Dave's Beast Hunters Rant: Deluxe Wave 3 Skystalker (dragon) Autobot Ratchet (retool with beast bits) Dreadwing (beasty jet) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/Deluxe7 Slowly working through my backlog, there's actually another wave to come out since this one. Dreadwing is another like Starscream, where it's designed to look like a retool that adds beast elements, but there was never a Deluxe Dreadwing released. That's not to say there was never one designed, of course, but you can't really call something a retool if this is the first time they've actually sent it to production. Digiretool? ;) http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/Deluxe1a - Original Ratchet CAPSULES $10-15 price point Skystalker: Decent in both modes, uninspired transformation, but way too dependant on joints being tighter than Hasbro can reliably provide. As a result, it's a gappy, somewhat floppy mess. Mildly recommended. Ratchet: Original mold was recommended, and the whole Dinobot/Dinobot II vibe on this design is a strong selling point for anyone who remembers Beast Wars (which, admittedly, requires DVD-watching for anyone in the target demographic for the toy). It doesn't really work for me as a Ratchet upgrade, but it's a decent retool in its own right. Recommended. Dreadwing: Speaking of Dinobot, this guy certainly turned into a similar type of character in the show. With one glaring exception, they did a nice job of making the beast elements subtle and the colors in keeping with the character design. Vehicle mode is really too bulky and robot kibbled, but there's a good gerwalk mode you can make. Recommended. RANTS Packaging: Same as the previous two waves of Beast Hunters deluxes. Cosells are the other two in the wave, plus Bulkhead. No functions or mottos, they're my own versions here. The storyline picks up from Shockwave: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Prime/VShockwave Chapter 12: Skystalker SKYSTALKER slides from the murky numbness of his Hyperevolution Chamber and into the heat of battle. His Spark aches to join th ebattle, but his instincts tell him to wait, to understand where he is. Even as the battle between SMOKESCREEN and SHOCKWAVE continues to rage, he takes a moment to look around. He stands in a room full of unfamiliar equipment - a room he nonetheless recognizes as a laboratory. A laboratory in which he - and possibly other PREDACONS - have been experimented on. His cold, calculating mind is suddenly submerged in anger. His wings spread, and a devastating barrage of white-hot discs fly, burning, blasting and melting all around him. Chapter 13: Autobot Ratchet AUTOBOT RATCHET scowls at the data discs recovered from the DECEPTICON lab by SMOKESCREEN. Most of them are useless - charred or cracked by the same plasma blasts that had rendered the AUTOBOT warrior himself nearly unable to return to base. But a few have shocking information on them. Information that not only reveals much about the cloning process used to bring the PREDACONS to life, but also about the secrets of the pwoerful new weapons recovered by BUMBLEBEE. Chapter 14: Dreadwing DREADWING has known STARSCREAM for too long for the cowardly Seeker to hide from him. Still, when he smashes into his former commander's hiding place, he expects a vicious fight, and is surprised to instead find STARSCREAM with his weapons lowered. "Listen!" STARSCREAM says. "Since when do I flee the moment MEGATRON is out of the picture? If he was deactivated because of me, I'd take command! As is my destiny!" DREADWING aches to blast his fellow air warrior to atoms, but he knows STARSCREAM is telling the truth. He levels a finger at the other DECEPTICON. "You will help me find MEGATRON then. Find him and bring him back." PREDACON: SKYSTALKER Series 2: 009 Altmode: Dragon Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: G1, RotF Previous Mold Use: None Gimmick: Cryostrike Double Disc Launchers Function: Ice Warrior Motto: "I am willing to sacrifice...are you?" SKYSTALKER is an ice-cold PREDACON warrior with the power to annihilate all who stand before him! STR 6 INT 7 SPD 8 END 7 RNK 5 COUR 7 FRB 9 SKL 8 Avg 7.125 Cryostrike Disc Launchers * Perfectly silent - ideal for sneak attacks. * Temperature can be adjusted to melt or freeze targets. * Can generate a blinding flash of light on impact to disorient enemies. That second line in his Cryostrike info feels like it was added at the last minute when someone realized his bio note on the cardback was all about cold, but his storyline had the whole burning, melting part. :) Packaging: The usual extra-deep Predacon blister. 8 strings at multiple depths hold the dragon mode in the blister, and his discs are loaded. Mistransformed in the package. For proper beast mode, the wings need to be pulled up to free the foreleg shoulders and let the wings rotate. Also, the pelvis needs to be pulled in half. The package claims that the tail becomes a mace, but it is pinned in place and is not removable. The very tip of it can pop off, but that seems to be more of a safety thing (or maybe a way to make it easier to tweak the looks of a retool). I had to check the instructions in order to confirm the "not really in dragon mode" stuff, and found that they're outright wrong about how to launch the discs (the instructions highlight a "trigger" that's an immovable part of the wing detailing). Before I go into the usual breakdown, I want to address a problem with this design that affects all aspects of the toy to one degree or another: an over-reliance on unassisted friction in hinges and sliders. The chest has no pegs to help it stay closed (yes, those also involve friction, but aided by increasing the pressing-together force since a proper peg is just a tiny bit too large for its hole), the hips are on sliders that don't snap into position when apart and aren't pegged together when closed. They did make an effort on the sliders, but not enough to DO anything. About the only place where they do add pegs to keep stuff together is where the beast foreclaws peg onto the forearms...and those pegs are far less necessary than ones in the chest or pelvis! Plus, hinges and sliders are rather harder to tighten up with aftermarket tricks, so you're very dependent on getting a Skystakler that's *just* the right tolerances to avoid a floppy, gappy mess. And, frankly, Hasbro has never been that reliable in quality control. Robot Mode: Digitigrade, winged and wearing a dragon head as a hat, Skystalker is definitely designed to evoke cold. From the predominantly blue and white color scheme (including a rather effective use of the swirled plastic gimmick) to jagged mecha-wings that look like ice shards, it's definitely an ice dragon bot. Unfortunately, it's also definitely gappy, thanks to the issues complained about above (the slider snaps don't keep the pelvis halves together, so there's a nearly 1mm gap down the middle). The robot face is basically inside a wide-open beast jaw, and other than some odd insect mandible sorts of details on the face, is fairly standard robot fare. If you don't care for it, though, it's easy enough to leave the beast jaw closed. I prefer it with the dragon head as robot head, myself. 5.75" (14.5cm) tall, with a wingspan of up to 8.25" (21cm). It's mostly medium-light blue and a sort of robin's egg blue with a bit of white and yellow. The wings are made of swirled plastic, with robin's egg blue as the main color and white swirled in. The legs below the knees are solid robin's egg blue. The launched discs, hands, beast claws (folded against the forearms), dragon horns, shoulder struts, tail strut, some internal struts, and hip sockets are white plastic. The rest is a lightish medium blue. Glossy robin's egg blue paint (good match with the plastic) is on the sides of the dragon head, the sternum, the front of the abdomen, and the tops of the forearms. A metallic blue that looks more like they just made the plastic shinier is on the rib-like details on the chest. Solid white paint is on the thighs, face, forehead crest (inside the helmet), dragon eyes, and the tops of the feet. The top side of the tail is airbrushed in white with a deliberate fade effect. The top sides of the tail spikes also seem to be painted white, but a thin coat so that it looks a bit duller. The tops of the shoulders and the kneepads are painted yellow, and the robot eyes are painted red. Articulation is pretty good. The head turns and can look up and down, but having the dragon jaw down inside the chest limits the range a bit. The waist is jointed, but if you have the tail up in robot mode position it prevents all but some wiggling. The wings have forward-back swivels (the left one on mine is way too floppy) and long-axis swivels just above the root and at the "elbows" so that the wings can articulate around a bit. In robot mode, you can set it so that the launcher portions point forward (you can put the robot hands under them to make it look like shoulder-mount weapons) while the middle wing sections stick out to the sides. The middle sections are blocked by the shoulders, but can be forced over them. The shoulders are ball joints on struts, but the wings lock the struts in place in this mode. There's swivels just above the hinge elbows. The wrists are locked in place. The hips are ball joints with swivels right below them. The knees, digitigrade ankles and false-ankle toes are all hinges, with good range of motion. The tail is hinged, and you can pull it down a bit if you want to make it the third point of a tripod. The hands can hold 5mm pegs. That's pretty much it. The discs have 3mm holes in their centers, though. Weapon: The wings hold discs that are 1.5" (3.5cm) in diameter on the upper half and 7/8" (23mm) on the lower half that fits into the launcher. They use a pressure launcher mechanism where a slider behind the disc is pushed forward against the clamped pieces on top and bottom, snapping the disc out. Launch speed is unimpressive. Transformation: Pretty simple once you know what the modes should look like. The pelvis halves slide apart and the tail goes in between them to keep 'em apart. The chest flips open to let the lower jaw close and then you pull the entire head up and out a bit. The robot hands swap positions with the beast foreclaws, and the wings slide back to free up the shoulder struts. There's a halfhearted attempt to at least stabilize the tail between the pelvis parts, but no actual pegging. Oh, and there's some dewclaws that pull out for this mode, although you can leave them out in robot mode too. Beast Mode: A bit of a mess, with so many joints that all have to be really tight or it flumphs. And since the typical Hasbro product has a random mix of tight and loose joints, it's a bit tricky getting this into a decent pose. Also, as one would expect from the simplicity of the transformation, there's really nothing revealed here, the only significant change is concealing the robot head. Otherwise, it's mostly a matter of stance. 6.75" (17cm) from snout to tail tip, same wingspan as robot mode. Same pretty-much-everything, in fact. The shoulders gain some range of motion, but the beast head has the same joints as the robot head. The wings can be put in a flying position, but are a bit too far ahead of the center of mass when you do it. Obviously, if you point the launchers forward Skystalker can't be flying at the time. Overall: It's an okay if largely uninspired design, the wings being the only interesting bit. Even if it had the pegs needed to keep it stable, I wouldn't be tempted to pick up any redecos (like the Sky Lynx from Target's exclusive Predacons Rising line). AUTOBOT: AUTOBOT RATCHET Series 2: 010 Altmode: Ambulance Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: Uni, Uni2, Movie1, RotF, DotM, TF:A, Prime Previous Mold Use: Prime (heavy retool) Gimmick: Spinning Dragonshredder Drill Function: Tech Specialist Motto: "I'm too old for this beast nonsense, I should have my processor examined!" The dedicated AUTOBOT scientist is through hiding in his lab. He'd armored up and ready to take the fight to the PREDACONS! STR 6 INT 9 SPD 6 END 8 RNK 8 COUR 7 FRB 5 SKL 10 Avg 8 Dragonshredder Drill * Ancient tool usually used for some less delicate surgical procedures. But also good in a fight. * Generates an anaesthetic vortex that numbs and disables targets. * Cannon fires pellets containing surgical nano-robots that can repair - or disassemble - a target. This is clearly a Dinobot homage. The color scheme (other than the face being silver instead of blue) is very much the original Dinobot, while the molding (cyber eye, chest details, general Transmetal II jaggedness) screams Dinobot II. Packaging: Five strings on the robot, one on the Dragonshredder. A plastic shield is held over the chest with a rubber band. Color Swaps: Black stays black, clear blue becomes clear colorless. Most of the unmodified white parts are now burnt orange, and most of the remolded pieces are light tan with a burnt orange swirl, but it's not guaranteed. Light tan with faint (sometimes VERY faint) burnt orange swirls is used for the head, chest, backpack, upper and outer forearm panels, thighs, shins, calves and toes. Burnt orange on the bumpers/spats, inner arm panels, and lower backpack chunk. A bright orange is used on the knee spikes. The shoulderpads, upper arms, heels, pelvis, and inner torso are light silvery gray. Paint Apps: The helmet is painted white with a silver face and green cyber eye. The regular eye is left unpainted so that the clear lightpiping works. There's also white on the pecs and lots of the vehicle kibble. The "unibeam" chest detail is the same bright green as the cyber eye. The fronts of the shoulderpads are painted white, with a red Autobot symbol printed on the left one. Otherwise, it relies on plastic colors and the vehicle mode paint apps here. In vehicle mode, they do an okay job matching the burnt orange paint to plastic on the sides, although the wedges that are the tops of the forearms have obvious outlines. Spikes on the front and some of the fins on the back are painted metallic blue. There's white EMT zigzags painted on the sides, and plenty of white on the cab roof and doors, plus the hood. The engine block and grille are silver. The lightbar is painted the same green as the cyber eye. Mold Changes: As with the other Deluxe retools, there's a lot of obvious changes, but a surprising amount of the mold is left alone. The head is new, with a "cyber eye" look taken almost directly from Dinobot II. The top and outer panels of the forearms are new, with spiny detailing and new 5mm peg holes on the outsides of the forearms. The chest and collar area is entirely new, and gives up on trying to fake the windshield and doors. Instead, it has a sort of unibeam chest thing, and a collar that looks like a bubble helmet is an optional accessory. New, spinier thighs, shins and calves (with an exposed engine block on the calves), somewhat more armor-looking feet. The backpack/back panel of the vehicle is also different, with spines and a turbo thruster. There's also another 5mm peg on the backpack, so you can stow the new weapon there. New Weapon: A sort of mix of shield and rotate blade sword with a vulcan cannon inside of it. The shell is dark metalflake blue while the mechanisms and inner cannon are bright orange plastic. So, pretty different from Ratchet's plastics, only sharing the kneespikes in common. The outside drill shell is painted the same green as the lightbar. A turbine detail is molded on the shield part, and when you peg the weapon onto the robot's back it doesn't quite line up with the thruster on the backpack. Closed, it's 4.25" (11cm) long, with the trigger on the center. The drill can be manually opened up to reveal the cannon and make the drill itself a spinning blade. The trigger mechanism is about the same as on Dinobot's blade, pressing it makes the drill or blade spin. The cannon barrels are all slightly different lengths so that it looks like they're recoiling as they come into firing position. Unfortunately, the spinning direction is opposite the direction of the drill's spiral, oops. The new forearm peg holes are meant for mounting the weapon, rather than having the hand hold the peg just behind the rotation mechanism. Other Notes: There isn't an obvious animal motif to vehicle mode, although it's not inconsistent with a dinosaur or dragon. There's still places for the original scalpel weapons, but those aren't included. It's about as frustrating to transform as the original, but at least the new spiky bits don't make it harder. :) Overall: Really, it doesn't at all feel like a Ratchet upgrade. But it does make a nice Dinobot II homage, perhaps the result of Ratchet experimenting with his own CNA and the Predacon code to try to understand how they differ...and then having it grow into a full entity due to a series of irreproducible events. DECEPTICON: DREADWING Series 2: 011 Altmode: Fighter Jet Transformation Difficulty: Intermediate (2) Previous Name Use: Energon, Classics, Movie1, Prime Previous Mold Use: None Gimmick: Dread Assault Cannon Function: Demolitions Expert Motto: "I am harder to kill than you may think." The powerful DREADWING flies to war for MEGATRON and the glory of the DECEPTICONS! STR 8 INT 8 SPD 8 END 7 RNK 9 COUR 7 FRB 8 SKL 5 Avg 7.5 Dread Assault Cannon * Ancestral weapon passed down by generations of air warriors. * Fully nuclear, making it hot and radioactive enough to destroy circuitry without piercing armor. * Churning axe blades designed to hurl shredded armor back at the victim, dealing ever [sic] more damage. Packaging: The missiles are held behind the head by one string. The sawblade part of the weapon is behind the legs, held by the strings that also secure the legs. The core of the weapon is held by one string. Five strings hold the robot mode. Packaged with the wings folded shut, rather than spread out like feathers or banners. The package photo suggests the entire combined weapon goes on the underside in vehicle mode, but chooses an angle that hides how bad an idea that is. Additionally, I'm not sure the grip on the combined weapon in the robot mode photo is even possible without photoshop. The instructions have a more reasonable view of reality, however. Robot Mode: If you leave the wings folded shut as jet wings, this isn't all that beast-encrusted, with the main visual cues being the taloned feet and some feather-blade details on the lower legs. And even if you do spread out the wing segments to be like feathers, it's a reasonably subtle change, something that could almost pass as a regular robot mode if not for the feet. Mold-wise, it's a slightly better fit to the animation model than the Voyager version, being a bit more stocky than the bigger toy. It'd be even closer if the head and shoulderpads were dark blue plastic rather than the swirled gray-with-black plastic. 4.75" (12cm) tall at the head, add a half inch or so for the backpack, and with a wingspan of 6.25" (15.5cm). The main colors are dark blue, several shades of gray, and yellow, but there's also some purple and red, plus a little silver and gold. Dark blue plastic is used on the forearms (including hands), shins, chest front and center of the back. Darkish gray with black swirls is used on the shoulderpads, wings and head (other than the lightpiping). A lighter gray is used on the shoulder struts, upper arms, and thighs. The lightpiping and chest cockpit are clear red...and unfortunately, so is part of the torso core, with a hinge bar passing through a section of clear red that's begging to snap once it gets old. Somewhat incongruously, a warm purple plastic is used for the elbows and inner forearms, as well as a strut connecting the front and back of the torso. And the talon feet are made of bright yellow plastic. Both of these last two colors are heavily involved in the weapons. There's yellow paint on the forearms, "eyebrow" crest, several strips on the torso front, and on the boot blade-feathers. The front of the wings is airbrushed in a yellow fade. The fingers, pelvis-front and some of the collar area are painted silver. The face is gold, the kneecaps are gloss red, and some purple on the abdomen sides (it's dull and dark, a poor match for the plastic, but at least they tried). The neck is a stiff swivel, but the hinge behind the head limits range of motion. The waist does not turn. The shoulderpads are on struts with hinges at base and end, so they can get out of the way easily enough. Ball joint shoulders, swivels just above the hinge elbows. There's a transformation hinge inside the forearm that can let you move the hands a bit if you're trying to get a two-handed grip on a borrowed weapon and can't quite manage it. Ball joint hips (a little loose, might need to try the glue trick), swivels just above the hinge knees, and ball joint ankles. The wings are on hinges to fold back slightly so as to not get in the way of the arms, and each wing has three slats that can be positioned independently on swivels. Well, "independently" within the few degrees allowed it by the space between it and its neighbors. The hands can hold 5mm pegs. There's also peg holes on each forearm (back near the elbow) and on each boot on the side, and one peg hole in the center of the back. Weapon: This comes in several pieces. The core is a stubby rifle with a chainsaw bayonet and a weird stock. A chainsaw axe can be held separately or plugged into the stock end of the rifle, with the stock forming a sort of hand guard. And there's two missiles for the rifle, but nowhere to store the spare one in robot mode unless you have Dreadwing use it as a club. The core rifle is mostly yellow plastic, with light gray for the trigger and dark blue for the front and back caps. The dark blue plastic is dipped in gray paint that doesn't match either of the gray plastics. The chain axe is a single piece of yellow plastic, and the missiles are purple plastic. On its own, the rifle is 4" (10cm) long unloaded, 5.25" (13cm) long loaded. The axe is 4.25" (10.5cm) long on its own and adds 2.5" (6cm) to the rifle when plugged into the stock. With everything assembled, including a missile loaded, the whole weapon is 7.5" (19cm) long The rifle has a 5mm peg grip about halfway along its length, and a purely decorative (it can't be held by Dreadwing, in any case) handle on top. The axe has sections that are 5mm in diameter, and one of these is the intended gripping point for the combined weapon. It also has an "eye of the needle" spot along the shaft with a 5mm peg hole so that the rifle can be plugged in on the underside of the jet. For jet mode, the axe's butt end plugs into a hole in the robot pelvis that is exposed in vehicle mode, and the blades stick out past the nose of the jet for ramming attacks. The missiles can be held by 5mm peg hole hands, and slot into small tabs on the wings (this only really works if the wings are in jet configuration, it looks stupid when the wings are spread open). Including some of those tabs on top of the rifle handle would have been nice. Transformation: Start by collapsing the wing pieces down into standard jet wings. Then the cockpit chest folds up as standard, and the front torso folds away from the back, flips over, and reconnects, putting the hips touching the shoulders. Then the calves peg onto tabs behind the chest (not as strongly as I'd like), the shoulderpads fold up to flank the cockpit, and the arms shorten up via those purple struts inside the forearms and peg to details inside the wings with weird trapezoidal tabs. Vehicle Mode: Well, it's a jet with talons sticking out the back, and forearms stuck under the wings. It's like they made it with the gerwalk in mind and didn't really care about the jet mode. Seriously, you can get a pretty good gerwalk (jet with arms and legs) mode out of this, with the chicken leg effect amplifying the bird characteristics (the nose end is hooked like a raptor's beak). The tail end is vaguely feather-patterned as well, but it's a fairly subdued birding. Well, other than (say it with me) the talon feet. Seriously, it's like they spent hours agonizing over ways to make something that still looked like a regular jet at first glance, with the beasty bits well-integrated rather than the "just throw spikes on it" approach of a lot of the toys...and then saw deadline was ten minutes away and cut-and-pasted some Predacon feet from an abandoned design. 6" (15cm) long with a wingspan of 4.75" (12cm), and assuming it's meant to be the same size as the F-35 it's loosely based on, that makes it roughly 1:100 scale. Other Than The Talons, the color balance is nicely subdued, with the dark blue down the centerline and the swirled gray on the wings and intakes (silver on the tail tries to follow the pattern, but fails), and only a little bit of yellow on the nose and purple behind the cockpit. Gold Decepticon Air Force-style roundels are on the wings, and the silver collar paint now tries to fill in some of the gray pattern in between the intakes. The only new plastic visible here is the nose wheel, which is light gray plastic. The rear wheels are nubs molded on the shins, and from the side it looks like an F-35 carrying comically oversized droptanks. The forearm peg holes end up on the sides of the droptanks, and the back hole is on the centerline (the rifle is best put there). The peg holes from the boots are blocked by the arms, which makes me wonder why they even included them, since they don't really look good with weapons in them in robot mode. A new 5mm peg hole is opened up on the top of the pelvis, intended for the included chain axe weapon, but you could also insert any other weapon with a peg at the end and small enough to fit in the available space. Interestingly, there's two 3mm holes on the underside of the cockpit window piece, but it's hard to fit much in there without getting in the way of the air intakes. Stability is okay, but the pegs holding the limbs in place aren't as strong as I'd like. Obviously this is less of a problem when you go with gerwalk mode. Overall: Nice robot mode, fairly standard jet transformation, overly bulky jet. But it does look pretty good in gerwalk mode, and it is notable as one of the few truly new Deluxe TF:Prime molds this year that isn't a dragon. Worth picking up. Dave Van Domelen, slowly whittling away at the to be reviewed pile, and rather more rapidly adding stuff to it. Oops.