Beast Machines Dinobots Triceradon

Some consider the early Beast Machines lineup called 'Dinobots' to be a last gasp of Beast Wars toys, but I am considering them to be Beast Machines since they were on Beast Machine cards, even though they really don't look like Beast Machine toys.

Update - Well, maybe not. I stuck the Dinobots in their own sub-category on the side menu, even though I only have three of them.

One of the deluxe Dinobots was Triceradon, a recolored Guiledart, who was a Predacon in the Beast Wars Neo toy line in Japan. Triceradon is packed in a box with two Airraptors, two Jetstorms and two Optimus Primes, some of the earliest releases in the Beast Machines line. Of all those, Triceradon has the potential to be to coolest, though I like Jetstorm better.

In beast mode Tricradon is a pretty cool looking triceratops. He's mostly brown with some green on his back and yellow horns. There's not much else I can say about it I guess, it's really quite a cool mode. It's very tight and solid, and his legs are all articulated where they meet his body. The only weird thing about it is his tail doesn't fit in with the rest of his body, that is, there's no green on it, it's a slightly different color brown, and it's got a different pattern on it. Still cool anyway.

Also, Triceradon's beast mode has a neat undocumented feature. Push his front horn in so his tongue sticks out and his eyes roll back, flip down his side panels so you can see his ribs, and flatten his legs and you have his neato corpse mode. This feature was hidden well on the box, probably because Hasbro figures someone would complain about a corpse mode. Toys in Japan are always so much cooler.

Transformation is tricky and a big pain in the ass. He has a transformation reminiscent of Megatron's, only he doesn't do it quite as smoothly. You need to rip out his tail and shift a whole bunch of panels. He ends up with his dino head as his hand which would be cool, were it not for the large size and cumbersome nature of it. His other hand is an actual hand, but it has fairly limited movement due to his beast mode back being a massive shoulder pad/missile holder/shield. Triceradon also sports a weird looking backpack which contains his beast butt, stomach and sides which come together in a mess of stuff.

Also, his tail becomes his gun, which is a neat idea, but his arm isn't long enough to hold it, so it kinda drifts to the side, but it fires the two missiles he holds in his back pretty well, so it's forgivable. Also weird is his spark crystal is in his gun, which is really a bad place to keep your spark. I guess he has a lot of problems if he ever loses his gun. Such is life I suppose though.

In the end, Triceradon is a pretty neat addition to your collection. His stable beast mode and decent robot mode are worth the price, though he has one of the most annoying transformations in the world, and can be a pain in the ass to get back into beast mode. All in all worth the six bucks I paid for it, and maybe even a bit more.