Dave's TF:Universe Rant - CDROM 1

     Just a few comments on the CDROM that comes with the Transformers:
Universe toys and some of the later Armada toys.  Hadda wait until things hit
a lull at work, since the disc is PC-only and my home machine is an iMac.

     As it's loading, there's a screen that says that the "Cyberer
Transformer Unit" is loading, oops.  And there's a couple other weird typos
here and there on the disk, suggesting it may have been put together by
people for whom English is not a primary language.  Like, oh, computer
programmers.  }->

     The opening screen is the Cybertron Hub, with a floating head in the
middle surrounded by five panels.  When you mouse over a panel, it opens up
with a Transforming sound, and the head turns to face it.  I suspect this may
be the head of Primus, since it looks kinda like an Optimus, but not quite,
and it occasionally "glitches" into wireframe.  You do not have to come back
to the hub to navigate the rest of the disc, however, since the nav buttons
appear on the right side of any given screen.

     There are five options.  One simply links you to www.transformers.com,
and is labeled "Web Link" appropriately enough.  The "Video Link" option
leads to a fullscreen movie file (PC-only format, sadly, so I couldn't just
open that file on my Mac) of Transformers: Awakening (the ep where Tidal Wave
shows up and the Requiem Blaster is first formed).  The quality is very good,
good enough that you can see the flaws in the animation itself.  :)
     "History Link" leads to a sort of animated comic that lays out the
background of the Universe line.  Unicron has been sending ships to collect
Decepticons for his Final Battle, and one such collection interrupts a battle
between a bunch of the Universe characters (including the Dinobot
re-releases).  Meanwhile, at the core of Cybertron, Primus has been planning
to do the same with Autobots.  The art is okay, if a bit murky and low-res.
     "Cybertron Factory" is a fairly simple "build a Transformer" thing
reminiscent of those various rub-art "lay down parts and rub with a crayon to
create a picture" toys that were popular when I was a kid.  There's only a
few choices for most body parts, and the art isn't anything to write home
about, but it does let you (broadly) color the thing and print it off.  You
could also screencap it if you wanted to use this as a basis for a web board
avatar or something.
     "The Energon Within" is a simple flash animation game (that starts with
a short comic) in which you launch missiles at hordes of Decepticons that are
trying to steal from your Energon Mine.  Hard to tell for sure who all the
raiders are, but there's hordes of Cyclonus, Demolishor and I think
Starscream (who's really hard to hit), plus one other ground-pounder whose
identity I'm not positive on (might be Tankor).  If you hit your energon mine
too many times, it explodes and the game is over, oops.  It's pretty much
impossible to hit the Demolishors with direct fire, you have to arc it over
the mine to hit them.  And the little buggers tunnel into your mine, too.

     For a free CDROM it's pretty good.  I wish they'd make 'em
Mac-compatible (it's not like Flash itself is proprietary, after all), but
I'm told there's no plans to do so.  Ah well.  Maybe some supahaxx0r fan will
convert some of the bits to platform-nonspecific files.
     
     Dave Van Domelen, off to throttle some graduate students until they give
him schedules to work with for assigning teaching duties....