Dorek

It was originally on the TRU website, but has since been removed; there haven't been any confirmed sightings of the 2012 sets in-stores yet.

I think keeping the Breakout theme would be nice; it would be interesting to see how they keep a whole year going, thematically. It could be like 2003, where there were basically two completely separate plot points, or like 2008/9, where it all tied together in the end. And yes, a vehicle would be wub.

Some good stuff, and it's nice to have that image textless. I can't wait to add it to HS01! Wait... D: DINKLEBERG

Also think when robots are called "bucket of bolts"; obviously they are much more than that, but it's still meant as a demeaning insult. We've seen titan combiners with smaller sets before, but I can only really think of one, the Sand Stalker (which was pretty ugly, but still). Interesting prelim pics. That red does work for Furno pretty well, but I'm glad he has tubes.

Well, he is on Reapa's home; presumably it's a toxic environment there as well XP. Yeah, it is weird that the game says "sold separately", but it would be a neat concept, in the wake of LU's demise. Dude I knooooooow. Gonna be a large, badass combiner. I don't know if those are canon or technical explanations, but damned if I'm not going to consider them accurate.

That's what I'm goddam talking about.

I remember in an interview when Hero Factory was just starting out, one of the designers said that since Plasma was a popular concept in the BIONICLE fandom (based on research or some nonsense) that they had integrated that into the story; I thought it was weird, since we hadn't seen any examples of it, but now it seems to be more popular =P. I'm okay with a plasma gun, because then at least we have something to call ALL of them. There's no way they can be different weapons. But, it remains to be seen what HF.com will do with it; they got hella lazy this past round, so I'm hoping that with this new wave, which is already drastically different from the past one, they will step up the web presence. Anyhow, I'm definitely gonna check out TRU tomorrow. Hopefully they'll have some of these sets.

Yeah, we do, they're listed on the Amazon.de pages. Jawblade: 45 Surge: 39 Splitface: 50 Breez: 55 Thornraxx: 44 Furno: 56 and Black Phantom has 124. Not too bad, all things considered. Splitface and Surge apparently got the short end of the stick, but ah well.

It all depends on who has the sets and who is willing to flip them on eBay. Some people see sets earlier in the year (I've gotten sets in December many-a-time) if they go to the right place, and some people are willing to turn around and make a quick buck. So even if they aren't widespread, some stores still have them for whatever reason.

Eh, I think people will be receptive to it; there was far less of an uproar about the new joints in 2008 than I expected, so this shouldn't be too different.

True, but there's doubles in three of the villain sets, even those colors aren't as exciting. Hopefully they show up in PAB, which they theoretically should; the one I'm most interested in is Rocka's, obviously =P eBay tends to be awesome for things like that. There's usually something to be found, even if you have to pay a wee bit extra.

New color? Scooooooore. This line actually has some awesome recolors. I can't wait until they start appearing in stores. Shouldn't be too long, now, only a few more weeks.

Hey, as long as it's a good build, I'm okay with it; we haven't seen four-wheel builds yet in BIONICLE or HF (Kaxium doesn't count), so I could definitely get on board with that. The Furno Bike is a great set, and Drop Ship is definitely on my wish list (they go on eBay for like, 20 bucks, so I'm probably gonna get that one of these days) so I'd love to see their take on something four-wheeled. It would be a lot less anachronistic than anything in Ninjago =P. I'd actually be okay with XL as a moniker; it wasn't officially used with Rocka, so really it could just be used to denote any larger than average Hero. But yeah, we might see another one of them.

Rocka I think was mostly included because he only had one release prior to this; I'm not sure if he's really a "favorite", I haven't seen any overwhelming support for him like I have for Furno. The only thing I'm thinking is that Summer, thus far, tends to have more sets overall than Winter, so I don't know how they're going to work that. Probably the ones we missed, plus Furno, maybe a newbie. I still maintain we need more vehicles. We haven't seen any tech in a while, and since they're discontinuing the canisters for the time being, we need a new mode of transport.

Haha, that'd kinda cute. Movie and a set. Not bad. Some kind of French thing. I certainly didn't see anything like that this summer, but where I live there is kinda out of the way, so maybe that's why.

I'm okay with lime green as Surge's secondary color, it's just poorly applied. It needs to properly be a secondary color, instead of being apparently equal with his true primary color, blue. The only indication that blue is his primary color is that his helmet is blue.

Matt Betekker, right? The guy who appeared in the most recent vid on HF.com? That's a good piece of trivia to have for HS01 (once we start adding 2012 set stuff. Which realistically should be soon...). And so they do. Excellent. Jawblade is definitely looking to be one of my favorites for the line, then. It looks like his blades are of a deeper orange/red than they have been previously. Any reason for the change?

I'm less than enamored with Toxic Reapa, but Jawblade still has some potential if he isn't posed retardedly. Not a fan of the lower jaw being fixed, but if the head unit has enough flexibility, it should be a good set. The lower jaw looks a lot bigger than it does in the CGI; I know the CGI is designed to hide various flaws, but it seems like they focused a lot more on covering stuff up this time around =P. Ah well, I'll still want a lot of them, and most of the humanoids are looking a lot better.

Rocka's is a bit different, and do we know that Furno is like that? It's impossible to tell from the hi-res pics, and the old prelim shots actually don't show anything. I just thought it was a weird design choice; it CAN accommodate a new hand joint, and I don't see why it didn't. Doesn't matter in the long run, I was just curious as to why.

Hah! That's awesome. If ever there was a time to lobby for fan canonization. Unfortunately, the TV show will probably show him with fingers, but it's still brilliant. I guess hand pieces are just that much more expensive than the "y-joints" to produce, so they try and shave off a bit on production costs whenever they can.

DBMe* sorry. Same diff, but still, you're right. Weird how they took only the lime green elements from Surge =P. Quirky combiner, but I like the general spirit of inventiveness they've been having with the combi-models. Even the humanoids get an interesting spin. This one has some weird designs, but I look forward to seeing what else they come up with. They probably won't have any storyline reference, but ah well. And they appear to be combining the same background ones (it's also good to see them finally include the villains). Wonder what they'll do with Rocka and BP?

It says they'll still be around, not that they'll keep updating ;D. They will probably keep updating, but still. With LDD tanking, they might not find updating any of the other services a priority. Any other sexy alternate pics of the 2012 sets?

I get that it's normal not to see hands all the time, and that they are robots, but Evo has a left hand, and if I'm understanding the design of the new launcher piece right, there's no particular reason not to use a hand piece (as opposed to the generic Y joint he seems to use) on his right hand. I just think that it's an odd design choice. I'll probably equip him with regular hand, but we'll see. As for PAB, I imagine that they'll still update that. It's a lot cheaper to get parts from there than from LDD, which is probably part of the reason they discontinued the models. Plus, they're also keeping Recon team, and if they intend to update that (which I assume they would) then we should get new parts. Not sure about the actual palette, but if they still have the budget for software updates, I can only hope that they'll add patches to the program itself.

Fun new images. They're all looking pretty good, though Toxic Reapa does look a lot more gappish. Evo looks like a bamf. I'm okay with the new packaging style too, it'll be a lot easier to manage. Rocka still looks to be one of my favorites of the line, as does BP. Evo appears not to have a right hand, though, which is odd.

It's just that many more characters you have to include in the TV episodes, y'know? With BIONICLE, not including characters in the comics was our biggest worry; they would find their way into the story somehow (and sometimes the reverse ocurred; Klakk was made an extremely important character in 2008, similar to Click in 09, because they wanted to sell Brickmaster subscriptions). With Hero Factory, you have to include all the Heroes and Villains, if only for a short while. They couldn't do it with Vapor for whatever reason (except as the briefest of cameos), so they probably decided it wasn't worth it. Although it's still sad, since 2010 was when they had the most time to play around. The subsequent episodes seem to be proportional to the sets in the wave.