Dave's Mega Transmetal Rant: Inf...er, Scavenger I had pretty much given up on finding Scav today and was just about to skip Meijer and head straight for dinner, when I remembered I needed some groceries from there (I like a few Meijer store brands). As long as I was there, I checked their paltry Transformers display. Lo and behold, there was one Scavenger hiding among the Primals and Megarexes. And I was further rewarded by fate because Scav was listed in Meijer's computer as Inferno... who had been marked down to $12.79, whee! Last one, though, sorry Columbus area residents. CAPSULE Kinda gimpy-looking ant mode, but it can stand on its legs with some tricks. Okay vehicle mode. Robot mode looks very good, but is really unstable and topheavy, just refuses to stand up on smooth surfaces. Some nice ideas, but iffy execution. Mildly recommended. Probably $15 at most stores. RANT PREDACON: Scavenger (Oh, come on, it's Inferno) Function: Infantry Commander Transformation Difficulty: Advanced (6, more frustrating than hard) Quote: "Fool! Pain is my friend! Allow me to introduce you to it!" A quantum surge has rocked the world of the Transformers, and now the evil infantry commander, Scavenger, has become a meched-out fire ant with awesome drilling power. Two spinning augers drill into the earth while bladed wheels thrust him forward, providing a perfect method of ambush attack and reconnaissance. One of the Maximal's [sic] most dangerous enemies [they all seem to be, don't they?], Scavenger's goal is to make every Maximal unable to set foot outside without thinking twice about what might suddenly burst from the underground. STR 7 INT 6 SPD 8 END 4 RNK 7 COUR 8 FRP 6 SKL 5 Avg 6.375 This is a really lazy job, both of packaging and of writing the techspecs. As Prabal Nandy has already noted on a.t.t, there are no photos of the toy on the box. The techspec uses the same stupid lines about the quantum surge and being "meched-out." And it's obvious they wrote this for Inferno, then just swapped out the names without checking to see if the meaning would be changed. And it even has the same grammar error as on Injector's techspec. I get the impression that this was just churned out to get the toys out of the warehouse. Beast Mode: About 9 inches (23cm) long, with coppery chrome on its thorax and a nifty graded shade chrome from refd to orange on the abdomen, plsu translucent dark red plastic on many body parts and metallic green paint on the eyes. Oddly, he has horns sticking out of his abdomen. The first thing that struck me about this toy was that the thorax is really gimpy. The thorax and head together really just look kinda badly designed. And when you add to that the fact that the thorax and head are really weakly held together, splitting apart way too easily, and you get a toy that's kinda frustrating to play with in beast mode. The antennae and mandibles are movable, although you have to be careful to avoid spltting the head apart. Each leg has two ball joints and a hinge, and the feet look antlike. It is possible to make it stand on just its ant legs, but you have to leave the tank wheels out and have the hind legs brace on them. If you fold the wheels in, the ant can only rest on them and use its legs to balance. Vehicle Mode: Pull back the ant head (carefully), fold out the wheels if you haven't already, and find some pose which gets the legs out of the way while looking reasonably cool. The drillbits revealed at the front work in basically the same way Drillbit's does, but you really have to bear down on the front end to get both bits to rotate at once, despite the rubberized wheels. The instability of the front end really comes into play here. Still, the position of the ant head does seem to help the stability a little bit, making this probably the sturdiest mode. Transformation: The whole front end breaks apart to become the arms, leaving each arm with half an ant head and three ant legs to get in the way. Fortunately, all of these elements are highly poseable, so they can get out of the way. The legs pull out of the abdomen in a manner reminiscent to the original Tarantulas, but are covered by a movable chromed piece in beast mode. Take a good look at this piece while transforming, it has details on the inside which aren't visible in any mode, little veins and bonelike structures. The head folds up after you pull the arms apart and down. The rest is a matter of moving the beast parts around to look cool. Robot Mode: With the exception of lacking a waist joint, this is a very poseable robot. Even the augers can be moved at the "wrists," despite not being real hands (it might take a little excessive force to bend them the first time). One poseability quibble, though, is that the heel spurs do not move, impeding some poses. The robot stands 6 inches (15cm) tall at the head, almost twice as tall if you count the extended ant legs. The robot is, however, VERY top-heavy, with bulky arms and skinny legs, plus the large (if not very heavy) backpack over the wheels. The net result is that unless there's pretty good friction under the feet, the figure will simply not stand up. The joints alone are not strong enough to keep the legs together. Even bringing down the abdomen shell like a third leg doesn't help, since it too has a weak joint. You'll need to make sure this guy stands on paper or unfinished wood. The color scheme is rather interesting. The torso is entirely painted in metallic green. The forearms, shins and head are mainly a deep, metal-flake purple. The shoulders, hips, hands and feet are translucent dark red plastic (suffused with metallic flakes), through which you can see "bones" of internal structure. The odd shape of the gearboxes in the forearms makes the toy look like it might be a small gestalt...the arms look like torsos for another, smaller robot. The antennae of the ant head turn into arm blasters, if you're wondering where his Firepower rating comes from. Overall: There's a lot of cool things about this toy, such as the colors and the look. But there's enough annoyances and compromises to drag it down to being only fairly cool. Better hip joints and a more solid connection between the arms in beast mode would go a LONG way towards making this a toy worthy of being Inferno, though. Those ant legs can really give the robot mode a seriously foreboding presence. Dave Van Domelen, also got a leg-hugger Godzilla toy and saw all the new Godzilla toys at K-Mart...days before they were supposed to be put on the shelves.