Jump to content

ReplicaOfLife

Eurobricks Knights
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    723

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by ReplicaOfLife

  1. ReplicaOfLife
    You, sir, are correct. What an absolutely awesome parts pack for sand- and dark green bricks and plates that was. Thanks :) It's a but of a boutique hotel with each room being different from the others, so of course the linens differ, aswell. Or I just might not have had enough pieces in the same colors for 6 beds and came up with that backstory Actually never heard that saying, though others have already said similar things. Personally I think that with the right color blocking the different 'sand'-colors will work just fine together (maybe with the exception of sand-red, but nobody can afford that anyway nowadays )
  2. ReplicaOfLife
    Imho, it's absolutely logical that they push out police/fire sets every two years. Both hold great fascination for children, which are their core market, espcially in the city line-up. And considering that most children will be into Lego for a little over half a decade, and taking into account that they usually will not get all the sets they want every year, I don't think many run the risk of being bored. And there is plenty of examples for other exciting jobs, too. Exploration, astronauts, mining etc are all subthemes we've seen in recent years. Don't get me wrong; I get your point. It's just that I think that Lego's target audience in case of City isn't the adult market. And I also think that after a few so-so years, City is one of the few themes where they're moving in the right direction with a lot of the stuff they released this year.
  3. ReplicaOfLife
    Welcome to Green Brick Grand Hotel! After over seven months in the making, it's finally time for me to present my newest modular MOC to you. Green Brick Grand Hotel is my biggest MOC to date, it is the largest both in footprint and height. It is built as a regular corner building, but features an inverted corner! Inside, it is fully furnished, featuring a lobby with reception and bar/loung area, dining room, kitchen, manager's office, an indoor pool and 6 rooms (two single & four double). I estimate this one to consist of about 7000-8000 pieces. Building time was February to September 2019. Except for the top of the tower, I did no virtual planning, it was all done as a free build using pieces from my collection (and a couple of bricklink orders I had to place...). More pictures can be found in the flickr album. A couple is just arriving at the hotel... Upon entering, you can't miss the reception. To the left is the grand sweeping staircase leading up to the other floors. The room for the couple isn't quite ready yet, so they enjoy some refreshments in the bar/ loung area. The dining / breakfast room. Currently, there's just one couple in. Overview of the ground floor Coming up from the reception area, there is a nice atrium from which you can look down to the ground floor. This also gives access to the manager's office, the small pool and a huge double room. The small indoor pool. There's only one room on the first floor, but it's a spacious double bedroom. The second floor also has two single rooms and one double room. Both singles are rather small, but they offer everything you might need! The other single room. Double room on the second floor. There's only two rooms on the third and topmost floor, both very spacious double rooms. One of them even features a small balcony with wide, opening doors! The couple we saw earlier arrives in their room. They booked the other spacious suite on the top floor. Again, there are some more pictures on my flickr account! Hope you like it - I'm looking forward to your feedback! Greetings, Tobias (RogerSmith)
  4. ReplicaOfLife
    That looks damn good. I have that set on my list of sets to possibly get as parts packs, and this just reinforced that. As soon as they're on sale somewhere, I'll get two or three.
  5. ReplicaOfLife
    Very nice write-up, and I totally agree that your proposed cars look way better together with Lego buildings than whatever Lego throws at us nowadays. The SC series always looked totally ridiculous imho, and I always felt that they were way to big in comparison to minifigs. Your write-up confirmed that.
  6. ReplicaOfLife
    Thinking about it, I don't visit the frontpage as often as I used to: - At times, it feels like there are way too many updates all at once, then at other times, nothing changes for several days. --> imho, there should be some regularity to the posts, while not exceeding one post per day regularly. Ideally, there'd be one MOC highlight every day, and, as rare exceptions, maybe one other post about other interesting things, like a huge new set announcements, a new contest or maybe an in-depth review. MOC highlights could also be queued up to a point - sometimes, a lot of great builds are posted at the same time, while at other times there's a bit of a lull with not much going on. - Selection of front-paged MOCs seems a bit biased at times. Some members will be frontpaged regularly, while others rarely or never get the honour, even if their creations and photography are on par with what's being front-paged. - Purely digital creations should be marked as such
  7. ReplicaOfLife
    Yep! While it is kinda hard to compare old to new sets, because even comparable sets usually have way more parts nowadays, the instructions used to be a lot more straightforward. 50-100 piece vehicle build? Here's a double sided piece of paper with a couple of steps, and you're done. Nowadays, that would require a 20-40 page booklet . Some thoughts of my own: Lego relies too much on licensed themes and has pretty much forgotten what its own product was actually designed for. Lego nowadays actually doesn't want its customers to come up with new creations, instead if ypou want something new, you should just buy another set. Lego's pricing policy is all over the place and at time smakes no sense at all. Some sets offer pretty good value, while others are just way, way overpriced. Replacing actual remote controls with apps on mobile phones is an extremely stupid idea that will render all the new components useless in a few years time. Lego has too many special interest themes.
  8. ReplicaOfLife
    Great build, I dare say 'as usual'? Two different but equally nice facades - the 'back' one is my favorite though. Daring use of [whatever] azure (or is it turquoise? It's kinda hard to tell), but it works for me. Nice details both inside & out - I always like how you are able to come up with new stories to tie parts from official sets one wouldn't necessarily connect with City into your buildings. On a sidenote: I'm spying an Assembly Square mod on some of the flickr pics - did you ever share that?
  9. ReplicaOfLife
    Why 'could'? It is!
  10. ReplicaOfLife
    This is propably the best argument ever for the return of sand-red
  11. ReplicaOfLife
    To be honest, I never really thought about the storage angle, that's actually a good point. Imo, though, they would do better if they reduced the number of different decorated pieces in sets with lots of stickers, and made those as printed pieces. I've seen a lot of sets that, for example, featured detail stickers that where almost, but not quite, identical (without the difference bearing any relevance to the 'plot' of the set). While that attention to detail in itself is welcome, I'd still prefer to get those as identical printed pieces instead. They also could re-use a lot of designs that are nowadays realized using stickers. I'm thinking about stuff like masonry, wood, etc. Then there are the stickers that are just there to liven up otherwise boring pieces, e.g. huge panels. And - in sets that already have thousands of pieces and cost a tenth of their parts count - it should be possible to just throw in the 12 or so pieces for each panel that would be needed to fill the same space using regular bricks and pieces, including some greebling... Regarding the different printing methods: That's very propably true in cases like the huge window adverts ion Palace Cinema, but on the other hand there are many, many stickers that have far fewer than twelve colors. And I still maintain my point that it's ridiculous that they include stickers in the big and often way overpriced D2C sets. If it's really such a big deal because they don't have enough shelves in the factories, just optimize which different decorations are actually needed, and include those as printed pieces.
  12. ReplicaOfLife
    Of course, including stickers is a pure cost-cutting measure. Which is absolutely ridiculous if applied to any set that retails for way over 100€. I'm very glad that Palace Cinema is the only modular with stickers, but just look at what they're doing in the other lines - 370€ for a 3600 piece Bugatti that, though labeled as Technic, pretty much is a pure display piece - and it comes with megablocking stickers??!!? Seriously? For that price you could expect each piece to be painted by hand and it would STILL be ridiculously overpriced. Same goes for the Aston Martin. And pretty much all of the big Star Wars sets. And so on...
  13. ReplicaOfLife
    Still wrong, as there were printed pieces in most of the previous modulars. Palace Cinema was the only modular ever to come with a dreaded sticker sheet. Parisian Restaurant also wasn't the first to contain exclusive printed pieces, i.e. pieces that were made specifically for that set. That honour goes to Town Hall, I think, which had at least two exclusive printed pieces (the clockface and the shield - the latter still is exclusive to that set, while the clockface made a second appearance in a Winter Village set a few years later).
  14. ReplicaOfLife
    When I was a kid, they had exactly that (early 90ies). As I remember, they were small cube-shaped boxes full of basic bricks in just one color. That was the time when Lego was pretty much only using the basic colors, and yopu could get them in white, yellow, red and blue (I think). There also was a similar box full of all kinds of slopes, which I also got a couple of for the ever growing city I had as a kid. Good times... I really don't understand why Lego doesn't do something like that nowadays. Even the most basic boxes you can get now have lots of specialized parts and often way too many different colors, too.
  15. ReplicaOfLife
    Great work!
  16. ReplicaOfLife
    Looks a lot better in this picture. The blue might be medium blue, after all . I still find it a tad too colorful, but I already see some bits that might just convince me to get two or three - all-white parrots!, 3 or 4 of the large window panel pieces or the ornate fence in white, to name a few
  17. ReplicaOfLife
    Very nice! Love how you managed to make the facades look interesting despite their relativ simplicity. Having two houses separate in three sections is an interesting idea, too, don't think I've ever seen that before. Sure makes it easier to take a look inside.
  18. ReplicaOfLife
    Thanks! And no worries - we're good! After all, it's all about having as much fun as possible with Lego - and talking about it, about what we love and what maybe we don't.
  19. ReplicaOfLife
    Thanks :) First off: I sometimes use hyperbole when talking about stuff that I feel passionate about - which I do, regarding Lego. I get why this might come across the wrong way sometimes, but that's really not the way it was or is meant. I'm a MOCcer of modular buildings, For that reason, I like sets that have a good selection of pieces in colors that I find suitable to use in one of my MOCs. I generally like to use somewhat realistic tones on the exterior of my buildings. Thus I wouldn't use most of the brighter colors Lego has (which, btw., includes classic bright yellow, blue and red aswell). You may have gleaned from the context in my post that I purchase sets like this mainly as parts packs for MOCing, because they are one of the few cases where one can get 1 x X bricks in significant numbers, plus other useful bricks for buildings, at relatively low-cost. I got at least 3 copies of Bike Shop, Park Street Town House and Corner Deli each and (with discounts) got a better price per piece ratio each time than on a modular! I really want more of this type of set. But I don't need or want large quantities of bricks in colors I wouldn't consider using visibly in large quantities in a build. If I had them, they'd propably end up buried somewhere where you can't see them (and I have more than enough old bricks for just that purpose), or would very occasionally be used for some minor interior detail. But when buying sets for parts, I want to get as many 'good' parts as possible. In that regard, medium azure bricks are pretty 'bad' for me. And I also really just don't like medium azure when used en masse. It's fine when used as accent (e.g. for bathroom floor tiling), but when used on walls or for larger floor areas, it just feels garish and - yep! - horrible to me. But, disclaimer: That's just my personal taste, and there's no reason to get worked up about it And, yes, some of the other 3-in-1 Creator houses also had 3 or even 4 main colors. But they all were colors I like or am ok with. And, no, this has nothing to do with medium azure being a 'Friends' color, what crazy idea is that?!?! I hardly would've built an entire modular in cool yellow if I was on some kind of weird crusade there, wouldn't I? I also really like teal - see the roof on one of my other MOCs, which was built before they even brought that color back. It took me several BL orders to amass all those slopes. Though I propably wouldn't use it as the dominant primary color in a build. But I loved it's use on the Diner, for example.
  20. ReplicaOfLife
    Same goes for me. It's April now, and I still haven't got a copy of this one. Just feels bleh to me, like an average MOC at best. All of the floors lack detail big time (with the vet being closest to the standards set with the prior sets), and I absolutely can't forgive the untiled ground floor either. Seeing images like this makes me cringe - the way the edges of the tiles from the exterior show up on the inside looks so untify and unfinished! All that and the whopping 20% price increase we got here in Germany (from 150€ to 180!) makes me very reluctant to pick up this set. If it had ~300 pieces more (which coincidently would be right about the number you'd need to tile the ground floor and get the detail level up to the standard of the last few sets), I'd propably be less critical, but with this one, Lego took two unpopular steps at once.
  21. ReplicaOfLife
    Thanks for the heads-up. Looks like a step back in the right direction, but I'm not sold yet. Of course it's hard to tell from such a small, pixelated image, but it seems a bit cluttered. And it may use too many different colors to be of real use as a parts pack, unlike most of the old 3-in-1 townhouses (I count at least four main colors for the exterior walls - tan, dark red/reddish brown (?), medium nougat and what I fear is medium azure or something horrible like that. Could be medium blue, though)
  22. ReplicaOfLife
    Great work, already faved it on flickr yesterday! Absolutely love the facades of both buildings, you pretty much hit my sweet spot there - lots of lovely details everywhere, but all blending together nicely to still create a nice & clean looking building. Well done! PS: Just the tiniest thing: The two ice-cream scoops pieces on top of the cheese shop's roof seem to be hovering in midair
  23. ReplicaOfLife
    Great build overall, as we're used to when you get down to it Like this a lot better than your last one, great detailing throughout, both on the exterior and interior. I absolutely love the typewrite, such a simple little build, yet you instantly know what it's supposed to be (assumning you're old enough to have seen one in real-life, that is). Only thing I don't particularly like is the usage of medium blue and dark orange (or is it medium dark flesh?) on the facade. Feels a bit jarring and doesn't go too well with the otherwise tan and grey color scheme. Maybe losing the medium blue would already fix that, otherwise I'd go with a more muted color, maybe dark tan? Regarding the Ideas discussion: Some valid points made, but overall I don't see anything wrong with following one's dream to get a MOC produced as a set. Unlikely though it may be in case of modulars.
  24. ReplicaOfLife
    That looks stunning already. Looking at it with much of the dark orange still missing on the top floor makes me think that it might actually look really good if the top floor was actually done in another, more toned down color. Something like dark bley, for example. That might help the roof to stand out more.
  25. ReplicaOfLife
    Finally got some copies of Benny's Space Squad this week. Such an awesome small littler set. Hope it sells tons, causing Lego to make some more sets to go with it. It being a simple & small build, I decided to try building it without even looking at the instructions, so just with the box images as reference. Almost got it right, only thing that was off was that I put the inverted tiles beneath the spaceship, not the little buggy .
×
×
  • Create New...