Dave's Deluxe Fuzors Rant: Injector Torca (review appended to end) Looks like these are hitting Wal-Marts all over the country this week, in numbers that suggest they may be the only things in the box. A special injection of Injectors for Wal-Mart, if you will. CAPSULE An interesting balance of the cheezy and the nifty, the stable and the fragile. It's a hornet with a fish stuck on its head. Mildly recommended. $9.76 at Wal-Mart. RANT PREDACON: Injector Function: Air Commander Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (4, I concur) Quote (my addition): "I'm pretty. I'm a baaaaad man." He's got a face only a Predacon could love, but according to Injector, the vainest of the Predacons, he is the best thing to happen since Energon. Fused into two beasts - half lionfish, half hornet - he is as dangerous as it gets. He is armed with a massive stinger and thrusting splines [sic] that inject his victims with a paralyzing poison; in robot mode he wields a devastating stinger missile. Charismatic, clever and evil to the core, Injector represents one of the Maximal's [sic] greatest threats. STR 5 INT 8 SPD 8 END 7 RNK 7 COUR 8 FRP 6 SKL 7 Avg 7 The last phrase should be, "...Injector represents one of the greatest threats to the Maximals." The way it's worded, aside from the misused apostrophe, implies that he works for the Maximals. And if he's such a great threat, why aren't his stats a bit higher? It's interesting to note that now both Predacon Deluxe Fuzors are charismatic and intelligent. However, while the charisma is just a front in the case of Sky Shadow, there's no indication that Injector's self-serving tendencies extend beyond his vanity. Beast Mode: 6.5" long (17cm) with missile loaded, wingspan of 9" (23cm), and a possible height of 6" (15cm) on his rather stable legs, he's a big one in beast mode. Which doesn't stop him from being a hornet with a fish on his head. Okay, the yellow horn on the fish and the translucent red wings of the hornet help to blend the two beast forms a little better, but for Primus's sake, it's a hornet that stuck its head up a fish's backside! That really gets in the way for me. Too much of a silly combination, not to mention that it has a pretty abrupt dividing line. On the plus side, it has the strongest insect legs, bar NONE. This baby stands tall, low or any other way you want, with rock-hard stability. Not a whole lot of undercarriage garbage, although there's something of a reverse effect in the thorax, with not much being there. For gimmicks, it can fire the missile in beast mode (yes, another Buttmaster, and I coined the term for TFs long before Suzanne Somers started hawking Buttmaster exercise equipment). The mouth can open and close. And if you push forward on the side fins of the fish, the fish flops fowards and the spines spread out. It also flips forward if you handle it too roughly. And the translucent plastic of the fish head is nice, although a bit too heavily covered with metallic blue paint (hence it doesn't quite look like the picture on the package). Transformation: Pretty simple. Rotate the head, pull the arms apart and out, and adjust the legs if you put them in a weird pose for beast mode. Then pull out the face, open the feet and wonder if you did something wrong. Oh, and put the legs back on, since there's a good chance at least one popped off while you were transforming the toy. Y'see, the outside of the hip joint is too big for the region cleared for it, giving greate leverage for popping it off if you try anything too extreme with it. In the transformation back to beast mode, you'll notice that the abdomen halves on the forearms are too big, and don't mesh together. Instead, one has to overlap the other like tectonic plates, and it's ugly. Robot Mode: Gimpy body that looks like it'd be more at home on a Regular, too-wide shoulders, and WAY too big of a head. It stands 7" (18cm) tall, with nearly half of that being head (4" of body, 3" of head). On the plus side, there's a LOT of extra joints in the arms and legs, plus another waist joint put there solely for robot mode poseability (yay, a trend!). But this is offset by having several important areas restricted. The hands, while "real," are too blocked to hold the gun well. The gun, for its part, can only be held by the pegs which keep it in place in beast mode, so it looks more like Injector's just holding most of his abdomen up...it would have been a lot better to have a fold-out peg in the middle so it would look like an actual weapon. Finally, as mentioned before, the hips are messed up. They pop apart too easily because the exterior of the socket is too large for the space it inhabits. This seriously restricts motion and poseability. Cannon Mode: I discovered this mode while tooling about with the gun and seeing how well it could be held in both hands. Y'see, the problem with trying to do a two-handed gun pose is that the arms aren't long enoug to clear the huge face Injector's got, so he can only shoot down at the ground. So I closed the face in and found that the gun fit nicely in front of the fish. Various combinations of robot and insect leg poses then gave a nice emplaced cannon mode for Injector. Or straighten the legs, then push them back a bit and you have a pistol mode, although the trigger's in a bad place for this. Shockwave as a Fuzor! I'd suggest bumping his FRP up to 9 in this mode, but reducing his SPD to 5. Very angry fish. Dave Van Domelen, also found an old McDonalds food-former for a quarter today.... Dave's Deluxe Fuzor Rant: Torca Found Torca at Wal-Mart today, but not Bantor nor Buzzclaw. Dunno if I'll be able to search more this weekend, since my car started leaking antifreeze on the way back, so I left it at a service station...hope it's just a gasket or hose that can be fixed before tomorrow afternoon. CAPSULE Somewhat dubious beast mode and color scheme, okay transformation, robot mode would be better without all the beast kibble hanging off it. Some nice gimmicks, but I'm generally not keen on squirtguns. Neutral. $9.76 at Wal-Mart RANT MAXIMAL: Torca Function: Infantry General Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (4) Quote (as always, my creation): "A ferocious visage can mask a calm spirit." A grand and wise warrior, Torca commands immense respect from his fellow Maximals. Well versed in most combat techniques, Torca's agility is excellent both on land and in water, suprising [sic] considering his gigantic size and power. His massive tusks can be used to trap enemy Predacons, making close quarter combat against him practically futile. In both beast and robot mode[s] Torca can access a dorsal gun which fires spark-diminishing spray, temporarily paralyzing enemy circuits. Impenetrable armor hide and unmatchable power sufficiently discourage Predacon poachers. STR 10 INT 9 SPD 4 END 6 RNK 8 COUR 9 FRP 6 SKL 8 Avg 7.5 Note: the card still has pictures of Silverbolt, Injector, Noctorro and Terragator. Maybe the graphic art department is in a summer slump? I guess SPD of 4 is fast for his form, but really. }-> Beast Mode: Once more, we have a toy not actually packaged in proper beast mode. To get the transformation complete, you have to separate his hips and pull his legs out against the outside of his flanks. You'll know you have it right when the white hip pieces snap into place against the robot's ribcage. From underneath, this results in a cubic inch (roughly) of empty space. Proper posing seems to have the hind "knees" up against the flank pieces, and the forelegs spread out to the sides and elbows bent so that the torso is roughly horizontal. Posed this way, Torca is 4" (10cm) tall at the fin, 6" (15cm) long from tusk to tail and 4.5" (11cm) wide in stance. The main colors are dark shimmery blue for the Orca parts and gold elephant parts, with white tusks and other accents. I have no idea what the designer was thinking here...I ain't never seen no gold elephants, eh? The feet are clawed like a T-Rex, and the lower jaw full of fangs...this Fuzor defies taxonomy. I'm writing it off as an Oni (Japanese demon) and washing my hands of the whole thing. There's two gimmicks available in this mode. Well, two and a half. The squirt gun can be fired from here, although it has to be removed to be loaded. It gets only one shot, but it's a nice stream with a range of several meters (at least 3m). If you pull the gun back, the tusks pincer closed...odd, never seen an elephant do that. Finally, the half-gimmick is that if you push down on one of his ears, his upper jaw opens sort of like Snarl's. The lower jaw doesn't fully closed, but this is not because the robot head is in the way, as other reviews have suggested. The jaw is simply hinged to stop before it hits the head. I checked this by spinning the head around backwards and the lower jaw clearly was stopping before it hit the head. Transformation: Simple, but not quite as simple as suggested by the way the toy is packaged, since there's an extra step they left out of putting it in beast mode. But it is still mostly a matter of standing the thing up and moving beast kibble out of the way. I was particularly disappointed that the foreclaws stay hanging on the fists and don't move out of the way or detach (well, with a screwdriver they detach, but...). Robot Mode: 5" (13cm) tall at the head, tack on another inch and a half (3cm) for the tusks. The tusks help given the head an Evil Overlord Helmet look, along with the skullish shaping and the grille mouth. The horns very strongly remind me of Tim Curry's character from Legend. The head can turn, and the tusk-moving mechanism works even when the head is turned, but you have to get the beast head halves well out of the way first, and it's clumsy. The color scheme looks better in robot mode, with gold dominating, white second and then blue and red accenting. There's too many beast kibble bits hanging off the robot, however...the flank pieces don't even fold all the way out of the way, and the tail doesn't fold all the way into the gap in the back left by the removal of the gun. And the lower incisors of the jaw give Torca a codpiece of sorts. Ah yes, the gun. While it is a pretty good squirt gun, the handle is way too far forward, so Torca can only hold it while his arm is fully straight. It's not quite as awkward as Injector's gun, but it could be better. The way the pelvis forms means that there's no waist joint, and since there's no swivel joints on the thighs, it's very easy to pop the pelvis apart when you're trying to pose the figure. At least there's two ankle joints on each foot (front and back pieces). The arms have ball joint shoulders, swivel and hinge on elbows, and ball joint wrists...but since there's these Hugh Jass claws hanging off the fists, the ball joints aren't as useful as they might be. Finally, the beast tail can be used as a third leg for some poses, it holds pretty well. Overall: Ehh. It has some good points and no single horrible point, but there's a lot of weak stuff in this one. Just a little more range in some of the transformation joints (to get stuff fully out of the way) would have gone a long way to fixing many of these problems...as would a better color scheme. But I can't really recommend dropping ten bucks on this one unless you're really hungry for new toys (in which case you might check out a different toy line, a bunch of stuff shipped this week, and the Knights of Tir Na Nog look good, I'll be reviewing one of them next, for the action figures newsgroup). Looks okay standing around in robot mode, but lacks in play value. Dave Van Domelen, REALLLLLY hopes it's just a hose or gasket or something cheap and not a hole in the radiator itself....