Mastermind Creations Reformatted: R-08D Azalea (Stealth Assassin)

(Femme-Bot Friday #31)

You might think that, with three other iterations of this mold already in my possession, I wouldn't think it worth paying over the odds for a(nother) limited edition, event exclusive repaint of the Azalea mold... But then, dearest reader, you would reckon without the dangerous allure of the dark/evil repaint of a Fembot, not to mention my OCDs.

You'd also reckon without the amazing good fortune I had on eBay with this one...

Combiner Wars Alpha Bravo

The wild-card in the set, Alpha Bravo is a whole new Aerialbot, replacing - temporarily, at least - Slingshot from the old Generation 1 character roster. Being a helicopter, he was also quite a blatant hint that the Protectobot Blades was on his way and, knowing Hasbro, set to be reused - likely with minimal, if any alteration - as the Combaticon Vortex (a move confirmed at this year's BotCon, when testshots of the Combaticons were first revealed).

Naturally there was a massive fan outcry when Alpha Bravo was revealed - not least over his nondescript name - which may have led to the repurposing of Firefly as 'Quickslinger'... but was it at all necessary, or is this a decent replacement for the loud-mouthed Aerialbot?

G.I.Joe/TransFormers Collectors' Club 2015 Old Snake with Advanced Stealth B.A.T. duo

While the TransFormers Collectors' Club has been run by the same company as the G.I.Joe Collectors' Club for about ten years now (wow, that makes me feel old!), and despite the fact that TransFormers and G.I.Joe have crossed paths in the associated fiction several times, the two Clubs have only relatively recently started crossing over their exclusives. It started a few years ago, with the likes of Hound, Starscream and Jetfire being turned into G.I.Joe vehicles but, this year, the TransFormers Collectors' Club released a pair of crossover exclusives: Afterbreaker (formerly Technobot Afterburner) with Marissa Faireborn and Old Snake with Advanced Stealth B.A.T. Duo.

Since the former is a non-transforming toy - just an underachieving repaint of a GI Joe movie vehicle featuring a spring-loaded gimmick that either fails to work at all, or operates on a hair trigger - with a fairly nondescript G.I.Joe figure, that was an easy pass for me: one thing I may never understand is TransFormers toys that don't transform.

The latter is a different story...

My Take on the New York Comic Con 2015 Reveals

You will no doubt have seen by now the many images of Hasbro's upcoming output, as revealed at the New York Comic Con this year. Obviously, I wasn't there, so everything I say here is based on those photos on the editorial accompanying them.

Combiner Wars Firefly

With a team made up of four Deluxe aircraft and one Voyager, I wonder if Hasbro were tempted to pull the same trick as they did with Energon/Superlink and use only two unique Deluxe models with the colourschemes creating the characters. Thankfully, the designers of Combiner Wars have been clever with their parts counts... and probably had slightly higher budgets, and so the Aerialbots have four mostly unique models with only a few shared parts between two of them.

Firefly - formerly Fireflight - is one of the entirely unique molds... but is that necessarily a good thing?

Combiner Wars Air Raid

When Hasbro declined to release the second wave of Combiner Wars toys across Europe, citing a lack of interest from vendors, that left collectors with an oh-so-nearly complete Superion and/or only the first component of Menasor, potentially leaving many fans unable to complete their contemporary sets of Generation 1's biggest rivals, the airborne Autobot team and the Decepticon road warriors.

This, obviously, is where the online retailers prove very useful... though the final component of Superion, Air Raid, sold out pretty quickly almost everywhere (mine is actually the US-style package, meaning I got a comic rather than a collectors' card, but pretty much everything else is standard) so I consider myself quite lucky.

But, of course, it's still a Hasbro product, so was it really worth the effort of tracking it down?