The story of how I got my Cyclonus is rather interesting, I was at a local comic shop but none of the comics jumped out at me, the only ones of a story I liked were Dr. Who, and none of them had the 10th Doctor. Then I saw a rack of used toys, and most were TRANSFORMERS! I went with Cyclonus because he and Titanium G.I. Joe Megatron were the only complete ones and Megatron... I know what he does when you transform him, he falls to pieces. There were toys like Armada Hoist and Energon Rodimus, but they looked incomplete, so I went for Cyclonus. I was not disappointed in the least. His color scheme is very interesting, it's white, light blue, dark blue, purple, and gold. These colors are unprecedented and that's why I like him. The name is derived from a G1 character but that's the only G1 element to him. The color layout is nothing like G1, and he's a helicopter unlike the G1 jet mode. But I think the name comes from the fact that he's a helicopter, that generate a mini-cyclone to provide lift, and they needed a name that had "cyclone" in it and Cyclonus was the final choice. The only hindrance is the rotor spinning gimmick makes a really annoying clicking noise. His Mini-Con can interact in two different ways in the chopper mode. The first one is that if you plug the Mini-Con onto the underwing cannons to fire the RPG or the chaingun barrel, why a chaingun would fire the barrel as a missile I don't know, but it's a missile gimmick, we should appreciate how much we got them in Armada, because finding a missile launcher on a Prime toy is like finding a needle in a haystack spray-painted silver. The other Mini-Con gimmick is you fold up the cockpit on Cyclonus. Then you rotate Crumplezone's turret and fold the treads around and clip the treads over the tabs on the sides of Cyclonus's front end. This gives Cyclonus an underslung cannon which recoils in tune with the rotor gimmick and a more realistic front end, with Crumplezone as the cockpit he looks like an Apache. There's another gimmick where you take Refute from Hoist or any Destruction or Adventure Mini-Con and plug it into the bottom of the cockpit and the rotor triggers the gimmick on that Mini-Con, I can't do that because I don't have any of those Mini-Cons. the transformation is simple but intuitive, I especially like how the waist slides down and into position when you fold down the chest. After that it's just a matter of unfold the arms and fold out the head. One essential but undocumented step is to rotate the rotor into a show accurate diagonal angle. When in robot mode he bears a very cliche helicopter Transformer look, cockpit chest, rotor on the back, side mounted parts becoming arms, and under-kibble stuff forming the legs. But the toy still looks good all the same. I don't mind the orange face, I do think, however, that the eyes being green looks weird. Especially since the orange sometimes bleeds through the eyes making them an ugly brownish. Crumplezone has the simplest transformation I've seen out of a tank-former so far. Fold the copter cockpit out into the legs, turn the waist, and that is it. Back to the main figure, his arms have the same missile gimmick from the vehicle mode. There is also a Powerlinx plug on each leg, which will trigger a flip-out cannon. The concept of cannons protruding from the knees was revisited with the Energon Wing Saber toy to compensate for the total brickiness making normal armament impossible. Back to Cyclonus you can still attach Crumplezone to the chest but that means he has a giant cockpit sticking right out of his chest. So I prefer to leave Crumplezone off the chest. The only downside to the toy is that there are no dead Mini-Con ports, so in robot mode Crumplezone has to stay off if you want to have both missiles in place and no knee weapons. So is this toy worth it? I got mine for $9.00, that means this is worth it, at least one eBay listing goes for twenty-something, but that was just one, and it's mint on sealed card. The rest were somewhere between 5 and 15, a great price range. So if you can find one on eBay in that range ( the odds of which are about 50:1 (if you think those are bad odds, go back to 8th grade math)) go for it.
OptimusPhillip rolling out
No comments:
Post a Comment