mon-o-mat

I actually like the colors. I don't know why, but the idea of a massive white vehilce standing in the red dust of mars is somehow appealing to me. Most of the later vehicles are quite good, but I dislike most of the first wave. But the aliens where kinda boring and most of their vehicles were to similiar. What I noticed is that basically all the visors are ugly now, because the gold color is wearing of. Some Moc I created a while ago with LDD:

You mean like Mars Mission? But with less fighting against aliens? Btw, Did TLC actually expect that Power Miners would be so succesfull? Because I have the feeling it is one of those theme complexes, marketing doesn't really like.

Don't forget the new helmets from City. They would be ideal to bring more variety to the minifigs.

Definitley. I mean, which boy doesn't like big maschines(Note: This may not be true for all boys, while being true for some girls too). But with a better setting and minifigs than PM please.

Sorry for the necro, but I have to say, now, that the Power Miners theme is nearly as old as Rock Raiders was when it came out, that I still have to agree with the OP. RR is more iconic, has better minifigs but PM is overall better. Ok, maybe excpet the third wave.

Playmobil generally has longer living products since they have to make new modls for every single set they create, meaning that when one ship is phased out another comes in, mainly because they improved the design. On the other hand, Playmobil is much more figure-centered than Lego. Most of the buildings are more like the sets of a theatre, where the story takes place in, but they aren't really great by themselves. Lego on the other hand has to give good builds.

What was the story behind the Islanders? I always understood it as Pirates trying to steal the natives treasures. But the islanders really were bad stereotypes in hindsight. Not because they mixed cultures, but because they mixed them in a bad and cheap way (In a film I would claim that somebody just took from the props department what he could find). I mean, Mayincatecs are still somehow accepted by most people and putting them in a fantasy unvierse on some islands that are visited by pirates shouldn't be much of a problem (Of course some people will complain, but some people will also complain about priates being to violent).

I like how many details you managed to have in this quite small build. Really good!

Don't forget that many kids today are only-childs and even only-grandchilds. Their parents and grandparents have quite some money to spend for them on chrismas and birthday. But I too thinkt that shelf live is to short nowdays. I remember smaller shops that had sets for years, but know you don't even get the sets from last year sometimes.

I added new pictures to the original post.

Has any one else seen footage of Sea Of Thieves? I really reminds me of Lego Pirates in it's cartoonish over the top look and picture of pirates.

Well, I never knew that there were those comics and I only got those old Pirate sets second hand from my older brothers, And I still had much fun. But I have the feeling, that todays children don't have the imagination anymore, or at least toy producers don't think they have it. You also have to give children a basis for their imagination, meaning books, films or comics. Here I see another Problem with the last waves, they don't offer fertile ground for that. Children like to roleplay. They like to fight that intrinsic conflict between order(soldiers) and freedom(Pirates). But this wasn't really possible. All there was was Pirates defending or stealing treasures from comically useless soldiers.

But since then there was not signicicant story to Pirates and while the figures probably are named they don't have any characters. Ok, there are short comics within the instructions but those are so swallow they are basically worthless. Besides that I have the feeling, that serious stories for children within the pirate setting will not be made anymore. Just compare the two versions of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicky_the_Viking

Ok, I underestimated the location based sets for Ninjago, I thought that it was mostly "crazy vehicles" like it was definitley true for Exo-Force or Nexo Knights. When talking about story driven location-sets I was thinking about Indiana Jones or PotC (and also Hobbit and LotRs) where many sets were good for nothing but replaying that single scene from the movie. I have to agree with the second part of your reply. Making the Pirates and their ships unique characters would produce better sales than having that same Captain Eyepatch-Hook-and-Wooden-Leg and his nameless crew.

I would like to see such a thing too. The only problem I see with such storydriven things is that they also tend to be very short lived if not heavily vehicle based. I think this is a general problem with Lego this days. There can be dozends of vehicles in a theme that all will be very diferent in size, appearance and functions while landscapes or buildings are always quite similiar and lackluster to be fair.