The Unlicensed Third Party Transformers Thread

[Kuma Style]

 

[Mechapilot77]

On 2/16/2022 at 10:18 PM, mikeszekely said:

Feels like I should have had this up over the weekend, but to be honest some personal issues have had me in a bit of a funk lately, and I really didn't feel like transforming everyone and putting this thing together.  This thing being Generation Toys' Guardian, their combined Defensor.

Admittedly, I think Guardian looks cool.  The realistic, modern alt modes come through on this guy every well.  The fencing and spotlights are cool details on the torso, and I dig the red accents.  Some elements, like the way part of the roof with the rotors shifts up over the canopy on Blades reminds me of Maketoys' Defensor, which was a similarly modernized take on the character.

Size-wise, by now there will be more or less universal agreement that Guardian is too small to be Masterpiece when combined, as he's certain to be significantly shorter than MMC or XTB's (assuming that MMC's is the same size as their Bruticus and XTB's is the same size as their Menasor).  He will, however, fit it just fine with Unique Toys' Abominus, GT's Devastator, Warbotron's Bruticus and Computron, TFC's Piranacon, etc.  Which, y'know, was probably a lot more exciting five years ago when GT announced this thing.

So, a few notes on him... that white piece that came with Foo Fighter that we didn't really talk about?  Well, when you transform Blades into his arm mode (as above) you'll notice that his arms don't actually tab together.  There are some flaps on them that do, but it's a pretty tenuous grip.  The white part fits over the flaps on Blades' arms, locking the whole thing together much more securely.  Unfortunately, that might be about the only thing that's secure on him, as the panels that grab into his waist don't do the best job at it, and the roof kind of just lays over the canopy.

Oh, and that blue part that goes on Foo Fighter's alt mode but not his robot mode?  Doesn't have a purpose in combined mode, either.

Foo Fighter's guns double as guns for Guardian, but they do a bit of transforming on their own.  The barrels slide out to make them bigger, and the handles that Foo Fighter hold fold in while larger silver handles fold out.

This is the part where I'd put him in a dynamic pose and write about the articulation.  You may have noticed that this is not a particularly dynamic pose.  This is because I have nothing but problems with him.  His head doesn't want to stay in place atop his torso.  The ratchet for his shoulder rotation on First Aid is either defective or broken, because it feels super soft and does not support the weight of his arm.  On Blades, the inability of the panels that are supposed to lock into his waist to actually lock in means that his forearm bends inward.  The way-too-tight hip ratchets on Foo Fighter are still way too tight for Guardian, so I just don't feel comfortable messing with them.  Other stuff might not break outright while you're messing with him, but his abs want to split apart, the sides of his chest keep coming untabbed, the windows along his back don't stay in, and twice now I've had one of the spotlights near his neck pop off.  Top it all off with the fact that the tolerances for the tabs on his guns that are supposed to go into slots on his wrists are a bit off so he holds them a bit poorly.

As you'd expect from a figure announced before the Menasor Wars, Guardian is a dated design that already had an uphill battle.  But where GT had an opportunity to finish strong and carve a niche with fans who like the more stylized, IDW-esque designs and 15" combiners you get the impression that they just gave up.  Despite taking five years this thing still feels rushed.  This set is plagued with questionable design decisions that don't hold up in 2022, magnified by poor materials and shoddy construction.  To be frank, while the individual bots range from poor to pretty decent on their own and the combined Guardian looks kind of cool, once you start to handle him it becomes evident that he's trash.  Utter rubbish.  I do not, in any capacity, recommend this set.  At this point, even if you're thinking that you prefer the stylized look over a more G1 design, even if you're looking for a shorter companion piece for TFM's Menasor or GT's Devastator, you're still going to have a much better time if you just buy MMC's instead.

its a shame.  i think they went the old route of releasing limbs and assumed they could get everything together at the end with the main bot (remember tfc hercules and mmc feral rex days?).  personally i think they realized it wasn't gonna work so well, hence the delay to try to fix things.  at some point they probably realized REALLY fixing it would cost too much or just wasn't possible with the other design decisions they made and management said.....go recoup some of this cost.  release it as best you can already.   i think GT is upon some harder times.  their pretty damn good sideswipe bull didn't sell well (i think you can still get it from some places almost 2 years later).  they've been reissuing and redeco'ing everything (Well except their j4zz which i still want!) under the sun from the white magnus ape, to the 2 giftbox sets of their devy (differnet decos), to their blingy TFM menasor release, to the mainly dark traslucent bomber megs...all wtithout releasing anything new except finishing this set out with their hotspot.  anyway i guess i'm glad i stopped at streetwise as i was always fine with another finely updated carbot (and he is really good in my opinion) in mp scale.  money saved for me i guess but sad this didn't turn out to be the knockout set the early days of these releases made it seem like it might be.  at lesat combined mode does look good.

[Kuma Style]

 

[Kuma Style]

 

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[sh9000]

[Kuma Style]

 

 

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[Ignacio Ocamica]

Bought silver legs Optimus Prime:

[Convectuoso]

Deformation Space Blaster

[Ignacio Ocamica]

Don't want to fall through the Legends rabbit hole!!!!

[mikeszekely]

6 minutes ago, Ignacio Ocamica said:

Don't want to fall through the Legends rabbit hole!!!!

I feel you.  That Blaster is MP-scaled, though.

I dunno.  Is it still a prototype?  The colors look kind of flat.  The shape is more cartoon-accurate than KFC's, but I kind of prefer KFC's overall.

[Convectuoso]

Yes, it's MP scaled, and looks like a prototype. Let's wait and see what the actual product looks like. Their Starscream was really good

[mikeszekely]

Y'know, maybe Legends is still too big.  Fortunately, long-time maker of 3rd party accessories is filling a void I didn't know existed until I needed a little extra something or I was going to get hit with shipping on something else.  Today, we're taking a look at Prime Commander, an Optimus Prime so tiny he makes Core-class seem huge.

See, I wasn't kidding!  Prime Commander comes up to Core-class Prime's waist, and Core-class Prime was already much shorter than Magic Square's Prime.  Now, sure, at that size things have to be relatively simple, so he's got those flaps along the sides of his legs and the lower half of the cab face on his back.  I might be nitpicking to suggest it would have also been nice if Dr Wu had painted the blue section of his undercarriage, especially since Hasbro couldn't be bothered to do it or the yellow details on a larger figure.  The proportions are a bit squat as well.  Still, while these are definitely things I'd be bagging hard on a MP-scale figure, a Titan Master standing on the shoulders of a second Titan Master is taller than this guy.  He's similar in size to Siege Rumble or Kingdom Eject.  And at this size I'm willing to forgive a bit more.

Prime Commander comes with a fair amount of accessories to boot.  You get the trailer, a rifle, and a pair of mechanical arms.

The doors on the trailer open, and you can pop a Micromaster in there (or, presumably, other figures Dr. Wu decides to release in this line, of which a few exist and a few more are being solicited for preorders).  And, like the G1/MP/Earthrise trailers, the entire thing splits open to reveal... well, not much.  There's no Roller (although Dr Wu is making/has made one).  There's no repair drone.  The trailer doors are there, dangling off the sides, but there's no ramp.  Like some takes I've seen on Prime's trailer, the bottom section with the wheels can detach, as it's kind of just pegged on, but it doesn't do anything.  There's no fold out supports or anything, either.

What there is inside, though, is a couple of peg holes.  And we can do some stuff with that.

For one, the mechanical arms have pegs on either side of the base, and the rifle has a peg on one side.  Utilizing these pegs and holes allows you to store the arms and the gun securely inside the trailer, rather than just tossing them in the back and letting them rattle around.  The arms also have pegs on the back of the base, so they can plug in perpendicularly and not just parallel.  This allows you to pose them in sort of a repair bay look.  Just be advised that the arms are not articulated.

Prime Commander himself is, though, and arguably better than the official Micromasters.  His head is on a ball joint that can swivel and let him look up, but nothing really down and no sideways tilt.  His shoulders are on ball joints for swiveling and the backwards butterfly that's integral to most Primes transformations, but he's got a dedicated pin hinge for 90 degrees of lateral motion.  His elbow is a ball joint that bends 90 degrees and doubles as a bicep swivel.  No hand or wrist articulation.  His waist doesn't actually swivel, but due to transformation he swivels between his chest and grill, and that's good enough.  He's also got a bit of an ab crunch, although it looks a bit weird since his upper torso moves but the grill on his tummy doesn't.  The ball joints on his hips get a little under 90 degrees forward, backward, or laterally.  Sadly, they also have to provide what limited thigh swivel he's got.  His knees can bend almost 90 degrees, and the toes are on ball joints so they can point down or they can swivel in such a way that he's got the appearance of ankle pivots.

His gun is kind of interesting.  Rather than using an extremely small peg and extremely small fist holes, the handle has a weird L-shaped handle.  What happens is that butt of the rifle and the L-shaped handle work more like a C-clip, clamping on around his fist.  Dunno how it'll hold up long-term, but for how it's quite secure.

Prime Commander's transformation is fairly simple (although more complex than anything Hasbro's offering at this size), and indeed it's not far off from what the Core-class toy does.  The simple nature of the transformation does mean that he's got fairly obvious legs and pelvis, and there's nothing really filling in the back and covering his head, either.  That said, at least his toes fold down, and the panels on the sides of his legs fold around to fill in the bottom of the cab, so I think the truck is arguably better than the Core-class toy.

Of course, you can block the view of Prime's head by pairing the cab with the trailer, which the Core-class toy lacks.  And the whole package is so tiny it almost looks like you could park it in the Magic Square trailer (You can't, though; the repair drone takes up too much space, and the Dr Wu trailer is too big to close the Magic square trailer around. It'd totally fit in the Earthrise one, though).  All of the wheels work, too, which is another thing that you don't always get at this size.

The trailer connects by using a white tab with a notch on it.  The notch fits around the two tabs that lock Prime Commander's legs together, and the hold is fairly solid.  If you pick up the combined truck by the trailer, the cab isn't going to fall off.  The notched tab is on a swivel, too, so the can can swivel for turning truck poses.

I suppose, when seeing that Dr Wu is making these tiny figures now, two questions are going to spring to mind.  The first, most obvious one is probably, "why would I want Transformers even smaller than Legends?"  The second is, "Why is a 3rd party well-known for making accessories for official figures dabbling in whole figures after all these years?"  I'd venture that the answer to both of those questions is the same.  Namely, these little figures are accessories.  Specifically, these figures are designed to compliment Hasbro's Titan Class figures.  The Ark is a great example.  You may recall from my review that it's got a button on the rear that drops down a ramp.  This ramp is seen often in the G1 cartoon, but as I pointed out in my review the ramp on the toy is so small that only a Micromaster could actually use it.  So instead of driving Roadhandler in and calling it a day, Dr. Wu went and made a Micromaster Optimus that can drive up it.  Or, you can simply pose them together in bot mode, to give your Titan a larger sense of scale.  And when you're re-enacting the Fall of Cybertron game with your Titan Metroplex, well, he looks a lot more intimidating with a tiny Prime on his shoulder than with one as big as his forearm.

Which brings me to another point- these things are priced like accessories.  In an area where even a new Legends-class figure from NewAge or Magic Square is guaranteed to be $50 or more, Prime Commander is right around $30, and he's available in regular, Nemesis, Shattered Glass, and dead colors.  Other figures from this line are solid in pairs for the same price.  So no, mini MPs these are not and I wouldn't seriously advocate collecting Prime Commander in place of a proper Legends/CHUG/MP Prime.  As a reasonably-priced accessory for Hasbro's Titans, though, he's not a bad deal.  I'd even recommend Prime Commander if you want a simple, small transforming Prime as a permanent desk bot.  Because, I'll be honest, TFSource wanted me to ship a figure I'd had sitting in a stack waiting since November for something else to come along, and it was either spend at least $30 on something else or pay for shipping.  I figured if I was going to have to spend I might as well have something to show for it, and at worst I'd have a little Prime for my largish Prime collection.  I wound up enjoying this figure so much, though, that I ordered two more sets (Galvatron with Soundblaster, and Soundwave with Beachcomber) currently available and I'll probably preorder the others as they come out.

[Kuma Style]

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[CoryHolmes]

Has any new information about James//Bond come out?  Everything I see still references those original CGI renders.

[mikeszekely]

1 hour ago, CoryHolmes said:

Has any new information about James//Bond come out?  Everything I see still references those original CGI renders.

Last I heard XTB was shooting for summer, but they're always late and their production gets shuffled. I think their next release will be the red Omnibot.

Edited March 4, 2022 by mikeszekely

[Convectuoso]

More pics of DS-02 Blaster

[sh9000]

https://www.thechosenprime.com/ds02g1barh

[Kuma Style]

[Convectuoso]

 

 

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[M'Kyuun]

17 hours ago, Convectuoso said:

 

 

Wow, excellent! Y'know, I could get behind a show done entirely in stop motion given the quality of today's toys, especially the legends stuff, which really lends itself well to the craft. Hat's off to the producers- it's a tedious, time-consuming, and meticulous art to achieve good stop-motion- I would have been thrilled with just the show intro, but to do a whole ep is really cool. My nostalgia's running high.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

 

[sh9000]

Those are awesome videos.

[Kuma Style]

 

[mikeszekely]

It's kind of funny, not long ago I was reviewing XTB's Perceptor, then last week I was in the other thread talking about the new Studio Series Perceptor.  A few days ago I was over there talking about the Target-exclusive Buzzworthy repaint of Studio Series Kup, and now, even though I technically bought him months ago, I just shipped and am now finally talking about XTB's Locke, their MP-style Kup.

First impressions are a big deal, and I have to say that when I took this guy out of the box I thought he had some nice heft, but something just felt... I dunno, off.  Now, this should be the V2 version of Locke- apparently, the initial release was so plagued by poor QC that XTB stopped shipping it, tweaked the design a bit, then sent everyone who did buy the original a new, revised copy.

In any case, I think the sculpt is pretty good.  My only real complaint here is that his chest looks a little short and his abs a little long compared to the animation mode, and there's some extra paint on his feet that kind of just makes them look messy.  The animation model's feet are the same color as the rest of his shin.  A bit closer inspection will reveal that the color on his thighs doesn't totally match the hips, but it's one of those things that if I didn't mention it you might not even notice.

(Side note... dear Primus, MP-28 has not held up well, has he? I wonder when Takara will get around to MP Hot Rod 3.0?)

He does have a bit of a backpack, but it's smaller and neater than the one Fans Toys' is carrying around.  What's interesting is XTB went out of their way to make the backpack and butt flaps accurate to the animation model- that wider-at-the-bottom shape with the raised circle on the backpack, and the straight across butt flap with the vertical lines at the bottom, that's on the Sunbow sheet.  A part of me wants to appreciate that attention to detail.  Another part of me questions if it was actually worth it.

Locke come with a few accessories.  There's a pair of Targetmasters, presumably one for Locke himself and another for MP-28 Hot Rod.  You get Kup's rifle, with a metallic gray coat of paint, and a Sharkticon tail.  You get three alternate faces to replace the default stoic expression, one happy, one yelling, and one smoking a cy-gar.  You get an alternate top for his head (the default one is dome-shaped, the alternate is flat.  And you get an alternate pair of hands, which I'm not entirely sure about.  They have the same articulation as the default hands (more on that in a bit), same color, etc.  The only difference that I can tell is that the fingers are slightly thicker.

Ok, we've cover the Targetmasters real quick.  To be frank, they're terrible.  The one on the left should be Recoil, Kup's buddy, and the one on the right should be Firebolt, Hot Rod's partner.  They're a weird mash of toy and cartoon details; Recoil's gray face is a toy thing (black in the cartoon), Firebolt's gray face is a cartoon thing (red on the toy), but his arms should also be gray then... whatever.  Recoil's head can swivel, but Firebolt's is on a ball joint with some additional up/down/sideways tilt.  Both of them have ball joints for shoulders (swivel and 90 degrees lateral), ball joints for elbows (90 degrees of bend, acts as bicep swivels), ball joints for hips (90 degrees forward/backward/laterally), too-tight hinged knees (90 degrees), and ball jointed ankles (swivels, some up/down tilt, but not much pivot).  No wrist or waist swivels, but due to transformation they can ab crunch.

Transformation on these guys is simple, yet somehow still a failure.  Their arms are supposed to tab into their hips, but they don't stay very well.  The legs don't tab into anything, not even each other, so the transformation is really more like bending over and hoping friction keeps everything in place.  What's more, Firebolt is kind of upside down compared to his character model.  This is correct, according to his instructions, but you'll note that the halves of his handle are hinged and look like they should swing around so he could be held right side up.  However, the halves of the handle won't tab together that way, nor can they fully extend due to tabs that overhang and block them.  Tabs that don't actually plug into anything, mind you.

As far as being held as weapons, Locke can hold either of them, although more from the tension in his fingers than from the slots on the handles plugging into his palms.  I couldn't fit Firebolt into Hot Rod's hands, though.

Mediocre sculpts, mediocre articulation, and half-arsed transformations that can barely pass as weapons are all bad enough, but I can't stress how cheap they feel.  Their actual pelvis is basically a dumbbell with the ball as the hip joint.  In the middle of the dumbbell is an upside-down U, and a screw runs through it into their crotches.  The U has already broken on Firebolt.

Locke himself has a head on a hinged swivel, so he can look up but not so much down and no sideways tilt.  Shoulders swivel and move laterally over 90 degrees.  His biceps swivel, and his elbows are double-hinged and collectively bend nearly 180 degrees.  His wrists swivel.  His hands are a bit different.  His thumb is fixed.  His hand has a hinge at the base of the palm, so he can open his hand like he's doing a "stop" gesture, then there's an additional hinge at the base of the fingers, which are molded into a curl.  The index finger is it's own thing, but the other three are a solid piece.  Moving along, his waist can swivel, and he's got 90 degrees of ab crunch.  The flaps on his hips, butt, and pelvis hinge out of the way so his hips can move just under 90 degrees forward and backward on a very soft ratchet, and just under 90 degrees laterally on a friction joint.  His thighs swivel, and his knees are single hinges that bend a little over 90 degrees.  His feet can tilt down, and the front of his foot can tilt up (the hinge is a little loose on my copy), and his ankles can pivot.  Technically, up to 180 degrees, but the shape of his leg around the hinge is going to practically limit you to 45 degrees, maybe a little less.

As noted when discussing the Targetmasters, his hands (both sets) have slots in the palm, and there are tabs on the handles of his rifle and the Sharkticon tail.  The tail seems pretty snug, but the rifle is pretty loose and held mostly by the tension in his fingers.  This was true for both sets of hands, which are just pegged into his wrists, BTW.  Just yank 'em out and plug in the others if you prefer.  The faces are held in place around his forehead crest, and the top of his head is tabbed in around it.  They just pop off if you want to swap 'em; I like the round head, not sure which face to use.  They all look like accurate Kup faces to me.  Even though it's a comics thing, not a cartoon thing, I kind of like the one with the cy-gar.

Here's were things start to get dicey for me... transforming Locke is a huge pain in the rear.  His legs aren't too bad, but turning his chest and backpack into the front of the car while tucking in his arms and head is torture.  Nothing movies smoothly, and its the sort of thing were you move stuff just to get it out of the way, except it's never really out of the way.  The joints that move his hips out are thin and, while I can't say I've had any issues so far, feel like they could be a potential break point.  Even after you manage to finagle things mostly in place there's stuff that just doesn't seem to line up quite right, and gaps where things are supposed to lock in.  Some tabs require to you bend the plastic to get them lined up just right, with the worst offender being the bed of the truck, which is on an armature that needs to be forced under his butt flaps despite there being no gap to go through.  Still, the real kicker is that parts were coming off on my copy during transformation.  Going into truck mode, the lighter-colored panel on the inside of his one ankle came off.  I glued it back in place.  Going back to bot, the same piece came off the opposite side, plus the panel at the top of his backpack that his head flap tabs into fell off.  These are all things that are/should be glued at the factory, and I just glued them back on.  They haven't come off since, but I also haven't tried transforming him again (and probably never will).

But the result is... honestly, pretty good.  I mean, if you look at him from dead on at the front you can see the head flap and some parts of his collar kind of dangling there, and there's some of the aforementioned gaps that happen to run through the front windshield and the dark spots on the sides, sure.  There's molded lines for taillights, but they're not painted.  He's got a cartoon-accurate bumper running around the back, which is a nice touch.  The rounded bits on the outside aren't actually on the animation model, but they're a necessity for robot-mode, so I'll let it slide.  If you look closely you'll note that the blue-grays used for the windshield don't match above and below the seam, which can make the windshield seem smaller as the top comes across as part of the roof instead.  Curiously, I'll note that the cab is one color (minus the fenders and the cartoon-accurate dark side windows).  This was something I just criticized the repainted Studio Series figure for doing, as I said that it doesn't match the animation model.  What's more, I noticed that Fans Toys also used one color for the cab.  Well, here's the thing about that.  If you're looking at some pictures, including stills from after he transforms at the end of the movie when they're leaving Unicron, the back of the cab does match his fenders, like the first version of the SS toy.  That makes it lighter than the front of the cab, like the G1 toy.  However, Kup is depicted inconsistently in the movie.  Right after he transforms when they're fighting the Sharkticons the back of the cab is lighter, but for the rest of that scene the whole cab is the same color.  And other Sunbow sheets show the cab as one color.  So, I guess this actually is accurate, and now I'm thinking it's a another point in favor of the Buzzworthy re-release of SS Kup.

Kup rolls fine, on rubber tires.  The Targetmasters plug into their respective partner vehicles.  For Firebolt, as long as you keep his handle together (easier said than done) you can filp open his engine and plug the handle into the square-shaped hole.  For Recoil, there are tabs on his shoulders that grab into slots on the backs of Locke's legs.

There doesn't seem to be any intended place to store his rifle, though, which is too bad because that's the actual weapon I'd want to use with him, not those very crappy Targetmasters.  However, I was kind of able to tuck it between the backpack remnants between his back wheels and under his front hip skirt.  It doesn't lock in place and will rattle around, but it seems to be secure enough that it won't fall out.

I don't have a lot of positives to say about Locke.  I mean, I guess he looks nice on a shelf, and he fills a hole in my MP collection.  Considering I got him for around $100 on a Black Friday sale, that'll do, I guess.  Especially when the only competition is Fans Toys' wildly overpriced and just as PITA to transform version.  So what am I supposed to say here?  No, I don't really recommend Locke, but if I wouldn't recommend FT's either and those are your only choices then you have to decide which of the two is the lesser of evils.  For me, that's Locke, but he's definitely just a placeholder.  If someone else takes a stab at him (especially MMC/Ocular Max) then Locke's coming off the shelf (and possibly into the trash).

[Kuma Style]

 

[sh9000]

 

 

[Scyla]

Nice review @mikeszekely. The only thing I have to add is that MP-28 always was a terribly bad rendition of Hot Rod. Much to my surprise FTs Hoodlum was also a failure. Especially since FT could have knocked it out of the park and really made a name for themselves being the better manufacturer of MP robots.

On the other hand the official MP line was on a downhill slope after MP Bumblebee so I guess FansToys won by default?

[Convectuoso]

DS-02

Magic Square's Hound

Edited March 8, 2022 by Convectuoso