Aanchir

It's definitely a useful part in my opinion. I have used it for feet on Koboldon and Caitlyn Gauss XL, for a torso on Unikitty's Chicken Walker and Geiger Tiger, and for connecting additional torso armor on Poison Dart. I also used it either as a torso beam or as connection points for back armor on various creature MOCs. I rarely do. I have some duplicate sets that I won as contest prizes, but I plan to keep one signed set unopened and haven't decided what to do with the unsigned sets. One of them, Dragon Bolt, is such an excellent set that I'm somewhat inclined to give it to a friend so they can enjoy it for themselves.

Ah, my brother referred me to this topic a few days ago and I keep forgetting to come back to it. Anyhow, creating a direct reference table between Bricklink names and LEGO names is difficult because Bricklink has a tendency to identify multiple colors by one name, and at the same time has a tendency to use one name for multiple colors. This spreadsheet is where I currently keep track of how Bricklink and LEGO colors relate to one another. It's not perfect nor complete, and sometimes I wonder if any comparison table between different AFOL naming systems CAN be perfected and completed. AFOL naming systems and the LEGO Group's naming system sometimes work at cross-purposes, because the LEGO Group is concerned with the production side of things (i.e. the materials), and AFOLs are concerned with the user side of things (i.e. the physical appearance of the colors). For instance, officially, this piece is transparent red, but from a production standpoint its material ID is 41 Transparent Red. It only appears opaque because it is molded in polypropylene, a softer plastic material, rather than polycarbonate, the hard, glassy-looking plastic material used for most transparent parts. Likewise, most AFOLs probably don't care about the differences between certain colors that look close to identical. Even if they do care, it can take them years to recognize that a part that looks different is actually a different color from a production standpoint and not just a result of quality issues in the part. Bricklink identifies Dark Pink as a single color that has been in production for twenty years, when in fact ten years ago the earlier dark pink color (22 Medium Reddish Violet) was replaced with a new Dark Pink color (121 Bright Purple). This was a part of the same 2004 color overhaul where 2 Grey, 27 Dark Grey, and 25 Earth Orange (classic brown) were replaced with 194 Medium Stone Grey, 199 Dark Stone Grey, and 192 Reddish Brown. But dark pink is a rare enough color, and the differences subtle enough, that Bricklink doesn't bother to differentiate between the two variants. So overall, I admire your effort and I hope my chart helps you complete or correct any issues with your own chart. Feel free to ask me if you have any specific questions. I have put a lot of work into researching the LEGO color chart, and being able to help people overcome confusion related to that chart does a lot to convince me that all that effort was not wasted.

Gosh, that's a lot of sets. Are you planning on getting all of those sets right away? Personally, I try not to get duplicates of sets unless I can get them at a discount of some kind, but if you have immediate plans for how to get the sets and what to do with the parts, more power to you!

I kind of like the generic title. It's short and sweet, and sums up what makes the movie special. I feel like a name specific to the story it's telling could end up alienating some adults who aren't used to LEGO themes having unique stories/mythology. My parents might not have understood the APPEAL of Pokémon: The First Movie, Pokémon: The Movie 2000, or Pokémon 3: The Movie when those came out during my childhood, but they understood what the titles meant: they were new Pokémon movies. The same wouldn't necessarily be true of the movies' actual names as they appeared in the opening titles, like Mewtwo Strikes Back (which, for a non-fan, leaves the obvious question "who or what is Mewtwo?"). Note that not a single one of the trailers or TV spots so far has bothered to even mention the Piece of Resistance. That kind of thing could throw people who plan to watch the movie casually for a loop. Instead, they focus largely on the humor and versatility inherent to a LEGO movie.

Even if he's not in the sets, he could end up packaged with some special edition version of the movie when it comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray. I was also surprised that he hasn't shown up in any of the sets.

As I understand it, generally, it's a weight issue. If some bags that have small parts without any extras, it might mean that the machines used to check the weight on those particular bags can measure the weight with more precision than the ones used to check other bags. For instance, I believe this is why the first couple series of collectible minifigures had extra parts, but later series did not — at some point the machines used for the weight check may have been upgraded. Also, small bags like the ones used for things like LEGO Friends accessories presumably do not include extras because I believe those parts all come off the same mold and are bagged as soon as they come out of the mold. This is why the contents of each of these bags are considered a single element in the LEGO Customer Service database and in instruction manuals.

I sort of believe that the poor sales of colors like brown and tan in BIONICLE might have applied more to heroic characters than to creature or monster models... after all, Vorox and Carapar were both brownish in color even after the 2006 transition to yellow and orange for "stone" characters. And even though these are similar to constraction sets in a lot of ways, they are still System sets, so the typical rule that "brown sets don't sell as well as brighter colors" might not apply to the same capacity. There's a different audience and a different range of things you can build with the pieces — even if kids don't like building robotic-looking action figures in brown, they might feel different about bricks that are ideal for building anything from creatures to scenery. As for why white is avoided, maybe it's because white is already a big part of all the Mixels due to the teeth, claws, and eyes. A white Mixel's eyes and teeth might not have as much contrast with the body. But as you say, it's still possible that white Mixels might show up in a later series.

If you're talking about the last constraction wave, I dunno. These new sets are decent, but some of the color schemes look a bit iffy with the overwhelming use of gold. Also, the rigid Technic wings on the flying characters do not impress me as much as the 2012 ones. And the torso armor on the mammoth character looks terribly awkward. I'm kind of surprised — not happy or sad, just surprised — that the Zamor Sphere launcher is being brought back, considering that it might have been simpler to use the same Thornax-style sphere launchers they've been getting such good mileage out of. In terms of parts, though, there's a nice selection. Lots of cool recolors. I am not entirely pleased with the new torsos. The pop-out CHI cores are a cool concept, but the shape of those new torsos looks a bit awkward. The new axe/bow pieces are kind of cool. In any case, there's still time for the sets to improve, so I won't be too critical until we have finalized, high-quality pics.

Toy Fair photos here and here! The sets look fantastic!

There are also lots of great constraction recolors in the System lineup. You can see lots of pics in this photostream.

Well, it does if you set your country as Great Britain, so it might be a feature they're planning to roll out for the rest of the world eventually. Anyway, it's definitely a neat feature that I probably don't take advantage of as often as I should.

I just now noticed that the Mammoth has Transparent Light Blue bricks with ball cups for its ankles! Fun, fun, fun! I don't know how much use Hero Factory builders will get out of these, but coupled with the various Transparent Light Blue and Medium Azur Hero Factory beams you could achieve some cool things!

I love this Overlord minifigure design from an aesthetic standpoint (at least based on what we can see currently), but at the same time I'm still not sure how I feel about his Warm Gold armor. I was liking the clear color-coding we had previously, with gold being used prominently for the ninja costumes, vehicles, and weapons and silver being used for the Nindroid costumes, vehicles, and weapons. Both the Overlord and his walker seem to throw that idea to the wind, which is kind of sad. Anyway, the temple and walker look great, although I don't like the torii gate as much as the ones from 2011.

It could easily be a combination of both, like how the red ones use both Bright Red and Dark Red or how the yellow ones use both Bright Yellow and Flame Yellowish Orange.

Again, I don't think there's a problem here. Other than the 2.0 feet, I don't think I'd have known exactly what parts he was talking about if he didn't provide links. I often try to provide links and/or part numbers in my own posts for the same reason if I think there's room for confusion. Anyhow, about this MOC. I love the design. It's fantastically beefy and has wonderfully smooth textures. The color scheme is very nifty. And I love the creative use of System to support the mini-hero's feet, as well as the elaborate weapon designs. I can't really find any flaws in this model. Great work!

Yeah. So "Flea Machine" (revealed at London Toy Fair) is more likely to be the official name used in English. Kind of an odd name, but maybe it's supposed to refer to its multiple legs? :unsure: I don't think the chainsaws are transparent. They could just be Warm Gold. The color doesn't look a whole lot different than the shells, which are likely to be Warm Gold. As a small, I like this a bit better than Evo Walker, but it does seem a bit bare-bones. I wonder if the cocoon is part of the reason for that. Also, I still have to wonder what color blue will be used for the blue-backed jumpers that appear in several of these pics.

You're free to like or dislike whatever you want. What's juvenile is thinking that one-sentence rants about sets you dislike, thrown together with random and petty insults to entire communities, deserve to be considered a "review" and given their own topic. The purpose of a review is to inform people about a product, not just to serve as a soap box for childish insults and uninformed opinions. As an example, you refer to one exclusive recolor in one of the 2008 sets. But it turns out that set doesn't actually HAVE any exclusive recolors, which you likely would have known if you actually owned the set. That information was just a catalog error, like many on Bricklink, probably made by a person who wasn't a BIONICLE fan. You don't show us the sets from any angles that we wouldn't have seen by checking them on Brickset. You don't tell us basic information like their price or their piece counts (the one you mention a probable piece count, 7217, is only two-thirds of the actual piece count, and anyone can arrive at a closer estimate than you did if they actually bother to count the pieces visible in the photo). You call the sets lazy, stupid, and simple without providing any examples of better sets at a similar price for comparison. Instead of giving meaningful number ratings, you use meaningless ones for dramatic effect (here's a hint: a NEGATIVE rating for value means your collection actually LOSES value if it includes these sets, a claim no intelligent person could be serious about). You refer only to the sets' looks without even making any mention of their building or play value, since only a person who actually built and played with these models could state any informed opinion on these two things, and you apparently didn't put forth the effort to do either. You don't even spend a moment considering the reasons the sets look how they do, any more than you consider how low it is to throw cheap and petty insults at the Custom BIONICLE Wiki or MOCpages. I wonder if maybe the title could be changed to "Worst review of BIONICLE sets of all time"? It'd be at least a bit more accurate than the current title, even if it might still be a bit of an exaggeration.

Very neat. It's fantastic that you managed to integrate the heads of all five Legend Beasts. The color scheme is also well-distributed. Voltron definitely comes to mind. The only thing that bothers me a great deal is the proportions of the torso. It seems like if you used those brackets from the crotch to point the hip joints downward instead of to the side, you would have a much better-proportioned torso as well as better articulation in the legs (which could then bend up to about ninety degrees forward or backward).

They're not the same piece as the spider legs. They're a larger version that also appears in the Hero Factory set Queen Beast vs. Furno, Evo, and Stormer. I was wondering whether they'd show up in Chima and I guess I need not wonder any longer! Truly that mammoth walker is a beauty to behold. The giant fans and huge quantities of transparent light blue help give it a fantastic icy look. It is every bit as formidable as last year's Gorilla Striker, but instead of looking goofy it looks huge and formidable. The bony aesthetic also gives it a fearsome prehistoric vibe. Laval Fire Lion is a less traditional mech, but it is still elegant and imposing. It reminds me a bit of the Tarakava set from BIONICLE based on its structure. I wonder what kinds of functions it might boast. Overall the summer Chima sets are looking good from these preliminary pics, and I have no doubt the finalized versions will continue to impress. I was a bit unsure about the "fire and ice" theme (especially since it feels like we got very little time to enjoy the unique aesthetic of the latest "outlands" arc), but I definitely like the direction the summer sets will be taking things.

I'm talking about Queen Beast. It doesn't look azur in the pictures, though as I said that could just be preliminary. I guess Medium Azur would be better from a consistency standpoint though, so I guess I shouldn't be disappointed if that's what it turns out to be.

Thanks for these pictures! I hope the Bright Blue ball cups are maintained in the final set. We need more Bright Blue beams and ball cups in my opinion. We already have Bright Red and Bright Yellowish Green ones which I love using for either color blocking or an extra splash of color in the skeletons of MOCs. And yeah, the cocoons are cool. Still, Dorek has a good point — these pics are neither clear enough nor final enough to form really informed opinions.

Well, in the case of the shoulder armor link, a link is rather useful. "Shoulder armor" by itself is incredibly vague and subjective — that piece is only used for shoulders occasionally, and pretty much just as often as forearms, so it's not a very specific name.

I dunno, Witch Doctor was awesome on a functional level, just not so much on an aesthetic level. I guess that makes sense, since it was so heavily Technic-based in its design, and Technic is designed with functional versatility in mind. I really disliked the set when it first came out because I felt TLG should be putting more time and attention into taking full advantage of the new building system in their titan designs than into coming up with new ways to do things with Technic, which was already a well-established building system. I suppose in hindsight I was too harsh. Witch Doctor WAS using the new building system in new ways, after all — his leg design was much more creative than any previous or subsequent titan designs, even if it relied on peculiar connections for the ankles and hips. I'd still love to see a model around that size that is less heavily Technic-based in its structure, like that one MOC of Christoffer Raundahl's that I can't seem to shut up about. Of course, Witch Doctor was already much larger than any single figure really needs to be to look imposing compared to a typical hero, which is part of why I love Dragon Bolt as-is instead of thinking he needs to be larger. But still, as an exploration and proof-of-concept for the building system, a set of that caliber would be amazing.

Haha, no, I'm not good enough with computers to come up with a way to do this automatically. First I open the LXF file in LDD and generate all the parts that I want to decorate. Then I have to open up the decorations file as an image file in one window, and the LXFML as a text file in another. I find the Design IDs that need decorations in the LXFML, and the decoration IDs for the correct decorations in the image file. And then I type out the Decoration IDs in the correct decoration fields in the LXFML. This stage is one of the most tedious, as if a part has multiple decoration fields, there's no obvious way to know which field corresponds to which surface on the part itself. Usually I just have to use trial-and-error if it's a part I'm not familiar with, plugging in a decoration ID and then opening the LXFML in LEGO Digital Designer so I can see what the resulting part looks like. But eventually you get the hang of doing this for certain parts like minifigure heads (in which the sequence is front, back, top) or torsos (front, back). Legs are tricky because the hip piece has two decoration surfaces and the leg pieces each have three, so that's eight surfaces to keep track of. In the past, I used to use an Excel spreadsheet to make a list of decorations, the corresponding LDD part numbers, and the corresponding Bricklink part numbers for the final decorated part. But this was even more tedious, as in between updates I had to color-code things according to which parts had all the correct decorations, which decorated parts were missing one or more decorations, which parts lacked decoration surfaces and thus couldn't be decorated correctly, and which decorations had bugs, etc. And these had to be checked and updated with each update. As I started to fall behind this became way too complex to keep up with — it was hard enough keeping track of which decorations were new in the latest update, let alone which decoration surfaces had been added or which previous decorations had been corrected or removed. I don't know if there's any way to streamline this process. I'm sure that it'd be easier for the actual guys programming these decorations into LDD to do it since they have the database info the decorations CAME from and don't have to look up which decorations belong to which parts just from photographs and fan-created databases, but I guess they have other priorities and are counting on the users to figure it out. One other thing — if someone else is willing to do this, I would still be available to do an error-check at the end, since recognizing errors is far less time-consuming than matching up the decorations in the first place.

Step 4, page 6, where you attach the friction joints to the shoulders, is not possible in LDD except by using scaffolding. There is no connectivity between those balls on the shoulders and the friction joints, even though the ones in step 5 on the next page work fine. Balls with and without guides are treated differently on LDD because a ball cup or ball snap on a ball without guides has three axes of rotation, while a ball cup on a ball with guides has only one axis of rotation and a ball snap on a ball with guides has no axes of rotation (it snaps to the piece at 90-degree intervals). That's not the problem here — the problem here is that for whatever reason, the friction ball cup 74261 doesn't have connectivity with balls with guides at all. Stage 16, page 25, where you angle the neck upward, is not possible even with scaffolding, because LDD says there is a collision between the corner of the square guides on 90623 and the curved sides of 74261. This should likewise be corrected, as the connection allows for free rotation in real life.