Sideswipe is not an interesting character!  I can think of, like, one good Sideswipe story out of all three decades of Transformers fiction, and he dies in it.  Even his design is kind of the Default Transformers Look.  You fold down the hood, yank the arms from the sides, and pull out the legs.  The end!  But he was the Red Sportscar Guy in 1984, and that's always given him an artificial sense of importance.  

And so when War for Cybertron: Siege (aka Stege) was first unveiled, and Sideswipe was part of that unveiling, I had to fight back a yawn.  (I failed.)

But I am here to give you good news: Stege Sideswipe is GOOD.  Oh my gosh, I really like him.  I hate that I like him.  It's like when somebody you dislike on the Internet says something you agree with, and you're torn between going ugh, fine, and wanting to alter your entire worldview just to put yourself on the opposite side again.  I really like Stege Sideswipe, and so I worry I'm a bad person.

Let me try to explain why.  I think it's the transformation.  There's a lot of car Transformers where you kind of have to fight and fiddle to figure out where, say, the arms go.  And they maybe sometimes just kind of fold under loosely, sometimes it's a fight, and you hope for the best.  But Stege Sideswipe's arms are a dream.  They fold into little Ls, you tuck the fists in as far as they go, and they just... fit underneath in an extremely satisfying way.  There's no fighting over the same physical space.  There's no forcing them over other parts.  And then some car kibble folds down over the biceps and plugs in, securing them.  

The leg transformation is pretty good, too.  you pull out the front leg panels, smoosh everything inside in layers, and close the front leg panels back again.  

Again, it's hard to state exactly how satifying everything is.

Sideswipe has 5mm pegholes everywhere so you can plug in parts from other toys in the line.  There's one on his back, one underneath each foot, one on the outside of each shin, and one on both his shoulders and forearms.  He's also pretty well articulated for a toy his size.  He's got ankle tilts, which seems to be standard in this toyline, which really ups his shelf presence.  

He's supposed to be a Cybertronian-style car, but he passes for a fancy concept car from Earth if you squint.  He's going on the shelf with my other Earth car guys, so that's fine by me.

I wasn't super-interested in Masterpiece Sideswipe when he was first announced, and I was kind of disappointed when I fiddled with my friend's, so that lack of interest felt vindicated.  

BUT

I gladly threw down dollars when it was announced that Masterpiece Sideswipe was coming out in his Generation 2 color scheme with a new snarly face and two new giant Derek Yaniger guns and two spikey wheels for his shoulders and a new sword.  The only thing that's missing is his bandolier.  I really want that bandolier.  (Okay, fine there's also a third gun we saw on his back that's missing, but eh, mostly I'm about the bandolier.)

The toy is about what I remember when I tried to transform my friend's.  Masterpiece Prowl was involved but pretty intuitive and easily do-able, but Sideswipe gets in his own way too much.  Sideswipe feels more fragile when you move stuff around.  He definitely seems more complicated than he has to be.  I mean, the original toy's legs just pulled out and you flopped the feet down.  I'm not entirely sure why this toy can't do that rather than having each shin blow up into shards which you reassemble to get basically the same look.  

The toy comes bare, but there's a sticker sheet included if you want to push the look of the G2 toy.  The comic book's Sideswipe left off the toy's green, so if you wanna strictly comic-accurate Sideswipe you should leave those off.  But while I'm in love with that first G2 comic book issue, I'd rather my toy be prettier and acknowledge the original toy more, so I applied those stickers first-thing.  

All the extra parts combine into a megaweapon which attaches to the roof of the car just like in the comic.  Yeah, that can also include the wheels and the sword.  It's pretty awesome.  

I'm not likely to transform Sideswipe much since he's kinda a chore, so I'm glad he makes a pretty great action figure in robot mode.  Visually, he's everything I've ever wanted from a Sideswipe, for seriouslies.  Sideswipe is just kinda boring unless you G2 him up.

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.)

I kid, mostly.  We got our G2 Breakdown last year, so it's nice to have the first BotCon exclusive of Breakdown which isn't in his G2 colors, as much as I love my cyan and magenta.  It's just... his regular colors are kinda boring.  I never dug the off-white.  And the BotCon exclusives are basically the only reason I know Breakdown exists, so I have no nostalgia for it.  Honestly, out of all five of the Animated Stunticons in the box set, Animated Breakdown is probably my least favorite.

...which is made up by Animated Sideswipe being so awesome.  Sideswipe was one of the at-show souvenir add-ons, bundled with Toxitron.  Unlike Breakdown, Sideswipe IS in his G2 colors, which are his G1 colors (red and black) reversed.  The original G2 Sideswipe toy had a green launcher and a few green stickers, and the Animated version ramps up the green to beautiful effect.  It's really a great combination, the bright green and the black and the red and the white.  It's not a color combination we get much.

Why is Animated Sideswipe in G2 colors?  I imagine it's 'cuz that mold's already been in red as Rodimus.  (It's already been in black as Black Rodimus, but not a lot of people have that, and it's pretty different anyway.)  Plus, well, G2 Sideswipe colors are just objectively better than G1 Sideswipe colors anyway.  There, I said it!  I've never owned a G1 Sideswipe, since I picked up a G2 Sideswipe in my late teens and never saw a reason to pick up any of the G1 reissues as they've been paraded out in the past decade, 'cuz, well, why?  I already had the better version!  Sideswipe didn't really do anything until the Marvel G2 comic anyway.

Another nice thing about this pair is the head.  It strikes a great compromise between both of their head designs.  Breakdown's head looks like Breakdown's (animation model) and Sideswipe's head looks like Sideswipe's.  It's amazing what a little hedging and color differences can do.  And they both kind of deserve the dour expression on their face, what with Breakdown being an unhappy nervous wreck and Sideswipe being a bitter ol' cop.

(Neil Ross did a great voice for him at BotCon 2011's script reading.)

Plus, you know me and mold reuse.  Reuse a mold once, and I shrug.  Reuse it a dozen times and suddenly I'm compelled to own all of them.  That collector mentality kicks in.  It's why I own 30 Dinobots.  And if you think I'm happy with my four Animated Rodimus reuses, wait 'til we get to my Animated Cybertronian Ratchet reuses.

I was just about to open with something about how all of Sideswipe's toys seem to be pretty awesome, but then I remembered the Human Alliance version.  Clearly my intended assertion is not true.  But still, a pretty good percentage of movie Sideswipe toys are pretty awesome!  I really liked the Revenge of the Fallen Deluxe Class toy, I don't own Sidearm Sideswipe, but I hear he's pretty good, and I like this new Dark of the Moon version of Sideswipe as well.

One of the reasons I picked him up is that he's in a new body this go-round.  Well, his robot mode might not be any different, but now he's (as I understand) the actual production version of the new Corvette Stingray, rather than just the concept.  And he's a convertible!  The convertibleness is probably one of the reasons why I'm so smitten with this new form.  Since he's got no roof, he's got something approximating a detailed interior.  He's got seats, a dashboard, a steering wheel... all really cool things that add visual interest.  Not many Transformers cars are convertibles.

What Sideswipe doesn't have, though, are floorboards.  You can look right through him from the top, peeking at the ground in between his seats.  He's a Flintstones car!  This tickles me.

Unlike the previous movie Sideswipes, this one doesn't have a silver paint job.  That's kind of disappointing.  Instead, he's a flat matte French gray-ish thing.  Not a dealbreaker, but it's something he's lost from his older iterations.

Sideswipe is known for his giant arm-mounted blades.  You know, the ones with which he cut Sideways in two!  Poor Sideways.  And because two arm-mounted blades that can easily bisect any Decepticon just isn't enough, his MechTech cannon also auto-converts into yet another blade that he can carry around in his hand.

That's kind of overkill, Sideswipe.

I'd meant to gab on about Generations Red Alert back on Monday night along with that week's Toy News International strip, but the Mike statues done shown up on my porch and Red got knocked back.

(Only a handful of Mike statues remain!)

As the TNI strip mentions, there's a lotta versions of this mold right now.  I own five, but there are about four more between Japanese versions of three of these guys and an additional (super super rare) G2 version of Sideswipe.  It's not the greatest mold, but it isn't terrible.  How is it that the toys that get redecoed the most are the ones that are actually pretty mediocre?  The original Seeker mold, the Classics Seeker mold, Dinobot... (SHUT UP SHUT UP DINOBOT IS AWESOME)

As I've mentioned previously, no matter how terrible the toy, the more versions of one toy I accumulate, the more desirable extra versions become.  It's absolutely nuts.   Maybe it's like mob mentality, how people get dumber in groups.  Well, these large groups make me dumber!

Red Alert himself isn't a bad version of the mold.  If I had to rank him by prettiness compared to the others, he'd probably rank a distant second after Breakdown.  Breakdown's color scheme has no equal, so that's just not terribly fair, but them's the breaks, Red.  The way the white and gray and sharp red play off each other is striking, just enough to edge him out over his primary color brothers.

As for the tooling itself, he's probably second-to-worst, just ahead of Tiny Head McGee, aka Mr. Punch/Counterpunch.  Why?  Well, because of the light bar on the roof, you can't mount his engine thingy on his back in robot mode anymore.  In addition, the holes on his shoulders are no longer large enough for him to peg his weapon into.  So Red Alert's forced into having to wrap the engine thingy around the gun and peg the whole thing into his wrist... which is an incredibly unstable arrangement even before we realize that this larger gun configuration conflicts with his forearm kibble.

So that's annoying.