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You guys might have heard that there's another Devastator War going on. I myself have reviewed, in the last two months, the entire set of Mecha Invasion Constructicons as well as Dream Star Toys' Scrapper and Hook. While those guys represent some cool and stylized takes on the Constructicons I expect that there are quite a few people thinking, "yeah, that's nice and all, but I was kind of hoping for something with a bit more cartoon-accurate and with more modern engineering to replace Constructor." Well, we're getting a few of those, too! But which one is the right one? With the way things are going I don't think I can realistically buy all six members from every set out there. I can probably manage to buy Scrapper from every set, though (although 01-Studio and MMC's aren't out yet). So the first one up will be X-Transbots' Ground Bite. Out of the box, Ground Bite is making a strong first impression. The colors seem spot on. The proportions are good; he's not too wide, and he doesn't have the extra chunky limbs that ToyWorld's does. He's got the tiered thighs and rib vents of the animation model, with silver, gray and red details on his chest and the stripes on his hip skirts that match the cartoon. The round bits are present on his shins, and his head is on-point with a metallic red paint over translucent eyes. With his shovel you'd expect him to have a bit of a backpack, and he definitely does. However, it's pretty tightly compacted. I mean, you kind of want the bucket to stand out, as I feel it's a part of the character's design, but everything else is pretty unobtrusive and you won't see it from a lot of angles. Ground Bite comes with a lot of accessories. There's his gun, which is maybe on the small side but otherwise cartoon accurate. There's a pair of trumpets- one is for Ground Bite himself, the other is for Big Load, XTB's Long Haul who did come with one. There's a chunk of partsforming Devastator thigh... I find it interesting that it's only the knee and thigh, and none of the hip/pelvis. There's Devastator's chest plate. There's a pair of green circular bits. There's a sword that, if I'm not mistaken, Scrapper used to cut a car in half in the episode where they were making the Stunticons. There's a plastic base piece, some stickers you can put on the base to make it looked like cracked concrete. Ground Bite's articluation is pretty good. His head is on a hinged swivel, which means no sideways tilt but he can look down a bit and up about 45 degrees. His shoulders rotate and move laterally about 90 degrees, both on ratchets, and if you untab them from his torso you can even get a bit of forward butterfly. His biceps swivel. His elbows bend maybe 60 degrees or so. His wrists swivel, and they're hinged so he can bend his hands back. His thumbs have one hinge for folding them down over his palm, plus two hinged knuckles. All of his fingers are hinged at the base with a second middle knuckle; the index finger is a separate piece, while the other three are molded together. It strikes me as an atypical design for XTB, who usually do fully articulated hands with lots of ball joints, but if I'm being honest I prefer Ground Bite's. Unlike earlier articulated XTB hands, these ones don't feel like they're going to fly apart on me. Moving on, his waist has a ratcheted swivel, and he's got a little ab crunch. His hip skirts move so his hips can go 90 degrees forward and one click short of 90 backward on a ratchet, and over 90 degrees laterally on a friction joint. His thighs swivel, and his double-jointed knees (both ratcheted) can get a full 180 degrees of bend. No upward tilt on his feet, but the toes can fold down 90 degrees. They also swivel, which gives him a sort of unlimited ankle pivot. If you're worried about it being like a fake ankle pivot, his heels also swivel so the bottom of his foot can remain flat, but they swivel independently of the front of his feet. He can hold his gun or his sword the same way in either hand. Tabs on either side of the handle plug into slots on his palms, then you wrap the fingers around it. Aside from holding them, he doesn't seem to have any accessory storage in bot mode. The trumpet works similarly. There are tabs that fit into his palms, but you need to leave his hand mostly open so that the fingers can sit over the keys. You can kind of wrap the fingers around the bottom loop of the trumpet, but the result isn't quite cartoon-accurate, not quite how a real person would hold a real trumpet, but somewhere in between. One gimmick that doesn't require any accessories- there's a panel on Ground Bite's left arm that you can lift up to find molded computer details under. It's a small shame they're not painted to help them stand out, but the entire gimmick is more "nice to have" than necessity, so I'm not going to ding him for it. As for the green bits, you'll find that the wheels on Ground Bite's shoulders are basically tabbed on. You can remove them (be careful doing so, the tabs are kind of thin), then replace them with the green bits. This is mean to give him a truly Sunbow look, where Scrapper's wheels turned into round green lumps in the cartoon, if you're a hardcore cartoon purist. It's something you might want to do if you plan on leaving him in robot mode or leg mode, but again those tabs are kind of thin and must be removed and swapped back to the real wheels every time you want to go to alt mode. Speaking of alt mode... the transformation's actually pretty good! I mean, XTB is still going to be XTB, so there are a few sliders and a few parts and panels that are a bit thinner than I'd like, but the engineering itself is pretty straightforward. I think the most confusing part in the instructions are his legs, but once you've done it once or twice it's honestly pretty intuitive. I think the end result is pretty good. Yes, you've got some cartoon elements like the arms chilling on the sides and a bit of his silver thighs peeking out at you, but you've got realistic details like the exhaust and air cleaner over the engine, the bumper, grill, and taillights on the back, an open cab roof of the sort you might find on a actual wheel loader, and detailed, realistic arms connected to the bucket. There's even a seat in the cabin, with a steering wheel and little levers for operating the shovel. The tires are rubber, and the shovel can lift about this far. If you turn him upside down, you'll find space between these green flaps, flaps that have tabs on them. Collapse the barrel into the gun, and you can slot the tabs on the flaps into the sides of the gun to store it under the alt mode. In a nod to the G1 toy, you can put the chest shield on Ground Bite's back. However, doing so does require that you attach Devastator thigh, as the shield connects to it and not Ground Bite himself. Speaking of, normally I don't like to cover the combined mode until I do my review on the entire combined mode, but since Ground Bite has to stand as a proxy for all of the XTB Constructicons, we have to take the leg mode into consideration now. It's pretty typical Scrapper fare, with the shovel becoming the toes and his arms becoming the heels while the back end requires minimal transformation at all (basically just folding the air cleaner and exhaust back in and the cartoon round bits back out). The steering wheel gets stowed away and the seat folds down, and the cabin kind of tucks in. Some extra struts help hold the shovel in place, and panels fold out from the shovel to swap the realistic alt mode teeth with the two-toed look of the animation model. However, I suppose a downside of the more realistic alt mode details is that the leg mode isn't particularly similar to the goofy animation model in the first place. Of a more practical concern, while the thigh fits on tightly enough and does a lot of the heavy lifting in the leg articulation department, Ground Bite's waist does extend to give the leg mode an ankle pivot. However, the extended joint is kind of small, and seems to have trouble supporting the weight of the leg above it. The result is that the entire leg wants to lean backward. Now, it's not enough to to cause him to tip over, and it's entirely possible that the weight of the rest of Devastator on it (and shifting said weight forward a bit) might make this a non issue. It's clear, though, that it was on XTB's mind, because this is where the stand comes in. You'll find a hole under each arm, and four across the front of the shovel. These holes plug into pegs on the stand base. Unfortunately, it's unclear at this time whether the base will be a helpful display piece of an unfortunately necessary one. Given X-Transbot's reputation for spotty QC, I'm happy to report that Ground Bite is an excellent G1 Scrapper. He's solidly built and well painted. The robot mode has well-proportioned, strong sculpt that walks a line that leaves him very Sunbow accurate without being overly blocky and devoid of details. He's also well-articulated and comes with plenty of accessories. The transformation is pretty straightforward once you know what you're doing, and while the alt mode strays a bit from the simplistic animation model it adds a ton of realistic details while remaining broadly accurate. If you want a Masterpiece Scrapper for your shelf Ground Bite is a figure I can easily recommend. However, I think a lot of people are more interested in a Masterpiece Devastator than a Masterpiece Scrapper, and that's where things are a bit more questionable. The relatively small joint in Ground Bite's waist that essentially becomes the gestalt ankle seems like it could be a weak point. Time will tell if it's actually a problem, but a lot of collectors might feel like they have to make a decision now before figures start selling out. Paired with a leg mode that's definitely toy-accurate but doesn't quite match the Sunbow design and I suspect there are (or will be) better options of Devastator.

@Papa Ratthank you! I will say that the Tomahawk was on the lower end of the three for pricing when I was looking (with the defender being the highest for some reason). Relatively cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean cheap though, so fingers crossed you can find a good price!

It all depends on how aggressive customs will get.....a brown shipping box from Japan in theory should get the Japanese tarrif.....some US custom guys looking to get employee of the month may open the same box for inspection and see a toy with packaging that says "Made in China".....what happens next may cost you more than double what you paid...

Some Chinese companies have been evading US tarrifs by outsourcing their manufacturing to places like Vietnam....thus why Vietnam is getting hit hard too....so it will be interesting to see how deep the US will dig to tack on tarrifs on any merch "made in China"....and/or "for China"....the weak Yen was nice while it lasted....now we'll be back to probably the same high prices or worse....

Last I checked, if the HMR says it's Made in China, it gets tariffed as coming from China even if shipped from Japan.

they had an event March 1-17 for all the fragement items, 500 master grade kits and some fix config units. https://en.gundam.info/news/event/02_13669.html I was there early April and the MG kits were gone but they had some fix configs and merch left over from the event there so i picked one up.

Yeah, this character fits him far better than the guy that talks to fish.

I wish these were less expensive, but I did really enjoy the little stormtrooper, even though it was just a figure and blaster.

Looks like a fun one

TMNT (Mirage Comics) The Shredder: Worms of Madness.

The whole tariff thing has been kinda shifting back and forth for the most part, but I think currently it’s leaving Japan alone, while hitting China quite hard. So I’d guess that it wouldn’t be too bad to get an hmr, while unfortunately the KC stuff may end up more than double the cost. Not sure if there’s an odd loophole that allows them to ship somewhere else that would end up showing the country of origin as somewhere different, since I’m not an expert at all in this kinda thing.

They have the Fragment Gundam at the Tamashi Nations NYC store?

This show totally has a sense of humor that I’m enjoying. For an exposition episode, it was highly enjoyable. So far so good with this show. Two episodes in and I’m still enjoying it. Hopefully things don’t get totally derailed in the next episode where things go back to the main story.

Who really knows why Bandai has yet to release those long teased figures....but I can't imagine our current economic climate being very encouraging for Bandai to finally pull the trigger on any of them....I'll patiently keep waiting....and try and stay optimistic on the KC releases....

Abigail. What a good dam* movie! Hands down, now my favorite vampire movie to date!

Mine showed up today, and dang are those pieces big!

I am really enjoying Witch Watch. It wasn't even on my watch list to begin with. Episode 2 was better than 1.

There's a custom Konig with speaker pod shooting launchers, which is pretty neat, I suppose. I'm a graphic designer, so Photoshop is my forte, and I honestly find mindless tasks in it very relaxing. It's a bit of an oddity that the Cutlass uses the old concept art NOVA logo instead of either the UNS kite or the NUNS teardrop. Best explanation I can think of off of the top of my head is that, since this is in the transitionary period between UNS and NUNS, there wasn't a set logo for it to use. In all likelihood, the artist just directly referenced the Cutlass's concept art with the Nova logo. Overall the manga is /thoroughly/ unremarkable. I get the impression it was kind of only made for someone to show off their favorite obscure Valkyrie. It dangles "Basara and Gamlin will appear!" in front of the audience on covers like a carrot on a stick - which I honestly find an odd move, seeing as this is supposed to be set seven years after 7, and yet Basara doesn't seem to be the type to return to the Macross 7 unless literally dragged back. Can't have faith in our original stories, I suppose...

Worst comes to worst, I have the complete thing, I can pass it around in other places if need be.

All I could think of with folding chairs is Dark Star... But even those chairs were only beach chairs.

Has anyone had a chance to download the Alien3 4k fan edit yet?

Reaction+ Python Patrol BAT.

Star Wars TVC Snowtrooper.

i saw

These came in, too... Zombies with little brains inside them. Picked up a blind bag which were really cool, too. Magic circles and all...