vexorian

I just recently got some used sets: A green vahki, a green rahkshi, the white bohrok, nokama metru and whenua metru. After disarming and cleaning the "bricks". The pieces for the rahkshi , vahki and bohrok all look like new, I mean you can see scratches if you really look for them, except for the bohrok which is really shiny new... But the metru's pieces just look wrong. Many scratches but the plastic also feels/looks cheaper to me (and thus more prone to scratches). I triple checked the pieces to make sure they are not clones, and they do have LEGO logos where I could find them. I didn't ever see a metru before, but my brother had a red vahki and , like the green vahki it seems to have better plastic than THAT. I also have Iruini and Norik which were released next year and don't seem to have this issue either. Generally you would expect weapons and armor to be made using that flexible plastic, but in this case even the torsos look to use that weaker plastic, except it is worse than usual...

I just had to deal with tons of megabloks bricks and they look quite far from LEGO quality to me, it was very easy to sort them out of the bunch of plenty of bricks with system and bloks. Then there are the n Chinese clones which maybe are the same brand using different names but it is just terrible.

Wow. Though I wish the bazooka had a "hole" so you could add 1x1 bricks to it, a black bazooka plus some trans bricks would be great for a space weapon.

holy feck: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?...p;mode=threaded The minifigs actually look better than what we've seen in the collectable minifigs previews... The plastic does not seem to have that awful transluscency from clone plastic. And that design is very nice, sounds like something I would not hesitate to put on display, if that is notoriously cheaper than LEGO I will really try to find it (I am so away of Denmark , the US and Korea that shipping/import costs are probably the same...)

It really does not look so real. I mean, the legoland logo is in use yet the figs are not yellow and do not have those suspiciously happy faces? :) Anyway, cute story.

First of all an introduction, it is probably not obvious but I am a just out of dark age AFOL that lives/was born in La Paz, Bolivia. That pretty much makes me forced to resign to buying new sets from some few toy stores that care about it (this is seriously playmobil's territory) and of them, even the most honest one gives me at least 1.3 times the retail price due to all the import costs and taxes, you know. Even so, it is pretty hard to find older sets and new sets come once in a year - if they come - . So I was jealous when reading threads in this forum and others about great deals in garage sales, garage sales are really not common at all in here and I am yet to find evidence that one has ever happened. But there is something about this. Just upwards this city there is another one called "El Alto", something odd happens on Sundays and Thursdays, suddenly most of that city turns into a marketplace. I have forever heard rumors of how you can find "anything" used, new or refurbished at insane small prices... But I never really put a lot of attention to it until some friend actually told me that there was a person selling technic/bionicle pieces by unit in the "El Alto" fair ... So I just went today. The problem is that the fair is excessively big and it is very easy to get lost so I couldn't find this person, or maybe I did but the rain did not allow me to notice. But I did find some other kiosks: 1. My father (this fair is not something that you go alone to) noticed this one because he saw giant bags of bricks, but when I checked, the bags were full of clones and other garbage. Yet by luck I noticed that the woman also had the following things: Yep , it was 99% of 7128 and 50% of 6572. But back then I didn't really know which set numbers or what exactly it was, i just cared about how I finally had a chance to had a yellow skinned Luke skywalker and two troopers with all and speeders... So I asked. Apparently you were supposed to buy the whole thing, including that sail vehicle but the price was... about 6.3 USD. So, I actually bought it, it seemed like they had more pieces than you could find for any other thing I could buy this year for 6.3 USD in stores, and I really wanted that luke skywalker... Plus the instructions were included! Close inspection, there were 'surprises' As you can see there are anomalies with one of the speeders: Well, the missing pieces are not uncommon and I think the only one I do not really have is the second trooper backpack. Some of the plant pieces had some missing leafs, one had no leaves at all. The extreme guy and his sail vehicle were something I didn't really consider while buying but now that I can take a good look I am happy. It turns out the "boat" has ... trans (yellow?) technic wheels! That's nice. But I also took a second look to the extreme guy minifig: Don't underestimate extreme guys, you never know when one of them is a ninja in disguise... Seems someone replaced the missing head with a ninja one, that's nice because we used to have ninja figs but now that head was gone. I love the rest of the fig, that helmet and that black visor sound like would be very nice for a space fig after adding a gas tank... Anyway, I kept going and many places started to pop up in which there were bag after bag of bricks. The bags held quite a mixture of bricks and it was very hard to tell all what was inside. But it was also easy to tell that there were plenty of megabloks and other clone brands inside the bags as well. After seeing so many of those in many different places (do notice that a) it was raining and b) These 'places' were outposts improvised on the floor of what was supposed to be the car area of a street). And I decided to buy one of them. The price for that bag size was about 3 USD.I made sure to pick one that at least seemed to have a good amount of interesting bricks. I picked one that had some few technic pieces in a visible spot. When I came home, I sorted the bag, and found a lot of LEGO bricks of so many types, there were free style, life on mars and some bionicle (Is that fenrak's head?)... But of course, the bag came with a lot of other brands, this one actually came with tons of megabloks, which is strange considering how I am yet to see a megabloks box in my hole life... Here you can see the bag and all the megabloks it had inside after I filtered out the LEGO bricks... it also had some few pieces of other clone brands: Well, I continued my journey and found a place in which they were selling completely built Bionicle canister sets (minus the canister and instructions and some had some missing pieces or replaced pieces) for 1.4 dollars each, I bought me five, including a white bohrok and a green rahkshi, two toa metru and a green vahki, well those guys did not have krata/krana and the rahkshi had metru foot instead of rahkshi foot, but otherwise it was fine. I triple checked the pieces to make sure they weren't "invincibility robot" chinese clones (for that price, it is hard not to be suspicious), but it turns out they weren't... Notice how before this date the only way to get those was to pay 10 USD or more at my toy store, and I just wanted to have many varied pieces for MoCs... It was fun. I am seriously considering to go and just buy all the brick bags I can find...

I agree and disagree.If he would just post that pic of all his collection it would have been annoying and content-less. But his flicker album is very useful to me. Detailed pics of sets is the best we can hope for in lack of actual reviews.

I started with LEGO at the spyrius age. Then I got most of the spyrius sets and all the ice planet sets. Then some exploriens. I also got like 4 of the captain set for space police 2 because that was the only space police 2 set around, and I also got some few m-tron and space police I. I also had close encounters with the true classic era sets thanks to a friend in school back in the day. I really think there were many cool and awesome things in the space era, then it got reduced a little until the blacktron 1 and space police 1 era which was once again freaking awesome... But as biased as I am I just love the Ice Age/Spyrius times. I mean, the design elements, the giant robots , the droid minifig, the magnets, the consistency... Exploriens are also cool for me although not as freaking cool as 1993-1994. I think it went very bad between exploriens and mars mission, inclusive. First the large pieces were starting to get overused too much. Then they had got a little overboard with the details in UFO. And the life on mars had very plain human vehicles. Not to mention the huge hole in which there were no space sets at all, now THAT's a bad thing... (I did like some sets from these times, I keep my large UFO and I also loved the mechs of life of mars, but comparing with the previous ages, it was not enough). Space police 3 seems so cool right now. Specially the 2010 sets. I have not gotten any set yet, but I think one of these days I might surrender to the impulse and go buy the Galactic enforcer that is standing on my local store's shelf as if it was waiting for me. Then I'll not be able to find space for it and explaining such an expense to my family will be hard, but I really feel that urge :/ So, I'd say yes and no. SP3 is in my opinion better than basically everything from 1996 to 2008. So space got better. But it is not really better than spyrius or ice planet, and it may be very far away from the good things on the classic era (although nostalgy might be making biased in here). But I do appreciate that there is such a solid theme after so much time.

*goes bohrok hunting*

But hey, even if the first brick they made was hollow, the one with cylinders is still LEGO's invention and it came after plenty of research and wondering around. And when it was invented, it started the history. It seems so scarily plausible though that LEGO would just keep dropping their standards until they reach megabloks level but just - as they do now- forget to lower the price

I think this is an unintentional double negation. But honestly, although the chinese plastic used by LEGO in the past is low quality, there is a large bridge between low quality plastic that looks like crap and is not as durable as the good old plastic LEGO is supposed to ship and plastic containing "toxic elements" I do not think it is good to speculate on that as I think there have clearly not been any reports about such thing.

Definitely , yes. I consider minifigs part of 'quality' so if minifigs are lame like megabullocks' then I'd probably not consider it a quality competitor. But really, If somehow a competitor decides to compete on quality or LEGO's quality keeps dropping as bad as it has been thanks to Chinese outsourcing and also the color issues, then I'll definitely jump the ship. As a guy that focuses more on the actual building and durability of the toy than on nostalgic/historic value, It would be almost my responsibility to move, someone has to do it, else LEGO would not wake up and recover its quality standards (and people that buy LEGO for nostalgy's sake will have to keep buying low quality stuff) Edit: I actually wish a company would dare competing with LEGO on quality and start shipping quality like what we had on the 90s. Not because I want to leave LEGO for that company but because I want LEGO to improve. I can't picture any other way for LEGO to actually care about quality the way I'd like them to care. LEGO has certainly been slacking off in terms of quality for too long due to the lack of serious competition in these regards, I don't think LEGO would ever charge 20 USD for five minifigs made in China with plastic of so bad quality that they look lime-ish instead of yellow if they had a true competitor. My understanding is that there are aeons of difference between the little brick that was around before LEGO made their little brick . I mean, look at : http://gupea.ub.gu.se/dspace/bitstream/207...38/1/200544.pdf (page 21, ignore the rest of it, it is mostly propaganda, sorry but it was the only image of the kiddicraft brick I could find). The kiddicraft brick has ackward dimensions but more importantly, it lacks the hollow tubes that are meant for interlocking. I spent part of my childhood dealing with Rasti and although the plastic quality of my set was great, the lack of the interlocking pipes and "sticks" was very limiting. It made stacking bricks and disarming models harder, but it also limited the amount of ways you could stack them together and reduced structural strength... In fact, that's what made me fall in love to LEGO. Suddenly I had so many options in comparison to what my old Rasti accomplished.So, maybe it is not history that began with a little brick, but history that began with a little triple of cylinders inside a little brick :).

As far as I remember the bohrok didn't use any gears but rubber bands? --- The Bionicle logo on furno's bike seems to be a sticker probably the retailers going to toy fair might be as unaware of the bionicle -> HF name change as customers will so retailers looking for Bionicle needed that logo as well...

Heh SNL+LEGO+predestination paradox , nice! Edit: Just hope this does not make Ronald go back in time to stop the LandShark jokes from being invented ^^. Are we ever going to see Ronald's Mom?

Heheh, just spent the last two days reading them all. Very funny and well... where else would we get to see a UFO fighting Nessie?. However, I think it is time already for spyrius to appear! you've been saying since the beginning you were going to feature them :)

I see this year it as a golden opportunity for me to move back to system. Perhaps next year they'll have something better for my taste.

This got to be the first blog I ever see that doesn't have a RSS or atom feed o_O that's messed up.

I prefer the cartoony and cute Grievous over the creepy Anakin. He is tan in CW:

Well, it would be a mistake for LEGO not to include them at S@H and I doubt they would not . They are in the middle between trading cards and impulse sets.. I actually think most people will just get one or three bags on each S@h order they make. They are like the super-impulse.

The whole scarcity thing has not been upgraded from "rumor" yet. I really doubt it. I bet that at least S@H and LEGO stores will have lots of them. (Where lots should just be read as enough) I can also picture bags being given away at events and promotions. Remember, they are using the China factory, they are seriously mass producing here.

At least series 1 figs don't come pre-assembled, and there is a sort of "instructions" piece of paper that has enough info to build any of the figs in the series. There is a pic of it in one of the many brickshelf galleries we found yet that had pics of these guys.

Great review of a set that's good to remember. This is probably the last space set I got the very year it was released. The year after it my store couldn't get insectoids in the country and then I tried getting old sets still available (Space police I / M-tron) anyway, this was a set I really liked. I actually like the figs. The faces are over detailed, but you don't get to see them most of the time, and I used them as a joke. "So that's the reason they hide their faces" But something good was putting the figs close to a light source and seeing the trans-plastic-caused glow in their eyes through the helmets... Which leads me to mention why I really love the figs - the parts are nice: The helmets, they have such a viper feeling, if you don't like the printing you can get it erased and the helmet will still be sort of unique. And then goes my favorite 1997 piece: The armor, that thing is so effective at making custom figs look evil... Yeah functions were a nice surprise. I have fond memories of the "canons" but my favorite thing was how the magnets keep it together.

To be honest these figs totally kill all my interest in the sets :/ The fun thing about licenses is to have minifigs of these famous characters. Now imagine if the Darth Vader minifig was just a small action figure... that would suck. If I wanted action figures I would just go... and buy action figures...

But you miss that there are going to be multiple series on it. If series 1 reaches crazy prices on BL it will be free marketing for series 2 and can only be good for LEGO.

Boba is ok, I don't see the megabloxy ness. He is just a minifig to me and one that looks nice. Grievous is just ok, it is awful but not much worse than the 2005 one. Also, it seems buildable and as compatible with LEGO parts as the skeleton and droids are, so it does not deserve being compared to megabullocks figs IMHO. So I guess not that good but not that bad.