Favorite Transformers

The Transformers are about to sweep the nation again what with the new movie coming out and we’re already seeing a heavy promotional push to cash-in on it all. So hey, why not do a few Transformers posts myself spotlighting my favorites?

It’s no secret that as I grew older, my love for the Robots In Disguise tapered off. I guess the super heroics & fantasy elements of Masters of the Universe and the military action/adventure of G.I. Joe struck a deeper chord with me throughout the years while the scifi nature of Transformers hasn’t. I’ve never been a huge scifi fan, so at best, I would have to rank the original TF franchise as my fourth favorite cartoon/toyline of the 80s (Joes, He-Man and TMNT would come first).

But all the hype for the movie sequel actually has me getting excited about the original toys and cartoon (I don’t care about this new movie), so here’s the characters I liked from that era:

OPTIMUS PRIME

This is a pretty obvious one, everyone loved the TF’s answer to Duke, myself included. He was the eldest (or at least sure seemed like it), most responsible of the group, always did the right thing as leader of the Autobots. Watching the 1st season on DVD just makes me hate the movie version that much more. His G1 design is so simple and so classic and and the CGI version is a convoluted mess.

Optimus Prime was my Holy Grail. I had friends down the street that had him, but he never made his way to MY house around Christmas or my birthday. There’s a 25th Anniversary Edition of Optimus that has been released but it’s like $60.

The Transformers on Commodore 64!

My family owned a Commodore 64, but I didn’t have a whole lot of games for it. For the longest time it was used for family business-related projects. It wasn’t until 1989 or so that it finally came home to roost and by then, games were getting hard to find and the ones you could find usually weren’t very good. So while I can’t speak from experience about these games, but I think they look pretty interesting nonetheless.

The Transformers (1985, Ocean Software)

The very first Transformers game. By most accounts I’ve read, it seems to be a mixed bag, usually faring no better than “average” and supposedly the controls are really bad. It’s a platformer with the goal of collecting pieces to form an energon cube. You can play Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Hound, Mirage or Jazz and you battle the likes of Megatron, Soundwave, Starscream, Buzzsaw, Skywarp, Laserbeak, Ravage, Frenzy and Rumble.

This is one of those weird cassette games Commodore had going in addition to their more standard floppy disk games.

The Transformers: The Battle to Save the Earth (1986, Activision)

The Angry Video Game Nerd briefly touched upon this game and how bad it is. Though the box art does not show it, the game’s full title is The Transformers: The Battle to Save the Earth. This time, the game was more RPG/text based with a few first person shooter scenes and you’re trying to prevent the Decepticons from building the ultimate weapon. I’ll take a bad platformer over a bad text game any day.

Another Commodore cassette.

New Guitar Hero hits the streets and things are more than meets the eye!

I made a stop by Best Buy on the way home from a 10 HOUR SHIFT today and treated myself to a few goodies:

Guitar Hero: Smash Hits for Wii:

Not a “new” Guitar Hero game, but a compilation featuring songs from the first three Guitar Hero games plus one Aerosmith song from Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and a few from Rocks the ’80s. I own Guitar Hero III and Aerosmith, but have never even played the first two games or Rocks the ’80s (which all total, account for something like 41 of 48 songs in the game), so this was a must buy for me.

I’ve only played a handful of songs so far in Quick Play (Avenged Sevenfold, Ratt, Warrant, Motley Crue, Poison and Judas Priest), but it’s the usual addictive GH gameplay.

And now we have Guitar Hero 5 and Guitar Hero: Van Halen to look forward to in just a few months! Hm… What other bands are worthy of their own GH installment? Led Zeppelin? Black Sabbath? I’d love to see a KISS game, but I know that’s a long shot. After that, my choices are even more unlikely (Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, Megadeth).

The Transformers: The Complete First Season

I passed on the original Transformers DVDs that Rhino Entertainment released. First off, cartoon nostalgia hadn’t hit me fully yet (I was still in conflict over whether it was okay for a man of my age to watch cartoons… the answer is YES) and the prices were atrocious anyway and that drove me off from even taking the chance. Besides, Transformers were always third in line behind G.I. Joe and He-Man for me.

Well, now this baby just got released yesterday for only $20 right now at most stores and for that price I had to pick it up despite not having seen a TF episode since it was re-aired in the early 90s as “The New Generation” or whatever bull that was. So this wasn’t a moment of getting hyped for the new movie (I thought the first one was pretty bad), but another attempt to reclaim my childhood.

Maybe I can do a write up on this set at some point.