Review: Transformers Combiner Wars Armada Megatron

There's a remarkably Generation 1-looking Megatron in the shops at the moment. If doesn't turn into a gun, of course, as such a Transformation will never happen again, but robot-Megs looks like he stepped out of the 80s and turning into a tank is a reasonable compromise on his alt-mode. I mean, G2 Megatron was a tank and so was...

Generation 1's case-mate in this wave is Armada Megatron. As people who run small businesses in the toy area are more than well aware, Armada Megatron is sitting, refusing to budge from shop shelves like a Bumblebee.

Guess which one I bought?

Review: Game of Thrones Legacy series 2

The first set of GoT figures from Funko weren't perfect. They were almost there, but the face sculpts were slightly off on most of them. But there was potential, lots of potential, and the hope was that things would improve with the second set. And things have...but aren't quite there yet.

Review: The Flight of Dragons

Currently I'm attempting to put together a comic convention for my children s' school. Like last year, the plan is to screen a film on Friday night before the 'proper' activities the following day. There was a bit of a problem, however, in that pretty much every comic-based film of recent times is rated 12.

Think about it. Amazing Spider-Man: 12, Iron Man: 12, Guardians of the Galaxy: 12, Ninja Turtles: 12, X-Men: 12...and so on.

Since no one at the school is 12, this poses a problem. There are only a handful of PG films, and most of those had to be ruled out due to length (Spider-Man 2, Superman). Batman & Robin was ruled out for other, obvious reasons.

The headteacher suggested looking at animated films, though many of those are problematic too for the same rating reason. There are a couple, I will admit, but not a lot. Then I remembered Flight of Dragons.

Review: Birmingham Comic Festival 2015

A couple of weeks ago a new convention was held at Edgbaston cricket ground in Birmingham. Seeing as though this is about a 40 minute walk from my house, I had little choice but to go, right?

I'm reviewing the con from more from a child perspective than a hardcore comic-reader perspective. There are a few reasons for this: this is primarily a 'toy' site, having 3 children I'm always in half a mind as to whether to take my kids along to events like these, and finally, the comic convention I'm arranging for my children s' school is now only a few weeks away and I was on the look out for comics/ideas which might work for that.

As always when I arrive at cons/events such as this there was a giant queue (though no where near as giant as something you'd find at the NEC for the MCM events) that you join the back of and hope you're in the right place. There were a few costumed characters hanging about but no giant COMIC FESTIVAL banner or anything like that. Considering it was a nice day and there was a large park packed with people close by, this was a bit of a missed opportunity. (There were a couple of, what appeared to be, American cop cars outside. Didn't quite understand those. I think they played the Police Academy theme at one point, but I'm certain no one wants to be reminded about that franchise.)

Review: Transformers Legends Jetfire

There are only two Transformers I can remember getting in the 80s. The first is Pretender Jazz. I got him for Christmas from my cousin and was slightly perplexed as I didn't realise they were still making Transformers. Time moves differently as a kid, so it may well have been only a few months since I'd got a Transformer before that, but I'd obviously moved on to something else, toy-wise (if not comic-wise, but that's another story).

Now that I think about it, I do have a vague memory of opening up Optimus Prime. I can remember lifting the pieces out of the box, the feel and slight squeak as the toy popped out of the polystyrene, but that's about it. But Prime wasn't the second robot I was referring to when I began this piece, that was Jetfire, which I remember much more clearly.

It was another Christmas present (it had to be, Jetfire was big and therefore expensive). I remember ripping off the wrapping paper and opening him up, but the most vivid memory is the pain caused every time I pulled the switch to open up the wheels and they flung open at great force and smashed into my fingers.

I was never a huge fan of the Transformers cartoon, much preferring the comic. A lot of this can probably be traced to the fact that ITV insisted on splitting up each episode and spreading it over an entire week. Due to this I very rarely managed to see an entire episode. In what is becoming something of a recurring number, I can remember only two - the very first and the one that introduced Jetfire.

Of course he was called 'Skyfire' in the show, but only having seen it once until the arrival of DVD, he was always Jetfire to me. It was an amazing episode and I can remember being extremely sad when he (spoiler!) crashed into the ice.

The first (proper) update of Jetfire came a number of years ago now and in many ways it was perfect. But, as I say, it was a number of years ago now and Hasbro has released another...

Review: Star Trek Generations Engineering Playset

It's been rather a delightful week for me. First the Garax Swordship arrived on my doorstep, then this, the Star Trek Generations Engineering set from 1994.

The Generations line by Playmates was, well, remember the 'new' Star Trek line Playmates put out a few years ago? Well, it wasn't that bad. But it was pretty bad.

Overall the Playmates 5" figures had been very good. The likenesses were more than acceptable and the articulation, for the time, was extensive.

And then they screwed it all up.

It wasn't all their fault. Due to a last minute change in uniforms for the film (the production team threw out the new uniforms that had been designed and simply stuck to the stuff the cast had been wearing during the time of the Next Generation TV show), Playmates were stuck with making a line of figures which didn't look anything like the people in the film. There was still the main villain, Soran, and the boob-tastic Klingon ladies, but as for the Enterprise-D crew...

And then, presumably because of the uniform problems Playmates could no longer be bothered putting any effort in, articulation was reduced to a sole 5 points. Considering at the same time there were fully poseable Next Gen figures on toy shop shelves, this was bizarre.

But enough of the figures, this review is all about the playset.