'I' On Malaysia

Having had a few days suffering from a dose of flu, I wasn’t able to continue my posts about the Shanghai 2010 Transformers Cybertron Con until now.  I’m still not 100% recovered which must make this one of the longest lasting flu I’ve had in forever even if it wasn’t the one with the worst symptoms.

Perhaps the second or third port of call for anyone visiting the 2010 Transformers Cybertron Con currently running in Shanghai is the display area which showcases collections brought in by members of the ACToys forum and other collectors across China along with some items from Hasbro and TakaraTomy themselves including upcoming releases in the Celebration 2010 line such as Unicron, Primus and Masterpiece Rodimus – all of which will be posted in a separate entry later on.

Last Friday night saw the rather unsuccessful “midnight launch” of the Revenge of The Fallen toy line in Malaysia. Unsuccessful because only one out of the three locations (E-Toyz) that were supposed to be having a midnight sale actually had stocks in to be able to do so.

OK, my updates on recent releases on the Transformers side of things has been somewhat lacking recently.  I’ve been asked a few times now what is going on and why no updates and the answer is that I have been planning to move house for about the past three months so for at least that long (probably longer), pretty much all of my purchases have been brought home still in their brown cardboard cases and have remained there till this day.  My theory was that it makes packing up the collection somewhat easier if they’re all already boxed up.  Unfortunately, I’m still in the same old place and the vendor’s are taking FOREVER to pull their fingers out let alone actually do something with them.

Starting to catch up on the Henkei releases a little bit brings us to the end of July which saw Skyfire and Ramjet arriving in the shops.  In reality, they were released two weeks earlier in Japan but it takes time for these to be imported by Hasbro who appear to have cottoned on to the fact that the TakaraTomy releases are just as popular as their own and seem to have been acting as a local distributor recently, instead of the toy shops having to bring the goods in themselves and passing shipping costs on to their customers.

Going back through my posts, I realised that I haven’t posted anything about the Japanese releases in quite some time, with the last post on the Henkei! range being back in April.  Almost an anniversary ago!!!

So without further ado, I bring you Astrotrain and Hot Rodimus who were released in April (ironically) and June respectively.

About three weeks ago, TakaraTomy released their ‘polished’ version of the “Premium” Optimus Prime that Hasbro had already released here in mid-March.  Back then (read my review of both “Premium” Prime and Megatron here), the Hasbro release didn’t fair so well as it just wasn’t “premium” enough for me and, going off what others say on the Internet, many people agree.

Movie related items may be on the decline but there are still some exclusive/limited editions out there that I’ve yet to get my hands on (Vardia Red Starscream for example, if I ever decide I like that strange colour scheme) but one less to have to track down now is the Wonderfest Winter 2008 Transformers Movie Arcee G1 Colours.  I’ll just call it Pink Arcee for short in a slight homage to Black Arcee that TakaraTomy also released.