That's slag.

A loose woman is a slaaaaaaag.

 

Both are slag, the insult (as far as I'm aware) is derived from the forging process and is meant in the vein of "no one wants you, just like slag" hence why Slag's name was changed to Slug as its quite offensive here in the UK

 

It's actually ssshhhllaaaaaaaaaag, but you knew that  

Except in the 80s when the term was used frequently. Now it's hardly heard here (and when it is it's mostly jokey or banter type, not actual name calling stuff), and I don't credit the fact a transforming triceratops being renamed as the cause. So it'd have been fine to keep the name, just a few too many pearls being clutched in corporate offices methinks

 

Does someone work in IT per chance  

 

Actually no, lol  

 

Ah my assumption failed lol. I thought we were the only folk too lazy to abbreviate preproduction

 

Nah, I'm just lazy!

To be fair, I've been involved with a few IT projects as a subject specialist and have become au fait with the stuff the IT bods talk about, so it's entirely possible I've picked it up by osmosis.

But I was at least consciously being bone idle, lol

 

I didn't notice that part, so you're probably right. There were no instructions to this piece, I only had Mangmotion's stop motion video as a reference.

 

Getting my balance paid for Toon Ultra Magnus today!

Also wondering why we still have Bluestreak with his uber-profane string of swears and curses (or is it now shortened to the less offensive "Streak" as folks are less sensitive to blokes running about naked?), Prowl who has some nasty slang predatory connotations, or Blaster who has his own very inappropriate slang references. Seems like much of the G1 cast is now slang for something pretty offensive. And don't get me started on that episode that characters were denigrating Hoist by calling him "that most hated word in english".

As someone who specifies welding in his daily duties, I'm not really troubled by Slag being used by a tiny group of people 40 years ago (and not really much since).

 

I do lol

 

Wow, do all those words really have an offensive meaning nowadays? I can't even think of what they might be, I'm so out of touch. Why can't kids these days just stop ruining perfectly good words? *waves cane*

 

Does anyone think this will sell out or is it something I should wait for a sale? I like the all-in-one aspect more than the FT version, but I also don't need it immediately

 

I imagine you'll be fine for a while. XTB stuff seems to stay in stock for a decent amount of time, especially compared to some. You might run into an issue if this is just universally praised and all of us circling like vultures descend on the available stock.

 

Just watching the sentinel bay reviews transformation video that came out yesterday, this isn't a transformer, it's a cobbled together mess of a panel former, horrible horrible horrible engineering and transformation, yuck

 

Also with FT showing theirs off (granted it could take ten years to release) XTB will have some stiff competition that might keep everyone from buying this one up.

Then again, those looking for an alternative to the MP (like me) will probably jump on this one in order to replace their current one if they arent willing to wait around for FT to release theirs.

You can count me among that group. I put mine on PO the day they announced Stack.

Dont get me wrong. Im not unhappy with MP, but I agree that Stack looks a heck of a lot better in bot mode and alt mode. Sure it will be a PITA to transform, but since I dont do a lot of transforming of my collection, I wont see that as a deal breaker. I transform them all once at a minimum and then leave them in one form or the other. Most times, bot mode, but some like the Dinos, I leave them in alt mode.

 

and there's the chance Fans Toys will pull some bullshit like making his shoulder pillars chrome or something

 

Not sure what people expected in order to get the final result

 

No more than a 2 step transformation

 

That's what I don't get with the expectations for some of these figures. With early MP style figures, you could tweak the design more to account for an easy transformation, as long as it was a cool representation of the character. Now with toon accuracy being the standard, you have to do what you have to do to get the figure to that level of accuracy. 'Shellformers",'panelformers', backpacks, whatever. Hell FT is making it armor, so I'm gonna guess a huge tractor trailer car carrier is a tough one to make work in both modes. As long you can transform it back and forth, I accept that some figures might have pretty crazy transformations, and that I might have to be careful.

Now if stuff starts breaking, that's still not acceptable to me.

 

Yeah, that transformation looked totally joyless. Watching the video gave me flashbacks of trying to transform XTB’s Menasor from trailer to combined mode.

I might be out on this guy…

IMO there was nothing about MP-22 that required it to have such chunky proportions: the arms and legs could have easily been made thinner without changing any of the engineering. — Pobably couldn’t have made him as svelt as the XTB version, but thinner than it actually ended up being.

In any case, Magic Square and New Age have clearly shown us that it’s possible to make well-proportioned bots with relatively elegant engineering. I’m not saying it’s *easy* mind you, but it can be done.

It just seems that XTB’s designers have shown us again and again that they aren’t quite able to consistently make elegantly engineered toys.

I don’t like MP-22 because of the chunky proportions. But he certainly has an elegant, fun, repeatable transformation. I still appreciate that about him.