It's hard to invest more fully in a new Transformers continuity family until all the major players have arrived.  Robots in Disguise didn't have a Starscream.  Animated didn't have a Ravage.  How are we as fans going to know a new iteration of the Transformers franchise is viable without seeing our beloved favorites take part?  How do we know this new stuff is For Realsies?

Well, wait no longer, because finally the electro-scrambler is in the Aligned continuity family.  The party has officially started.  I know there was a conspicuous electro-scrambler-shaped hole in all of our War for Cybertron and Prime displays, just eating at the edge of our collective consciousness.  Even if we didn't know precisely what caused our distress, what specifically was missing from our lives, that pull was there all the same.

Sure, you might ask yourself, I have plenty of electro-scramblers, but what's so great and better about this one?  Well, this time around the electro-scrambler can attach in both modes!  No longer will it have to be set aside!  There will be no gaps in its service.  The Aligned electro-scrambler is also redesigned to be smaller and more compact, though all of the familiar shapes are represented.  It even has a sculpted hole in the side that calls back to the hole in the original Microchange gun which was meant for earphone storage.  This time, however, it's a 5mm peghole.  This means you could peg other electro-scramblers into it!  Electro-scrambler inception.

The only downside is that it comes in a three-pack with two other guys, so you gotta pay for all three just to get the electro-scrambler.   One of those other guys is a real storage-space hog, too.  Come on, Hasbro, that's dirty pool.  Next time I'm waiting for the single-pack version.

Not content to release buttloads of single-bagged Transformers Kreon mini-figures into the world, Hasbro's also got a larger assortment that gives you four Kreons and some parts and tells you how to assemble them into a super-robot, G1-homage style.  There's Predaking, Bruticus, Superion, and Devastator so far, and I chose to do Predaking first.  He's, y'know, animals, which are awesome, and I've had quite a few redoes of the other three guys over the past few years.  Predaking feels the most novel.

As I said, there's just four guys in each combiner set.  The traditionally fifth guy you can find in the single-bagged assortment, and in the Predacons' case it's Rampage.  He doesn't help make the big robot.  He just gets to stand there and exist, completing the set of Kreon mini-figures.

True to most Transformers beasts, the beast modes of the mini-figures are pretty one-to-one, with arms becoming forelimbs and legs becoming hind limbs.  They're a bunch of crawling dudes with animal masks.  It's kind of adorable.  They get a new specialized piece, an all-purpose animal head.  There's holes in it various places so you can stick horns in there to make a crude rhino or a bull head.  The only one who doesn't follow this pattern is Divebomb, the eagle.  Divebomb's eagle mode is... not good.  And this is by Kreon standards, with the aforementioned crawling masked dudes.  You basically put horns in his feet and sit him down.  he doesn't even have an animal head helmet like the others.  Ah well.

The individual robot modes are what you'd expect.  The're Kreons, all based on the original Generation 1 Predacons.  You can attach some of the transformational extra pieces on them as the instructions show or you can just keep 'em bare.  Your choice.  Leaving off the flak jacket is probably a good thing to do with Razorclaw.  The jacket covers up the decoed lion head/mane on his chest just so you can hang the felt mane off his back.  It doesn't seem necessary.

There are several extra pieces to accomplish the combined Predaking mode.  There's a separate crotch piece included which forms the crotch of the super robot, plus some specialized pieces that help form biceps and thighs.  The thighs connect onto the extra crotch via a balljoint, and the biceps connect onto the shoulders of one of the mini-figures inside the torso.  You gotta remove the arms of the mini-figure to do so.  At the end, you've got two mini-figure torsos stacked inside the super robot torso, two whole mini-figures helping form the shins, and the remaining set of legs to be the hands.  It's not quite how the old combiner teams did it, which is why Rampage comes separate.  There's not anywhere for him to go.

There are pieces left over in both modes, which is sad but understandable given what's going on.

For ten bucks?  This is a friggin' bargain.

I won something and I didn't even know I was in the running to win something!  The 80s mashup band Rock Sugar sent me an email saying that I'd won their "Share the Sugar" Wednesday giveaway thing.  Apparently when I reblogged that new video of theirs on Tumblr simply because it was awesome, there was some sort of contest going on unbeknownst to me.  I never win anything I actually try for, but I won this by accident!

Time to start accidentally buying lottery tickets.

And so they sent me a copy of their album.  I bought a copy a year ago from their website, but I lost the hardcopy and so it's super great to have a replacement... this time with signatures on it.  Sweet ass.  And apparently I am a rock star!  How'd Jess Harnell know?????

(Jess Harnell, the band's singer is, y'know, Wakko Warner.  Or Ironhide/Barricade, if we're doing the Transformers thing.  So if you've ever wanted to hear Wakko rock out to friggin' Journey, I recommend checking them out.)

(Also, hey, Animaniacs Volume 4 is out on DVD today.  You know what to do.)

Gail Simone's Batgirl is one of my favorite comics and so I couldn't not get a toy of her.  One of the things I miss from the pre-New52 years was the occasional line of DC Direct figures based on certain popular story arcs using the specific art styles from those arcs, like "Public Enemies" or "Batman and Son."  Those seem to have disappeared abruptly with the new paradigm, with only toys of the new Justice League themselves being offered.  That's super boring!  Where's my "Court of Owls" toys?  Where's my Batgirl?  I want plastic Greg Capullo, not plastic Jim Lee.

Well, Mattel is giving us a Gail Simone Batgirl via their Batman Unlimited toyline, so that's at least one Want crossed off the list.

She's a very shiny and attractive figure, though her articulation is very shallow.  Her knees don't bend very much, and so there's not a lot of jump kicking she can do.  Batgirls need to jump kick.  She has a lot of joints, they just don't have range.  That's mitigated somewhat by the aforementioned shininess.  She's a gloss black and gold and she catches the light well.  She's also got all of her excessive costume detailing sculpted in, not painted or ignored, so that's an unexpected bonus.

Barbara needs to get with my Stephanie toy and go kick some heads.  In my personal canon, they fight crime together.  Hey, if you can have fifty Robins...

It was both awesome and terrible that we got all these Transformers Kre-O Micro-Changers this year.  It was awesome because, well, duh, these guys are great and there's an insane variety and breadth of character choice.  There's guys like Hook and Warpath, sure, they're not too surprising, but we also get folks like Scorch (as "Singe") and Bludgeon and Airachnid.  The character choices are from all of Transformers, and that makes them interesting to me.

What's terrible about it is that now that I knew there was going to be all these interesting guys, I kind of wanted to have all of them.  I wanted to start collecting them, rather than just choosing the ones I wanted.  Having a larger and more populated "world" made the line "real" to me.  And so I ended up buying a lot of old sets I had passed over to get guys like Bumblebee and Sideswipe.  Thankfully, by the time I got to them they were old enough to start going on heavy clearance.

Anyway, check out this sweet Bludgeon Kreon.  He's a Micro-Changer, meaning he's in one of twelve blind-bagged figures.  Other than a stamped imprint of a number code on the back of the bag, you don't know which one you're getting, like a pack of trading cards.  What makes him a Micro-Changer specifically is that he comes with some extra parts to give him a very crude vehicle mode.  Basically, you pretend this dude lying down with treads on his arms and a barrel on his back is a tank.  Not the best-looking thing, but given the idea requires that a little dude be in the center of whatever you're putting together, plus the whole $2.99 price tag, it's hard to complain.  Besides, folks just want these things for the figures themselves anyway.

The only real annoying part is the piece Kre-O uses to attach things onto the back of the robot mode.  It's always these military flak jacket pieces that fold over the entire torso.  Sure, the peg on the back is there so you can give him kibble, but the front of the flak jacket covers up all the distinguishing deco on the front.  LEGO has pieces that connect over the neck and hang over the back of the torso only, leaving the front of the torso bare, but Kre-O must not.

But it's a building set, so you can always just leave off that stuff if you want and go with the bare figure.

Here's the number codes if you find a box of these guys and want to select one you want.  Not every case has a full set of dudes -- sometimes it's almost everybody, but sometimes it's just three guys that repeat over and over.  It seems to always be random.

40 - Singe
41 - Inferno
42 - Springer
43 - Warpath
44 - Quickslinger
45 - Rampage
46 - Insecticon
47 - Blast Off
48 - Hook
49 - Dirge
50 - Airachnid
51 - Bludgeon

My buddy Trent is making action figure weapons through Shapeways, and since one of them included a head on stick, I kind of had to get it.  Plus, y'know, my buddy Trent.  I've never bought anything from Shapeways before and so it would be fun to see what that's all about.  (As far as I understand, you can give them 3D models of stuff they download into reality, aka plastic.)

Trent is making a bunch of stuff that enhance your Transformers figures (or any other toy with 5mm pegholes) but not in a way that infringes on their intellectual property.  That's something I can get behind.  This one's called the "5mm MakeShift Weapons Set."  And so there's a car engine flail and some arm claws made out of garbage and, of course, the generic robot head impaled upon a smokestack so as to be used as a hammer.  As you do.

The accessories are "printed" on a to-order basis and mailed to you, and arrive unpainted.  So I painted mine!  It was fun to do, and I got to add lots of dribbling mech fluids.  I was a little worried that the paint would not survive interacting with the figure, but it seems to be resilient enough.  It doesn't scrape or make the accessory too wide for the grip.  So huzzah.

And now my toys can beat each other with heads on sticks, which is a noble goal.

Hasbro is spreading their Beast Hunters stuff into the Kre-O line as well.  This set based around Optimus is the only set that's out so far, and it's only been spotted at Meijer.  But I had to have it for Reasons.

Well, Reason.  Finally Hasbro's started giving names to the little human dudes who come with the bigger sets.  Usually they're just "driver" or "pilot" or whatever, but this time the human's named and designed after the kid from Transformers: Energon, Chad "Kicker" Jones.  As were his toys in that toyline, his name is better trademarkable as "Energon Kicker," so there y'go.  Another set that's not out yet comes with "Col. Daniel Witwicky," which is Sparkplug Witwicky's full name and rank in IDW comics.  If they keep on throwing awesome pre-existing human dudes into these sets, I am going to be very pleased and also very poorer.

The rest of the set didn't disappoint, either.  I really feel like these later Kre-O sets are hitting a groove.  The sets from the first year annoyed me as they got more complex.  Even the mid-sized sets built its robots from many strata of thin tiles, and as a result they weren't that fun to put together.  This Beast Hunters Optimus Prime set avoids that without being a pile of specialized bricks.  It feels more efficient and creative.

There was another pleasant surprise: there are two different choices for hands on each wrist.  On older sets, there was just a generic fist-block for hands.  But here, we get slightly rubberized hands molded into various poses.  There's  a sword-holding hand and an open-palm-fingers-splayed hand for the right arm and a clenched fist and pointing finger for the left arm.  This is the damn coolest thing.  I was going to build the truck mode first (it looked cooler) until I saw I had all these hand options.

Even forgetting the hands, the robot mode is a satisfying completed build.  Lots of articulation is built into the robot mode, and not just on the limbs and ball-jointed waist.  Prime's knee-kibble points foward, you can play with his shoulder stuffs similarly, and the winged backpack with working missile launchers can raise up from his back to position over his shoulders.  There's a lot to do.  His sword doesn't come with a scabbard, but that's okay, because this is construction block stuff, so just peg it on his thigh.

His truck mode is neat-looking, too, but it sort of sits in the shadow of the awesome robot mode build.  It was interesting to discover that the trailer is actually mounted on an articulated ball-jointed arm that comes out of the hitch.  The roof is more lightly pegged-in so you can remove it easily to fit a Kreon inside.  And, again, missile launchers and deployable wings.

There's an unnamed dragon dude, too.  He looks kind of like Lazerback, but not quite.

The only thing that bugged me about the set was the stickers.  The sticker boundaries weren't cut very precisely, and so if you have two stickers which are supposed to have symmetric deco, one of them is sometimes a little offset.  It can be a little annoying, especially with the dragon's eyes.  You can line up the boundaries of the stickers themselves so they're symmetrical, but one eye will still look a little dippy as it's wandered across the surface of the sticker.

The current New Big Line is Transformers Prime: Beast Hunters, which means some motherfriggin' beasts, dude!  All of the titular beasts appear to be  dragons, but while I am not super fond of dragons, beggars can't be choosers, y'know?  It's been a dry season for beasts for quite a few years!  I mean, sure, you get your occasional Grimlock or Laserbeak or Ravage -- which I am thankful for because those are awesome guys or at least guys who can be redecoed into Buzzsaw -- but never an actual semi-flood of beasts.  A beast buffet.  And the most recent two beasts like Thundertron ... some... other guy... I forget... were kind of bleh, so hopefully these Beast Hunters beasts will amend my disappointment!

Beasts beasts beasts beasts... yeah, now the word has no meaning.

Anyhow, in the first wave of Deluxe Beast Hunters is Lazerback.  Oh man, that name.  Did you know that the packaging mock-up in the presentation slide at New York Comic Con had it spelled "Laserback," as is right and holy?  And everyone online kept on spelling it Lazerback, with a Z, and I was all "NO YOU DUDES IT HAD AN S OH MY GOD LEARN TO SPELL LASER" but ahahahaha no, the packaging mockup was a dirty well-spelled lie and we got it with the Z for reals.

"LASER" IS AN ACRONYM THAT STANDS FOR SOMETHING GOD DAMMIT

Anyway.

Lazerback is pretty cool!  And... hefty.  His card bubble is way deeper than the rest of his wave, and he feels about twice as heavy.  He's dense.   He is also the Beastiest Beast.  His forelimbs become arms and his hindlimbs become legs.  His tail comes off and becomes a weapon.  These are all things that beast toys like to do a lot.  And y'know, I don't think I really care.  If I can get 30 billion car toys where the hood becomes the chest and the trunk becomes the legs and there's some door wings or something, then I can enjoy Lazerback.

And truth be told, he's a solid toy. He doesn't do a lot of innovative things, but he does old things well.  He's a great dragonbeast thing.  He's meaty.  His jaws open and he has a missile launcher that comes out of his spine.  And while the tail does become his weapon, the way it closes up around his fist makes me think it's supposed to be just an extension of his arm in one mode, like the tail IS his arm.  He's got a tail-arm.  And that's pretty cool.  Definitely Beast Warsy.  And those colors of his -- red, purple, and yellow -- they're really grabbing me.  I like him.

I want more.

I like toys of human characters! Especially important ones. When a show is about Transformers and humans, I want the whole cast, dangit. People are people, too!

So I was excited that Hasbro was making little dudes of all of the Rescue Bots human partners. Well, they tell us they're gonna make Dani Burns later (we'd better), but we're for sure getting the dudes! And they all come with a robot in a two-pack. Unlike the toys which predated the television show, these nontransformable robot figures are based on the cartoon designs which were reworked from the toys. So if you looked at Normal Transformable Chase and thought, man, he looks way too happy to be Chase, well, here's your guy. Your... much smaller guy. (He's a few inches tall instead of several.) ((I don't own a ruler.))

The robot guys have way more articulation than I was expecting.  Their heads rotate, which I did expect, but they also have universal-joint shoulders and a rotating wrist and arm weapon.  They also have "sitting" articulation at the waist, but both legs move at the same time.  They're the same piece, just run through the pelvis.

The humans don't have any articulation at all.  Bummer.

They're also all the same size and shape, so they're not totally on-model.  It's kind of like Andrew Wildman drew them.

For Christmas, the mighty Cholma gave me the gift of underage teenage girls!  I am required by law to state upfront that I absolutely do not harbor any kind of perverse sexual lust towards Asuka Langley ShiftingLastName.  None whatsoever.  I am pretty sure that would be a crime, and I am a law-abiding citizen who lives by a strict moral code.

My gift from Cholma also included Rei, who is your albino mom if your mom had a concussion or something.  Her schtick, other than being your sexy mom, is that she can be bandaged up if you want her to be.  I'm sure this is checking off somebody's list of fetishes, but it ain't mine.

And there's the new girl, Mari.  If you know me, you know I appreciate that she has glasses, but she's entirely way too into you and how you smell, nor does she hit you or call you stupid, and so I know ahead of time that this relationship just isn't going to be screwed up enough for me to be interested in it.

I don't want anyone to come away from these paragraphs with the impression that I don't absolutely adore Neon Genesis Evangelion, because I do.  I just like to tell myself that I have a healthy attitude towards my love of it.  If you can't love something despite all its creepy faults, did you ever really love it to begin with?

Anyway, these are Revoltech folks.  They're hyper-articulated!  And they come with like fifteen billion different hands and a handful of other accessories.  They also come with some variant faces, like Mari's awesome "I AM SO CRAZY" face and Rei's "I seriously get bandaged up a lot like all the time" face.  One of the best parts about these sets is that they come with a little translucent box to store their numerous accessories.  This is not only amazingly appreciated, but it also gives you a bunch of boxes with occasional little girl faces.  Just, you know, staring at you.  Disembodied.  I swear, any more of these little faces and my Ego might be destroyed and I might bring upon Third Impact.

Thankfully, I've got Ego to spare.

P.S. Don't be an asshole and talk about the last part of the movie series which hasn't come over to North America yet.