he doesn't come with the propeller sword either.  A trade-off for the awesome color scheme, I guess.

Sandstorm's traditional mustard-and-orange color scheme has been contrasted dramatically into a very visually grabbing yellow and orange.  He's hard to look away from, he's so pretty.  If I didn't have such a hard-on for Springer and Nick Roche, Sandstorm would be the best of the two just by virtue of his color scheme.  Even then, he and Springer are often neck-and-neck in my brain.

(All Wreckers symbols are Reprolabels I applied.)

I love Ratchet.  I love Dinobot.  So what happens when you take a Ratchet toy and retool him into Dinobot?

Woodies.  Millions of them.

I don't know what the target audience is for a toy that takes the show's medic and gnarls it up into this thorny DeathUV with what some would say is a mind-boggling choice of color scheme, but that target audience is at least one, because I am me and I exist.  Mostly white with some beige and orange and hints of bright green?  Yeah!  Staple up Ratchet's face and give him a targeting monocle, making him look eerily reminiscent of Dinobot II?  Yeah! Give him a friggin' rotate blade?  Hell yeah!

Thank you, Hasbro.  I have no idea if anyone else will ever buy this toy, but I sure did.

Ratchet is extensively retooled, but it doesn't affect his transformation any.  Mostly they just wanted to give him giant spiky scabs everywhere.  The kibble panels that form his inner forearms (with the zig-zag line on them) likes to pop out of joint way too much, though.  Might as well just rip them off first-thing and set them aside for the duration.  Also, man, was getting the ambulance's rear end panels aligned as hard as it was before?  I think some of the extra stuff sculpted on here might be making him a little rougher to fit together.

ROTATE BLADE!