This next wave of Transformers Generations is some crazy shit.  Nightbeat and Jhiaxus, who are really awesome guys who rarely get toys?  Windblade, the bestest new character?  And the guy in the wave I'm least interested in is somehow Crosscut, who's a new toy of a previously e-Hobby exclusive guy?  It's like Hasbro was throwing darts at a dartboard composed entirely of stuff I really dig.  

Let's talk about Nightbeat.  He's a retool of Generations Bumblebee and his retool Goldfire Bumblebee, so this means he's the third use of the mold and the third head for it.  (There'll be a fourth head on a fifth use of the mold next year.)  He almost was made from Reveal the Shield Jazz, which so almost happened that art of that version is on the cover of the comic book Nightbeat comes with.  RTS Jazz is a much better toy (one of the best), but this version made from Bumblebee looks more like Nightbeat in robot mode.  The original Nightbeat was a Porsche, just like Jazz, so RTS Jazz woulda been perfect in vehicle mode.  A muscle car feels a little off.

Nightbeat's in the colors you'd expect him to be -- he's a bright cyan and yellow, grounded by black.  All of his yellow is painted, and the toy valiantly tries to cover up blue plastic with yellow paint.  It mostly succeeds, surprisingly, but there are a few thinly covered parts that look a little greenish.  Nightbeat's new head has lightpiping, but it's painted over in red on both sides.   This time Nightbeat's shins are glued into place so that you can no longer slide them out laterally for robot mode.  Perhaps there were stability or looseness issues?  

There's a way to transform Nightbeat so his shoulder kibble hangs in a way that suggests Nightbeat more -- a transformation alteration that Japan is using for their upcoming Goshooter exclusive.  Just, uh, keep his shoulders untransformed, basically, losing the door wings and keeping them hanging off his biceps.  

His weapon is still ridiculous.  It's Bumblebee/Goldbug's, but every time this toy comes out again with that same weapon, I feel like its ridiculousness increases.  

I kinda wish Nightbeat had gotten a newly sculpted chest in addition to his head.  I also wish he'd gotten to have an orange face.  Yellow is way better than silver like everyone else, but it's not strictly accurate.  However, Nightbeat's face is yellow in the ongoing IDW comics, so maybe that's where that comes from.  

Speaking of which, I strongly need a Nautica for him to solve mysteries with.  

Tankor's wavemate is Rattrap, who's a Deluxe Classed version of his original 1995 Basic Class toy.  Back in 1995, all of the Basic Beast Wars figures had autotransformations -- in Rattrap's case, you move his rat mode tail and he springloads roughly into robot mode.  Most of these worked by cramming robot limbs up inside the altmode, resulting in a standard "robot guy with huge altmode backpack and a chest made from the head or ass or something" look across the size class.  Rattrap made it onto the Beast Wars television show, so it was established that Rattrap is that guy with a rat head on his chest and everything else from his rat mode piled up on his back.  

Well, now it's 2014 (ninteen years later!), and it's time to make a larger, non-autotransforming version of that same design.  He definitely still has most of his rat mode on his robot mode back -- if he didn't, he wouldn't look like Rattrap -- but there is an attempt to integrate more rat parts in with his robot mode.  Well, okay, only his hind legs.  Those unfold and pack into the back of his robot mode legs.  His rat hindfeet become his heels.  The rat backpack does collapse in on itself better than the original's does, which is nice.  (The show Rattrap's backpack SHRANK, which isn't exactly an option here.)  

Since new Rattrap doesn't auto-transform, that means all the business of shoving his robot mode limbs into his animal shell is now your job!  And, yikes, is it a job.  It is a quagmire down there, with everything competing for the same spot at certain points.  There's about three separate joints in each knee that need to be bent and compiled in a way Just So in order for everything to fit together as it's supposed to, and until you figure out this correct way, transforming him may take you quite a while.  

That said, his rat mode is wonderful.  It's got a prehensile tail (it's soft plastic with a wire running through it) and he's got somewhat poseable legs and feet.  He's also got an openable jaw.  But what really blows my mind is that he's also designed to stand upright if you want.  There's a patch of fur-textured gray plastic you can rotate up behind his rat head so that when you bend the rat head forward while upright, there's no unsightly gap in the back of his neck.  Of course, there's always going to be those robot arms in place of his rat stomach, but making the rat mode able to get on its hind legs goes a real long way towards making the toy feel like Rattrap the character.  I think this is my preferred mode.  

The robot mode is great, but there are some small limitations.  His elbows can't bend a full 90 degrees, for starters.  This limits the amount of things you can do with his arms.  It'd be nice if his wrists rotated, too, and they look like they do, but it's possible this was something budgeted out at some stage.  His rat ears are also pretty large and tall (as they should be for rat mode) but they get in the way of most of his peripheral vision.  Photos of him need to be head on or from slightly above or you aren't going to see his head.  

On the plus column side, he's got some interesting weaponry in this mode.  He has a rifle that can split up into two separate guns.  Open up his left forearm and you can pull out one of his sticky bombs which he used on the show.  

In summary, this is a Rattrap toy with two great modes, some minor flaws, and an annoying transformation.  The latter deal should be somewhat mitigated once the proper leg transformation order is discovered, but not entirely.  It's a toy full of character and stuff to do. 

(Like Tankor, his comic book pack-in is published with terribly out-of-order pages.)

It's Tankor!  Well, the other Tankor.  The Windblade comic book is currently milking the fact that there's two guys named Tankor hanging around, and their peers have -- without their knowledge -- labeled them "tall Tankor" and "fat Tankor."  Well, let's hope that at some point nobody has to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons to save fat Tankor's life, huh?  

"Squat Tankor" would be a better description, I think.  This is one of those "conservation of toy mass" things that resulted in us getting really short Bulkhead and Lugnut toys back in Animated.   Tankor here was presented as a super-massive large-ass dude in Beast Machines, and so if you want to find some Beast Machines Maximals remotely to scale with this guy, maybe try the McDonald's Happy Meal figures.  

The robot mode makes me super happy!  It's an amazing Tankor robot mode, both in regards to cartoon accuracy and in fun.  He's just this wide slab of awesome.  I love his stubby back-canted tread legs and his large meaty arms.  (his forearms could stand to be more meaty, but they wouldn't fit during transformation if they were any thicker)  He's got a missile launcher (the pressure-release kind the old Cyberjets had) that operates if you pull back on the cannon barrel.  Or ditch the missile.  It's kind of dopey-looking.

Transformation is pretty easy.  You pile his arms into each other, fold his torso down, and peg his legs into his crotch.  It's not terribly accurate to his Beast Machines cartoon tank mode, but that thing transformed via magic anyway, so it's not very surprising.  The robot mode head ends up on top, and that's really the most important thing.

I very much like him!  Especially since he's showing up in Windblade's comic these days.  I think of the toy as that guy more than the Beast Machines guy.

He comes with a comic.  Its pages are insanely out of order.  Yikes.

A few years ago, Tailgate was just that guy with the tech spec that was about how he's some wacky dude who believed all machines were sentient beings and talked to them as if it were true.  I mean, it's a fun Budiansky-esque concept, but it's funny how quickly such things are buried under the waves of Actual Longterm Characterization.

In the More Than Meets The Eye ongoing comic book, Tailgate's naivete is taken in another direction.  He is technically about two-weeks old when we first meet him, even though he fell in a hole and slept in it for several million years until the present day.  So he doesn't know about the Autobot/Decepticon war, he doesn't know that he shouldn't go make friends with Cyclonus, he doesn't even know who Optimus Prime is, and he doesn't know not to let Swerve start rambling at him, though he picked up on that one pretty quickly.

All this is why I am overjoyed that Generations Tailgate (like Swerve before him) is based on his Nick Roche (I believe) design from More Than Meets The Eye.  Sure, he's white in places where he should be blue and vice versa, and he transforms into an Earth car instead of a Cybertronian one, but he's definitely that little adorable design.  And so I neeeeeeeeeeeded him.  I especially needed him back in like December when we thought he'd be out already and so I drew him into a Dumbing of Age strip, fully expecting him to have hit retail by the time my buffer got eaten up to that far.  For the longest time, the most unrealistic thing about Amazi-Girl was that she owned a Tailgate toy.  Well, no longer!  He's out, both at online stores and in United States brick-and-mortar stores as of a few days ago.  

Tailgate is more complicated than he looks.  He's definitely still a Legends Class-sized guy, with the lack of a rotating neck joint -- NOPE IT MOVES HOORAY just from lower than you'd think -- and otherwise simplified articulation, but his torso does all sorts of crazy things.  The easist way to lampshade it is by pointing out that his exhaust pipes, which stick out the back of his vehicle mode, are placed in the middle of his robot mode torso.  You pull half of his torso down, pull the rest of his torso up, and then try to wrap stuff together to form a car.  Not bad for a Tailgate toy, considering the original required only that you fold his legs down.  

He comes with Micromaster partner named Groundbuster, based on the original Neutro troy.  He's there.  He makes some sort of weird claw thing.  I suppose a weird claw thing is useful if you're a waste disposal guy like Tailgate, so sure, whatevs.

(This review uses male pronouns, but it's distinctly possible that the jury is still out on that.)

Here's your damn Whirl!  I was gonna talk about him, like, a week ago, when I got my FIRST one, but he kind of got his leg snapped off at the knee, so I had to get another.  Those knee joints?  They are a large thigh and a large shin piece very very tightly connected via a thin knee strut and rough ratcheting joints.   Whoof.  Be careful.  I was just trying to get mine into helicopter mode to put on his stickers and BAM the kind of damage you can't pop back on.  

OTHER THAN THAT I guess I kind of like him?  I mean, I'm super up for a Whirl toy now that he's been pretty glorious in the past few years of More Than Meets The Eye.  He's that archetypal anti-social pathological hyperviolent jerk who's somehow an Autobot.  Who doesn't love that guy?  No one, that's who!  

Unfortunately, he's not actually the design from the comic book, which is awesomely inventive.  Instead, he's a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the original Whirl toy, but with digitigrade legs because that's how he is in the comics now I guess.  Seriously, this toy's just straight-up the original thing with joints.  I mean it.  He comes with STICKERS, and they nearly all replicate the original stickers.   That's how weird this thing is.

Again unfortunately, that means they're those clear GIJOE-style stickers which I am not terribly fond of, so they leave me feeling kind of cold.  And since most of them are based on the original stickers, sometimes you get stuff like the triangular stickers which originally fit into the triangular space directly behind the cockpit on the first toy, but this new toy doesn't HAVE that triangular space, so you kind of just have to put them floating there awkwardly behind the cockpit somewhere.  Whaaaaaat, why?

(Also, I recommend looking at photos of the original Whirl for better sticker placement ideas than the placements suggested by the instructions.)

Whirl has a third mode, dubbed a "heloped," which is really your traditional gerwalk mode.  You know, like with Veritechs or whatever, in which you half-transform it so it's really a jet with backwards legs and some arms.  In this toy's case, it's not strictly a midtransformation, as there's a slider along the underside of the cockpit for the crotch and legs to slide back on and center themselves on the vehicle.  It's not needed otherwise.  I guess it's cool this exists?  It's superfluous to my needs, though.  

(Another thing the instructions probably get wrong -- I'm pretty sure that it has the leg configurations for the heloped and robot modes switched.  The robot mode should get the digitigrade legs, since they actually look like actual functioning legs that would actually work to walk with, and the heloped mode should get the simply backwards-kneesed legs, since that matches other "gerwalk" modes and, say, ED-209.)

(Oh oh oh oh and you can collapse the shoulder struts into the torso, y'know, the long stalks that connect the arms to the body.  They're on ball-joints, but you can push them in farther regardless and then yank them out for transformation.)

Whirl comes with four weapons, all of which I believe correspond to the weapons the original toy come with.  They attach via 5mm pegs or those c-clipy deals which were a big thing in Transformers a few years ago.  I don't really need them, and now that I have my first Whirl AND my replacement Whirl, I've got entirely too many of these things sitting around.  Oh well.  

Overall... Whirl's good?  I mean, he's good enough.  He's Whirl.  I wish he didn't try to be the original toy so much.  It's not exactly that I wish he were the current design in the comic so much that I wish this toy weren't trying to be specifically the old toy with joints.  Even though he's a brand new toy, his look is kinda dated.  Maybe that's what they were going for.  Who knows.  

Anyway, be careful with his knees.  And thanks to Big Bad Toy Store for being super helpful about getting him replaced.

Hey, it's a new toy of Scoop, why the hell not?  He's one of those guys I had a toy of from my childhood but who never became important beause he really got much fiction, so this feels like one of those times that Hasbro reaches into my specific nostalgia.  

Mind, since these guys have to be presented in the comic books they come packaged with, Scoop's getting some characterization now.  However, it's kind of hard to figure out what it is.  Broadly, he seems to be a religious zealot, but specifically, he's kind of violently bipolar about how Starscream fits into those prophesies he totally buys into.  Does he like Starscream?  Does he hate him?  Depends on what issue it is!  Is he a jerk?  Is he a hero?  Is he just misguided?  Does he believe what he's saying or is he putting on a front?  I'm not sure the story knows?

Anyway, New Scoop is a little more deceptively complex than you'd think by looking at him.  Visually, he looks like the original toy but with joints, but there's a lot more going on in that torso than is first apparent.  The whole front of his chest is just a panel that folds down, and his shoulders are both on a rotating tumbler separate from the real meat of the body.  It's all fine in robot mode, but in vehicle mode, nothing really holds together very well.  The slots and tabs are pretty shallow, and there's always one of them kinda hanging loose, it seems.  So if you want to buy this for a young kid to smash around, that's probably not gonna end well.  It's gonna come apart pretty easily.  It's not a sturdy brick like the original Scoop.  (I bring this up because I've been asked about it a few times already, and so it seems like a common concern.)  

His Targetmaster partners, Holepunch and Tracer Caliburst, are not immune from problems either.  Their gun modes' pegs are on rotating joints which are held between their legs by a shallow hinge rather than being pinned through, and it takes a lot less force to punch that chunk of plastic out than it is to push the peg through any kind of fist of peghole, so that's kind of frustrating.  You have to be kind of calculating to get the peg into the hole without the toy disassembling.  

Also I kind of wish the yellow paint on the shovel hadn't been budgeted out of the production version.  

Those are some definite negatives, but he's not all bad!  I am very happy with his colors.  He's mostly orange, which if you know me is a big plus in my brain, and his yellow is this very attractive faded yellow that I hope we see more of.  It's kind of a shortcake color.  I want to eat it.  The robot mode is great, as noted, and I love that we get new toys of Holepunch and Tracer and that they combine into their double weapon still.  And he comes with a comic book!  ...though if I recall correctly, he spends his time in it being a weird religious creep behind bars.  I'm not sure if that's gonna make him some kid's favorite character.

I was gonna talk about the new Whirl first, but he kind of snapped his leg off at the knee before I could even get stickers on him.  SO HERE'S ARMADA STARSCREAM, COVERED IN MY TEARS

Armada Starscream is, obviously, a new toy of the Starscream design from Transformers: Armada.  Since these toys are being featured in the IDW Transformers comics that come packaged with every Deluxe, Armada Starscream's design is also now a IDW comics continuity G1 Starscream toy!  For those of you keeping track, this is the second time in a row a Starscream toy that represented Starscream from a different continuity family has been used as a G1 Starscream in this comic.  With both Aligned and the Unicron Trilogy out of the way, once this Starscream also repurposes an Animated or Movie-style version of himself, I think this dude will have collected the whole set.  He will become Meta Starscream, the Allscream, Devourer of Alternate Starscreams.

The toy itself is fantastic.  While it is, broadly, a smaller version of the original Armada Starscream toy but with joints, the sum is more than these parts.  He feels solid and dynamic and feels like he has a presence, and he has more weapons than you expect of a toy in these expensive times.  While the original Armada Starscream would pop off his entire wing to make a sword, this new Armada Starscream hides his (now-translucent) swords behind his wings.  They just fold up and plug into the backs.  He also gets two, instead of just the one.  Also, dude's got double missile launchers.  It's been a while since those were the norm!  They're the push-pressure kind, not the spring-loaded kind, and they sit in his maneuverable shoulder intakes.  Starscream's also got Mini-Con hardpoints on both his forearms and on the back of each of his launchers, as is right and good.  

If you're more discerning about your Starscream purchases, I'd check out this guy.  He's one of the best Starscream toys, I feel.   Or you can wait until we get that Jhiaxus retool out of him we seem to be receiving.  New cockpit, new wings, new tailfins, new head.  When I'm at Toy Fair in a few weeks, I hope we get to see him.

In Bumblebee and his redeco/retool Goldfire we've got a little microcosm of toy-pushed fiction.  The Bumblebee toy was designed to mimick a comics-only design that appeared years back.  Later in the comics, he'd be rebuilt into a "Goldfire" version of that same body because the comic had to advertise the redeco/retool.  As I type this, I realize no one else is going to care.  BUT TOO LATE, YOU READ IT.

The toy is simple enough, and for that it's a fun buy.  Back of the car becomes the legs, the sides become the arms and the hood becomes the shoulders.  The torso untelescopes to reveal the head, and everything else piles up on his back.  It works better as Bumblebee -- my Goldfire has trouble keeping the torso locked together in robot mode.  

That's about it.

Cosmos is Swerve's casemate but I'm way less excited about him.  Mostly because, well, we got a pretty similarly-sized Cosmos a few years ago.  It's kind of like a partial upgrade.  The rest of my malaise is that I'm in a pretty strong More Than Meets The Eye groove at the moment, toy-wise, and Cosmos is kind of the odd guy out.  In the current comics, Cosmos is a pretty big guy!  (as you'd expect a guy who transforms into a spaceship to be, probably)  And this is a small toy, albeit marginally larger than the other one.  I also think this design isn't quite what's in the comic, either, though it's hard to tell.  Cosmos mostly likes to be in the back of big group shots.  

That said, it's still.. an upgrade!  I mean, it's clearly a better-looking robot and a slightly more interesting saucer mode.  He's a bit larger and he comes with a little Micromaster guy.  The Micromaster parter transforms from robot to shuttle to weapon and is clearly supposed to be Blast Master despite being named Payload instead.  This guy's pretty cool.  I like him.

Cosmos himself isn't bad or terrible, but he kind of feels like a rerun.  I'm sure there are some Star Wars collectors out there rightfully mocking my tears as they buy their sixteenth Han Solo with better-painted belt buckles or whatever, but oh wells.  

*looks through his site to see what he said about the Swerve that's getting summarily replaced*  Huh.  Apparently my verdict was "he's red."  Well!  

This new one's red, too, in addition to being (almost) perfect.  Swerve's always been pretty cool!  He's a Transformer who can't drive, despite being a car.  He never really got any good fiction, like, ever, though, so all he's had to go for him all these years has been that Tech Spec write-up.  Until recently, that is!  The "More Than Meets The Eye" ongoing comic book series (which you may have heard me talk about for forever and ever) has thrust him into the spotlight as an insecure loudmouth jokester.  And he's pretty great.  And this Legends Class toy is really really good at looking like that Swerve does.

Sure, the toy transforms into an Earth vehicle instead of the Cybertronian car he does in the comic, but that's details.  What's important is that he's a tiny ball of annoying energy and that perfectly sculpted little always-yackin' face of his.  Even his toy can't keep his mouth shut.  

He transforms pretty simply, as you'd expect.  Unfold his legs, pull out his arms, and collapse his hood back over his roof.  Remember to push forward his head from his shoulders so he's not staring at the sky.  I mean, you can have him do that, if you want -- he's pretty short, and so up articulation on his head comes in handy sometimes.  This articulation means his head can't turn left and right, though.  That's no big deal.

Up there, I put (almost) in parenthesis in front of "perfect."  The only thing that keeps him from being so, really, is that I really wish he were sculpted with fingerguns.  You know, index fingers out, both of 'em.  That woulda made him perfect.  Dude needs some third-party forearms.  

Swerve comes with a little Micromaster dude who's basically Sky High but named "Flanker" for trademark reasons.  Sky High transforms from robot to weapon to jet and back.  I know less about Sky High as a character (there's not much to know) so I'm less excited about him.  Here's a gallery on Tumblr if you wanna look at him and more of Swerve.

I got mine from RobotKingdom.com.  He's not in the United States yet.  I'm sorry, but you have to wait.