Joebot
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Everything posted by Joebot
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I, for one, am so grateful that we have these guys around to call us names, and condescendingly tell the rest of what we're doing wrong as fans! To think that the previous 10 pages of friendly, spirited, mostly polite discussion was entirely the wrong sort of fandom! Who knew?!?! So, thank you guys, for setting us straight!
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Serious question -- how do you tell when someone is "whining," and when someone is just "disagreeing?" I've read through this whole thread, and haven't seen anything I would characterize as whining. Just different people sharing their (something differing) opinions. You know ... having a discussion. Like "grown-men-babies" do sometimes. Just curious.
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I wasn't comparing the new "Prison Island" to 6598. I haven't actually seen the new Prison Island set, so that would be a foolish thing to do. I was just answering your question, "When has Lego ever made a prison island set?" The answer is set 6598. That was my only point. Oh geez, you can find all kinds of great City wish lists here on EB. Usually right around this time of year, in fact, when people see the actual list of upcoming sets, and are inevitably disappointed. But, off the top of my head, a zoo is the obvious answer. It blows my mind that Lego has never made a mini-figure scale zoo. Anything to do with animals would be successful, I would think, like a vet. How about a whale-watching boat? The Farm sets from a few years back were pretty lackluster. I wouldn't mind seeing TLC take another crack at those. Maybe a Safari theme? Beyond that, I think more things like restaurant and shops. How about a comic book store? TLC could get some more use out of that Marvel/DC license! Or a hobby store, or a candy shop? An arcade? Or maybe kids don't go to arcades anymore. An Apple Store then! 100% agreed on the lack of baseplates!! I can't argue that the newer sets are more realistic. However, I would ask this question: When did "realism" become the goal for Lego sets? If I wanted to build a realistic-looking model City, I'd get into model trains. Lego has its own unique charm and appeal that has nothing to do with being realistic. For example, if we really wanted "realism," then we should be clamoring for a new mini-figure. A mini-fig is laughably unrealistic in its proportions. And yet we love them because they're so wonderfully "Lego."
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Of those sets you rattled off, two are from 2016 (car ferry and prison island). And the prison island HAS been done before, although I'll grant you it was a long time ago (6598). That means there is ONE set coming up next year that is something truly new. One. Out of about 20 new City sets. I would personally not describe that product line as "innovative," but whatever. Glad you're enjoying the sets and the designs. That's cool. Where you see "detailed and realistic," I see oversized, out-of-scale, ugly monstrosities that don't fit on my road plates. But I'm old and grew up in a different era of Lego Town, so my tastes are likely quite different. Nobody's "bitching and moaning." People are just expressing their opinions in polite, friendly ways. Some people (like me) are disappointed in the product lineup. Hey, it happens. And so we come here to talk about it. It's a discussion board after all. So, let's discuss things.
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Of course it does. At this point, Lego City has become so mind-numbingly repetitive, boring, and predictable that it'd be impossible for them NOT to repeat themselves. How many different ways can you make a freaking fire truck?
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I recently bought a tub of used Lego sets, which also included a bunch of old product catalogs. Remember these? The small catalogs that Lego would inlcude in every set? Man, flipping through those catalogs was like a unfiltered hit of pure nostalgia. I studied those things endlessly when i was a kid. So anyway, what struck me when looking through the Town sets from this era (late 80's mostly), was the picture of a big Town layout. It was probably six road plates wide by 5 road plates tall. It had only three buildings in it -- a fire station, the Exxon gas station, and I think the Paramedics Office. The rest of that huge layout was empty. I remember that picture so vividly from when I was a kid. That picture shows you what you can do with the Town system. All those empty baseplates are just dying to be filled up with buildings and cars and mini-figs. As a kid, that picture really fired my imagination, and got me hooked into Town sets for the next 30 years (and counting). I think TLC has lost sight of what makes Town / City unique and appealing. It's not about "collecting" named mini-figs the way the licensed themes are. It's about creating a tiny version of the world you see around you. It's about a system that you can expand as much as you want, and it all fits together into a system. Lego City isn't a "system" anymore. Road plates and baseplates are mostly gone. Buildings are few and far between. There's no way to populate that big, empty town pictured in that old catalog. I think that's a huge mistake on Lego's part. They're chasing short-term profit (new police sets!) at the expense of creating life-long fans. Or maybe I'm just old. Get off my lawn!
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Those of us who collect Lego City are used to seeing year after year of boring, repetitive sets (more fire sets next year!!). Sad to see the trend spread to the Winter Village theme too. I have the original Toy Shop and certainly don't need a second, mostly-identical one. What a weird marketing decision. I sometimes think TLC simply doesn't understand those of us who COLLECT Lego sets as a hobby. Back in the olden days, Lego themes were designed as a system that could be expanded upon endlessly. Once you got into that system, you were hooked. These days, with all their one-off themes and repetitive sets, it seems like they're chasing short-term profit at the expense of creating life-long fans and hobbyists. And what about that price hike!! The original was $60, and now it's $80?!?! A 33% price hike in six years?? Holy crap. I don't know about the rest of you, but my salary sure hasn't gone up 33% in the last six years!!
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I agree with this too. There's a strange correlation at work here. As the SET designs for City have grown more sophisticated, detailed, and realistic, the PRODUCT design has grown increasingly repetitive and uninspired. The same thing is going on over in Pirates, where the '15 sets were (admittedly well-designed) remakes of the previous Pirate wave. It's frustrating.
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Very nice! You've accurately recreated the experience of a Microsoft retail store -- it's almost completely empty of customers! HA! The only things you're missing are piles of unsold Zunes (preferably brown) and Windows Phones. All kidding aside, that's a beautiful modular.
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Does anybody have information of this old user and his comics?
Joebot replied to ponyboy's topic in Brick Flicks & Comics
Hi ponyboy, I will definitely look into uploading those image files someplace. Yeah, there was a lot of care and effort in those comics. Probably too much. I always wanted the Unlikely Society to look like a actual printed comic book, with multiple panels per page, and different layouts for each page. That approach was really time-consuming, as I had to create each page from scratch, figure out how many panels I was going to squeeze in, and still leave room for word balloons. Plus, all the special effects stuff. Ugh. If I could just WRITE the comic, then hand over all the tedious photography/image editing to someone else, that would have been perfect. I loved writing it. Man, now you got me thinking about all those characters ... Thanks again for your note. It's very flattering to think somebody actually remembers the Unlikely Society! I never got much feedback here on EB, or on any of the other Lego message forums. It's nice to know somebody was reading it! -
Does anybody have information of this old user and his comics?
Joebot replied to ponyboy's topic in Brick Flicks & Comics
Holy crap! I have a fan!??! Yeah, The Unlikely Society was mine. Unfortunately the comics aren't online anywhere. I just didn't have time to make them anymore, and I let my web hosting contract lapse, so I don't even have the website anymore. I think I still have the picture files on my hard drive though. I could probably look into putting them on Flikr or something. Thanks so much for your comment. I spent HOURS making that stupid comic, and it's very nice to hear that somebody read it and enjoyed it. Sometimes I miss writing those characters. Although .. the fact that you say you read The Unlikely Society "as a kid" makes me feel really freakin' old, so thanks for that. Cheers! - Joebot -
what do you call your lego city/ names for lego city?
Joebot replied to legoguy1984's topic in LEGO Town
Back when I used to make my Lego comics, i always referred to my town as "Fluxington" because it's always in flux. -
Penguins don't live in the Arctic. They live in the Antarctic. That being said, I agree with the sentiment. I'd love a mini-fig scale penguin. Lego has made Duplo penguins and of course the cutsey little Friends penguin. Something in between those two would be great. I need some more animals for my zoo.
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I suppose so. I'd love to pose that question to Lego and see what the official story there is. Other than the modular buildings, does any Lego set come with baseplates anymore?? I can't think of anything else off the top of my head.
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Yep, And road plates too. The pictures of the Town Square from the toy show look nice, because Lego has the set sitting on a mat with roads and tram rails drawn onto it. You take that away, and I suspect the set is going to look very empty and disjointed. It's a bunch of little structures and vehicles with nothing to hold them together.
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Thanks for the additional info! This is probably a dumb question these days but ... were there any road baseplates in this set? I'm guessing not since Lego seems to have mostly abandoned baseplates.
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That sounds very promising, although the Exploration Vessel sounds enormous. 16 studs wide?!? I'm curious to see if these sets have any bits of environment / ocean floor. One of the best aspects of the old Divers theme was the way they incorporated underwater caves and such, or the one with the half-buried whale skeleton. Lego City is so ridiculously vehicle-focused these days that I don't have high hopes for that.
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I find it weird that the recent batch of sub-themes marked as "City" (such as Forest Police, Arctic, Mining, Farm, Swamp Police, and now Space Exploration and a Divers revamp) all take place somewhere that's obviously NOT IN A CITY. It's like the City theme is becoming a dumping ground for the one-year, conflict-driven sub-themes that used to fall under the "Play Theme" umbrella. There's no cohesion to any of it anymore. A remake of Divers has some potential. I have very fond memories of the Divers theme, and still have a bunch of those sets. Divers came out during the darkest days of "Town Jr," and actually offered some interesting set designs and builds.
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This is a really interesting point. I've often thought that the appeal of City is fundamentally different than any other Lego theme, because it's designed to mimic the real, modern world. The attraction is not in the "action / adventure / role-playing" that most Lego themes go for. The appeal comes from building a model of what you see around you. It's more akin to model trains. Back in Ye Olden Days of "Classic Town," the Town product line provided you a wide variety of stuff to populate your little town. And it was all designed to go together. The cars actually fit on the freakin' road plates, for example. It was cohesive and easy to expand. Just buy a pair of straight road plates, and boom, your town just got bigger, and now you've got a couple of empty spaces, just perfect for the pizzeria or the auto mechanic or the hospital or the cargo center. As Airborne put it -- it's a marathon. City builders are in this for the long-haul, not just some flash-in-the-pan trendy movie license. I think Lego has totally lost sight of that. They seem to trying to market City as just-another Play Theme, no different from Chima or Ninjago. Most sets have a built-in conflict (usually cops / robbers). There are sooooo many vehicles. I think that approach is wrong. City is unique, and the product design should reflect that.
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Lego makes lots of decisions that I find baffling, but the lack of a System-scale Zoo theme is the biggest head-scratcher of them all.
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LEGO Collectable Minifigures Series 12 Rumours and Discussion
Joebot replied to Rufus's topic in Special LEGO Themes
The price hike has definitely put a damper on my enthusiasm. I own every figure through series 11, and I generally like everything in series 12, but ... $4 is a mental stumbling block for me. My collecting days are over. It's interesting, the same thing happened when comic books went from $2 to $3 to $4 in a very short span. It totally killed my interest in the hobby, and now I haven't bought a new comic in years. I suspect the same thing is going to happen with the CMF series. I assume Lego knows what they're doing, and the increased profit on each fig will offset the potential decline in overall numbers sold. Still sucks though. I really enjoyed collecting these figs, but at $4, I have to tap out. -
I'm predicting a whole line of biome-themed police sets. Forest and Swamp police first, then we'll have the obvious Arctic Police. After that, Lake Police, Mountain Police, Desert Police, River Delta Police, Cave Police, Grassy Plains Police, Tundra Police, Fjord Police ...
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The only hot air balloon I can think of is the one from the old Adventurers theme (5988 - Pharaoh's Forbidden Ruins), but that was a pretty weak design. I'd love to see what Lego could do with the wider range of curved slope pieces now available. I'm a little disappointed with the repeats in the Friends line, but it's still better than the utter black hole of creativity that is the City line these days. I'm guessing at least six of those Friends sets are honest-to-goodness BUILDINGS!! That's freaking unheard of in City!!
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Swamp police. Wow. That seems very ... specific. Obviously Lego's obsession with police / fire is well-documented by this point. But in reading through the list that CM4Sci posted, it occurred to me that Lego has another obsession that maybe isn't so widely recognized -- "transporters." That is, a truck with a wagon that's hauling some other vehicle (motorcycles, boats, jet skis, helicopters, etc.). Just within that list, I'm guessing there are at least five of these types of sets: 39.99 - Dune Buggy Trailer 39.99 - Pickup Tow Truck 39.99 - Racing Bike Transporter 49.99 - 4x4 with Powerboat 69.99 - Excavator & Truck In 2014, we had four: 60045 - Police Patrol 60049 - Helicopter Transporter 60058 - SUV with Watercraft 60060 - Auto Transporter
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Yep, me too. Police sets used to be on a three-year rotation ... and then it was every other year ... and now it's every year. All the interesting city-related stuff is going on over in Friends now, which in its short lifetime has already spawned more new buildings and locations than the last 20 years of Town / City (vet, juice bar, cafe, high school, bakery, pet shop, etc.).