Lyichir

There's a significant problem with that mode of identification. The different part designs are due to the Chinese facility simply using newer molds, so it's not unlikely that the newer molds will be implemented in the other factories as well. I don't know when that would happen; perhaps in the near future and perhaps a long time from now. As a short-term means of identification, it holds up, but in the long term, there's no telling. Not that it matters to me. What small quality issues I saw in some of my earliest Chinese-produced figs have decreased in the later ones, and I'm sure that they'll continue to do so. And I'm not going to pass on figs I want just because of their point of origin.

The Adventurers Elephants are unlikely to show up again. They're based on the old Dinosaur building system which hasn't been used in years, and is not quite stylistically compatible with most modern animals (for instance, their empty stud eyes aren't like any modern animal molds). But I'd appreciate a NEW elephant mold as much as anyone. I wouldn't bet on them appearing in Friends, for sure, since they're extremely blocky even compared to modern horses or sharks from minifig-based themes. Plus, the only large animals we've seen in Friends are the horses. Maybe we'll see a baby elephant at some point, but I don't know about a full-sized one. Friends animals could sometimes work in system and sometimes not. The lamb, I think, is iffy, since it's a little too rounded and poofy even for modern City animals. The poodle, however, would be wonderful if you gave it more typical black bead eyes (since that style of trim on a poodle is meant to be poofy and frou-frouey. The Friends Dolphin is a bit cartoony, but on the other hand it's not much more rounded than the old dolphin. The penguin could probably work in minifig-based themes, too. And so on and so forth.

...Odd. But I doubt it'll be yellow, as it's not even yellow in the movie itself. I wonder why it's like that in this shot... perhaps Batman was going to be yellow in early stages of production?

Awesome! The other day I remarked to my brother that The Lego Movie might provide us with some more adult-sized Lego T-shirts, and now we have confirmation! I wonder if we'll see any Uni-Kitty shirts in men's sizes... I can only hope.

I wish there were a Lord Business alarm clock. Like, legs and all. It'd be like a freaking grandfather clock.

As a proud owner of 6082, I'm going to take issue with this part. Sure, the set FELT complete from the outside... but I think modern sets give a more complete play experience. With no way to unfold walls or remove floors, getting the dragon out of his cave was nigh impossible, even with my small child hands. That whole interior was hardly accessible, and there wasn't a lot of detail there because of it, so while it made the castle look bigger and more complete, it amounted in the end to so much wasted space. The modern "open" castle design may look less formidable, but hardly any space is wasted. It's easy to get at the front and back of every wall and tower, and as a result regular play involves more creative role-play and less frustration. As a bonus, modern castle walls are typically modular, so kids can easily rebuild the castle section-by-section instead of starting from scratch. I haven't bought a Castle set in some time, but I imagine if I were growing up now instead of two decades ago I'd be much happier and much less frustrated by the modern castle sets.

They're probably on a lovely beach somewhere in the galaxy, taking a much deserved vacation. Stringer is bringing some frosty drinks back to Nex. "You know, I've been wondering," says Stringer, "whatever happened to the guys back on Alpha 1 Team?" "I don't know," replies Nex, shrugging and accepting his drink from Stringer. "But I'm sure if they needed us, they'd call. The Breakout's over, and the galaxy is at peace. What could possibly go wrong?" At this point one of two possible scenarios emerges. The two heroes either continue to sip their drinks and reminisce, or they're brutally attacked by alien brain-controlled kaiju from underground and killed instantly.

What Aanchir and I do is carefully run a blade (often a pair of scissors) along one side of the top of the bag. If you do it right it lets you open the resealable top without separating the top section altogether.

That's my opinion, too. In addition, the news coverage of this sort of thing happening to companies like Mattel is sure to have put Lego on high alert. I wouldn't be surprised if they now do more consistent safety checks on parts coming out of the Chinese facilities than on any of their own facilities, just to be sure that nothing like that happens to them.

Good review! One quibble: those parts you listed in Medium Lavender are actually the rarer "Lavender". Medium Lavender is the darker variety. Any new part in Lavender is good in my opinion, but I hope that more basic bricks are made in both that color and Cool Yellow in the future.

http://www.pockyland.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=59473 This has scans of the retailer's catalog, one of which features a slightly better pic of the Queen Beast set! Looks like her horns ARE a new piece...

http://www.pockyland.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=59473 Saw someone share this in the Trains topic. It's got some Chima sets too. I wasn't expecting the mammoths to be bigfigs.

At least you can rest assured that there'll never be official versions your Pulp Fiction Duplo figs, eh?

How were you firing them? I had a similar problem until I realized that they work far better when you push the trigger gently to raise the missiles and THEN push it hard to fire them. It still doesn't work 100% of the time this way, but it does work much better than if you try to fire them in one hard motion. EDIT: New Ninjago summer set images! http://www.pockyland.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=59473 It's not what I was expecting... but that's not to say I'm disappointed.

Firstly: notice all of those stories about toys from China being tainted with heavy metals and formaldehyde. Then notice that none of those involve Lego. And finally notice that there are MILLIONS to be earned in a class-action lawsuit against a company the size of Lego, and that nonetheless it hasn't happened yet. Believe it or not, the lack of oversight by the Chinese government doesn't mean Lego has no oversight of the factories they're contracting, or that they don't care about quality if they're not directly responsible. Tell me, what was the name of the company that made those pencil toppers? Had you heard about it before? Do they even have contact information on the box? There are a lot of companies that don't give a shit about anything but profits, and pencil toppers are the kinds of disposable doodads that can be made cheaply and easily and then sold for a quick buck. Lego is different. Lego is a global company that has cared about quality from the get-go, and even if they manufacture in a country that offers cheaper labor you can be sure they're going to be selective about which companies they rely upon to make their products. Your response is a perfect example of the kind of prejudiced and ignorant opinions cause the issues with Chinese-manufactured Lego. It doesn't matter that you can't give any concrete examples of poor quality Lego coming out of China; nothing less than a complete pullout will satisfy you, because other companies (ones without time-tested records of quality) have made poor-quality products in China. If that's the kind of logic you rely upon to guide your purchasing decisions, there's not a lot I can say to convince you otherwise.

Or they hadn't considered that for licensed proposals they'd have to share profits with the license-holders instead, and in order to make Cuusoo as a project sustainable they had to put reasonable limits on the amount they were giving away. Cuusoo promised a percentage of a single set's sales; they don't need to offer more than that just because the project that succeeded was vague enough to apply to any set they designed based on the same property (and truly the Minecraft project was; under the current more clarified rules it probably never would have passed review). Cuusoo is, after all, in beta, and the whole point of that designation is to iron out unforeseen issues with the current terms. Business as usual, in that business involves making practical decisions that don't necessarily have nefarious intent.

Like I said, there's nothing wrong with having moral objections to Lego doing business in China. But the majority of the opposition to Chinese manufacture I see in the Lego fan community is far less civic-minded. The calling out of every "Chinese" part in a set is borne more out of fear that those parts are inferior to the others than to any concern for the standard of living of the workers who oversaw their assembly. AFOLs, it seems, are more concerned with the value of their end product than with what it took to get there (and indeed, I think they'd be outraged if Lego actually did pull out of China and it resulted in raised prices to account for a typical western cost of labor). As it is, issues like unfair wages and pollution may exist, but the oft-raised specter of tainted or inferior products hasn't manifested in Lego products. So if AFOLs want to see more transparency and oversight for the Chinese production facilities, I would be all for that. But if they just want Lego to pull out of China because they're afraid they're getting an inferior product, when the evidence shows otherwise, I can't sympathize. I, too, like to imagine that Lego's oversight and care for quality is probably a positive thing for their Chinese manufacturers, and I don't think they should be deprived of such a responsibly-minded client for petty or ignorant reasons.

Oh, there are problems with Chinese labor to be sure. But my point is that they don't necessarily manifest in the actual quality of Lego's products. Not all things imported from China are cheap and crappy; in fact, the majority of high-end consumer electronics are produced there. From what I can tell, Lego took up Chinese production primarily because of the cheaper labor, but cheaper labor is the norm in China, for better or for worse. That doesn't mean Lego is cutting corners on their actual products, and in fact a lot of what we've seen produced in the Chinese facilities are things that are, for the most part, HIGHER quality: things like parts with more complex printing than usual, that are most likely produced there specifically because they require more manual labor and less automation to produce. The stigma against Chinese production isn't new, and part of why I'm skeptical of it is because it was used as a scapegoat even before Lego started producing things in China: the Bionicle fandom, for one, often blamed Chinese production for quality issues long before any parts from Bionicle sets were produced there. When parts actually started being produced there, fans looked at them with a critical eye from the very beginning, and any faults (such as the discoloration in early CMF parts) were blamed on Chinese production: a classic example of confirmation bias, which ignored any other possible explanations besides cost-cutting. And that fear of Chinese products coupled with ignorance led to a number of myths: that Chinese parts didn't use "real" ABS (the start of the "cheap Chinese plastic" meme that relied on the false assumption that ABS was some sort of secret formula that only Lego could use), or that things like the lack of neck printing on Chinese-produced figs were an example of the lower quality (and not an example of HIGHER-quality printing machines being used in the newer Chinese facilities). Even when the quality issues appeared less and less, AFOLs continued to behave as if nothing short of pulling out of China completely could solve them. So I can understand objecting to Chinese production on moral grounds (even though the lack of any reports of abuses from the production facilities that produce Lego suggest that perhaps they are more scrupulous and ethical than widely-panned companies like Foxconn). But most AFOLs object to them not because of that, but because of an irrational fear toward Chinese-produced parts. And that's why I can't take a lot of the hysteria over Chinese production seriously.

Except when the colors of their element change between appearances (such as with Pohatu Phantoka) or when two characters share the same colors yet are different (such as Toa Hordika Vakama and Tahu Mistika). The Brain Attack masks were excellent at maintaining visual motifs from the characters' older masks while updating them. I love the consistency in character appearances of Hero Factory; I only wish the story media like the TV episodes were more consistent with their actual characterization.

No, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that LEGO has to comply with Chinese law if they want to do business there. And that Lego doesn't just outsource Chinese production to the most unscrupulous manufacturers available; they actually do care about the quality of the products they sell, as evidenced by the lack of anything like the examples of the kind of abuses you're using as evidence occurring with Lego. The most we've seen is perhaps slightly more color inconsistency in Chinese-produced parts (especially when they were just starting out production in the country), which isn't any sort of high crime. But conversely, are you suggesting that China is universally a nation of cutting corners? That Chinese workers can't take pride in their work despite their comparably lower standard of living? That Lego has effectively zero control over the companies they contract to produce their products? I'm not saying that Chinese production has been without its faults (like most new production facilities Lego has used, it got off to a shaky start, and even now it's not quite perfect), but like most issues with Lego it gets way overblown by the fan community, to the point where the facts give way to paranoia and ignorance.

"Regarding the allegedly cheaper plastic (which is also ABS, and I think has always been an overblown problem, often confused with dye inconsistencies and new molds), Chinese law requires that a certain amount of the materials for products produced in China be sourced from within the country. It has little if anything to do with reduced costs. Yet the meme of "cheaper Chinese plastic" continues to circulate throughout the Lego fan community.

Keep in mind that "not many more pieces" and "not much larger" are two different things. The parts of the Simpsons house seem to be basic bricks for the most part, whereas the Sea Cow features plenty of mast elements, large Technic panels, large Technic wheels, and of course the huge ship hulls. $300 still seems pricy, but when you take into consideration how much plastic those large parts entail and it starts to make a bit more sense.

Okay, this one isn't exactly a bug. But part 60800 has a problem whereby the default connections don't line up when you use it as left and right shutters (for instance, with part 60583). Unless you exploit the rotation tool to line them up, one will always sit slightly higher or slightly lower than the other. The standard connections ought to be symmetrical so that they can be more easily used this way, since it's the primary way this part is used in sets. EDIT: Also, I encountered a boundary error when building the set Rescue Reinforcements. It's the part on step 24 of the instructions, where the chicken peers through the spyglass. It seems the only way for it to work is for the chicken's beak to jut slightly into the hollow stud of the spyglass, but either the chicken (95342) or the spyglass (64644) has a boundary error preventing this.

I'll be interested to see if the mall is similar to one I tried to design on LDD at one point. My design featured essentially three 16x16 bases in a row, with two floors on each, and the center base being a "hall" or atrium with escalators to the other floor.

That's one of the tricky things about proposing a project that fits into an existing theme. If a fan can come up with an idea for a set based on that theme, there's no reason Lego can't come up with the same idea (and in the case of this, they have the resources to make it work, unlike the Cuusoo program). I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened to my Ninjago Advent Calendar, but in that case I wouldn't mind so much because the end result would be about the same, and of course the work I put into designing this on LDD isn't nearly comparable to the kind of work that would have gone into your amazing customs.