So let's set a scene.  

It's 11:15am.  I've just gotten up, and I'm sitting on the potty.  (wait wait don't leave, let me finish)  I know there's the Transformers panel running at New York Comic-Con right then, and so I pull out my phone and start watching a live feed.

Oh, hello, John Warden!

Oh, huh, John Warden is pulling out two toys.  I guess each is one of the toy's two modes?

...oh, cool, it's Grotusque!  I guess we're getting a Grotusque!   That's a surprise!

......oh, i see, it is now suddenly on sale at HasbroToyShop.com right now

and those kind of things tend to sell out in five minutes

Can a man will himself to stop shitting so he can run to his computer and order exclusive product on a time budget of about ninety seconds?   The answer is, apparently, yes!

And a day later, here Grotusque (and his extra Titan Master partner, Scorponok) is.  These guys ship from Pennsylvania, and I'm just one state over, so the trek is pretty short.  It is ... insanely odd to go from "I just now know this toy exists" to "I have this toy in my hand" in a matter of hours.  Usually first you get the store listing, then you get the blurry and/or cropped stolen imagery, then you get the official announcement, and then you get six more months to wait for the damned thing to actually come out.  Grotusque went from Knowledge to Having in a day.  It's kind of rad?  I mean, definitely not rad if you were, say, at work that afternoon, and not a cartoonist who spends all day at home.  But for me it's definitely rad.

(He will reportedly be available later at Toys"R"Us as well, so there's another chance at him.)

Grotusque is half Doublecross/Twinferno and half new parts.  The bottom half, or the legs/tail is what's kept, while everything from the waist up is new.  (Okay, the wings and stomach are still retained.)  And, honestly, Grotusque is working for me a lot more than Twinferno.  Twinferno had this problem where his torso was awkwardly elongated, and he just looked kinda weird in beast mode.  But Grotusque throws all that stuff out and starts fresh.  The beast mode arms become robot arms, the beast head now opens and unfolds and integrates into the torso, and the result is a toy that looks proportional to itself in both modes.  So, like, score.  

Like Arcee before him, Grotusque has a "premium deco."  That means they actually paint him.  They don't, like, go overboard or anything, but they put enough paint on him that he looks like himself.  There's lots of parts that are painted over entirely just to get them to be the right color.  The wings, for example, are translucent plastic under there.  His head, Fengul, is sculpted and meticulously painted (for a Titan Master) to look like the Battle Beast Platinum Tiger.  This attention to detail also nudges him over Twinferno.

Also like Arcee, Grotusque comes with an extra little die-cast Titan Master head guy.  This time it's Scorponok.  Hi, Scorponok!

hey takaratomy maybe make this toy into fangry please and thank you

A G1-redeco of Energon Scorponok was not something I thought I wanted until this thing was presented to me.  The original Energon use of the mold was G1y enough for me already.  It had enough green for me to think of it as passably G1 Scorponok and I didn't figure the-same-thing-but-with-purple would be interestingly different enough for me to care.

WHOOPS.

I guess I didn't count on the unforeseen insanity of giving the guy a new transforming Headmaster head in addition to the tweaked colors.  Honestly, that kind of stuff doesn't happen at this level.  We get a new head occasionally, sure, but the weird extra mile taken here took me aback.  Here's how it works: Encore Fortress Maximus came out recently, a reissue of the original Fortress Maximus.  That means tooling for the little Headmaster guy, Spike Witwicky, is viable.   So what Fun Publications did was retool Spike Witwicky a new Scorponok face to go on his back, then retool a new neck connector piece for the combined robot mode.  That piece just flips down into the chest cavity where the original head used to go in the other two modes.  So in the end you've got two separate toys being combined unnaturally into this new entity, using a multiple of new pieces.  

Energon Scorponok is one of my favorite Transformers toys ever, and so even though I kind of shrug at the idea of doing a G1-style version, I'm happy to have another in general.  There's something delightfully monstrous about him.  Some folks don't like his proportions or the way his torso looks, but for me that's part of the appeal.  He's dwarfed by his own massive claws.  He looks like he could grab planets out of the air.  The whole damn thing projects this feeling of menace.  And, so, sure, I'll take another one of those with a new transforming head, why not.

The retooling does solve a few minor problems with the toy, as well.  It ditches the original head's visor, which in latter releases was getting loose and having trouble staying on.  That's entirely gone, so problem dissolved.  Also the new neck connector piece makes the head sit up higher on the torso, so that looks a little better to me for the character, bridging the monstrous Energon Scorponok's feel with the slightly more housebroken G1 Scorponok.  

The toy is, however, assembled wrong.  The green and orange panels on either side of the purple torso (along with the panels' purple backings) are swapped left-to-right.  This doesn't impede transformation, but it does keep his shoulders from sitting properly in robot mode by a fraction of an inch.  Just unscrew the two screws behind the panels on either side, remove the arms, swap the panels-and-backings, re-attach the arms, and rescrew.  Huzzah.  

Scorponok still transforms into three modes -- robot, scorpion, and jet.  The new Headmaster can kind of stand in the small gap remaining inside the cockpit, in between the new neck piece and the wall of the torso, but it looks a little awkward.  The scorpion mode, as always, is great.  It's really just a pile of construction equipment - shovels and hooks and treads - assembled into the shape of a scorpion.  That's always really done it for me.  The jet mode is still that surprisingly awesome thing as well.  You wouldn't think you'd get a great jet out of a scorpion made of construction parts, but you do.  The electronics are gutted, however, as BotCon electronics tend to be. 

The box set sold out, so the only place to get this guy now is on the secondary market.    Good luck with that.