Dave's Transformers Siege Rant: Voyager Wave 2 Soundwave ("space ship") Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/VSoundwave Casemate is Starscream, already reviewed. CAPSULE $25-30 price point. Soundwave: Good robot mode, complex but not frustrating transformation (aside from a couple parts that tend to pop off), and a vehicle mode that really wasn't worth the bother. Mildly recommended. RANTS Packaging: Same as other Voyagers. His sigil uses the cityscape top, a mid-rank bottom, and a unique (so far) labyrinth-like center that's both a hexagonal maze and a sort of cube. The art on the angled panel is...pretty bad. It looks like they ran it through a pretty aggressive filter to make it look like analog art...but it ended up feeling like someone printed out line art and colored over it with more enthusiasm than skill. [Update: there is a significant easter egg in the packaging. If you open the BOTTOM of the box, one of the hidden flaps has line art of an official lamppost mode. Trying it out, I found tabs and slots that are clearly meant for this mode and no other, so the mode was intended by the designers, sad as it may be.] DECEPTICON: SOUNDWAVE Assortment: WFC-S25 Altmode: Spaceship, I guess Transformation Difficulty: 25 steps Previous Name Use: Yes Previous Mold Use: None Fireblast: None Weapons: HI-KEP Concussion Blaster, LR-HD Sonic Cannon, EMXT Blitz Charge Blaster (the three combine into USW HF Sonic Compression Mega-Blaster) Function: Communications Division: Ground Command Unit: Espionage Rank: Major HI-KEP: DAM 18, PRE 15, RNG 12 LR-HD: DAM 17, PRE 12, RNG 19 EMXT: DAM 11, PRE 19, RNG 15 Does not come with any cassette minions. Packaging: Only three plastic ties on the robot (both ankles, right wrist), with the blister shape doing most of the work. The shoulder cannon is on his shoulder, while the two handguns are on the sloped part of the blister tray, with no ties needed. The cosells are Aimless and the Espionage team (cassettes) showing how they can fit inside his chest or peg to his upper arm. The instructions use the same art for both the concussion blaster and the sonic cannon. Assuming they're going with the G1 terms, the HI-KEP Concussion Blaster is the hand cannon, and the LR-HD Sonic Cannon is his shoulder weapon. The EXMT is a new weapon as far as I can tell, not inspired by any other Soundwave's weapon. [It has been suggested to me that it can be given to Megatron to emulate how G1 Megatron's barrel ended up on his back or under his arm.] Robot Mode: Soundwave has pretty excessive battle damage paint. Clearly, he tried to give Ravage a bath. Other than that, it's deliberately pretty faithful to the looks of G1 Soundwave, with minor changes here and there. Some of the changes are to accomodate the new altmode (the backpack being the big one, but also the landing skids on the forearms and as sort of epaulets), others recast tapedeck detailing as more general greebles. For instance, the stickers on the original toy's kneecaps are redone as a molded valve array on each kneecap, round rather than rectangular. They preserve the odd non-mirrored colors seen on the G1 toy, with red-yellow-yellow from left to right on each kneecap. And unlike a lot of later Soundwaves, he has yellow lightpiping for his eyeslit instead of red. Not all of the sticker details are painted, but most of them are molded. And there's the usual Siege greebling on top of that, leaving very few flat surfaces. The main concession to modern sensibilities is that the head is based more on the shape of the G1 cartoon model (but without the red eyes used in the cartoon). The shoulder cannon and the pistol in stowed mode do still look like batteries, but there's no battery compartment to store them in, and they're too thick to store in the chest. 6.25" (16cm) tall in mostly dark blue and light gray, with silver, red, and dull gold accents. The chest panel and a cockpit on the butt are made of colorless clear plastic, while the visor lightpiping is clear yellow plastic (or colorless clear with transparent yellow paint). Light gray plastic is found on the collar area, the tape door button, the "epaulets", the socket for the shoulder cannon, the elbow joints, the forearms, the shoulder struts, the backpack chunk struts, the thighs, the knees, the feet, the barrel of the regular cannon, and the entirety of the non-G1 gun. Everything else is dark blue plastic. The dark silver battle damage paint is all over the chest door, the fronts of the forearms, the fronts and outer facings of the boots. Regular silver paint is on the faceplate, helmet cheekplate fronts (but not the sides), fake tape deck buttons on the pelvis, and the not-actually-kneecap bits on the fronts of the boot tops. Dull gold is painted on the border of the tape door, and a techie detail replacing the arrow. Brighter gold paint is used on those valves on the shin and the vent under the not-kneecap bulge. Dark red stripes are around the front and rear of the main gun and shoulder cannons, and around the wrists. The red valves on the shins are painted a light metallic red (or maybe just red ink over the silver). The cannon barrel details (well, they're really thrusters, but in this mode they look more like cannons) are painted gunmetal gray. A purple on silver Decepticon symbol is printed on the center of the chest. The neck is a ball joint with a decent amount of wiggle room for looking up and down, the waist is a smooth swivel. The backpack can lift up a bit to make the thrusters into something like antiaircraft cannons, but you have to stow the head in order to get them pointing forwards (allowing a sort of Empurata Soundwave: http://www.dvandom.com/images/empuratasoundwave.JPG). The shoulders are pinned universal joints, with swivels just below the shoulders. The elbows are double hinges, although the bulk of the forearms and shoulderpads prevent the arms from bending completely double. The wrists bend inwards on transformation hinges. The epaulets can lift up on transformation hinges, and the landing skids on the forearms can swing out as a sort of hold-out derringer (both seen in the "Empurata" picture). Pushing the button next to the head makes the chest compartment pop open on a spring. The hips are universal joints, with the armor skirt panels in front being hinged to get out of the way of the legs. There's stiff but smooth swivels just above the hinge knees, and the ankles have the usual-for-Siege hinge to let them bend sideways to keep the feet flat. The hands can hold 5mm pegs, interestingly the left hand has the index finger out a little as if pulling a trigger or beckoning "come here" to someone. Or pushing his own eject button, although the arm isn't flexible enough to actually let the figure do that. There's a 5mm socket on the top of the torso on the right side, dedicated for the shoulder cannon. Annoyingly, there's not quite enough room for the cannon to face forwards unless you pull the backpack out a little. There's 5mm sockets on the outer faces of the shoulders, forearms, and boots, and the larger two thrusters on the backpack can accept 5mm pegs (the smaller ones are 5mm pegs). [Correction: while calipers show the inner diameter is 5mm, it narrows down too quickly to be useful for actual connecting.] The soles of the feet have 5mm sockets for wearing Weaponizer boots, and there's 5mm sockets on each pod of the backpack. Given that the backpack pods don't lock very solidly in place, I don't recommend mounting heavy Weaponizer weapons there, but they do allow storage of the two hand weapons that come with this toy. There's short 5mm studs on the backs of the thighs for transformation stability, but I suppose they could be used to attach weapons weirdly. There's a 3mm socket on the back of the belt, but the backpack does make it a little tricky to get at it. There's 3mm studs on the tips of the epaulets and the forearm landing skids, one on the front of each shoulder, one on the outer edge of each shin around the middle height. The HI-KEP Concussion Blaster is the traditional handgun, with the outer part (including 5mm peg) being made of dark blue plastic, and the core piece light gray (silver paint or chrome marker would probably wear off rapidly if you transform the gun). The gun barrel is solidly snapped in place to yield a 2.5" (6cm) long heavy pistol. Pushing the barrel in makes it hide inside the barrel, with a blue-painted end piece sticking out the back to give it the same silhouette as the LR-HD. Both the main barrel tip and the end piece tip are 3mm studs. The collar around the end piece is 5mm, although it's pretty short at that width and won't fit well into all 5mm sockets. The LR-HD Sonic Cannon is the shoulder weapon. The front end has the traditional 8 mini-missile tips, while the back end has a 3mm tip for Fire Blasts in vehicle mode. The 3mm tip has a 5mm collar as with the HI-KEP. The 5mm peg is a separate piece of light gray plastic, and it can be popped out, possibly an anti-breakage measure? It's 1.5" (4cm) long, same as the stowed-barrel HI-KEP. The EMXT seems to be included solely so that there's something to connect the other two weapons into a longer weapon. (The two can connect directly, but the handles end up too close together to let both handles be gripped at once.) It has a wide barrel on top and a narrow barrel on bottom, with the top barrel having a 5mm muzzle while the bottom is a 3mm stud on the end of a 5mm rod. They're a little too close to put two Firedrive Fire Blasts in at once. The grip at the back is a 5mm peg. It can unfold into a sort of club or tonfa weapon, but its main purpose is to form the bridge between the other two weapons. The USW HF Sonic Compression Mega-Blaster is kinda skinny and looks more like one of those boffer staffs the American Gladiators used to use. It's 6.5" (16.5cm) long, so slightly longer than Soundwave is tall. Getting a two-handed grip on this that looks good is a bit tricky, but helped by the fact you can rotate the pieces a bit, and fold the wrists in. And by "good" I mean the pose...the weapon itself is still pretty weak. Well, at least they tried to give him a combining weapon, unlike Starscream. The chest compartment is meant to hold the special Micromasters Laserbeak and Ravage, who I picked up during the writing of this review. I'll probably skip ahead in the queue to review them, but I broke my usual pattern and opened them prior to reviewing. Since only one can fit in the chest at a time, they also have fold-out 5mm pegs to attach to the shoulders as shown on Soundwave's packaging, making them Sonicsurge Drone Armor. There's no clear right-side-up for inserting them, but I've found that Ravage will stay in the door part securely either way, while one orientation lets Laserbeak launch when the door opens. Transformation: The backpack opens up to let the head hide inside the torso, then swings up over the top of the neck hole (as seen in the Empurata mode). A joint in the abdomen lets the entire torso fold back so that the waist plugs into the robot's back, putting the chest door as the rear of the vehicle. The shoulders detach and swing down on hinges so that the arms can peg together into the landing gear chunk. (Be sure to rotate the waist 180 before locking the arms together, though.) Panels on the backs of the boots open up to let the feet stow inside, and then fold out and covering the stumps entirely. The legs rotate at the thighs so that the backs of the boots can peg together, and panels on the outer facings of the boots fold up to cover the thighs. Of course, I had to lift the backpack up to get the panels in place, which deranged the arms...so, basically, there's only one right order and I don't do it ever, apparently. The backpack pods just sort of swing out as warp nacelles or something, they don't firmly lock into any particlar position. Oh, and speaking of wrong order, there's a tiny bit where the shoulder cannon mount rotates out a tiny carrier-style command tower, and it can't be done except at the right step. (Given that there's also a more obvious cockpit made of clear plastic, this tower seems redundant.) The two blue weapons go into the backpack pod parts with their 3mm nubs pointing forwards, but the EMXT just sort of hides on the side, the iron sights plugging into a slot under the right side nacelle. I'd really have preferred it if they made a way for it to mount along the centerline, either on top or underneath. Altmode: Okay, it's a flying brick with nacelles. They put a lot of effort into making it look like it's not just a robot lying down with its arms behind its back, but unfortunately the result isn't that great. I suppose it's inspired by the various 1980s "it doesn't need to be aerodynamic" spaceships from both anime and cheap Star Wars ripoff movies. It has lots of details that look like they should open up to launch missiles, including six on the hammerhead front, which would have looked better if they were painted (especially in the red-gold-gold pattern of the shin stickers) to bring out the details. Most of them aren't even visible in robot mode, so painting them wouldn't make them stick out oddly in bot mode. I might like this a bit more if the pod struts were both a little more stable, and also could be moved fully to the sides instead of their kinda weird 45 degree angle. Unfortunately, they're not only limited in range, they use snap-in joints so tend to pop off if you try too hard to adjust them past their intended spots. Anyway, the arms form a sort of chunky landing gear or even cargo bay with landing skids pointed forwards in the middle front and backwards on either side. The chest panel door is accessible in back, as a sort of shuttle bay ramp or something. 5.75" (14.5cm) long including the nacelle thrusters poking out a little behind the main body. The clear plastic cockpit window on the butt is now in a more proper place for such a thing, although the 3mm socket behind it isn't as useful in this mode. Technically, all the parts here were visible in robot mode just turned around different ways, except for the front end pieces that hid inside the boots (and they're dark blue plastic). Lots more silver splatter, looking less like damage and more like Laserbeak droppings, on the top of the front end (previously hidden by those fold-out panels) and the rear top (previously hidden by the backpack nacelles). Most of each mid-fuselage panel is painted silver. The intakes on the nacelles are dark silver with black borders. Most of the 5mm sockets are inaccessible or hard to get at in this mode, except for the ones on the nacelles. The bigger thruster ones can hold Firedrive Fire Blasts as rocket thrusts. There's 3mm studs on the tops of all four landing skids, and the shin-front studs are now on either side of the front end. While not intended for such, some tabs on the rear landing struts can hold Lionizer's Fire Blast. Lamppost Mode: This is a semi-documented feature. It's not in the instructions, but it's on the hidden box flap and there's slots on the forearms clearly designed to attach to small tabs on the lower edge of the backpack. Basically, you start with my Empurata mode, swing the arms behind the back with the landing skids raised as antennae, rotate the waist 180 degrees and bend slightly. The epaulet skids seem to be hidden on the back as well. The lower joint of the elbow needs to be bent while the upper joint is straight, in order to make this work. Since the line art on the box flap is a little hard to make out, I've taken pictures of both it and the official mode on my toy. The line art doesn't show any weapons, but the two regular ones can go on the forearms and be out of the way, while the EXMT can go in one folded-out fist as a third antenna. Or, if you want a more G1-like T-pose lamppost, the guns can be plugged into the shoulder 5mm sockets, although on mine the shoulder cannon's 5mm collar around the 3mm stud is a little big, leading to a tight fit. The images are, in order: official line art, two views of that mode, the relevant tab and slot, and then the weapons-added version. http://www.dvandom.com/images/siegelamppost1.JPG http://www.dvandom.com/images/siegelamppost2.JPG http://www.dvandom.com/images/siegelamppost3.JPG http://www.dvandom.com/images/siegelamppost4.JPG Fan Modes: http://www.dvandom.com/images/sswtapedeck.JPG is my best shot at a tape deck mode, and I've seen some valiant attempts at a streetlamp mode more in keeping with his G1 Cybertronian mode that were more G1-accurate thatn the "official" one. The main barrier to a lot of fan mode attempts is the way the arms fold down rather than back. Empurata mode described above. Overall: Okay, I can see the goal being to give him a more mobile and combat-oriented altmode while hewing as close as possible to the G1 robot mode, but I think they might have been better served with a "communications tower" mode or something. Or at least found a better solution than the nacelles that keep popping off. The rest of the toy is very solid, making the backpack stand out even more. Dave Van Domelen, tempted to just permanently remove the nacelles.