Remember the 90s? It was a time when "day glow" was popular, when everything was "hot", "florescent", or "neon". Blaze orange wasn't just for hunters, it was a fashion statement. So it wasn't that surprising for Hasbro to catch the trend and rehash many of our favorite Transformers figures in bright, garish colors and call it "Generation 2". For some the changes were pretty minor, for others it might have even been an improvement, but for the rest we got some downright CRAZY color combinations. 

Case in point: the G2 Combaticons. Where the G1 originals all consisted of earth tones that complimented each other, the G2 versions looked like they got their colors from a bag of Skittles. A bright red army Jeep is probably not going to blend in anywhere and certainly doesn't make for a very good robot in disguise. But despite all of that, G2 is a very solid piece of the Transformers universe and garnered quite the fan following. In fact, Botcon 2010 was all G2, all the time from the website design to the exclusives. It's one of those things that if you grew up with it you learned to like it (or at least tolerate it). 

And that once again brings us back to the present. Seems the G2 train never really ended, it just made a couple stops. This time our throw back to 1993 is in the form of the Transformers: Fall of Cybertron Combaticons. This one is a bit of a head-scratcher; you've got G1 characters in pre-G1 designs using post-G1 colors. This right here is a set of figures with an identity crisis. It's made even more confusing by being the third version of these figures and the game is still over a month away!

It started with Game Informer getting the jump on everyone by showing off game accurate versions of the team which we would later learn are SDCC exclusives. Later on at Toy Fair 2012 we got our first up close look at the retail version which features a color scheme that could only have been chosen by pinning a color wheel to a dart board. That version is due later this year. This newest repaint will be sold online as a shared exclusive between Amazon.com (pre-orders are open now for US$59.99) and BBTS (pre-orders start Sept. 10 with the price coming later). Both retailers are calling for a November release date. The Amazon price is actually quite good as the retail version will run you around US$75 to complete and the SDCC exclusive is US$99.99. 

I'm personally aiming to get all three, but what about the rest of you? Is there a version you're particularly interested in getting or are you going to pass on all of them?