Zeya

Huh. In that link you gave, it references an even earlier article from early 2009. Take a look: http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2009/03/16/lego-hobbit-lego-harry-potter-lego-batman-2-lego-indiana-jones-2-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull-confirmed-by-animator.htm It's saying there that a Traveller's Tales employee mentioned the following games in development: Lego Harry Potter Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Lego Batman 2 Lego Battles (Nintendo DS) Lego Hobbit So did all of these end up being published between March 2009 and now (except Hobbit of course)? Let's see. This wikipedia article has a listing of Lego games. Lego Harry Potter (YES,years 1-4, years 5-7) Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (YES, released in 2009) Lego Batman 2 (YES, upcoming in 2012) Lego Battles (Nintendo DS) (YES, released in 2009) Lego Hobbit (NOT LISTED) Interesting. I used to work on video games, and I shipped 3 console games, for the record. Games can take a couple of years to make, or more depending on the situation. So it's plausible that even in early/mid 2009 they would have started on a Hobbit game. It also looks like the other games mentioned all were released. Of particular note is the mention of Batman 2. It has almost the same title as mentioned in the article _and_ it is set for release in 2012 - hasn't even come out yet. That makes me think the mention of the Lego Hobbit game could be true as well. It sounds like the source from that article isn't named. Maybe the blogger/news person had a chat with a friend of theirs at the company. ("A staff member of the UK studio..."). That's a little shady, is all. There's still some doubt there I'm afraid. Well, more fuel for the circular argument fire. Sorry, lol.

I don't think anyone has mentioned here. Their torsos have a special printing on the back, right? I know they do for other openings.

A couple days ago, I won one of these on eBay for around the BL price, shipped. I'm trying to collect all of the female minifigs with printed dresses. There's a thread here on EB about them, listing them all with photos, that inspired me. A couple of them are super expensive, which I probably won't get, I think one of the yellow Harry Potter ones, and then another one I can't recall that seem to go for 20 to $40USD or so. A little bit much.

I played a bunch more this weekend. I'm at level 22. But I'm not very far along any of the main quest lines. I tend to do side quests because I like unlocking places on the map. I've done a lot of smithing and enchanting. And alchemy. :) I ran into what I assume is a random dragon. But he was really buggy. He kept flying close and then would pop away into the far distance suddenly. Maybe it was because I was around some NPCs by a little roadside inn and he's not supposed to kill NPCs? I'm not sure. It was pretty disappointing. This is on the Xbox 360 with the latest patches and everything. I hope this bugginess doesn't ruin the game. I think I'll try going and visiting the "graybeard" guys so I can find out more about dragons, and hopefully encounter some of them for fun and profit.

You must be using these: I was thinking of that or maybe this: I'm not sure which. I'd want to see them in person and decide. Walmart and Target both carry the sterilite stuff here in the US. I need to upgrade to something with more storage for things like basic bricks. My little hardware cabinets are getting filled up and I would like to migrate bricks, slopes, and plates to more roomier storage. P.S. I recently got a new desk and installed some display shelves that I"m happy with. Just need to find a spare minute to upload and share. (Christmas!)

Nah not really. I just know how to search on bricklink. That site has a little bit of a learning curve, but you'll get the hang of it eventually.

I wouldn't mind some smaller craft for this theme. Everyone likes a dinghy with a sail, right?

Probably from this set "Ice Ramp Raiders". That set has a trans-blue dome piece and a trans-blue gem like in your photo. I think they're nested, so it kind of looks like one piece in your photo. http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=4579-1 The trans blue dome was in another set too. A "Fire Helicopter" set. But that set doesn't have a blue gem, so it wouldn't be that one (assuming the parts came from a single set). http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemIn.asp?P=30151&colorID=15&in=A

Is that "ships" as in multiple ships? Very interesting indeed. Maybe there will be two Flying Dutchman sets in 2012 (one Spongebob and one PotC)!

My girlfriend and I are going through the 2010 Kingdoms and the 2010 City calendars. We're doing one each day, just like good boys and girls, because Santa is watching! My observations... I read reviews a while back for these, but long enough ago that I forgot half of it. What I've noticed is that they have a finely crafted layout for what you get on each day. Both calendars started with a minifig (as opposed to a small device or scene). The kingdoms one starts off with a blacksmith. Then you get a little anvil station for him the next day, and then a rack for him. And then they introduce a knight, and then a weapon cart for him... It's just laid out very nicely. And each day of the month, we have a moment where someone goes "oh the advent calendar! it's time!" and then we rush over and count down together "one...two...three" and then rip open the little door on each of our calendars. It's fun. I like the advent calendar so much, I wish there were more of them! I want one for every month in the year, lol. Well that might be overkill. I consider the 2011 calendars to be sub-par to previous years. The city one is all cops and robbers. And then if you're not into Star Wars you're SOL, but then again you can say the same about Kingdoms, etc. I wish I wasn't in my dark ages for the 2009 calendars. Can't wait to see what they'll have for 2012! Hopefully a return to something more reasonable for the city calendar.

I totally agree with this. There's way to much of "bring back X theme" or "do a Pokemon theme", and to a lesser extent "reissue this particular piece again". It's too bad people don't realize that we don't need a thread for each pop culture thing under the sun. I do like Cuusoo though. I've seen some good stuff on there, and I log in and follow the ones that catch my eye. The website could use some work. I think they need to make it easier to browse through projects and see things. Because you run into this initial wall of "look at these popular ones" and there's only like 10 of them. Then you have to go to a particular page on a slightly hidden tab to actually be able to page through any quantity of projects. This is stifling the usability and foot-traffic on the site, I think. I would like to see an EB thread for our members to post things they truly think are worthy. Maybe with a thread rule of excluding "do pop culture theme XYZ" and pitfalls like that. Maybe such a thread already exists here...?

Lol, nice. How to sit like a Jarl: http://i.imgur.com/iXl5a.jpg Making fun of how the jarl sits on his throne in the game.

I think the ring would be printed on the new 1x1 round tile. In fact, this theme might be a driving factor in making that mold. Makes me wonder why that didn't introduce that mold for Jack Sparrow's compass (they printed it on a 1x1 square tile).

I read an unsubstantiated rumor somewhere on EB (maybe this thread) that they're jacking up the price of CMF6 by another 50¢. Anyone know if that's true? I guess TRU will have preorders open soon enough... I'm still creeped out by the Alien. This might be just me. I wouldn't have minded a fun/happy face on that guy, something more stylized. Maybe it's just all those "unsolved mysteries" TV shows I watched as a kid in the early 90s with the artist sketches of scary aliens. He doesn't quite fit with the other "monsters" either. Despite his humorous back-story blurb, if you compare with frankenstein, wolf man, witch, vampire, mummy, those all have a cartoony and friendly feel going on. But not this guy. I like the Bandit the best. I also like the celtic guy, now that I can see his printings better. The flamenco dancer is more appealing to me now too, for the same reason. I can't get into the Roman centurion though - he really could have used an armor accessory. (I'm still waiting and hoping for a sweet CMF Knight! But I can be patient.)

Can anyone shed more light on the license issue? I don't know much about licensing when it comes to toys, but I remember reading that for Star Wars there were different licenses for toy merchandise. I remember because people were saying that Mattel (or Hasbro? I forget) killed the Lego products where they were packaging just minifigs (3 to a pack I think) because it was encroaching on Mattel's action figure SW license. That tells us that for SW there were different toy licenses for different types of toys. Obviously Lego had/has one for building blocks. So to me it's not all that clear how this works. Maybe we can lure a "resident expert" from SW over here? That link also says that they have a license for the two upcoming new movies (with "Hobbit" in the titles) and doesn't mentioned the older LotR movies. (BTW I'm pulling for classic Castle. I'd much rather have original Lego stuff instead playing minifig collector to the detriment of building fun and affordability.)

There was also a super deluxe Flying Dutchman MOC made by a TLG designer. It looked to be more than 2000 pieces though. Maybe that's the image that was allegedly shown and some misunderstanding took place. My pure speculation is that a second wave won't happen. I think the Pearl might have been a contingency, meant as "the big set" for a second wave that may not come. I hope to be proven wrong though.

Yeah, I just wish I had more time to play! I've been getting up an hour early in the morning so I can play before going to work. I've only fought one dragon so far, and I got the impression that it was intentionally easy (there was a small army of NPC friendlies with me helping). I also find myself doing the side content. I do that with other games too where I have to clear all the side content before going forward in the main quest. Although with Skyrim, I think I might just sort of travel to the closest thing and then back to town to sell/craft, rinse and repeat.

Is anyone else playing the new Elder Scrolls game? How are you liking it? I played a tiny bit of Morrowind and a fair number of hours of Oblivion (restarted and faded away a couple times). I also played to the end of Fallout 3. I'm liking most of the improvements they did for Skyrim so far. Honestly, if any game needed "dumbing down" (heavy air quotes there), it's the Elder Scrolls series. Alchemy was so boring and obtuse in the old games, and I find the new Alchemy menu much easier to use. I'm also liking the smithing too. And no more need to carry around heavy alchemy gear or repair hammers, it seems. I'm only in like the 2nd or 3rd town, about to fight my first dragon (or so they are leading me to believe), so I'll see how that goes. The visuals are definitely improved too. The characters look more natural now and I'm liking the snowy feel of the landscape. I also think I've finally learned to stop going through every barrel and house in the game. I used to want to play a sneaky thief character. I would pickpocket all over the place, pick locks, and steal all kinds of stuff. I think I'm happier now that I've moved away from that. I think you get better stuff from dungeon raiding and playing quests. I'm doing a sort of spellsword build now - an Imperial that uses destruction with the left hand and a one handed weapon with the other. Liking it so far. Hopefully this one will last me some time. P.S. I passed up on Assassin's Creed Revelations and settled on Skyrim. I'm glad I did. Having a lot of fun with Skyrim.

I read elsewhere that people were seeing that individual items on their orders appear to be NOT discounted. But then the total does include the discount (i.e. the total is correct). So just do your own computation of what you think your total should be (don't forget tax), and then if that matches then you're good to go. Then again I also read about other problems including a lack of confirmation emails and such. So good luck out there. Sorry if this was already mentioned. I haven't done any S@H purchasing today.

About what time last year did the Summer/mid-year wave of sets have their catalog leaked? I'm talking about the first solid rumors / info about about the 2011 Kingdoms line. Whatever that was, we could presume a similar timeframe for any mid-year 2012 info. I really need to write things like this down.

Well a good place to start would be to look through western MOCs posted on these forums. But off the top of my head, you'll likely want to use tan bricks and plates for desert/dry landscapes. You can make cactuses out of 1x? green plates and round greens. Those palisade bricks that look like logs are good for buildings. You'll probably want to think about using colors like tan and shades of brown. You might go with mostly brown parts for buildings, I'd imagine. Long brown tiles would be nice for a porch in front of a saloon, maybe. I had been looking through mini fig torso prints recently, thinking about maybe dabbling into western or civil war uniforms and the like. There's some potentially good torso prints from some of the adventurers and Johnny Thunder type of themes. I think some of the villains from those themes had things like suspenders or button-up shirts and uniforms. It's worth a look anyway. For women, you can use some dress prints like the new one from the Kingdoms Mill Village Raid (she has a nice apron on) or the white dress one from the Imperial Flagship or Brickbeard's Bounty. You could also repurpose the blacksmith from the new Kingdoms line as well - he could easily become a western blacksmith with just a new hat, I think. I have some red handkerchief accessories, that go between the head and torso - those came from the winter holiday sets. I would also use some pirate or city crook heads, maybe one or two with an eyepatch. The female pirate torso from 2009 and MMV would make a good wench/whore character. A whorehouse MOC, there's an idea. I should do that, lol. I hope I'm not offending anybody with the language here. Of course I'd say that parts from the true-blue western theme from years ago would have the best parts. You might be able to actually use some stuff from the Toy Story line as well. I started watching a new TV series here in the US called Hell on Wheels. It's a western, and really a good show. Runs on AMC which is a premium cable/satellite channel. So I've been giving western stuff some thought lately. Also there's that new bandit fig coming out in the next series of "collectible" minifigures, and that's got me thinking too. :)

Whoa. Illegal and unethical. Doing that would probably run the risk of getting you or your shipping address black-listed, or perhaps some other sort of annoying trouble.

After keeping a vigilant eye out every time I visit Target, I finally found a single one of the Bullseye gift cards alone on a hook. These things disappear immediately and I'm happy I found one. Could never find these things last year. It basically amounts to free Lego. There's something like 30-40 bricks in there. You just have them put the minimum amount of $5 on the gift card and you keep the bricks and spend that gift card money later. Can't beat essentially free Lego, right?

Target's Black Friday deals are 35% off Portal of Atlantis and Scorpion Pyramid. Not worth it in my opinion, and last year my stores had the same deals and plenty of stock well after BF. http://www.blackfriday2011.com/ads/target-black-friday-ads Credit to UnknownUser at toysnbricks.com

I was never able to find these last year, always sold out. I'm hoping there might be some way to order a handful of these online with free shipping; I have a feeling that might be the only way I could get my hands on these. By the way, I noticed the packaging has the "3 in 1" logo on it, like the Creator line has.