I was about to remark how there's five whole new dudes in this third wave of Fall of Cybertron figures, but there were five new dudes in the previous wave, too, plus five new dudes in the wave following.  So I guess that's actually situation normal, and not some weird aberration.  What is still remarkable is the huge-ass new weapons that this wave's guys have.   Three out of the five are retools of guys from the first wave but with new giant things to tote around.  I presume this is the result of the growing pains the pricepoint has been in for the past tiny bit.  As the pricepoint skips up to $15, Hasbro's able to shove in more.  The first uses of these molds were on the low-end of the bell curve as far as deluxes go, but now they're bulked up in mass a bit.

I can't scoff at the $5 raise.  $15 in Today Money is equal to $10 in Past Money.  Proportionally I'm paying the same amount for these things as I was in 1999.  And in 1999 I was a poor college student who could barely afford Chef Boyardee, so I'm putting this one in the Win column.

It is surprising to me how much I like Sideswipe.  I didn't hate Jazz or anything, but I seem to like Sideswipe (who Jazz was retooled into) so much more.  I don't even like Sideswipe much!  Sideswipe is boring!  And I love Jazz.  But Sideswipe just appeals.  Maybe it's the smoother car mode.  Maybe it's the colors.  Maybe it's the large-ass gun.  I dunno.

It's the exact same transformation as Jazz, but nearly the entire car mode has been reskinned.  I assume all the bumper-to-hood-to-roof-to-spoiler parts were on one moldset, and that's been swapped out for a different moldset that poops out a different car design.  This is awesome.   I hope to see more retools like this. Sideswipe is retooled to look like his car mode from the game, though Jazz's transformation gives him a different robot mode.

Sideswipe's new huge-ass gun is a Path Blaster, a weapon from the game which isn't nearly this huge.  But I don't care that it's oversized, because the Path Blaster is named after the Pathblaster from the Marvel UK stories, which was indeed huge.  And wielded by Roadbuster.  Who's in the next wave.  The design looks nothing like the old Pathblaster, but I'm still totes giving this thing to Roadbuster when I get him.

The only thing I actively dislike about Sideswipe are his eyes.  I like his new head, but his eyes aren't so much eyes as they are black gouges on his face.  He looks as if he has expired.  I might try painting them, if there's anything there to paint and the eyesockets aren't portals to some cruel dimension of pain.

(My Jazz has the Reprolabels upgrade set, so he may not look just like yours.)

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So, you may be asking yourself, hey, webcartoonist guy, why would you buy a Reprolabels set that mostly enhances a fire truck that a) is a bitch to get the toy into and b) results in a winceworthy sea of unaligned panels when you make the attempt?  Because I'm insane, that's why.  And because in theory I like big accurate fire trucks that happen to transform into robots.  And I really like that field of stripes that's now on the rear.

This thing had probably fifteen billion stickers, half of which were tiny millimeter-wide lights.  It took me a while.

But I like it.

Here's the Sentinel Prime toy unstickered, photographed way back.

A Reprolabels "upgrade" set for Drift is one of those things I didn't know I wanted until I learned of its existence.  I'd never considered that Drift's toy might be missing some deco from Guido's original design.  And some of that deco is actually pretty nice, like the red that ran along the skirt of the car and, to a lesser extent, on his spoiler and hood.  Plus there's all the tiny bits of gold tucked away in his torso and face.

Oh, right, and those sculpted windows in the back corners, maybe they could use some color.

So, yeah, I'm happy this set exists.  Adding some color to the robot mode greebles behind his roof-kibble chest also helps, and bringing out the details around his exhaust pipes is appreciated.

Though it's not all gravy.  The set provides three potential stickers to line all his swords.  Problem is, his swords are very rubbery plastic, and on the super long "must only use this sword in the most dire of circumstances" sword, that rubberiness is very evident.

Stickering this sword is not a good idea.

Well, you could probably manage it if you never stow the sword ever.  If you keep it either in one of his fists or kept to the side, nothing will ever go wrong.  But once you try to stow the thing, it inevitably bends in on itself, and then the thing wrinkles up like it's been badly shrinkwrapped.  Yikes.  I will probably remove the long sword's stickers, now that I've photographed them.

Also the long-sword stickers are like a quarter of an inch too short for the blade anyway, so oh well.

If you want to see Drift pre-stickers, here's a link to my original review.

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Here's "Grappel" with some Reprolabels on him.  I used most of them but not all of them, mostly leaving off the faction symbols since I prefer the ambiguity of the Rub Sign.  I also left off the tummy grill sticker since I thought the existing painted deco was fine, plus a few other things.  Some of the silver stickers on the side of the vehicle mode covered some horizontal grating lines, but I was able to keep that detail by running over it with a toothpick.

And finally, I finished the silver paint on the wrists with a silver Sharpie.  The factory paint only covers half of them, and I always thought that looked kind of off.

Some pictures, I guess.

Today I went to the Columbus Toy & Collectible Show here in town.  I was alerted to its existence by my pal Robowang, who had a table there.  So off I went.  I kinda wanted to find an extra Beast Machines Mirage to make myself a Devcon, which I didn't find, but I still came home with some stuff.

EDIT: I got one off eBay not long after writing this, so thanks everyone who's offering me a Mirage, but it's been taken care of.

It was a much larger show than I was expecting.  (Heck, it was bigger than some of the earlier BotCons I've been to.)  I was also pleased with how many Transformers were about.  Robowang's friend Rich was there adjoining his booth space, and from him I got this Henkei! Mirage.  It's a, what, magazine-exclusive toy from Japan?  Something like that.  Anyway, the reason I care about it is because he was repurposed as evil Shattered Glass Mirage a few years ago.  And the reason I really care about it is because I put SG Mirage in a Recordicons strip I drew a year ago.  He's the only guy in that particular strip who actually exists as a toy that I don't already own.

So Rich sold him to me and I put an SG Autobot symbol Reprolabel on him.

And then on the way home, I found the next wave of Young Justice figures for my wife!  So, like, score.

I've been wanting Reprolabels for my Hosehead for forever, and finally they exist.  It's not often I buy Reprolabels to replace missing official stickers.  Usually they're to "enhance" a toy above and beyond the official appearance, like with Perceptor a few days ago.  But my Hosehead has been dreadfully bare for years, and now he is not.  Hurrah!

Hosehead is Nightbeat's friend.  Sort of.  It's hard to discern.  Both he and Nightbeat are Headmasters, which means they musta gotten their Nebulan partners basically around the same time frame, right?  They should know each other from then.

But in their Marvel UK introduction, when Nightbeat and Siren meet Hosehead, they don't recognize each other at all, to the point of confusing each other for Decepticons.  Maybe Hosehead was in another room when all the Headmastering went down, and convenient foliage kept blocking him whenever Nightbeat and Siren passed by?  Who knows.  In the US stories, it's assumed they just hung out together forever.

Anyway.

These are the questions that keep geeks awake at night.

Hey, look, some new stuff.

So I ordered a lot of new Reprolabels sets after their recent update, which was a great idea because most of my toys are still packed away.  I got to do some digging!

I was most excited for the Reveal the Shield Perceptor upgrade set because of the monocle sticker.  One of the reasons I liked RtS Perceptor is that he reminded me of Perceptor's appearances in Last Stand of the Wreckers, and the only important visual detail that got in the way of Complete LSotW Power was the lack of a monocle.  The upgrade sticker set comes with three of them, because it's hard to apply and they're easy to lose.  They're tiny.  They're super tiny.  And getting them onto the face itself is really challenging, since it's a recessed area smaller than the tip of my finger.  I lost the first of the three, managed to get the second onto the face, pushing it up into place with a prong of a fork, and then realized that I needed the third one as well.  Just one sticker doesn't really over the eye that well.  I used both.

The rest of the stickers are pretty good, but not as important to me.  It's nice to get some color on his stomach, since that was a silver piece on the original toy, and I think the tech readouts look better than the gray windows they cover up.  There's some smaller stuff as well, like the  headlight stickers and the "14X" and "United States of America Antarctic Program" stickers.

The one set of stickers I used but wasn't sure about are the ones that go on the thighs.  They call back to the original toy, but I don't know if I think they're attractive.  I might remove them later.  I'm not sure.

And I'm certainly not replacing the rub sign faction symbol with a normal Autobot symbol, no.  I love that gimmick.  IS PERCEPTOR AUTOBOT OR DECEPTICON????

Reprolabels sticker upgrades for Animated Wreck-Gar arrived in the same envelope as my RtS Jazz stickers, but my need for the Wreck-Gar set wasn't nearly as drastic as it was for Jazz's.  The set comes with a lot of stuff, mostly alternate heads and faction logos and such, but I really just wanted the damn toes.  Wreck-Gar has three red toes on each foot on his character design, and the toy's feet are solid black.  It's easy for me to paint black, and I've done that all over Wreck-Gar's body already, where necessary, but painting red is much harder for me to do in a way that doesn't look horribly sloppy.

So, woo, toes!

I did use a few more from the set, but not many.  There are also orange stickers for his heels which I applied, and new orange stripe stickers to go over his preexisting painted orange stripes where his forearms meet his elbow.  The paint doesn't go quite all the way around, which I guess is the reason for the sticker's existence, but it's not something I absolutely needed.  There's also stickers to cover up the orange on the top of the torso, surrounding the head, but you can't see them in any of my photographs because they're really not all that exciting.  Oh, and the Autobot symbol.  I used that.

Stickers I didn't use include the small black stickers to stick up under Wreck-Gar's forehead, but I'd already painted that, so those weren't necessary.  He also comes with a bunch of faces and facial expressions you can paste over his toy's face, but... wow, no.  Never.  That'd be awful.

I'd completely forgotten that I'd gotten Weird Al's signature on my Wreck-Gar.  That was a fun rediscovery.

As soon as I had Reveal the Shield Jazz in my hands, I knew that there'd quickly be a Reprolabels "upgrade" set for it.  Since most of Jazz's paint was used up giving him what racing deco he has (plus, uh, painting his forearms white), there wasn't bound to be much budget left for paint elsewhere.  So his rear window and taillights are unpainted.  If Reprolabels didn't exist, that's the kind of thing I'd actually bother to try to paint myself.  But they do and so I won't!

The thing of biggest concern to me was the Rub Sign on his roof.  The Reprolabels set includes new stripe stickers that complete the full length from hood to trunk, but since it's a more intricate stripe than the one the toy has, I couldn't just put the missing trunk stripe stickers on and call it a day.  Then it wouldn't match!  But putting the roof stripe on meant potentially covering up the Rub Sign.  That just wouldn't do.

Thankfully, I was able to peel the Rub Sign off without any problem, and it was still sticky enough afterwards to plop it right back on after I'd applied the new roof stripe sticker.  I was even able to center it a little better, so that's another plus.  Mission accomplished!

The set gives you an option between putting a "real" Autobot symbol on his chest/hood or leaving it blank.  Since I was keeping the Rub Sign, I chose the blank option, of course.  That's not the only option on the sheet.  Hell, half of his sticker sheet is a choice between four different sponsor decoes.  You can either have everything say "MARTINI RACING" like on the original toy, have it say either "AUTOBOT JAZZ" or "AGENT MEISTER" like on the reissues of the original toy, or have the text left blank.  Choosing between these was actually a little rough.  I mean, the "MEISTER" stickers were never a real option, but the other three were all vaguely appealing.  In the end, I decided to go for original toy accuracy and choose the "MARTINI" stickers.  Those go on the doors, on the spoiler, and on the top of the windshield.

The last option it gives you is between two personalized license plates.  You can choose between "JAZZ" or "1984."  I chose... neither!  Or both, depending on how you look at it.  Because Jazz's transformation slices up the rear end of the car like a stack of party cheese, each license plate sticker is actually four stickers, each with one character on them.  J-A-Z-Z or 1-9-8-4.  I decided to use J-A-Z-1, because the idea of Jazz  himself not being able to nab his name for his vanity license plate amused me.  Plus, well, it looks more like a license plate that way.

In the end, I'm pretty damn happy.  Jazz looks a little less bare, plus putting on stickers is fun.  And I feel like he's personalized.  He's mine, dammit!  Nobody else's Jazz has "JAZ1" on their license plate!  ...unless you steal my idea.

*glare*

(Here's the toy before stickers.)

Lookit me, buying Reprolabels.com's upgrade sticker set for Reveal the Shield Tracks for not the same reason as everyone else, because I'm unique and counter-culture-y!    Ah-heh.  No.

Anyway, nobody likes Tracks' new tribal-style flame deco on his hood, and so everyone was super happy when Reprolabels made a sticker set for him that gave him some labels that'll cover them up with a more classic-style flame pattern.  Yeah, I didn't want those.  The tribal-pattern flames don't bother me, and the retro-style flames are just kind of gross.  Plus, yikes, they were designed by the guy who drew this.  I don't want that on my stuff.  I have some scruples left.  Not many, but a few.

Instead, I was all about the other stickers included in the set, most of which you can't see in this photo because I didn't feel like transforming Tracks back into car mode just so you could see his new foglights.  There's also a license plate sticker and some chrome silver stickers that apply on the business end of his side-view mirrors.  That's the kinda stuff I always like seeing in these sets.  I like "completing" the vehicle mode.

The robot mode stuff is almost always secondary to me.  But there's an awful lot more of it than the vehicle mode stuff, so that's why there's a picture of it here.  He's got yellow stripes on his feet, which I much appreciated, some more-complete red stripes on his wings, which I was okayish on, and green stripes that wrap around his missiles, which are okay by me because I like adding color like that.   There's also silver stickers that go on his knees which I only added because at that point I was having fun putting on stickers.