Dunjohn

Nice review. I think it's extraordinarily cool that they actually made a track marshal's car when they could have just made another racer. I think it shows a depth to the theme that isn't obvious on the surface. I really hope they continue to make more support vehicles in this line.

Amazing stuff. Well done!

Just saw this on Brothers Brick. Blew me away. If you're reading this, DeGobbi... holy crap.

Ooh! Yes, and I also love the original Alien movies and respect the original Predators. This was little more than trashy name-dropping, though. After about twenty-five minutes of trying to get my head around a nonsensical plot that spat in the faces of both it's inspirational movie franchises, I just turned to my brother (who'd already seen the movie) and said, "If Predator ends up siding with the humans, I'll scream." He was strangely silent for the rest of the movie... yeah, the plot was that vapid. I did stick the movie out to the end, just to see how badly they'd end up disrespecting the source material. From that point of view, it was absolutely gripping. Over and over, they did it. Haven't seen the sequel, though I think my brother has the dvd. He loves trashy movies. I do too, but I have limits.

There's an ad on telly at the moment for some Wii dance game. The ad uses Kate Perry's Hot n' Cold, which put me in the mood for this.... I've never heard that version posted by Captain Zuloo. It's rather excellent.

...three genders, mumble mumble....

I got this set in a dedicated Lego store while on holiday in Krakow last summer. I built it there but broke it up for the journey home, and didn't get around to rebuilding it... until now. INFORMATION: Set Name: Alien Avenger Set Number: 6975 Theme: U.F.O. Year Released: 1997 Number of Pieces: 369 Minifigs: 4 Price: Umm... loads of złotych, can't remember how much. I think I worked it out to around €80, which is about the Bricklink average. Bricklink The set came sealed in its box, but that's probably part of several rolls of toilet paper in Warsaw by now. The image above is from Bricklink. I'm no James May, I just couldn't fit the thing in my luggage. A pity, too; it was a nice big one with the flap on front so you could open it and drool on the special drool-resistant plastic membrane. Once again, apologies to the boxed-set collectors out there. This is one less for the brotherhood. _____________________________________ THE CONTENTS: The manual cover, with a nice little scene showing the terrified robot fleeing from the wildly out-of-control mothership. A random page, showing the completion of the command module and the construction of the buggy. The graphics throughout are very clear and there are no problems with telling light grey from dark, but the lack of a piece callout makes certain stages a nightmare. Note how a sticker has suddenly appeared on top of the dome in the last stage. You need to watch out for that sort of thing throughout the building process. Using these old manuals was like reading a "Where's Wally" book at times. I had to backtrack some stages a couple of times, even on this second build. The back features two alternative builds. I think they're actually rather good, but I haven't attempted them yet. The set also contains a rather campy mini-catalogue for 1997, and an insert for ordering additional parts from various sets. Cute. Pretty much everything is printed in the set, and there's a lot of it, but there're still these four special stickers which I didn't (and don't plan to) apply. The two black ones are heat-sensitive mood sensors. Touch them, and they light up with an alien face. Unless you're me. I must be a zombie or something. Let me just pre-heat my hand.... Bingo! Moving on.... PARTS: The main colours are black and classic light grey, but pretty much all of it is hidden under the printed and transneon yellow saucer shell. I've made a couple of errors when sorting these out of my boxes: some bits are bley rather than the correst colour, and that bley flap in the middle of the black parts is the wrong flap type and wouldn't fit. I had to go back and find the right ones later on. The cooler stuff. A bendy crane thing (which I hate), six magnets and their various sockets, small transneon yellow saucer segment (two in the set), small light grey segment (two), large light grey segment (four; two with printing on the left, two with it on the right), a transneon yellow octagon cockpit, a squared slanted one (two in the set), a safe with transneon hatch (two), two weird flappy things, the bizarre hollow octagonal 10x10 plate, and the printed tiles. I missed two of the 2x2 tiles, there are actually four in the set. My set has a misprint, with one large segment having a thick yellow band across it. Meh. I'm not too bothered. I'll say I crashed into a mint-condition Yellow Castle. The four minifigs: Three aliens with armour and helmets, and one robot with no accessories. These are the only minifig accessories in the set. I gotta say, though: These minifigs are easily my least favourite of all the ones I own. Their printing - and that of the entire U.F.O. line - strikes me as ridiculously over-detailed and complicated. Thankfully, Lego has toned it down since. I mean, the faces are just absurd. I've named them Smiley, Botox, Buckteeth and Robot. Moving on.... THE BUILD: Building begins with the figs, then the command module, then the buggy, then the large saucer section. This image is from very early on, I just wanted to show the first use of magnets. These attach the command module to the rest of the craft and do the job very well. This also shows just how spartan the command module's build is: Finish out the rim, attach a few antennea and the dome, and that's it. This is the random page I pulled out earlier. As you can see, the excessive printing makes the command module look far more involved than it actually was. A victory for juniorization! The four stickers are also all applied on this page, three on the craft and one mood sensor on the buggy. There are still a couple of stages to go before I attach the huge saucer segments, but as you can see, this is far more involved than the command module was, and the end result will be a surprisingly solid, sturdy construction. The building process isn't symmetrical, you sort-of do it in layers from right to left. It lets you see everything, but exacerbates the "Where's Wally" phenomenon when they stick a few small bits in with the larger ones. This build is the stage before the one you can see in the book, but if you look at the book, you'll see that the black plate sticking out at the left should have two grey 1x4 plates on it. They were added in the previous step, and I don't discover the mistake for a couple of steps yet. I've also just added the magnetic crane, which will be used to lift the buggy in and out of the centre of the craft. The reason I don't like it is because the segments are quite flimsy and separate easily, and also don't bend as smoothly as Lego illustrations and photographs suggest; instead, it tends to bend at only one or two points each time, giving a jagged look. By contrast, this handle is a simple feature that I really like. If you hold the craft in one hand by the handle, you can spin it around, giving the ship oodles of swooshability and making the alien commander wonder what the Earth his engineer is drinking. Gotowy! The ship has tonnes of moving parts and things to do once it's complete, and looks great too. I'm not fond of the two huge guns at the front. They're nice and menacing, but very plain. Given the OTT design ethic of the U.F.O. line, I think they could badly use some greebling. The buggy sits in here. Robot doesn't get his own bed compartment, so I presume he's supposed to sit in the driver's seat between planets. And the command module sits on top. Like I said, the magnets keep in in place very securely; if you try to lift it off by holding just the dome, the dome will come off before the magnets separate. You need to lift the rim with two hands. I call this little thing the bug, because it really doesn't deserve all five letters. It sits in it's own compartment opposite the crane. However, you need to be careful when driving it off the ship... ...because it's quite a drop. IN CONCLUSION So, spending something like €80 on a set that probably retailed for a third that from a theme I hadn't even known existed because it reminded me of those awesome large Blacktron II sets I fantasized about owning as a kid: Worth it? Ehm... yeah, after seven months, I suppose I'm still happily feeling that odd misplaced nostalgia. The more striking elements aren't as MOCable as I'd convinced myself they were in the shop, unless I want to build something on-theme. The big, <insert that tiresome argument> elements make the end result look good but detracted a little from the building process. And of course, the minifigs are horrible. But overall, I'm very pleased with how it turned out. It is a deadly looking set. Design: 8/10. A heavy reliance on large pieces to provide the shape, but they integrate well, and the thing is literally covered with doodads to lift and pull and turn and generally mess with. Parts: 7/10. The larger bits are difficult to reuse and a lot of the smaller bits are old-fashioned compared to today's standard, but there are a god few pieces in here to fire the imagination by themselves, and it also has plenty of basic elements to support that. Transneon yellow is my favourite colour in Lego, and this set has it in spades. Build: 6/10. Having to pore over every illustration to see if there are any 1x2 plates there that weren't there a second ago was a pain in the neck. We've come a long way, baby. Nothing too challenging otherwise. Playability: 10/10. Lego managed to squeeze functionality into practically every seam between the large plates. Price: 5/10. I suppose it hasn't inflated as much as more in-demand lines, and I knew I was paying collector prices which I managed to justify by being on holidays damnit, but still, it was a fair whack to the wallet. I don't think I was ripped off, by any means. Overall: 80%. There are parts I don't like, the building could be a chore, but damn, the thing looks awesome when it's finished. Thanks for reading! Separated at Birth - Dunjohn

I haven't seen Twilight, so I can't comment on how naff the sparkling is or what other aspects of vampirism have been adapted to ft it into the boyband mould. And it's definitely true that the definition of a vampire changes in the detail from one fantasy universe to another. I think the reasons so many people pick on the sparkling skin are twofold: They hate the idea of vampires being "dragged down" to the boyband level in general and need a specific target to rail against, and the sparkling skin is a particularly tweenified, overly romantic reimagining of a "genuine" vampire trait and it doesn't seem to serve any logical purpose. I can't really say anything else until I see the other ways that Edward acts as a vampire.

Shaun of the Dead zombies did die, didn't they? Then they reanimated almost immediately.

The SNES Zelda is Zelda III: Link to the Past, and is fantastic. Zelda II: Adventures of Link on the NES is indeed rather crappy.

Exactly what I thought when I saw that red car that looks like Snake Oiler's. This is definitely the action racing stuff that was completely ignored in the Street Racer line. Although the red team will probably win that race. Anybody who brings an F1 car to a race called "Wreckage Road" doesn't have their yellow head pushed down all the way.

When I came out of my dark age about eighteen months ago, I'd buy small sets from any line, just for the fun of building them, but my focus was Exo-Force. Exo-Force is gone, replaced by Power Miners as my primary theme, but I also like Toy Story and Agents, and I still buy the occasional small set from any line if it looks like an entertaining build or has cool parts. Biggest set not from one of my main lines would be the blue Creator motorbike, the orange City bin lorry or the Mach 5 from Speed Racer, to give you an idea of how far into those themes I might go. So no. I have favourite lines but I don't ignore the others completely. I've yet to buy anything from Castle or Star Wars.

Unless they're monsters mutated to look like humans. Then it's, like, double-speciesism.

This set had a second daycare fig last time we saw it, but I don't recall a Legoman in the cab. He looks a bit odd.... the truck in the movie must come with a driver build-in. That would explain the fleshy skin and irregular torso. I loved the chunky design then and I still love it. I'm not sure if it would really work in City because of that, but as a toy truck, I think they captured the look perfectly. The front looks a bit odd, with the grille being only three studs wide with four loose studs below it. They ever do anything like that before?

B.A. had possibly the most terrifying smile ever seen on television. Especially in the way it formed so slowly, like he had to send each electric pulse to his mouth muscles separately because they sure as hell didn't know the way themselves.

I'm playing Brütal Legend on XBox at the moment, so, yeah, loads of heavy metal.

Hmm, perhaps something built out of Lego to handle the 3am feedings....

Another sequel that took an awesome original movie and use the name to sell a completely different load of garbage (Chronicles of Riddick being the first one, I mentioned it earlier) was Starship Troopers 2. If you haven't seen it but like the first one, this one has zombies in it. Man, I just kept getting angrier and angrier as I watched, wondering when the movie I thought I'd rented was going to start. Second that comment about Last Action Hero being better than it's remembered as being. It had some great ideas, if only it hadn't tripped itself up with all the awful ones.

Huh. That Toa Undersea Attack set is still in a shop in town, I should go have a look. I've always thought the parts looked unusually System-esque for a Bionicle set but I never really examined it.

There are Bionicle minifigs? Not a contradiction, I honestly didn't know there were any. Probably most people are gonna scream for System sets with proper minifigs and bricks. I know next to nothing about Ben10 but I've seen a rather nice green and black car on toy shop shelves. It's the only vehicle I recall seeing though, so I don't know what else they could make.

Not sure if this counts, exactly, but in the same vein as "Legos." Throughout their Lego Games range TLG refers to the "buildable Lego Dice:" a cardinal sin among gamers. "Dice" is plural, the singular form is "die." http://shop.lego.com/ByTheme/Product.aspx?...cn=595&d=70 ... funny, I'm just using that page as an example, but reading it, it lists "AWARD WINNER" among the contents. I suppose that's technically accurate, but... okay.

They wouldn't put regular minifigs into Dublo sets, the studs wouldn't fit the feet and they'd be out of scale with the bricks. I don't want to get the Duplo sets myself, but have pictures of them been released?

I do like this theme, though there seems to be a massive number of stickers involved, and I never apply those. The colour scheme is nice. With Power Miners likely coming to an end and me not being interested in Atlantis, this may be the line that I take up instead. I'd imagine that the trophies are fully unique per set, like Atlantis' rings. It enhances collectability. Did anybody actually bother with Agents' stars?

The head can still come off. Trust me, as the second-oldest of five, I know how adept kids are at finding improbable ways of choking on things. You should see the Lego I have left from before my dark age. I keep it quarantined. My personal favourite Legoman in this video is the one waving while Mrs. Potato Head is checking out Flick's muscles.

Well, speaking personally, I love Power Miners but have no interest in Atlantis ;)