Aanchir

I'm kind of curious about one detail, actually. The old MBA box sets included sorting trays. Will these kits have that too, and if so, will they have larger sorting trays to match the larger box? If so, that could be invaluable. Previously you only got a sorting tray every three kits, yet it was hardly sufficient to store three kits worth of pieces. A larger sorting tray could help with that considerably. I'd almost worry that the lack of mention or depiction of the sorting trays anywhere on the boxes mean that the sets don't have ANY sorting trays of any kind. But if they kept the fancy, heavy-duty storage boxes, they'd surely have kept the sorting trays as well... right? There's also another logistical issue. Europe has a LOT of languages. And I believe similarly wordy instruction manuals in the past (early 2000s Mindstorms and Studios manuals, specifically) have been translated into local languages rather than simply limited to English. This especially makes sense in the context of the target audience of kids, since while adults in Europe are often multilingual, kids with English as a second language might have a hard time digesting a lot of the material in these manuals. That means a lot of work has to go into prepping these sets for other regions, and consequently a lot of work determining which regions will have enough demand for the product to justify all that work. Certainly some close-by countries could share a multilingual manual between them. It is common practice, as a matter of fact. But I am not kidding when I tell you that the MBA manuals are fairly thick, and printed on remarkably good-quality paper, and full of text. Since the MBA manuals have building tip callouts and other text on almost every page, it's not even as simple as with the LEGO Architecture sets, in which the majority of the text is in an "introduction" that can be repeated two or three times while the main body of the manual (the building instructions themselves) occurs just once. You'd be at LEAST doubling the thickness of each manual if you wanted it to have the same content in three languages. So yeah, I'm sure there are a lot of puzzles that the LEGO Group is going to want to sort through before MBA makes it to non-English-speaking regions (Britain and Australia may get them sooner, if TLG decides there's demand in those regions). In the meantime, if you're that interested in having the MBA kits and don't care if they're in English, you may soon be able to buy MBA kits from resellers in the U.S. (now that they're not a one-per-household subscription-based model). And given the well-known discrepancy between U.S. prices and prices in the rest of the world, you may even end up paying less than you would for the localized version of the product.

Not just financial ups and downs, but also by a measure of what works and what doesn't. Perhaps they found that the Hero Factory comics they've done just haven't been as popular or had as big an impact on sales as the BIONICLE or Ninjago comics had. Comics, TV episodes, and the like are indeed expensive and time-consuming to produce, but even if they're doing well financially they want to use whatever budget they have responsibly. It's probably similar to the reason why BIONICLE never got in-depth adventure games like MNOG and MNOGII after around 2003. With a hectic production schedule and new marketing potential being discovered in the form of books and movies, they were no longer deemed an efficient use of resources. Currently, it seems like Hero Factory has discovered newfound success in two categories: chapter books and gaming. There are far more Hero Factory books coming out this year compared to previous years. Last year had two readers and two chapter books, and previous years just had mini guides that weren't even released in most countries, but this year we've got at least three chapter books, two readers, a guide book, and a sticker book. Additionally, the Breakout web game and mobile game seem to have been successful (and influenced set sales very directly and measurably through Hero Codes), so this year there have been two new Hero Factory mobile apps (Brainify, which is less of a game and more of an interactive widget, and Brain Attack, which seems to have a lot of money and marketing being pumped in its direction). The new "timeline" style of the website also seems to be geared towards tablets and mobile devices, and it wouldn't surprise me if that, too, was in response to the success of the Breakout mobile app. In contrast, the profile of the TV episodes seems to have been reduced, with this year's reduced to just a 22-minute webisode, and I don't believe we've had any comics. The TV episodes may start to see more significant investment next year with Advance and Ghost handling things, but as far as we've heard it's still going to be just one 22-minute episode for the year. The movie rumors, if they actually end up amounting to anything, might lead to additional shuffling of resources further on down the road. But I don't know if much stock can be put in those since the most news we heard was that Universal and a few writers were "interested" in doing a Hero Factory movie. They were in talks with LEGO, apparently, but there was never any confirmation that those talks went anywhere. All in all, how LEGO invests in Hero Factory from a storytelling perspective will depend almost entirely on what they expect to be profitable.

I can almost guarantee the rounded corners on those panels were NOT a cost-cutting measure, unless there was some factor like the square ones often breaking during production and having to be remolded. Overall, material cost is just a small portion of the cost it takes to produce any given piece. The cost of the mold and the cost in machines and floor space (remember that setting aside a machine to produce any part means having to find other machines to produce other, possibly more useful parts) are almost certainly more significant than any small amount of money that could be saved by trimming a corner here or there. The o-rings changed before my lifetime, so all of the thinner ones I own come from yard sales and lots purchased online. With that said, I am almost certain that if you have a lot of weight supported by o-rings for a long period of time (or a short period of time in extreme temperatures), the thinner ones would give out sooner. This may be the reason for the change. Regardless, both sorts of o-rings have their advantages. The thinner variety is one-half a plate in thickness, meaning a tile on each side will bring the thickness to one module. The thicker variety is one full plate in thickness, meaning a tile on each side brings the full thickness to three plates or one brick. Thus with the thicker variety it's easier to fill the gap between parts on opposite sides of the "o", but the thinner variety is easier to keep "in system". If you do stick a tile on either side of the thicker variety, the edges will stick off the square portion of the o-ring by a quarter-plate thick on each side — a handy tip to know for the sake of aligning certain things, since it's a measurement that isn't used by many other parts, but also a difficult measurement to line up with other pieces for the very same reason.

I think it will depend more on the complexity and creativity of the models more than specifically what they depict. After all, if you build a character model and it's just a slight modification of one of the official ones, then it doesn't really suggest you put more thought into it than the people who took the time to scale up weapons from the System sets or even create their own weapons and accessories. Thankfully, most of the models, whether creatures, characters, or weapons, have been fairly original designs. And I agree that in this case, the larger and more complex models probably merit far more points than the "early bird" weapon MOCs that I and others have made. I figured I would have had a second submission by now, but time management is hard. A lot of my creative effort has gone towards the "Before and After Brain Infection" contest. I'd like to make a vehicle MOC for this contest, but it hasn't been easy...

I think many of them are probably just meant to pique kids' imaginations, not to be thoroughly explored in the official story. Which is pretty neat, I'd say.

From my experience, the 1x4 panels have had rounded corners for a much longer time than the 1x2 panels. Many of the 1x4 panels in my collection have rounded corners, and some of those are over a decade old. I can see how reducing a sharp, thin corner might be desirable for safety reasons. But there are definitely instances where I'd prefer the sharper corners as a MOCist. The flame is the main part where I feel functionality was changed greatly on a part that kept the same ID number, but I'm somewhat content with that change since it opens up new uses of the part at the same time as it's eliminating older uses. You can now fit the new flames into this piece, which is great for constructing small rockets.

I think his point was more that the white printing on the orange parts was cleaner on the official photos than on the final set (or at least, most copies of the final set). In the final set, the background color is likely to show through unless white decorations are printed in multiple layers. This isn't necessarily a case of photo manipulation, of course. It could be that these are pre-production versions of the parts and aren't subject to the same variability as the mass-produced versions. Or it's also possible that TLG just had an entire batch of parts to select from and used the ones that were most attractive for their official product shots. Either technique could be argued to be deceptive, but it's not necessarily a case of photomanipulation being the culprit.

They probably won't all set box office records, but I imagine they have some potential for success. A Ninjago movie would be a lot different than the LEGO movie that's currently pending release, because it'd be an adaptation of an already story-driven franchise rather than a brand-new property crafted around a broader toy brand. In any event, I don't think feature-length LEGO movies are anywhere close to becoming a "once a year" thing. Anyway, I'm very excited. I hope Jay Vincent and Michael Kramer will be doing the score. And I hope they can get the original voice cast on board. If so, this is already a recipe for something amazing! Good to know Ninjago has even more momentum than we were giving it credit for!

Ain't nothing wrong with a Technic build if you can manage a consistent aesthetic. I prefer to see the HF building system explored just because it hasn't been around for as long so there's still a lot of novelty when people achieve awesome things with it. But let's be fair: many Technic-intensive builds don't look any more like official BIONICLE sets than they look like official Hero Factory sets. We're just used to thinking of them as "BIONICLE style" because BIONICLE MOCists have been making MOCs this way for so long. The solidly-built Technic-based designs like this one almost have more in common with AFOL mecha models than with any official theme's typical building style. Anyway, this is a cool MOC, but I feel like the "hero side" needs some accent colors. Black and dark red is a somewhat boring color scheme without any brighter or metallic colors to spice it up. Additionally, I feel the legs and arms don't have a lot of stylistic consistency with the torso. Pretty much every armor piece on this guy has its own unique texture, and they sort of compete for my attention. There isn't any particular motif that really defines this MOC. I like the mutated arm, though, as well as the claws growing out of his back. Attaching the brain to the side of his head also helps balance things out while keeping a visually-interesting asymmetric design.

Or it could be some factor that affects different people to different extents, such as heat or humidity. Even if you don't live in a hot or humid place, it could be that your nearest distribution center isn't as well-insulated as others. There are always a lot of reasons these kinds of problems can affect different people to different extents. Of course, when a problem's as widespread as cracking cheese slopes seem to be, it's still something TLG should be looking into.

Yes, and I think this is part of the reason people thought it had a bit too much product placement. In reality, I think that the reason for this was the film's low budget rather than product placement. After all, by the time the film came out in 2010, many of the sets featured in the film (Fantasy-era Castle sets, the Agents Turbocar, etc.) were already discontinued, so there was no real monetary advantage to featuring them. Perhaps it would get kids slightly more excited about the film to see sets they already owned in an animated movie, but the goal certainly wasn't advertising those specific products. The real advantage of featuring these sets was it saved them the trouble of designing as many new models for the film. This new movie doesn't seem to have that same problem, considering that pretty much everything is made of LEGO, including scenery. This would be impossible if the creators were limiting themselves to official sets, with just a handful of unique models hastily created for the movie.

The actual calendar has fine print at the bottom about all the special offers. The HF promotion at least is both online and in-store (I checked that one shortly after the calendars were posted online), and I imagine the same applies for the hot dog stand promotion.

SNOT techniques for either the inside or the outside can be effective. For example, if you use snotted red, brown, tan, or dark tan tiles for the brickwork on the outside of your house and use white or tan bricks behind them as mortar, then you'll have a nice, clean white or tan wall on the inside. But since you describe your white and tan exterior walls as "boring" I suppose that's not what you're looking for. Snotted plates and tiles to decorate the inside of a wall can be done effectively. I've seen some people use this for a rustic wood-panel wall, for instance, and you could likewise make a tiled wall in various colors with common sizes of tiles. This requires a lot of planning, though, since you need to make sure your SNOT bricks are spaced appropriately. If you use a SNOT brick with studs on both sides, you can have snotted wallpaper AND snotted exterior brickwork. But at that point there's not much advantage in terms of thickness over just building your wall two modules thick. Building walls two modules thick has been done in some sets and MOCs, notably including the Café Corner, but this is not practical for all buildings, particularly if you want a realistically-furnished interior. Also, don't underestimate the advantages of panels! Using a panel as the wall itself can be somewhat limiting, but a 1x6x5 panel like is used in many City and Friends sets can be used to decorate an inside or outside wall. Structurally, this is the same as having a wall two studs thick and using different colors of bricks on the inside and outside. But in a practical sense, the majority of your walls will effectively be thinner (allowing either more interior or exterior space), only with "support beams" every six studs or so. The effectiveness of this technique really depends on what kind of architecture you want for your building. These panels lining the interior or exterior of a wall might work even better, since they don't have ribs sticking out as far, but they're not that common, and white, black, and blue are the only solid colors they come in.

You've got some of the basics down, but the manuals are far more in-depth than Creator manuals. Master Builder Academy is about teaching building techniques, and as such the building steps are filled with callouts explaining just why that part of the build is constructed in that particular way. As an example, here is the manual for Kit 1 (Space Designer). It teaches the techniques of Locking and Sideways Building (SNOT). The manuals are thick and sturdy, unlike most other LEGO instructions. The closest other LEGO sets I've owned in terms of manual quality are the old LEGO Mindstorms sets and the LEGO Studios Steven Spielberg Movie Maker Set. In other words, it's more like a sturdy paperback book than a leaflet held together with staples. Other features in the manuals include interviews with LEGO Master Builders and MOCists, inspiration pages with paintings or photographs, and additional design tips. Each MBA manual also includes a code that can be entered on the Master Builder Academy Website. This unlocks lots of things including building challenges, downloadable brick paper, product development images (concept art, sketch models, etc), designer videos, etc. It is meant to be an interactive experience, so there are "checkpoints" you have to meet to unlock some of these things (some are easy, like watching certain videos, others require completing the building challenges). Starting with Level 3 (Kits 7, 8, and 9) the building instructions start to change in terms of format. These kits are the Adventure Designer kits, and focus on teaching you to tell stories with your MOCs in addition to the more functional building techniques. Each manual starts with a fantasy story explaining the main model — the three stories are all separate chapters of one big story. Instead of giving directions for three complete models, they give directions for one main model and several smaller "springboard models". The building challenges encourage you to use the springboard models as a start for a larger model. So as an example, some of the springboard models for Kit 7 include a staircase, a door, and a drawbridge. Additional springboard model building instructions are available on the MBA site. MBA is clearly geared toward kids, but there are still lots of things that AFOLs can learn from it, I think. This especially goes for less experienced MOCists. The parts selection isn't bad either. My favorite kits were Kit 2 (Microscale Designer), Kit 3 (Robot Designer), and Kit 5 (Creature Designer). All these kits were very well-suited to my preferred style of building.

Well, I included 2013 polybags and Bricks & More sets in my count, so I don't think it'd approach 30% unless there are a large number of female characters in 2013 sets that haven't been revealed yet. I agree though that LEGO Friends is doing its job in getting girls interested in LEGO building. Perhaps more importantly, it's helping to eliminate the stigma that construction toys are just for boys, and that means that if a girl DOES want LEGO sets other than LEGO Friends, their parents might be more open to the idea than they would have when it was perceived as a "boyish" hobby.

Brickset's parts browser (which is sourced from the LEGO Customer Service replacement parts database) has it listed, but only one part is listed in that color since the replacement parts database only includes parts for which pics are on cache.LEGO.com. And the thumbnail shows as gray, so you wouldn't even be able to recognize it as pink if not for the name and the set it comes in! Not to my knowledge. There were a lot of colors being used very sparsely in the early 2000s, such as the "flip/flop" colors used for BIONICLE masks or various transparent fluorescent colors. Since then there has been a concerted effort to reduce infrequently-used colors, and for the past several years the number of colors still on the LEGO color palette hovers around 50 or 60 if I'm not mistaken. It's entirely possible there are Transparent Fluorescent Red parts I'm not aware of, but they'd probably have to be from 2001-2003 sets. I've found no indication that the color was on the palette before 2001, nor any indication that it was on the palette after 2003. Fabuland Brown and Earth Orange seem to do double-duty as the go-to color names for brown colors people don't recognize. There's an actual rust color, yes (216 Rust) but I can't verify whether those old Duplo animals are that color. And believe me, I've tried. Chances are they are not, since an ID number as big as 216 seems to suggest a color that wasn't introduced until sometime in the last decade. And yet they're certainly not Bright Red like so many other "rust" parts. Finding info on colors from that long ago is hard because it was long before TLG introduced their replacement parts database or started putting inventories in instruction booklets. They were in the early naughts, I know that much from the Element IDs for the watch links (which appear in sequence with other 2000-2001 parts). I'm guessing Army Green ones were in the X-Tracker watch, but that's just a hunch. Likewise, I think Transparent Deep Blue watch links came in the Star Pilot watch. Gun Metallic is harder. This one seems to have something fitting that description. As far as I can tell, the color IDs for these colors are 144 Army Green, 168 Gun Metallic (of the three, this is the one I know for absolute certain, since it's on the Isodomos LEGO color list), and 156 Transparent Deep Blue. The Isodomos link has thumbnails of 2x2 tiles in those colors, from official LEGO color charts from that era. Flat Silver is a bit of a funny color. Before 2010, when 315 Silver Metallic was introduced, "Flat Silver" parts were officially the same color as Pearl Light Gray parts — 131 Silver. Its darker appearance was usually just due to differences in the material or surface finish of particular molds. The silver KK2 swords are probably as good an example as ever. Hard to say. I haven't owned any others of the parts Bricklink calls Metallic Green, so I don't know which sets have a metallic surface finish and which actually use metallic-colored plastic granulate (which would be the defining factor for Lemon Metallic). I honestly don't remember if Transparent Fluorescent Yellow (the color of those BIONICLE eye stalks) was used in Clikits. If not, then chances are those are Tr. Fire Yellow. Clikits is one of the areas where I don't have much firsthand experience. I know which colors EXIST primarily from LDD and from pictures I've seen of 2006 color palettes used by LEGO designers. And occasionally I find specific examples of parts in those colors, though I still sometimes have a hard time knowing which of these colors were used in which Clikits sets. The other salmons (at least, the ones I've seen) are usually also identified as Salmon on Bricklink. 2x2 Duplo bricks in Salmon from 2003 sets are Bright Reddish Orange if I'm not mistaken, and earlier Scala and Belville parts in Salmon are usually Medium Red (which I'd say is the most common variant). But I can't recall if I've found any other salmon colors, or what those might have been used for. As for Maersk Blue, the official ID is 11 Pastel Blue. Duplo parts Bricklink calls Maersk Blue are from an irritating era of early 90s Duplo that I've had an infuriatingly difficult time identifying colors from, same as that rust-colored cow. I'm afraid I don't have an answer. I started studying the color palette several years back, as an offshoot of my interest in BIONICLE. I did a lot of BIONICLE art and the few times I colored it I wanted my colors to be as exact as possible. Being a BIONICLE fan already gave me a head start on knowing a lot of names for obscure metallic colors from the early 2000s because the official Kraata identification chart on the BIONICLE site used the official color names. I found knowing as many color names as possible was useful in discussions and I started putting together color charts on Microsoft Excel. The Peeron Color Chart and Isodomos LEGO color chart (which I linked above) were a godsend for me. Knowledge of LEGO colors became even more useful once LEGO Universe mode of LDD was introduced and a lot of these obscure colors were usable by a large number of people for the very first time. I started helping Superkalle out with the LDD Manager color chart in the Digital Tools subforum here on Eurobricks. And I eventually discovered the LEGO Customer Service database, which gave me a HUGE amount of material to study. Here's a sort-of secret about the LEGO Customer Service replacement parts database: just because a part doesn't appear in any inventories doesn't mean it's not in the database. Here's an example of an item in the database that doesn't appear in the inventories that are accessible from the customer service site itself (It's Ms. Stevens' torso from 41005 Heartlake High, if you're wondering). The template for this URL has changed a few times as they've revamped the Customer Service interface, but the principle of how you use it is the same: just replace the seven-digit Element ID from the URL with any other Element ID to see the name, Design ID, and color for that element. And the way I used this also stemmed from my interest in BIONICLE. I found some 2001 BIONICLE element IDs, plugged them into the template, and started increasing or decreasing them, one digit at a time. It's tedious, time-consuming, and probably not a very good use of my time. But occasionally you learn something! I've found a large number of 2001 BIONICLE parts that never appeared in sets, such as masks and other parts in colors they never appeared in — probably from prototypes or sketch models for the various BIONICLE video games. And occasionally I find enough information to verify what the actual name of the color an obscure, misidentified Bricklink item is. (Random tangent: look at any instruction booklet, sticker sheet, or leaflet that appears in a LEGO set and you'll probably see a seven-digit number printed somewhere on it — those are Element IDs too!) So yeah, it's really tedious, inefficient work. There are a lot of Element IDs that don't belong to any items in the database (all the fields will be blank for those). But if you ever have the patience, try starting with a part that you know debuted in a set from the year and theme you want to know about and plowing through a hundred or so Element IDs. Whether it's worth it or not depends on how interested you are, how lucky you are, and what you're hoping to learn! EDIT: Here's the list of BIONICLE elements I collected on Microsoft Excel[/url], so you can get an idea of how many hours of my life I've wasted on this!

Regardless, all the transparent colors you would have needed to use are available on LDD on the default palette. So you can at least make those corrections. I look forward to seeing what it looks like in real life!

Welp, I just ran some numbers and you're probably not going to like what I found. Let me first give some details of how I measured things: I compared all 2013 sets on Brickset with five-digit set numbers. I did not include magnets, gear, books, or battle packs with six-digit set numbers. I tallied total number of minifigures, number of male minifigures, number of female minifigures, and number of ambiguous minifigures (figures with no face or torso printing singling them out as male or female). In some cases, you might disagree which I considered ambiguous and which I considered male, but there were not many figs that could lean either way. I included Duplo figures and friends figures in my tallies, as well as roughly minifigure-size aliens and robots (which, besides those who appear as main characters in licensed themes and take pronouns, tend to fall under "ambiguous"). I included Jabba the Hutt but not the Rancor. I did not include constraction sets or brick-built Duplo and Bricks & More figures. I did not include animals. I did not include sets from the Hobbit theme. Brickset calls these 2012 sets and while there's some room for argument (holiday 2012 and 2013 are not much different), I don't think it makes a huge difference in the analysis. This was a tally of minifigures, not UNIQUE minifigures. Comparing only unique minifigures could yield radically different results if one gender's figs tend to reappear across multiple sets more than another gender's figs (which is likely the case). Since I tallied only 2013 sets, not all sets on the LEGO website, I was not analyzing the exact same data as the SPARK Summit folks. Now, overall I found 616 minifigures across all the sets tallied, out of which 443 were male, 91 were female, and 82 were ambiguous. This means in my tally, 72% were male, 15% were female, and 13% were ambiguous. This is not significantly different from the numbers the SPARK Summit arrived at. In fact, it points at possibly fewer female figures than their tally, which covered figures found in sets on the LEGO website. Like them, I did another tally that disregarded licensed figs. This time, there were 381 total figs, out of which 254 were male, 74 were female, and 53 were ambiguous. Like in the SPARK Summit's analysis, this painted a slightly brighter picture: 67% male, 19% female, and 14% ambiguous. However, the percentage of female figures still fell short of the ones they arrived at, which was surprising. My brother suggests that the reason for the discrepancy is that polybag and promotional sets (which would not have appeared in the SPARK Summit tally) may be more likely to include male characters. Regardless, with only slight discrepancies between my data and the data posted to their website, I see no reason to doubt that their data is sound. Once all the sets for the year are out and cataloged on Bricklink, we can more easily do a tally of UNIQUE 2013 figures only. I imagine this would paint a somewhat rosier picture for female minifigures than a tally of TOTAL minifigures, because in most themes, male minifigures are repeated more often than female minifigures. However, that isn't to say such a tally is more relevant to the problem. After all, no matter how many unique female minifigures there are, if there are fewer sets that contain them than male minifigures, then there is an imbalance that one day ought to be corrected.

On it. I had already done some rudimentary comparisons when we got our first pics of the full year's sets from Toy Fair, and I'm interested in seeing a more accurate picture. At the same time, though, there may be some validity to their assessment. Even if it seriously undercuts the number of female characters, it does hint that female characters are not always being made obvious in product images. In the BIONICLE theme, part of the reason why female characters rarely had obviously-female physiques, aside from the fact that there were too few female characters to dedicate molds to that specific purpose, was that in general female action figures don't sell as well as male ones (you may see comparable numbers on store shelves sometimes, but the female ones do not need to be restocked as often). By making female characters gender-ambiguous at best, BIONICLE kept from alienating its core audience of six- to twelve-year-old boys. If male characters appear unambiguously in prominent positions on LEGO product images and box art, but female characters are stuck in supporting roles where they're less visible at a glance, that is a legitimate concern in terms of gender equality, whether or not there are sound marketing reasons for it.

I don't think Chima's failing to the extent that it'll be cancelled immediately after 2013. It's certainly not doing as well as expected (or at least the Speedorz aren't), from the indications we've seen, but the theme is definitely very popular with kids and I think there will still be sets next year. However, there'll probably be fewer of them than there were this year. Ninjago coming back will be an interesting piece of the puzzle, since the two themes are very similar and could cannibalize each other's sales. But I think it's a little early to be declaring that Chima is as good as over. The LEGO Group didn't jump into Legends of Chima without doing any market research. They know an audience exists. The real question is, how big is that audience? Certainly it should be big enough to support a smaller-scale theme of four to eight sets, even if a line of forty-some sets was too ambitious right out the door.

No, not at all. The one here is Transparent Bright Green, the same color Rocka uses in both his Breakout and Brain Attack forms. It's a color that was introduced in 2010 in the Atlantis theme and which has been used frequently since then in Hero Factory (Meltdown, Nitroblast, and many sets in the Breakout and Brain Attack waves). The only Hero Factory sets to use regular Transparent Green are the 3.0 hero sets, which use it for their name badges. Toxic Reapa and Speeda Demon (among others) use Transparent Fluorescent Green, which you can tell this isn't because on LDD it looks practically indistinguishable from Transparent Yellow. There are still a few errors on this model. The Silver Metallic shield 2013 shields are still an apparent error, though — as of the summer Brain Attack wave they only come in Titanium Metallic. The Phosphorescent Green shell and weapon barrel elements should be colored Tr. Fluore. Green. The Tr. Fluore. Reddish Orange hex shield should be colored Tr. Red. The Tr. Yellow lightning element should be colored Tr. Fluore. Green or Tr. Blue if it's one of Surge's, but can be left as-is if it's one of Furno XL or Pyrox's. The Tr. Blue lightning element should be colored Tr. Light Blue or White if it's one of Stormer's, or left as-is if it's one of Surge's. Those lightning elements are supposed to be blended, which is impossible on LDD currently, so it's hard to tell which color you meant for all of them to be. Other than that, all colors are correct (considering the shoulder spheres are to be substituted for the square variety). I really ought to put a color guide together some day... in the meantime, the Brickset set inventories are your friends. Those are sourced directly from LEGO Customer Service, so they rarely have color errors. The only parts that would still be challenges are blended parts, which are just listed as "Multicombination", but even for those the inventories from the LEGO Customer Service database (which Brickset uses) can be an asset.

Very neat. I'd hazard a guess that Red Pink is the color Flamingo Pink, which Bricklink misidentifies as Bright Pink. The official name for the color you identified as Trans-Salmon is Transparent Fluorescent Red. Good that you were able to recognize it as a unique color from Trans-Dark Pink (Tr. Medium Reddish Violet)! The color that matches the flute from the Harry Potter sets is officially called 128 Dark Nougat, and it's the same color as Vernon Dursley's hair from the 2002 Escape from Privet Drive set. Bricklink misidentifies both as Earth Orange (Light Orange Brown), if I'm not mistaken. Peeron knows to identify it as a separate color (DkNougat), but I can't verify with absolute certainty that everything they list in that color is actually that color, and they don't list the flute or those technic elements under that name. The rust elements you have between classic red (Bright Red) and Fabuland Red are officially just classic red. The variation is because of the material as far as I can tell, and they share this color with some Technic gears from the Slizer/Throwbots sets. It still fits on your chart since you ARE listing some subtle and not-so-subtle variant colors. There's one obscure color I discovered semi-recently exists in regular LEGO. It's called Tr. Deep Blue, and I previously thought it was only used in LEGO Watches (like some other colors, "Army Green" and "Gun Metallic", whose names are surprisingly warlike for when they were introduced). But I recently discovered by trawling through element IDs from 2002 in the LEGO Customer Service database that the eye of 8009 is this color. In metallic colors, you're missing a few which are not too hard to identify. 189 Reddish-Gold is usually identified as Pearl Gold or Copper (not even close) on Bricklink, but in fact it's a distinct color. It was used in Duplo and Knights' Kingdom II. The brighter gold swords in the KK2 playsets, and Sir Danju and King Matthias's armor in the 2005 playsets, are this color. So are "copper" BIONICLE Krana masks and Kraata slugs from 2003. It looks almost the same as Pearl Gold (Warm Gold) but it's a little more orange. I can't tell if you have Cool Silver or not. It was a very briefly-used silver color from 2006. It was apparently SUPPOSED to replace the classic 131 Silver that had been used up to that point, but it evidently wasn't very good as 131 Silver came back the very next year. BIONICLE and Vikings sets tended to use this color during that time. If you have a silver BIONICLE or Vikings part from 2006 that is lighter than your typical Pearl Light Gray part, then that's probably what it is. 146 Metallic Sand Violet is a pearl purple color, but I have never seen it used except as a misprint variant of the lid to 8794. You probably wouldn't be able to fit that lid on this chart anyway. Too big. 200 Lemon Metallic is basically the same color as your Metallic Green parts, but it's a pearl color instead. Bricklink treats it as the same thing as Metallic Green, but the difference is obvious in the case of rubber parts like BIONICLE Krana and Kraata. In non-metallic colors, there's a transparent orange color from Clikits which Bricklink usually calls either Trans-Neon Orange or Trans-Bright Orange. It's neither. It's a separate color called 231 Tr. Flame Yellowish Orange (in other words, the transparent equivalent of Bright Light Orange). It should be somewhat lighter/yellower than Tr. Bright Orange and nowhere near the same color as Tr. Neon Orange, but not being a Clikits expert I can't verify exactly which sets had this and which had one of the more familiar orange colors. Similarly, as far as I can tell, most transparent yellow parts in Clikits are a unique color called 234 Tr. Fire Yellow. But I can't verify that ALL of them are because I have never owned a Clikits set to make comparisons. There are at least a couple different colors Bricklink calls Salmon. I know some Duplo sets around 2003 used one called 123 Bright Reddish Orange. Earlier Salmon parts were more often 101 Medium Red. Anyway, that's all the omissions I can think of at the moment. Great collection!

I don't know; I felt the concepts presented by Team Jigsaw seemed pretty compelling. It doesn't have much of the humor (which is understandable — a lot of the humor in Portal may be too dark for a LEGO theme) but still has some degree of that puzzle/platforming element to it.

Yessiree! I figured I might as well post if only to make the correction regarding the gender ratios in Legends of Chima.

I like the German catalogs a great deal, myself. These days the U.S. catalogs do not display the sets as artfully (nothing even approaching the layouts seen on the LEGO City pages here or even the decorative backgrounds of the Chima and Hero Factory pages), and they don't even feature all the sets! There is more text, which is nice (I love looking through old catalogs at the brief story descriptions that accompanied older Space sets), but all in all the U.S. catalogs often feel like just a watered-down version of the LEGO Shop website. I'm also impressed that there are ads for extended-line products, such as the LEGO Friends chapter books, shoes, luggage tags, storage containers, etc. These are also the sort of thing that were once featured in the U.S. catalogs, but not any longer.