Transformers: Age of the Primes Thread: ll First Post All Listings II Update : April 12th, 2027 Bonus Wave: Repaint fun, Beast Wars, G2, Machine Wars

[unluckiness]

Vector Prime being the same mold but a new sword is so strange. I could understand the logic behind either a straight redeco or a newly-tooled release. This seems like a waste of resources addressing a problem that didn't exist.

Anyway, with that reveal, looks like I'm not going to complete the Thirteen. Skipped Quintus for being half clear AND soft plastic, Nexus for being Nexus and now both Vector Primes. I still have a Galaxy Force one somewhere but I dunno, The Ten sounds a lot better than The Eleven. Kinda regret not getting the cheap Universe Vector Prime that sat in a toy store for years.

 

[Platypus Prime]

Maybe they just want people to pay an extra inflated Voyager price for a sword to fit in the disk that, unless I got my size class math wrong, is already a $700+ display item completed.

 

[Swerve]

It's a 5 mm port so thankfully I think the Legacy sword will work from the old Vector Prime. I was worried he was going to be a new mold or retooled enough that I'd want him. I'm content with my 13 with the old Vector Prime. Still haven't ordered the Sentinel Prime set. The wheel is nice but the price is not great.

 

[Agent X]

The blue gauntlets, trunks and toes on Megazarak is giving him undeserved Super-Hero vibes.


And I'm gonna say this every chance I get:
They're not wires, they're Air Hoses! Vector Prime is so old he runs on a pneumatic system!

 

[unluckiness]

An eBay seller has a copy of Megazarak. While I really don't like that mold's shoulders, the obscure nature of the redeco and the unique color scheme still interested me. It looks like the bright red's closer to salmon or coral and the electric blue's somewhat faded. Disappointing.

 

[Stepwise]

Vector Prime is one step up from levers and pulleys.

I like Joyride's head sculpt, it's fun. It'd be nice if his powermaster could fit somewhere in back, but based on the pics I've found of Sureshot, that wouldn't be possible w/out some sort of upgrade kit.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

I liked my digibash better, but I gotta get that Megazarak. I support its existence on general principle. Old BotCon exclusives have had their time.

 

[Shadewing]

I liked my digibash better, but I gotta get that Megazarak. I support its existence on general principle. Old BotCon exclusives have had their time.

But this wasn't a Botcon exclusive, it was an OTFCC exclusive.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

Tomato, tomato.

 

[lastmaximal]

An eBay seller has a copy of Megazarak. While I really don't like that mold's shoulders, the obscure nature of the redeco and the unique color scheme still interested me. It looks like the bright red's closer to salmon or coral and the electric blue's somewhat faded. Disappointing.

I liked my digibash better, but I gotta get that Megazarak. I support its existence on general principle. Old BotCon exclusives have had their time.

I go back and forth between these. I want to get that Megazarak on principle, but the more I look at these pictures the more annoyed I am at how safe they played it with the colors. Let's (inaccurately) use that bright blue as one of the main sprue colors (for the record I like this move), but let's dial it wayyy down. And that strong red needs a bit of tempering as well. Like, COMMIT, will you?

 

[CoffeeHorse]

I don't know. I'm already getting used to the colors. They're wrong, and I have no idea what they could possibly be based on, but they're giving me a late G1 vibe that works for me. They should have just done it right, but I can deal with this.

 

[Stepwise]

Are Joyride, Blanker/Pointblank, and Megazarak getting the same reds and blues?

Totally admitting I have no idea how this works on the manufacturing side of things, but I'm still wondering if there's a connection there.

 

[unluckiness]

I don't know. I'm already getting used to the colors. They're wrong, and I have no idea what they could possibly be based on, but they're giving me a late G1 vibe that works for me. They should have just done it right, but I can deal with this.

Chances are an overexposed photo on the wiki

 

[Sabrblade]

Chances are an overexposed photo on the wiki

Negative. This is what the wiki's toy pic looks like:

Compare:

If anything, the red is less salmon on the box back pic but more salmon in the white-backgrounded stock photo.

 

[Exatron]

Why is it everything must be either an exact match to what came before or a mistake? Is it really so hard to believe that the team might just think something a little different looks better? Amidst all the complaints that the current team sticks too closely to what came before, we insist they're wrong whenever they deviate from what came before?

 

[Princess Viola]

people want things to look like how they should look like

 

[lastmaximal]

When the whole point is to reference something that came before, fidelity to that something is not an unreasonable expectation. This isn't a new thing "incorporating elements of" Megazarak "we wanted to redeco Cyberworld Scorponok with a Megazarak-inspired color scheme". It's pretty straightforwardly "a remake of Megazarak", and as a redeco of existing tooling, the specific thing this release brings to the table IS the deco, so it'll be judged on those merits. And, I feel, fairly.

Mistakes can and do happen, and have happened, in the design and production process. It's not just a matter of a fan going "this is a mistake because this isn't what I want", it's someone with eyes going "okay, this isn't how this looks". The wiki has plenty of examples of honest, even admitted, mistakes.

And really, what's so bad about calling it that? An error is an error and it happens. And honestly, in this decade, in this forum, it's not like anyone's calling for the design team's jobs over stuff that's rightfully dismissed as small beer.

But to be fair, maybe it wasn't a mistake, and they wanted it that way? That's certainly possible too.

We won't know until we get the always-deeply-appreciated behind the scenes talk about it whether this was "yyyeah it looked different on my monitor" or "the wiki reference picture looked like this" or "I felt the blue was too much so I put a drop of gray in".

Maybe it was indeed a deliberate choice. And you're right, the team is free to make that choice.

But the audience is free to agree and like it as well, or disagree and dislike it. Or, imagine this, a bit of both: I like that there's way more blue now, replacing the blah gunmetal, but I don't like the shade of blue. (There's the red, too, but the point is made. At least Hasbro seems to be making things in proper black plastic now, rather than veeeery dark blue or brown or whatever.)

At that point, it's not them misjudging the color, it's them deliberately choosing a different color than the one the thing they're referencing uses. And there's degrees to that, certainly -- it's not like they chose lemon yellow instead of a less saturated blue -- but those degrees create room for degrees of agreement or disagreement.

 

[Exatron]

Oh, I'll never say anything against anyone's preferences or that they should like or dislike something. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions. It's this very specific thing where every time something varies in any way from previous versions, there's an assumption that the team just doesn't know how something is supposed to look and screwed up.

I get it. It can happen. It has happened. But every single time? Megazarak here is just a particularly egregious example. I doubt there's any image out there that could be interpreted as having these parts be that bright blue. And yet I see immediate jumps to how they must have used a bad wiki image or some such. (Admittedly less here than on other sites.) It's just irritating. Barring some weird story that comes out later, it seems pretty obvious that they wanted to get some bright blue in there, and chose to change that sprue to that color.

Like it, hate it, whatever. Just the immediate jump to incompetence gets really old.

 

[unluckiness]

I just don’t like the dull blue. Dude looks like cartoon Perceptor now, I dunno how elseyou go from the Allspark Blue they paint on all the windshields to this pale, almost blue jeans blue. If it’s not incompetence it’s a jive design decision.

 

[lastmaximal]

The "immediate jumps to how they must have used a bad wiki image" is because it's happened before, enough times for the wiki to write about it being a thing. And the inaccuracy in shades is in line with what basing color choices on a slightly-off reference image would yield.

I think it's very important not to gloss over that no one to that point in this discussion had even called anyone incompetent or really anything. CoffeeHorse called the colors "wrong", which they are. I said I wanted the team to "COMMIT" to a color they're referencing, which I'm still saying now. Unluckiness is the one who mentioned the possible use of the wiki image (which has since been responded to by Sabrblade, seemingly ruling that possibility out).

Even the mention of the wiki precedent in this discussion was done without casting any aspersions on the team as people, or on their level of competence. Like, in the cases where the wiki reference picture they used was off, they DID do their research, but what turned up didn't help them like they thought it would. That happens plenty. I can't speak for what any other discussion venues say about the team, which is because, and why, I stay here.

Frankly, when the business hinges so much upon referencing a particular look (much more in the current era's design direction than in 20-years-ago CHUG's), one should probably anticipate that people will have expectations about how well that particular look is referenced. To mix metaphors, Hasbro set the bar for themselves using that specific reference point as an anchor. It's not unreasonable to hold them to the bar they set themselves, for themselves.

(I should clarify that I'm not even against changing a lot of the gunmetal to blue. I've said that I like that choice, regardless of accuracy. More color in more places, and not overwhelmingly so, raises the overall visual interest. Whether this was out of the team's hands as a sprue allocation thing or a deliberate choice, I like how it turned out. What I don't like is the weirdly tealish shade of blue, which to me is not preferable to the solid tone of the original. Same deal, minus the sprue change, for the shade of red.)

Ultimately, it's just the wrong blue and the wrong red, and it's not a catastrophic failure OR a sign in any way that they don't deserve their jobs. But while these shades of blue and red don't make this toy no-longer-Megazarak, it's still fair to say they're the wrong shades of those colors.

I don't think "we deliberately got the colors wrong" is necessarily any better an outcome than "we accidentally got the colors wrong", but if the design team dialed those colors differently on preference, I'm content to agree to disagree with them.