Encore 20: Devastator

[Dominic]

I tried that a few times as a kid. But, it always left me pissed off.

Generally, most of either faction was either away from the base for a day, or back at the base while the guys I did have were on a long mission.

[138 Scourge]

Heh. That's one way to do it. Characters I didn't have toys of were occasionally away from the base that day, but mostly they'd be spending some time dead. Scourge and Razorclaw made awesome Decepticon leaders. As for the Autobots, I think Jetfire was running things until I got Ultra Magnus, who then took over until one of my buddies got Rodimus Prime. Why my friends and I were so bad at getting the leaders of the factions, I dunno, but it made for interesting teams on either side.

I'd really like to like the Devastator toy, because I loved that character in the cartoon, and especially in the movie. But I got a semi-decent knockoff awhile back, and even if you leave out the problems with the thing being a knockoff, I wasn't as impressed with it as I wanted to be. Of course, when I got that knockoff, I had the Build Team to compare it to, and man, Devastator just looks like bullshit next to Landfill. I mean, I generally like the G1 toys for the clunky, goofy-looking things they are, but Devastator just doesn't hold up.

I never had the problem of having to use the different teams to make a combiner when I was a kid. Just lucky, I guess, but when I'd get one combiner limb I'd make it a mission to get the other four or five I needed to build the combiner. It helped that I'd usually get one limb for a birthday or Christmas or what have you, and have birthday money to get the rest of 'em. And I had a Wal-Mart and K-Mart in bike riding distance.

[Shockwave]

Ever since taking on the molding project I've wanted to redesign the combiner parts to have more articulation. But it looks like a 3rd party already beat me to it. Oh well.

[Dominic]

I might actually go for non-official parts.

But, yeah, love of the characters will be more a factor in me buying this set than it really should be. (I had a G2 Devastator in HS. It is a terrible toy.)


Dom
-but, ya know, Devastator.

[Dominic]

Lewis got his Devastator.

Here is his review, (copied from his blog).

Encore Devastator

After so many years of waiting, finally they have reissued Devastator! Too bad they did such a piss-poor job on it.

I’m not going to get into minor mold and color changes. It is outwardly identical in both mold and color, and if there are small changes, they don’t change anything major. Other sites will have pages devoted to these changes, so I’m not going to go into them.

When they started the Encore line, one of the great things was using tampos to replace at least some of the stickers. I hate stickers on toys, I’d rather have tampos. Well, that was great for a while. The best example of tampos improving toys is the most recent release of Predaking (which was technically not an Encore, but was released while that line has been being made). They did tampos to replace a number of stickers, and updated the stickers that they did include. It was awesome.

Well, Encore Devastator has NO tampos, and it is a toy that sorely could have used some. Devastator’s original stickers are terrible, as many of them are placed on non-flat surfaces. While this is a common problem with G1 toys, it stands out more on Devastator than others (at least to me). So, overall, this is pretty lame, unless you don’t have a G1 Devastator and want one. Then, go for it. It’s much cheaper than the original.

However, when I said earlier that they did a piss-poor job on this toy, I wasn’t just talking about stickers vs. tampos. On my set, Mixmaster will not stay on the purple leg connector. I’ve tried everything. It just won’t stay on. Best I can do is get Devastator standing up and not touch it. As soon as I pick him up, Mixmaster falls off. This isn’t the first recent toy to have major quality control problems. I had problems with the afore mentioned Predaking reissue. I had to take out screws from Razorclaw’s shoulders and swap them with his hips because he was put together wrong and it wouldn’t transform properly. There was at least one other thing like this I had to do, but I don’t recall it at the moment. So, you’ve been warned.

The sad thing is you’ll pay $125 for this toy. For not much more, with some searching, you can probably get an original near mint loose set on ebay for not too much more than that.

Dom
-not feeling so bad about skipping it.