You’ve seen Nemesis Prime transform in one of our videos, but for me NOT to make a video or open up this bad boy, you guys are probably wondering why:

Look, I know a lot of you guys would want me to open this ULTRA-RARE Transformer Toy, but I simply have to refuse.  However I will put this post up to educate everyone on it. This is a 2008 BotCon Exclusive “Shattered Glass” Megatron, that was sold exclusively to a select few. Now you’re probably wondering why he’s colored in white, blue, and red. Well, this Megatron comes from the “Shattered Glass” reality, where he, for the first time in history, is A GOOD GUY and yep, you guessed it, the AUTOBOTS are the BAD GUYS!

NO, YOU’RE NOT GOING BLIND NOR CRAZY. It really is inverted in this “Shatted Glass” World. Here’s an introductory blurb from the 2008 Comic Con:

Anyhow, it’s pretty messed up but its the same storyline that’s usually used in comic books and popular sci-fi shows, where the main characters to the film actually are used in alternate universes where things are completely opposite! Like this one!

Yes, that’s our Megatron with the Red, White and Blue, and that’s a PURPLE Evil Rodimus Prime (Which I’ll do a video on..YAY!) with a damn goatee to really reiterate the evil LOL.

I got this bad boy purely for collector and possible re-selling purposes in the future. He’s pretty hard to find and I’m sure the best way to get him is through E-Bay or if you actually dig deep into the collectors’ forums like Seibertron.com (hint hint). He’s huge, and an awesome collectors item that is sure to be drooled on by hardcore Transformers Fans. Again, this was purchased during the 2008 BotCon. If you’re serious about getting exclusive toys as I am, then I advise you guys to be on the next BotCon (and Comic Con) to stock up. I wish I had known this last year or I would’ve gotten 10 of these and not get 1 for a pretty steep price.

And for you guys who’d wish I had opened it, here’s a few solid shots of this toy: CREDIT GOES TO UNICRON.US

Megatron “Shattered Glass” in Robot Form

Megatron “Shattered Glass” in Jet Form

Yes, he’s a BAD-ASS

Still pondering on whether I should get the Shadow Commander Upgrade, now that I have Alpha-Trion LOL

The Review:

This toy, if you guys haven’t caught it yet, is merely a color swap of the Classics Optimus with darker hues appropriate to the character. The only new addition is the Decepticon Logo. But overall, it looks pretty damn good for a dark character based on Optimus. It is nice and clean, looks very G1 but with an added Commando Vibe for this Evil Prime version.

In hand, this toy is even better than what you’ll see on the videos or photos. The eyes are painted over which is great. There are less than 20 points of articulation on this figure which makes for great poseability. Another thing to point out are the 2 guns that are able to transform into different pieces that can accentuate Prime even more.

I give this toy a 9/10.

Oh what a weekend. Where to start. I suppose a food place to begin is to apologize for the lack of any “live video”. For starters, once there I had completely oped against the laptop/ustream live streaming idea because it was inconvenient. Then I couldn’t for the life of me get my phone to send any email. It must be running in some weird roaming mode that’s incompatible with my so ervice. I’m sure they will (already have by the time I post this) all spill out some where on the road on the trip home.

Why already have?

I get to the hotel and I can’t for the life of me get the internet to connect. This sucks because A) I NEED to log on remotely and take care of a short maintenance task at work. And two, I can’t make blog posts. My only means of blogging anything has been Twitter through my Blackjack. . I’ve gained at least 3 followers from it though.

On the subject of the hotel. I recommend against the Travelodge in Sharonsville. The internet access doesn’t work. I made my reservation for Friday two weeks prior to this event. I call the place up at like 9 PM Friday and make sure they are going to hold my reservation if I arrive late. The guy on the phone looks up my name and says they will have my room. When I finally arrive at 1:30 AM, a very rude foreign guy who hardly speaks English tells me my reservation had canceled automatically at 6PM and now I’ve got to pay 10 dollars more per night for an upgraded room. I realize it’s only ten dollars and I didn’t bother to argue at that time of night but the fact is I had CALLED AND MADE SURE at a time that was ALREADY PAST THE EXPIRATION of my reservation.

So enough bitching about the hotel, on to the trip itself.

Friday, After mowing the lawn and dropping my kids off at school, I head out on the road for the 5 hour drive to Cincinnati, which I can never spell correctly no matter how many times I correct it. Somewhere along the road I realize “There is a time change, I’m going to get there are two thirty not one thirty and the zoo still closes at five. After some debate I decide to go ahead and hit the zoo anyway. I can’t get into the con and I need something to kill two and a half hours. I’m glad I did because it’s a very nice zoo.

I should just mention I love photographing at zoos. I’ve started a small hobby of trying to see how many different zoos I can go to (4 Large ones so far and 1 small one). The Cincinnati Zoo doubles as Botanical Gardens which means there are gorgeous flowers everywhere. Also the animals were more active than I’ve seen at many zoos, especially the apes and monkeys (I’m sure the nice weather helped). I took a ton of photos which can be found in this Flickr Set (Eventually). I’ll add more once I develop my film. I broke out my old Minolta and man, I had forgotten how nice to looks when you look through that glass.

Anyway, around 4:50 as I’m finishing up photographing the penguins, I get a call from Naladahc. He and his group and going out for dinner and they wanted to see where I was at. I told them I’d meet them at the hotel.

A half hour or so late, I’m meeting up with 75% of the “Non professional Transfandom Blogging Community”. I’ve never met someone I only know vie the internet before. It’s very interesting actually. I’ve read stuff they have written, I’ve seen photos of them, it actually is almost like meeting up with someone you know in real life. For the most part, no one really felt like a stranger and the whole environment was pretty comfortable. It makes me wonder what it would be like to meet up with Rob or Shannon, a couple of people I’ve known via the Final Fantasy fandom for nearly twelve years now. I have known those two longer than I’ve known any non family person in my entire life.

Anyway, dinner was very entertaining and it’s fun to watch how other bloggers operate. This first group consisted of Naladahc, Giga, Mr. Terrific, Teresa, and a friend of Naladahc and GigaMutt, JKNotRowling. We went to an restaurant which was located across the street from the hotel. After the food we headed back to the hotel for some very very uneventful “room trading”. Which lasted about ten minutes before we all landed in the bar downstairs for a few hours of crazy yacking and general mayhem. It was a lot of fun.

I left around 12:30 ~ 1AMish and had the previously mentioned trouble at my hotel. The next morning, I managed to completely sleep through my alarm clock by twenty minutes, something I NEVER do, which was kind of odd. After cleaning up I headed out to find gas and a Wal-Mart to buy some breakfast. This turned out to be a totally awesome idea when I found a lone Transformers Animated Bulkhead and a pair of the Optimus vs Megatron two pack. I picked up the two packs for my fellow bloggers and bought the Bulkhead for myself.

I should probably explain for anyone not familiar with the situation. The new Transformers Animated toys aren’t slated for a mass release until June 23^rd which is ridiculously stupid since the cartoon has been airing since like last December. Hasbro decided to do a “test market” campaign which happened to occur in the same town as Botcon, where 90% of the real hard core Transfans are going to be. Basically, they saturated the market, then everyone came in and bought up everything either for themselves or to resell to dealers or on ebay.

I never expected to find any of these toys arriving 2 days late after everyone knew these had been in the area for at least a month. I’ll continue with the story of Animated toys in a bit.

Saturday was the actual event. After arriving back at the hotel to find everyone gone, I realized I had no idea where the con actually was (It was apparently not in the hotel itself). Turns out it was across the street at the Duke Energy Center. After waiting in a reasonably short line for maybe ten minutes, I had dropped down my ten dollars and was in the dealer’s room.

This room was actually very much like the one I’d seen at Anime Central back in 2002. It’s like going to a flea market or craft show only everyone is selling toy robots. As expected, most of it was priced more than I was willing to pay. After meeting back up with the group, which also now included Despotes and the guys from the About Heroes podcast,I did quickly find my first purchase, a tenth anniversary Beast Wars Megatron. I’d never seen one on the shelves and it was only fife dollars over MSRP, I went ahead and made it my first buy. Next, I found one of the items I’d been planning to buy, Encore Skylynx for only 60 dollars, 40 dollars less than I’ve ever seen it listed for online. I also later would pick up a World’s Smallest Thrust and two Revoltechs, Rodimus Prime and the Patlabor Ingram.

We took a break at one point to head down to the panels. After sitting through half of thevery boring Club Panel, we were allowed to stay over and thus got decent seats for the Hasbro Design Panel. Oh man, worth the trip alone. I was twittering the whole time and most of my thoughts can be found there. I’m going to do a whole separate post on the subject though.

After the panel we headed back to the dealer room for a bit. The line for autographs was dwindling so like a complete dork I decided to go ahead and get Tara Strong to sign my copy of Final Fantasy X-2. She was obviously very bored during the whole event and I swear she was text messaging on her cell phone while some guy was yakking with her. Like a boob, I had dumped my Beast Wars Megatron in my car when we had taken a break for lunch without thinking about David Kaye being at the con signing things. Oh well, I’m not really a huge autograph person anyway.

Around 5PM, the con was closed for General Admission. Depotes, Giga, Omar, SpiderBen, JKNotRowling and I all decided to do a toy run for Animated toys. Sadly, we found nothing at Wal-Mart, TRU and Target nearby. Not really surprising through. We headed back to the hotel and dropped Giga and JKNotRowling off. The rest of us decided that since we weren’t going to the Botcon dinner, we’d continue the hunt. Despotes has a brilliant idea to head south across the river into Kentucky.

Apparently Transformer fans are afraid fo water and won’t cross bridges. Actually maybe they avoid bridges due to a fear of Trolls (LOL Internet humor is TEH FUNNIES). At the first Wal-Mart we found Prowl, Bulkhead, and Lockdown and a Prime. I picked up Prowl and Lockdown. I then proceeded to break the hand off of my Lockdown in the car because, I’m a genius.

Next we hit a Target with no sign of ever carrying anything. Third was a Toys R Us overrun with Bulkheads. I tried to post a photo from my phone but as previously mentioned, email wasn’t working.

After the TRU we hit a K-Mart which had almost everything in mass including two Voyager Megatrons. Megatron is probably the best figure in robot mode. I’m not doing reviews here though, I’ll leave that for later.

After one more uneventful Wal-Mart, we headed out for some Hooters for dinner. Good stuff.

Back at the hotel room, we mostly just sort of hung around talking. Some people went down to the bar. Crazy Steve, and a couple of other scratchbuilders were there talking about resin casting, molding and kitbashing. Interesting stuff. If I had more time it might be something I could really get into actually.

Once everyone had landed at the bar again around midnight I opted to go ahead and head back to my hotel. I really wanted to continue hanging around with everyone but I was also getting pretty tired.

On Sunday, I decided not to return to the con. I’d bought all I really cared to in the dealer room and the only panel I wanted to attend was the second design panel. I had a reasonably long drive ahead of me and I could get back at a reasonable hour this way.

Comments on the Hasbro panel as well as reviews of the five animated toys to follow later.

Hey all! I just checked my eMail and guess what I found? Got an eMail from Brian at the Transformers Collectors Club with details about BotCon 2008. Read it and weep fellas, read it and weep!

Hello **** ***********!

Here is the start of the information you have all been waiting for:

BotCon 2008 will be held in Cincinnati, OH at the Duke Energy Center.

Convention dates are: April 24-28, 2008

The hotel is across the street and is the Hyatt Regency.
You can make your reservations online by using the link at BotCon.com or call:

888.421.1442

Note: There will be tours and classes offered on Wednesday April 23 and
Thursday April 24. Currently Shawn will be teaching his class on Wednesday and again on Thursday so we will have 50 slots. We are also working on potential classes in sculpting and or molding as well. We can’t answer any specific questions currently but we wanted to give you a heads up for your hotel reservations needs.

Convention registration and details to follow….

Don’t delay as last year’s rooms went in less than a day….

Thanks for your support!

Brian

PS. The con set is really going to shatter your world….
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Cincy, that’s drivabel for me! I could do that on a tank of gas. 0f coarse given current gas prices, it still might be cheaper for me to fly. lol

As much as I hate to give that city any of my money, with all the trouble I’ve had out of there latly… I’m soooooo there! Anybody else going?

I can’t believe Ohio got a second one, that’s so awesome it warrents a “Breakdancing Soundwave” LOL