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

Man, why didn't this head option for the Inferno mold exist back in 2010?  It's perfect for Pyro.  Instead, we got Inferno's head in blue because all of the slots for head retools were used up on other figures in the BotCon 2010 set.  Back then, I figured I'd get home with my set and  immediately tape over the mouth and then paint the tape silver or something.  That mouth had to go, man.  It just did.  But I never got around to doing that.  I'm pretty lazy.

So anyway, now Hot Spot is a thing that exists, and he has a head that's pretty Pyro-y.  It's probably more Pyro-y than Hot Spot-y.  And so I waited until our stores started getting piles of Hot Spots and grabbed an extra one to steal a head from.  I got some Cobalt Blue and mixed in a bit of Napoleonic Violet, and apparently that matches Pyro's blue pretty damn well.

I could have made his faceplate gold or yellow, to match the head this head's replacing, but I have never ever ever painted yellow or gold without it looking like utter crap.  And so I left him with a silver faceplate, which happily matches the original Pyro toy.  Huzzah.

See? A rut. First Octopunch, then SG Prime, and now these guys.  I left them all for last, and now this feels like a big hate parade.

I feel about the Shattered Glass Junkions the same way I did about Shattered Glass on its debut year.  I wanted to add to my existing armies and not start new ones.  I was really excited when we found out about Hasbro making Junkions.  Junkions with three heads, even!  That was guaranteed a souvenir set of some sort.  And it meant I could double the number of Junkions from three to six.  Maybe we'd even get a new head or something, who knows.

But naw dawg, have some mirrorverse Junkions.

Mirrorverse Junkions who borged a bunch of guys I like into more mirrorverse Junkions.

It just wasn't what I wanted from these molds at BotCon.

At least they're attractive.

Man, I'm kind of annoyed with myself that I somehow saved the BotCon toys I like the least for last. I was on a pretty good roll of "Woo"s and "Yay"s, and now we're in this rut where it feels like I hate everything. That's not true! It's just that we're to the stuff I didn't want to talk about immediately.

Shattered Glass Ultra Magnus I'm not unkeen on.  He's a new character!  And he uses the mold's second head that Hasbro hadn't used yet.  It's a translucent skull, because, yo, bad ass.  Reportedly this is an "evil Optimus Prime" noggin that Hasbro would have attached to their eventual Nemesis Prime use of the mold.  It's a pretty villainous head, so it works well for SG Ultra Magnus.  The Diaclone Powered Convoy colors work well here, too.  Red and blue are usually heroic colors, but with their specific hues and with all the black and gray, it comes off as evil enough.

My only complaint is the relative tininess of the toy.  He's plumped up in the comic, because his opposite number is Treadshot, the huge Deluxe Jazz mold.  It feels  uneven.  The smallness is something I complained about with the original use of the mold, and it's relevant with Magnus, too.  But not as relevant as it is with BotCon's other use of this mold.

Geez, Shattered Glass Optimus Prime!  I dunno what BotCon's historical fascination is with upgrading their guys as less impressive toys, but yikes.  SG Prime used to be a Voyager.  A good Voyager!  One of my reluctant favorites of the 2008 set.  He was the centerpiece of my Shattered Glass Autobot shelf.  When I eventually put this new version of him in his old toy's place, you wouldn't even be able to see him.  Bumblebee can see over the top of his head.  It's just not a great upgrade.

Size aside, the toy is decoed marvelously.  There's paint washes everywhere.  But I'd rather his new toy had the presence of the old toy.

Now, Optimus Prime only appeared in the comic as a head on a screen, so my brain hasn't really registered yet that he's this body now.  So I'm probably good to keep the old one on the shelf until he eventually appears in a future story and reminds me.  Let's hope that's a long way off.

We got a Shattered Glass Jazz years before we got a "Classics" Jazz, but I was pretty fine with that.  We were bound to get a "real" Jazz eventually, and we did!  And now we'll get a new Jazz every year until the end of time.  But this Shattered Glass Octopunch business, I just dunno.   I don't expect many Octopunches.

It'd be forgiven if SG Octopunch were a neat character.  No, his stated personality on his profile card is that he has no personality.  He's average, boring, a regular joe.  He pointedly has no amusing quirks.  I imagine that's partly because there's isn't much personality in the original Octopunch to mirror.  His appeal has always been that he's a crazy tentacled diver monster, like something out of Scooby Doo.   (His mirrored self obviously should have been a guy who drives around in Soundwave with Ravage and solves mysteries.)

(He'd be very big on traps.)

Seriously, if this guy were the real Octopunch and I got to see him in the comic in action as the real Octopunch, he would have been my favorite toy of the set.  As-is, I'll still enjoy him, but it will be a dulled enjoyment, mostly because I have both an SG and a Classics display, and it's pretty obvious between the two where this guy goes!  If/when I put my SG stuff away, then Octopunch can go hang out with my Bludgeon.

Begrudgingly.

Knowing all the while that it's just my stupid fanon.

But it is a good toy!  A very pretty toy.  Again, wacky late Eighties colors like Spinister, with the teals and purples.  I like the mold better as (an) Octopunch than I did as Sea Spray, from whom this toy was redecoed.  And he doesn't have a new head, but the paint job done on his noggin makes the idea of a new head redundant.  With the oxygen tubes around his chin painted blue, that makes his head look more like a separate, dome-shaped piece, akin to the original.  And you can give him Terradive/SpaceCase's trident if your Octopunch needs a trident.  (The original Octopunch toy didn't have one either.  It was made up for the comic.)

The only part of the deco that I wish were different were the seafoam chest and upper arms.  Octopunch in the comics was colored unlike the toy, with a solid yellow torso and upper arms.  With yellow instead of seafoam, he would have been absolutely glorious.

But then, SG Octopunch isn't supposed to be absolutely glorious.  He's supposed to be forgettable and average.  So.

Good choice, I guess.

And back to our regularly-scheduled BotCon stuff.

One of my most anticipated toys in the set this year was Metalhawk.  Now, I don't know Metalhawk from a hole in the ground.  He was a Japanese-only Pretender in a show I've barely watched.   But goddamn do I love myself some Pretender references.  Sure, we've gotten a handful recently, between Skullgrin and Thunderwing and Bludgeon, but those were remakes of the monster-type Pretenders.  Half the Pretenders were human!  I crave a new human Pretender toy.

And so Metalhawk was my ticket to happytown.  Human face!  For reals!  None of that post-modern "let's redesign the fleshy Pretender shells to look more like robots" crap.  He's just straight-up a dude in armor, as things should be.  The natural order.

Plus Metalhawk was the only human Pretender that wasn't a white dude, so that's neat.  Finally my Pretender collection has a little racial diversity!

And now that Metalhawk is a transforming Pretender shell, that means he's a Mega Pretender rather than the usual kind.  That puts him in the ranks of Vroom, Crossblades, and, yeah, Thunderwing.  Him being a transforming human guy is even more geeky.

Metalhawk is a retool of Thunderwing.  He has a new head, obviously.  The mold works pretty well as Metalhawk's Pretender shell body!  The red, white, and blues make him look heroic enough, despite his claws and pointy toes.  I do wish they'd painted the mohawk on his helmet red, though.

Hey, let's take a break from BotCon stuff!  I got other guys that weekend, after all!

This is Transformers Prime Hot Shot!  I enjoy him very much.  In a world where Bumblebee is Optimus Prime's trusted yellow hot rodded sportscar and Hot Rod has taken back the "hot headed youth destined to be leader" job, I'm happy to see there's still a place for Hot Shot nestled somewhere in between.  Sure, he kinda has to be his blue-and-red-then-yellow Cybertron colors so he's not exactly Bumblebee, but I understand that this is the compromise between him existing and him not existing.

Prime  Hot Shot is a retool of the second Bumblebee Deluxe toy.  I only have the first Bumblebee Deluxe toy, and so this mold was a new one to me.  This version transforms a lot more simply than the first one, which is good for fun but not as good for show-accuracy.  But this is Hot Shot, who's not on the show (yet?), so it doesn't matter that he's not screen accurate to a screen version that may or may not exist.  So I can bask in the fun of him.

His entire torso is geared to autotransform, you see.  If you pull his shoulders/front wheels outwards from the hood, this incredible thing takes place where the torso and head orchestrates itself wildly into position.  It's kind of amazing.  Everything else is kind of an easy afterthought.  Pull out the legs, fold up the roof, the end.

Like the original Hot Shot, this guy has a visor that flips down!  This really makes him feel like Hot Shot to me.  Unlike the original Hot Shot, the visor is translucent plastic painted mostly black, leaving unpainted goggle lenses, which is an improvement over the original opaque piece.  Also unlike the original Hot Shot, his head can turn at the neck.  He's pretty poseable overall for a Hot Shot!

One thing I have trouble grasping visually are his eyes.  See those horizontal silver slabs?  Those are actually his eyebrows!  Below them are his eyes, and they're blue translucent plastic, same as his windows and the unpainted portions of his visor.  But you can't really see them very well when they're buried inside the middle of his blue face.  They're lightpiped, but the big plastic piece behind his head tends to block light from going through there.  Maybe at some point I'll paint his eyebrows black to help my brain read his face properly.

(I've never actually customized any of my Hot Shots.  This would be a first.  I might get a double, just to have a pristine specimen to match the rest of my Shrine.)

This toy comes with a fun story!  I had this guy (and the rest of his case) preordered from Big Bad Toy Store, and they were due to arrive from UPS the day I left for BotCon.  Well, dammit, I knew that the truck wouldn't arrive until I got to the airport.  And sure enough, I was right.  No sooner than I'd been dropped off by my wife and gotten checked in than I got a phone call from her telling me the UPS guy got there with my Hot Shot as she was pulling up to our place.  And because my wife is the best friggin' wife in the whole damn world, she grabbed the Hot Shot for me, drove back to the airport, and handed him over to me on the curb.  (We live one exit down the highway.)  Hot Shot got to be my trip buddy!

One of the security guys asked if it was collectible and if I was gonna keep it sealed.  He was really sad when I told him that he was gonna be opened as soon as I got to my gate.

And then licked.

Spinister was one of the at-show surprises, and the one at-show guy other than Kick-Off who wasn't a Shattered Glass mirrorverse guy.  He's a redeco of the Tomahawk mold, which I hadn't owned a toy of yet.  Back when Tomahawk hit stores, I figured eventually he'd be some guy I liked better, probably in a BotCon set, and I was right!  Huzzah.  Spinister uses the mold's alternate head, which until now had only been used in Japan.

He feels really close to a perfect Spinister toy.  Fun Publications obviously tried to go for a more accurate helicopter mode, colorwise, leaving us a robot mode with flipped colors.  Y'know, with pink legs instead of a pink torso.  I dunno if that's how I woulda gone.  Sure, the other way would have resulted in a pink helicopter, but if anything's gonna be a venue for a pink helicopter Transformer, it's gonna be BotCon.

That said, the colors ARE very nice, and not what we'd expect at retail.  His pink, teal, and blue screams 1988 all over.  Open up the Decepticon side of the 1988 Transformers catalog, and this guy's colors are what you'll see everywhere.

The toy itself, since I hadn't owned a version before, is pretty standard.  In vehicle mode his legs are obviously kinda hanging underneath the whole helicopter deal, especially now that they're bright pink.  He's got some missile launchers and some c-clips to attach other weapons to.

I kinda want this toy redecoed as Rotorstorm.  Probably wanna use the other head, though.