Old Pirate set reviews at Adequate.com

[Dreamweb]

Hi there. I remember reading those reviews a very long time ago, before I even knew Eurobricks existed, and long before Classic-Pirates.com was born. I thought there are many users who haven't seen those, and the review section of that website seems to have been abandoned long ago anyway. Luckily the reviews are still there, and they're really interesting, with a nice made-up backstory for every set. To give you some taste of the stuff that you can read there, I chose to copy and paste one review as an example, and that would be 6249 Pirates Ambush - because it's a set that has not yet been reviewed on Classic-Pirates.com.

(this picture taken from Brickset)

6249 Pirates Ambush review by Joseph Gonzalez

Rating: 2 Stars (out of 5)

Pros: Good source for brown walls

Cons: Structures aren't solid; Suspension bridge was a neat idea but it falls down when you don't want it to unless you move the bridge rods to extend further into locking bricks

Contents: 155 pieces including 3 mini-figs

Price: $19.99 - Discontinued

Reviewed: 16-Jul-1997

Hours of work on the rusty lock prove fruitful as the device springs open and drops into swampy water. Already up to his knees in the mire, the imprisoned soldier works the door slowly open. He steps on a bar of the door and swings his tired body up to the second floor and carefully works his way onto the swaying bridge that leads to the main guard shack and possible freedom. Alligators below snap dangerously close at the soldier's feet. The slightest misplaced step will send him over the railing and into a terrible death. The mere thought sends shivers down his spine, and then he sees him. At the other side of the bridge, the toothless grin of a pirate smiles back at him with the pirate's hand on a trap-lever to the bridge. A few more steps would bring safety, but that is no longer an option. With a last breath of hope, the desperate prisoner lunges into the air as the gnarled hand of the pirate drops the lever and the bridge falls into the swamp.

Recent Pirate projects have included combining sets to come up with larger models and while I originally never intended to pick up the 6249 Pirates Ambush, the set looked like a good purchase for parts and it has not dissatisfied me in that aspect.

The 6249 is a small bay or inlet-based structure of two buildings joined by a booby-trapped suspension bridge. Neither of the buildings is very sturdy but I liked the idea of spanning them with a bridge. One structure is a three-level defense tower with a cannon on the second floor roof and a prison cell on the first floor. The suspension bridge crosses from the second story of this tower to the roofless top of a small hut.

Two pirates defend the small fortress from one Spanish soldier in a row boat (the pirates also have assistance from a hungry alligator).

The only unique pieces that stood out to me were the wide-leaf plant element and the net which is used for the bridge. While the plant pieces look kind of cool on the boxes, sadly they don't stay stuck very well to regular bricks. They are the same flexible plastic that green flower bases are made out of but for some reason they keep falling off. Another flaw with the set was that the booby trap bridge doesn't lock in place very well (a slight modification without extra bricks solves this problem, though).

A brief overview would state that while the principal structures are not very stable, the pieces included make the set worth buying (I think three or four of these sets alone could build a good small size fort).

---END OF REVIEW---

If you liked it, visit http://www.adequate.com/lego/reviews/Pirates to read more of them! You can find a lot of classic sets reviewed there, like Black Seas Barracuda, Skull's Eye Schooner, Eldorado Fortress and many others! Also, if you follow this link, you will see that they've reviewed a lot of sets from other themes, like Town, Castle etc.

[bloggedcp][/bloggedcp]...soon!

[Skipper]

Nice find, Dreamweb.

All text really doesn't stand up to a pictorial review but it's still interesting to read some different perspectives on the sets, especially since they've done many of the more obscure ones. I saw this Pirate's Ambush set in the index a while ago, and have always wondered about it because in terms of coloring and design it's very different from the other Classic Pirate sets - the bridge isn't molded, the palisade bricks are more reminiscent of the Wild West theme, etc. I still don't like it, but the jail and bridge dropping features are pretty cool.

[TalonCard]

I remember reading these back in the day! I loved the little stories, and reading reviews about sets I really wanted but didn't have was always exciting. :) The best part about the stories is that many of them are interconnected, so reading all of them can be rewarding...

TC

Edited December 17, 2011 by TalonCard

[Tuskano]

Oh, very nice find! Never saw this site before but I got to read up on a few sets I owned such as the Barracuda. The stories are good.