War for Cybertron Trilogy Covert Agent Ravage/Decepticons Forever Ravage

Every so often, even now, a set of TransFormers toys comes along that has the potential to get me excited. Whether it's something new and unique, or simply a repaint into a favourite character, Hasbro sometimes manages transcend the current mediocrity of their products... and this was once such set.

It excited me because I was interested in the Beast Wars Metals Jaguar - the 1999 Japan-only retooling of Transmetals Cheetor into the Tripredacus Agent seen in the three-part Season 2 finale of Mainframe's seminal Beast Wars television series - but the toy, frankly, looks a bit crappy and, these days, tends to be very expensive on the secondary market, with some sellers asking over £350 for the boxed figure.

Hasbro's new version, released in 2021, didn't quite hit all the right notes for me and, at its full asking price of £49, was an easy pass. However, during their Advent Calendar sale, they dropped the price by 50%, and I felt almost obliged to order, just to have a version of such a fantastic reimagining of G1 Ravage, even though the accompanying part of the set would be possibly the fourth copy of the actual G1 Ravage toy that I've owned.

But was it a worthwhile investment, even at half price? Read on, and find out!

2022 Retrospective

I realised this year that, over the course of the last few annual retrospective posts, it has metamorphosed from a set of lists - highlights, disappointments, etc. - with a brief introduction, into a massive wall of text detailing some events from the year and going off on various tangents, followed by the standard lists...

...This has become increasingly difficult - not to say downright depressing - to work on, even when I start early in the year and continually add to it, because there's often an update to specific information that necessitates great swathes of the wall of text to be rewritten, sometimes more than once. It's been enough of a struggle to work on regular blog posts - writing about the toys I've been collecting since the 1980s - which, over the course of most of this year, I just haven't been enjoying as much as I used to. I managed a decent number of posts in September but, overall, this has been the leanest year since I first started this blog!

As a result, this year, I'm going back to basics, and just presenting the lists. Honestly, if you'd seen the original, full version of this post about this dumpster fire of a year, you'd be thanking me right now.

So, without further ado...

Real Gear Robots Spyshot 6

All things considered, when Hasbro decided to launch a range of TransFormers toys modelled after real-world electronic devices, my thoughts and feelings tend toward "what took them so long?". Micro Change had been part of the foundation of the brand, back in the early 1980s, but the focus turned more toward vehicles as the line progressed... These toys might have been in development alongside the Cybertron/Galaxy Force line, but it took the 2007 live action movie to shift focus back. By positing that our technological leaps in electronics had been achieved by reverse engineering Megatron, the movie gave these toys some context.

Given the number of electronic devices already in the TransFormers back catalogue, one might have expected a new take on Soundwave or Reflector... but the closest we got to the former was Booster X10 - a clear reference to Laserbeak - and the closest we got to the latter... would be this little fellow.

But, of course, cameras have got substantially smaller since the 1980s, what with the digital revolution, and all... and just 15 years after this toy appeared, many people believe cameras, per se, to have been made redundant by those built into cellphones... So let's take a look at this relic of the past, and see how it works as a TransFormers toy.

 

Real Gear Robots Speed Dial 800

Given the increasing popularity of cellular telephony over the last few decades, it was perhaps inevitable that a toyline like Real Gear Robots would include a compact, hand-held phone as one of its innocuous devices... And, in fact, the concept has even been revisited since, with the 2017 au X TransFormers line of INFOBAR figures, featuring Optimus Prime, Megatron and (of course) Bumblebee, created as a promotion with the Japanese-made devices.

Weird as those are, though, they're not a patch on the abject insanity of the attempt Hasbro had made ten years earlier. Here, I present what must surely be the nadir of the Real Gear Robots line... Read on, if you dare!

 

MetaGate G-01 Haiku

I have quite a few excellent Third Party figures in my collection now, with an increasing number based on movie characters, and in a loosely Masterpiece-adjacent scale. Considering the couple of Hasbro-produced, Deluxe class figures of Age of Extinction Drift that I own are less than stellar, the announcement of a Third Party MP-analogue version certainly piqued my interest... And the fact that it was to be a triple-changer, taking both his Bugatti Veyron and futuristic helicopter modes into account, seemed like a tall order.

Add to that, the creators, MetaGate, were previously unheard of, and suddenly launching themselves toward an eager - and frequently highly critical - fandom with such an ambitious debut project. There have been rumours - as there were with DX9's La Hire - that Unique Toys have had a hand in this figure's creation but, so far, there appears to be little or no concrete evidence of that.

However, it quickly became a figure I was intent on acquiring, and the recent sale of my Game Boy Color game collection gave me just enough breathing room in my finances to risk taking a punt on a stunning-looking figure from an untested company. I preordered from Iacon.Store at the start of September, and it arrived a little over three weeks later... so, let's take a look at MetaGate's inaugural offering, and see how it compares to the output of some of the more established Third Party figures.

Jurassic Park X TransFormers Tyrannocon Rex (& Autobot JP93)

(Femme-Bot Friday #80)

By and large, the very concept of TransFormers crossovers with other properties is not one that interests me. The pair of Street Fighter II sets won me over because I'm also a Capcom fan, and because it used the Generations Arcee mold - which I was quite keen on - for Chun Li. The movie crossovers - Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Top Gun and Universal Monsters - all looked low-effort and poor-quality.

And, to be perfectly honest, when the Jurassic Park crossover was revealed, I planned on skipping it. Sure, the new paint job for the Kingdom Megatron mold and its new head sculpt looked great, but the transforming Ford Explorer looked like the kind of knockoff toy sold in the London Zoo gift shops. With a price tag in excess of £120, I felt it was more overpriced garbage that I could happily live without, even though the absurdly-named Tyrannocon Rex was billed as a Femme-Bot. If Kingdom Megatron was overpriced at £52, and the equally absurdly-named 'Autobot JP93' (whom I shall henceforth refer to as 'Dickie Attenbot', per my girlfriend's suggestion) is very clearly not Leader class in terms of size or engineering, this boxed set was clearly a rip off, and not worth investing in.

But then I saw an announcement on Reddit that Zavvi had cut over £70 from the price tag, bringing it down to about £51 for the pair... and then saw that Amazon had followed suit... meaning that the cost of the boxed set of two figures was below Kingdom Megatron's RRP. That changed everything...