Found these in Central California yesterday - the four Fresno-area Wal Marts had nothing, but the rural Sanger store had six of them.  I picked one up and like it.  It is a new tooling from the older TIE Bombers, but the tooling is not significantly different in appearance.  The cockpit has definitely been changed with the ejection seat and new control column.  That probably wasn't necessary given the detailed cockpit on the original tooling, but now the cockpit "matches" the retooled TIE Interceptor and TIE Fighter better.  The bomb-dropping mechanism has been improved as one now loads six bombs into a magazine and twists the rear of the pod to drop the bombs.   The magazine has a sliding hatch to keep the bombs from falling out.  The missile clicks into the port in the front of the ordinance pod, protruding slightly. 

My biggest beef is no pilot figure, but its a good ship overall.

Found this the other day at TRU.  I have an orignal vintage version and now the new one.  Naturally, the new tooling goes well beyond the old one in terms of detail and functions.  The cockpits and opening avionics bays are my favorite features, as is the accurate paintjob.  I do not like the "splitting" feature and the missiles are too toyish for me.  The original version has less obtrusive landing gear as well.  Overall, however, its a great new vehicle

Late response here... but I feel that showing impending doom in the next season would be a good way to go.  I mean, we all know the way the whole thing ends.  Personally, I feel it would be best to kill off Ashoka, but have a couple ways it could be done:

1) It happens sometime before ROTS in the general timeframe, her death results from something that Anakin feels he could have prevented, and through his sadness for Tano's loss, he gets pulled closer to the dark side.  (I see this as somehow being the most likely scenario).

2) Tano survives up to the general ROTS timeframe and the last couple of episodes take place while the events in ROTS unfold, but offer us a different view of what was going on elsewhere besides Coruscant, Utapau, and Mustafar.  After some brave and very intense fight scenes, she gets whacked by the clones during the Order 66 purge.  Ideally, it would be Captain Rex that would shoot her, just to hit home the tragedy and make all those clone-loving pre-teen viewers cry

   

Yes, tonight's episode was fun.  Very much the WWII submarine movie feel and the scene where Senator Organa gets bombed sort of had a WWII Battle of Britain Blitz feel to it, sirens and eveything.  The OT dialogue tidbits were nice as well, particularly Organa's "Help me Obi Wan..." line

Overall, I have enjoyed this season.  I'm not as wild into the whole bounty hunter thing as other fans may be and was sort of glad it got downplayed to some more spectacular events such as the re-invasion of Geonosis story arc as well as some of the political intrigue type stories.  The episodes are certainly "helter skelter" as far as a timeline is concerned, but individual ones have been particularly enjoyable and fun and there's been a much greater effort to show more ties to the OT in this season.  All good in my book

Found the complete wave of comic packs at one of my local Targets yesterday.  Nice figures all around, though I agree with the general consensus about the Kashyyk clone trooper's head change.  I picked up the clone trooper/lieutenant set to go with my Cody figure.

I found the new AT-RT at Target the other day.  These seem to be somewhat hard to find as it was only the second one I've seen between the several TRUs, Targets and Wal Marts in my area (versus tons of the Count Dooku Speederbikes).

This is actually a cool little vehicle and well worth the price.  It is smaller than the ROTS AT-RT and lacks the walking feature, but seems better-proportioned and has a better chin gun feature.  The ROTS AT-RT gunner figure looks good on it.

Got the TRU exclusive Speederbike with Scout trooper set yesterday at one of my local TRUs.  I like the bike and the paint job, but certainly agree that it needs a tooling update.  The price was also a bit much, but again, I do like the set

Good episode.  I liked how they developed Obi Wan's character more with his relation to the Duchess.  Certainly a contrast to Anakin. 

As was stated in a few previous posts, this new Clone Wars show goes far and beyond the TPM and AOTC films in the quality of the stories, dialogue, character development, and even visual sequences.  While one does need to be familiar with the prequels to really get all that is going on in the CW3D show, it certainly is better.  Kind of too bad its actually a syndicated cartoon series that accomplishes the characterizations and stories that the films should have done in the first place.  I guess that goes to show us what can happen when Lucas only supervises with creative input and does not direct