Dave's TF Beast Wars Rant: Deluxe Beasts For review of the packaging and general line, see the Leaders Pack Rant. CAPSULES Dinobot - Undercarriage garbage problem in beast form, robot mode not as stable as I'd like, Mutant Head fails. However, poseable, durable, neat gimmick, overall pretty good. Recommended. Waspinator - Very nice transform, lots of things to do, although not as solid in beast mode as I'd like. Good gimmick and poseability, although the insect front legs get in the way. Recommended. Tarantulas - Very good in both modes. Fairly sturdy, although transform is a little too simple. Very good gimmicks. Strongly Recommended. Cheetor - Okay animal mode, not too much undercarriage garbage. Pretty complex transformation, reasonably poseable robot mode, weapons not too bad. Mildly recommended. Overall - Medium-sized toys, good colors, mutant head trick works two out of three times. All have the "Tailgunner" gimmick, with parts of their hindquarters becoming their weapons. Good set. $9.99 at Target or TRU. RANTS Maximal: Dinobot Function: Frontline Combat Secret Weapon Location: Sword inside tail, tail becomes slashing weapon No quote. Note: As if torn from the pages of earth's prehistoric past, a vicious velociraptor breathes again! But Dinobot is no ordinary 'raptor, he's a robot in disguise battling beside his heroic teammates, the Maximals! Armed with a spinning cyber-slash tail weapon and always hungry for battle, Optimus Primal considers him a natural combat expert who has clawed his way to the top one victory after another! STR 8 INT 5 SPD 9 END 5 RNK 6 COUR 9 FRP 6 SKL 6 Avg 6.75 The notes on the Deluxe seem a bit more "rah rah!" hypish than on the Regulars, and this one's the worst. Note that Dinobot is a *registered* trademark, so they don't have to worry as much about losing it from disuse (unlike Megatron, which is not a registered TM). Raptor form: Very poseable, jaw tends to hang open, though. Forearms are on limited ball-and-socket joints rather than simple swivels, which is nice. There's a mysterious peg on his back that is not used in the transformation, and I suspect it may be an artifact of the old Jurassic Park 'raptor mold used to make the outer parts of this toy. The legs of the robot form just sort of hang on his underside, though, wrecking the illusion. Transformation: Quite complex and involved. You have to remember to turn his head backwards before transforming to raptor mode, for example. However, it's a royal pain getting his arms into the right position, since the shoulder pieces don't fit onto pegs or anything, and are sometimes easier to move than the parts you *want* to move. Robot form: Stocky and powerful-looking. The feet are poseable enough to allow for many stances (like Dreadwing's Smokescreen part), but there are some problems. The biggest is that parts of the rotating shoulderblade unit get in the way of the hips and restrict leg movement some. In addition, the "mutant head" trick just doesn't work well, there's not enough room for it to fully clear the regular head. However, it is easily removed and replaced, so you can just pull the thing off. Oh, and he's about 5 inches tall in robot mode, compared to the 3 and 3/4 inch tall Regular Beasts. Weapons: The sword hiding in the tail is nice enough, my main complaint is in how it attaches to the hand, essentially forming a long claw or something. Dinobot can only thrust, Primal can only slash. So it goes. The rotary weapon is slightly marred by the fact its halves are curved, and you can't close the hand's claws around it without making it pop out. The mechanism works quite well, however. Modifications Suggested: Remove Mutant Head pieces. You'll never miss the dratted things. Predacon: Waspinator Function: Aerial Attack Secret Weapon Location: Launcher within back/missiles beneath wings No quote. Note: Like a rattle snake's [sic] tail before an attack, a chilling sound buzzes in the distance as if to forecast approaching danger. Suddenly from the sky the giant wasp appears, revealing its monstrous face and bulging eyes as it streaks down for an aerial attack! The Waspinator launches its secret wing missiles, striking the helpless victims below with the poisonous power of a robotic cyber-sting! STR 8 INT 5 SPD 8 END 5 RNK 6 COUR 7 FRP 7 SKL 6 Avg 6.5 Ye gods, that's a badly written note. Painfully purple. And inaccurate, too...he's making a *ground* attack. }-> Wasp form: As soon as I saw this in the package, I realized it was Ransack Done Right. Sure, it's a wasp, but the transformation scheme looks very much like the Deluxe Insecticon's. Anyway, the front legs are held in place by weak tab-and-slots and the rear legs aren't as poseable as I'd like. A fairly passive beast mode. The wings are on ball joints and fairly movable. Transformation: Very nice transformation of the insect rear legs into robot legs, on a par with Ransack's but not quite identical. Arms pretty much just pull out, the simplest part of the transform. Then you pull the insect head apart and down to form two sides of the chest, but before you're done, you have a choice to make: which head to use. By opening panels in front and back of the chest, you can rotate either the normal robot head or the insectlike mutant head into place...careful, the heads can pop off. That done, then you secure the sides of the chest in place with pegs. Also, if you don't like the front four legs of the wasp hanging off the robot's arms, they're easily removed. Robot mode: Also 5" tall, it's a very cool robot once you pull off the extra legs. The arms use a joint system very similar to Smokescreen's, although the fists are not movable. This one actually retains the glowing eyes siganture of G2 toys, and even has a slight "glowing chin" effect. }-> The only real flaw in the robot mode (other than the insect legs) is that the feet are fixed, not hinged, which slightly limits the poseability. Weapons: Waspinator's stinger pulls out to form a gun, and the missiles are snapped into his translucent wings. The appearance of the missiles suggests that they are supposed to be liquid blasts (poison), but that the manufacturers finally realized that squirting transformers weren't necessarily a good idea. A thin film coating on the wings and missiles gives them that oily sheen we see on real insect wings, nice touch. Effective range is about 2 meters. Modifications Suggested: In robot mode, remove the forelegs of the wasp from the robot's arms. Predacon: Tarantulas Function: Ninja Warrior Secret Weapon Location: Launcher within back/legs are hidden missiles No quote. Note: An eight-armed master of the martial arts, this ninja nightmare slashes his way through battle virtually unstoppable! The heroic Optimus Primal suspects him of being responsible for the disappearances of numerous earthlings, and recent rumors suggest the existence of giant cocoons where Tarantulas may store his unfortunate prey. He must be stopped before he spins his web of terror across the galaxy! STR 8 INT 4 SPD 7 END 6 RNK 5 COUR 7 FRP 7 SKL 8 Avg 6.5 Bad name. Tarantulas don't use webs. Not that Tarantulas looks much like a tarantula anyway. }-> Oh, and Tarantulas, meet Rattrap...I'm sure you two would like to compare notes on how unsavory you've been portrayed as. Spider mode: Limited poseability via the front four legs. Lineshooter can actually be fired in beast mode, letting you dangle this guy by his line in a window or something. Translucent parts make dangling him in a window highly desirable...the nine spider eyes will glow in sunlight quite nicely. Only a slight undercarriage problem with his robot legs. Transformation: Simplest of the lot. Pull down the legs, pull out the arms, fold down the front, then adjust feet and spiderlegs. Gun pulls out of abdomen easily, although the grapple must be removed first. The mutant head is just a swivel away from the robot head, and this is the one case where the mutant head looks better than the robot one. Robot mode: There's only one problem, and that's the forearms/claws. They look like they're on backwards. Otherwise, this is a very good robot form. It's stable, the extra insect legs all gather together in one direction and look cool that way, the legs are impressive, the feet pose, etc. A touch over five inches tall. Weapons: The grappling line is hooked to his abdomen, and it's way too short, allowing the hook to travel about three inches from the gun. I'd suggest either snipping the string and inserting an extension (you need to take the toy apart to put in 100% new string) or just use the grapple in spider mode. The gun has two triggers, one on top and one on bottom (so it can be fired while stored). The bottom (back of spider) trigger's easy to use, but the main gun trigger is stiff and hard to operate. The front four legs can be detached and fired as missiles with a range of about 3 meters. When you're using missiles, you can sort of store the hook on his back. Maximal: Cheetor Function: Jungle Patrol Secret Weapon Location: Tail becomes cannon/stomach becomes squirter No quote. Like a bolt of greased lightning, Cheetor strikes fast and strikes hard. Quiet and confident with incredible reflexes, he is equally efficient when battling in robot mode or in his artificially enhanced organic earth form. Constantly stalks the jungle in search of Predacon enemies, daring them to challenge him and his laser-powered quasar cannon! STR 6 INT 5 SPD 10 END 8 RNK 6 COUR 9 FRP 7 SKL 7 Tot 58 Avg 7.25 In beast mode, Cheetor is almost totally unposeable, about as bad as the other mammalian Maximals. His back legs move, and that's about it... if you move his front legs, you expose his robot bits. His squirt gun can be fired in beast mode, which leads to some...disturbing imagery. I'll skip ahead for a moment and cover his weapons. Apparently they used the delay to redesign both of his weapons, both the squirter and the tail cannon. The tail gun had been designed like Razorbeast's hairpiece, but got redesigned so that the tail itself flips back to reveal a much less dorky barrel. I'm going to assume this is the quasar cannon, BTW. The squirter was rebuilt so that the entire back half was the reservoir, instead of just a bulb hidden behind the stomach. This also toned down the gross factor a little...originally the bulb was to be pinkish and look like intestines...now there's just intestine-shape molding on the yellow plastic of the bulb. The upshot of this is that the squirt cannon is basically firing the contents of his digestive system at people. GROSS. To transform, first you have to pull off the butt and the gut (the two weapons). Then you get the robot legs down by a series of rotations of hips and thighs (which can be painful unless you're a skilled contortionist, but I kid). Then you rotate the forelegs out of the way and to some pulling apart and twisting and stuff to get the arms set up. Finally, you pull and rotate and snap and etc to the cat head to get it into position as the chestplate...this can take a bit of force to get it right, and even more to undo it in the reverse transformation. All in all, not a bad transform. Oh, and you have the option of a mutant head, but I'd suggest ignoring it. The robot mode could be better, frankly. My main problem with it arises from the hips. There's not enough clearance to move the leg forward more than about 30 degrees, so most neat poses are out. I tried fixing this by simply not rotating the hips, but then the pelvis plate doesn't fold down correctly. The feet are pretty rigid, adding to the poseability problem. OTOH, it does have swivel hips, the arms have full SmokescreenG2 motion and the head's movable on two axes. In general, there's also just a few too many extra bits of cat floating around on the robot mode. Modifications Suggested: No parts to remove this time, but I'd suggest reversing the legs in robot mode. Snap them off at the hips (nice ball joints) and put them on the opposite sides. This improves the poseability of the figure dramatically. It'll make the beast mode look a little worse, but the rear legs of the cat mode frankly couldn't look too much gimpier anyway.