Ah des bisous ! Oui oui des bisous ! How are you mate ?

Mood ?

mhmm I've played some Castlevania 2 lately, and sure it was a nightmare as a kid, once you know where to go and what to do, I still really enjoy playing it. Uneventful, yes, but a lot of charm for it, and a lot of it comes from the still amazing OST (And I mean, you've got only four main musics and yet you're never, ever, bored of them).

Also...



welp !

 

Ja, I did preorder from Zavvi, but it comes with the need to firmly cross fingers because they're clearly putting up the preorder before they've confirmed they can even get their hands on them. ID and Kapow are obviously allocated limited numbers, and Zavvi seem to think that it'll work like Kingdom, and that they can just get in as many units from Hasbro as they have preorders. I am suspicious, to say the least. Plus they show a release date for January, so they clearly aren't looking to carefully at, y'know, reality.

The other other possibility is Forbidden Planet, which might, might, just get some on their shop shelves. But I wouldn't put too much stock in that. And getting to a FP means either travelling miles to get to Birmingham, or diving into the plague-ridden hellscape that is my beloved city of Leicester.

I mean, Overlord showed up unexpectedly in TR, but that kind of lightning is unlikely to strike twice. The next line after Kingdom will be done by whoever John Warden's successor is, and they're not necessarily going to want to continue on in his style. It might be that they do a Generations soft-reset again and we just see even more versions of the '84 crew.

My hope against hope is that Generations 2022 will be a mix of Armada and late-stage G1/G2. If Earthrise can upscale the Classics deluxe Seeker mould to voyager, I'd be thrilled to see the same happen to the T30 Armada Starscream. Stick in Thunderwing, Goldbug and that weird pretender-in-a-pretender-in-a-pretender-in-a-car that was made entirely out of gold plastic and you'd have a winner. With my wallet, at least.

 

As I wasn't around at the time but looking back, I think Overlord was included due to him being around in the IDW comics. They managed to get all the Phase Sixers in Titans Return.

Post WFC Trilogy, I'm hoping they will supplement what will mostly be a post G1 Generations line with the G1 and Japanese G1 characters that haven't had their shine yet. Thunderwing and Bludgeon are pretty complex if you want to stay relatively true to G1 toy and character because of the Pretender gimmick. Would you rather it had the Pretender gimmick or just do without like one of those Bludgeon toys that were repainted from the Bayverse toys. (My preference would be the latter or have the Pretender shell become a Weaponsier so it does act as armour. Edit: thinking about it you could make a whole line around the Pretender shell is a Weaponiser/Modulator/Armourer (I made that one up). Charge us fans twice for the same character, once for the inner robot and once for the Pretender Armourer.)

The Inception Pretender car you are talking of is Roadblock I think.

 

The Pulsecon TF presentation confirmed it's Lenny Panzica (Lenny from the TF & Joe Pulse streams, as I mainly suspected as he was already heading up the Joes and if your Design Managers handle pairs of properties, well, they don't really have a more naturally marrying pair of properties than the TFs & Joes, right?), so I expect to see a Voyager or Leader or Commander Tigerhawk with a Darksteel remould that's an Ursagryph (Gryphon that's half bear instead of half lion on the non-bird half)!  
And things are looking good for Quickstrike, Lenny looooves snakes!

Given the "entirely gold plastic bit" I think it may be a slightly misremembered alt mode Skyhammer, GPS all over his various arses!

It's GPS, GPS, GPS all the way down, baby!

 

I’m just waiting for a commander class Lugnut to come from somewhere, the voyagers we’ve had so far have been big in jet mode so maybe a new one would transform to Cybertron Optimus height which would work for me  

 

He's one of the very few non-G1 figures that earned their way into my collection by their awesomeness (Vehicon is another).

 

And what a dream!

I found it though, it was in your Titan Scorps review, when you did the comparisons with the g1 and the mega action

 

Could be too! Roadblock inner toy has a lot of gold plastic though as well.

Roadblock (G1) - Transformers Wiki




Anyway both should be re-done (without GPS!) Actually looking at the pic directly above this sentence Roadblock is giving me Fasttrack vibes. Possible recolour?

 

 
Last week I was toying with the idea of rewatching the Star Wars trilogy's - I bypassed all of that and decided to dive head first into The Mandalorian!  

I rather enjoyed it too - I watched the entire first season last night and keen to see more now!   

Season 2 when?  

 

End of this month for season two. Really looking forward to it, since it seems to be tying into their animated shows as well.

 

I reckon I'm on track to beating that record with both Skyrim and now Crusader Kings 3. The latter has thoroughly got it's claws into me by being a brutally murderous political sim that is somehow still a pleasant break from reality. Fancy that. I recently managed to usurp the throne of Mercia (the middle bit of England) and am hoping that this might be a springboard in liberating the north from naughty vikings.

You'll be pleased to know that France has created a terrifyingly powerful post-Charlemagne hegemony in Western Europe, with territory stretching past both the Alps, Pyrenees and Rhine. England remains fractured and tribal.

Also there's a ruling family over in India that follows a religion that preaches nudity at all times. It is hilarious.

It was Roadblock I was thinking of, but couldn't remember the name - Roadhugger and Roadgrabber kept getting in the way in my brain. Still, bonus points for Skyhammer for getting GPS in every single mode, but Roadblock concentrates it all into one ludicrously fragile inner bot. There was once one of the inner bots for sale in Leicester Old and Vintage Toys, and they had to seal it away in an air-tight container for safekeeping. Despite being relatively rare it was not expensive. I brought it up with one of the guys there and he just rolled his eyes at the difficulty of trying to sell something that will definitely crumble to pieces if looked at all wrong.

I would honestly really love to see a new Skyhammer, as that drop ship mode is absolutely unique. Definite Aliens vibes there. But as neither he nor Roadblock had any fiction, it'd be a hard sell. Stranger things have happened though.

The thing is the perfect opportunity for Thunderwing has come up two lines running in the recent past. He'd have made a perfect PotP leader toy, with the 'upgrade' armour that the others had, and I think honestly plenty at Hasbro were secretly wanting him to win that infamous poll (then don't put it to a public poll you numpties!), and failing that, would have worked similarly to how Siege Ultra Magnus and Shockwave worked, again bulking up a smaller bot with modular armour. But they didn't do either of those things.

Now the problem is that to do that in 2022 would end up looking somewhat derivative - yet another small robot armouring up into a bigger robot? It's been done to death now.

All that said, I would take a late-stage remould of Sky Shadow. I'll take anything. I'm so thirsty.

 

I chuckled at that story about the shop finding it difficult to sell lol.

I forgot about the fan poll and you are right on POTP Leader toys, they would have been perfect for Thunderwing. Come to think of it they could do that with all the Pretenders. I'm not a fan of the Autobot outer shell original designs because why do you want your robots to look like humans? I would like to see the inner robot toys get their shine though. A whole Pretender focused line lends itself to a Titan class character (Monstructor) with Japanese Selects repaint (Dinoking).

 

I've no idea who that is but he looks cool!

 

Ah, the "entirely" is what threw me. you see.
Every. Single. Mode.
The entire bottom half of the outermost vehicle shell, and 66% of the weaponry as well.
If they were going for in-built obsolescence then...


Thank heavens for Mantic Games!

 

I feel you here!

I've missed this!

Oh Hai! You have been missed. Greatly!

It was all both more drawn out and compressed for me. Nothing between 1988 and 2012. G1 complete from 2013 to 2015 (with a few stragglers thereafter), a few tangents for TF: Animated and BW, and then CHUG CHUG CHUG from 2015 to now.

"No Way Out!"
Needs more Alicons
From TF:UK#185 'Space Pirates'

 

CALENDAR UPDATE

I STILL FUNCTION. Been cracking on with the calendar layouts and have (finally) finished the month pages! I'm not gonna spam this thread with all 12 pages (so far) but all of them are here...

2D Artwork: - tikgnat's 2021 calendar thread!

Let me know if I've cocked up any dates like birthdays or very importantly, TFN dates...

Picture submissions will close at the end of the month!

 

@Imperator If I'm ever going to touch CK3 even a bit, I'm screwed. Like terribly screwed. This game is too much of something I spent hours as a teen thinking about to even consider touching right now. I just don't have enough time to play it, I know it, and that would be too much of a shame. I need to be entirely focus on it, to have cleared everything else before hand and then going full nut on it.
Like, dang, you reversed Verdun's treaty apparently and mate, that's a What If scenario that excited me much more than What if Jean Grey didn't die.
ha, good ol' Charles the Bald.


Anyway, speaking of not enough time, big day on Switch with Super Mario 35 battle royale, Alwa's Legacy, Electronic Super Joy 2, and Y's Origin (weeeee).

And I haven't finished Paradise Killer yet... A game I really do enjoy, and so should you.

 

Weird thought with Polar Claw: I've no idea how big the original toy is but I kind of wonder if he was intended in Kingdom as a retool of Primal? For some reason ever since seeing the bit of him in that group artwork with him seemingly in a humanoid bear mode type thing I've been thinking it wouldn't be hard to use Primal to make a bear instead of a gorilla?
Of course that's academic now if he has been axed though you never know if he might crop up somewhere still if they need an exclusive slot to fill or something.

 

Every year I keep meaning to order one of these, this year again I definately mean to order one but for one reason or another (due to memory) I probably won't.

They look great though.

Anyone else on the fence over the beastwars kingdom stuff still?

I found the 90s BW animation okish but wasn't really into transformers anymore by then. I never really liked the toys either.

However I found Optimus Primal in TRU when I was at uni in the late 90s and decided he would look fun on my shelf, he was the first and only transformer I had bought in 10+ years. He was also the only BW figure I ever bothered with and didn't buy any more transformers for another 5 years after.

 

I can always put you down for a preorder now, if you want?