J-J-J-Jolt!

[Onslaught Six]

I bought The Last Remaining Sideswipe In Altoona as well as a Jolt for a friend of mine to help justify laptop parts costs, and he found difficulty transforming Sideswipe. Somehow. But he didn't have as much trouble with Jolt. Kind of.

[onslaught86]

You know what's sad? I'm beginning to wonder if I'll end up buying Jolt simply because there's nothing else new out right now and he's not the most offensive item I can find.

Heh, I hope you do, and I hope you enjoy him as much as I have. He's a clever little cartoony gem in the midst of the movie toys who're largely lacking in personality. I find it intriguing that ROTF contrasts so much with Animated - Animated was a poorly engineered line that brimmed with personality, whereas ROTF is a cleverly engineered line that's largely bland, and QC/budget cuts have done a lot of damage.

I stand by Jolt being a fun, innovative piece of work. The articulation and fluid transformation keep me coming back to him.

[BWprowl]

Animated was a poorly engineered line that brimmed with personality,

What was poorly engineered about animated? That line had some of the most intuitive stuff we've seen in ages. Toys like Shockwave, Lockdown, Snarl, and Prowl are amazing pieces of work.

[138 Scourge]

Animated was a poorly engineered line that brimmed with personality,

What was poorly engineered about animated? That line had some of the most intuitive stuff we've seen in ages. Toys like Shockwave, Lockdown, Snarl, and Prowl are amazing pieces of work.

This. The only real example of poor engineering I can see in Animated was Lockdown's hand issue, but even that's not too horrible.

Furthermore, Blitzwing is just an amazing toy, Oil Slick's kinda simple, but fantastic for all of that, the Activators pull off their shtick really well (Grimlock's the only one I've had trouble with) and Wreck-Gar's just the most visually appealing toy that ever happened. (Slight hyperbole, but not by much).

[onslaught86]

Animated was a poorly engineered line that brimmed with personality,

What was poorly engineered about animated? That line had some of the most intuitive stuff we've seen in ages. Toys like Shockwave, Lockdown, Snarl, and Prowl are amazing pieces of work.

Cleverly designed, sure, but the engineering wasn't always up to par. Lockdown was indeed very clever, though he (Like Mega Megs and several others) had the late-run safety testing modifications ruin his hands. I really wouldn't call Snarl or Shockwave intuitive, though, Shockwave I'd definitely call clever. Snarl I like, but he's not especially clever or intuitive at all. No club storage, man, when that so should've been flame breath.

I think my main problem with Animated as a whole is that the line was too complex for itself. They were chunky, kid-friendly designs, some of which were indeed very cool, yet were also very simplistic. They then engineered ways for these to transform into the chunky kid-friendly alt. modes, but they applied the movie design philosophy to them. The result was a line full of chunky kid-friendly designs that were not chunky or kid-friendly at all in toy form. The overcomplex nature of the figures was less than elegant, with lots of poor joint tolerances. Some higher-end Japanese items manage to meld a minimalist design aesthetic with expensive, articulated, multi-part figures. I feel Animated fell short of this, and has largely resulted in a line of toys that, despite my enjoying on principle, I now find easy to forget and ignore.

I bought most of the line, and now largely regret it, because their engineering does not gel with their designs, and this discourages me from playing with them.
Basically, Animated Prime turns into a shitty cartoony truck, and it's not fun transforming him, so he sits on the shelf in robot mode while I fiddle with toys that turn into fun things in a fun way.

I dunno, I'm feeling pretty burned out on current TF as a whole, these days. The fandom seemed to be all RAH RAH ANIMATED for about a year, while I sorta scratched my head and went "I still dunno." Really liked what they were trying to do, really liked all the homages, the consistency and continuity efforts alone prove that this can be done right. But at its core, I keep coming back to it all being too simplistic, and too kid-friendly, when the toys were anything but simplistic and kid-friendly, and the show was awfully spread-out.

Universe had a bunch of suck toys too. Man, I miss Classics and Cybertron.. It feels like for every gem in Animated, Universe, and ROTF, there were several failures.