Aanchir

Thanks for the review! I think the relatively low piece count and the short lower arms are probably both consequences of how very bulky his design is. He's armored about as much as the other medium-sized sets, but his armor and weapon pieces tend to be fairly bulky. Three of those "paw" pieces from the Savage Planet wave is nothing to sneeze at! Alternatively, it's possible that the designers were aiming for a similar look to the 2010 villain sets, on whom the weapon/tool with its bulky weapon shell usually was the lower arm. If that's the case, I think they succeeded quite well. Part of the reason he looks so effective even with those shorter arms is that he has two very large weapons. In any event, arms that are too short are easy enough to fix, and he still looks quite impressive in a range of poses. I personally am often more bothered by arms that are significantly longer than they should be-- Natalie Breez's arms in particular seem a bit bothersome. And even though this isn't as much of a problem on the medium-sized sets, I'm quite grateful he doesn't end up dragging his weapons on the ground when his arms are at his sides, a problem faced by some of the 2.0 Hero sets among others. Anyway, Core Hunter looks really impressive and unique, even with a relatively simple villainous color scheme. Overall I think TLG really showed with this wave that they're far from running out of ideas for themed villains. And a villain with such a dark theme as Core Hunter is well-represented by this fearsome-looking set.

Welcome to Eurobricks! Keep in mind this statement may just be describing the new season coming out later this month. We do know, after all, that a "sneak peek" of the upcoming season was promised as part of the Ninjago panel. Even if the Ninjago theme is continuing in 2013, there's no guarantee that 2013 content will be discussed in too much detail at Toy Fair. Still hoping we might catch a glimpse at some not-yet-revealed sets, though, but I for one think we Ninjago fans should count ourselves lucky that Ninjago is getting so much attention at an event that's otherwise dominated by licensed themes. As for Ninjago being one of the most successful LEGO play themes ever, that's almost a given considering that its first year was their strongest new product introduction ever (if I'm interpreting their annual report for 2011 correctly). It's done a good job holding its place as their second-most-popular non-licensed theme (after LEGO City), and this is part of the reason I will be fine if it ends within the next couple years. Better to end it on a strong note and leave an indisputable legacy than to extend it until its sales start to plummet and leave people wondering if it really was all it was cracked up to be. Especially when TLG has shown that they can make even a brand-new product launch into an instant success.

Voltix looks very awesome and imposing the way he's looming over Stringer... great work on the colors, too!

No problem! Thunder and Meltdown are definitely looking a lot nicer now. The new shoulder armor for Thunder does a good job echoing the shape of the armor from the original set while sticking to the new building system and fitting in with the other armor on his arms and legs. And Meltdown's weapons now look very imposing, even if it means being a bit more complex than is usually seen in sets with the new building system. Very nice work!

The tail is actually not post-processing, it's the PotC mermaid tail with a 1x2 inverse slope underneath, both are on LDD. #6 Shark's eyes #7 Medallion (not sure of the term) on Imperial Guard's hat #8 The chain on the front sail (but not sure if it's being counted separately from the sails) #9 Warm Gold flag on top of mast (doesn't match other warm gold parts) I can't find the last one though...

"An Unexpected Party" is probably not used because "party", for kids, would bring to mind balloons and birthday cake. It's the sort of thing that an older (preteen or early teen) kid might think of as girly or babyish to have a toy of. "Gathering" gives a better sense of what's going on without sounding too lighthearted and silly to kids.

I don't see how a Rancor Pit could be made to look much prettier than what we have here. The mottled colors really suit the cavernous setting IMO, and help it look a little less smooth and "pristine" with their varied textures. Perhaps with fully-SNOT wall details it could be done in monochrome without losing detail, but as it is it seems about as good as I could imagine at a typical LEGO Star Wars age range and non-exclusive price point.

He's the Rancor's keeper. I forget his name (it's never mentioned in the film), but after Luke kills the Rancor he can be seen breaking down in tears. Look at his weapon! It uses what looks like an inverse of the 1M bar with clip (48729). A useful piece to be sure. Also that skeleton is, to my knowledge, the first use of Ninjago skeleton arms with a Fantasy-Era Castle skeleton torso. About time, I say. I think that's among the best combinations of skeleton parts, certainly better than the classic Fantasy-Era Castle skeletons with their absurdly-long battle droid arms. The set itself is pretty impeccable, with a decent-sized Rancor, a sturdy-looking structure with some nice rocky details, what appears to be a dark orange pitchfork (!), and a color scheme and shape that look like they'll work wonderfully with Jabba's Palace. Shame there isn't anything present to boost up the adjacent tower, but I guess we can't have everything (and that shouldn't be too hard to MOC anyway). The Rancor himself is quite nice, with printed eyes that don't go over-the-top in detail, some claw pieces that could potentially prove useful, and a cohesive-looking structure that looks just as "alive" as any other minifigure. Some more studs might have been nice, but overall it's a great size and a great shape, and generally meets my expectations.

I thoroughly dislike the mentality that "missing out" on something is a reason that something shouldn't exist in the first place. In my opinion there's no difference between not having a figure because it is super-rare/exclusive and not having a figure because it doesn't exist. LEGO collecting isn't a competition, so there's no reason to feel sore if other people have something you don't. Now, there's a possibility that the existence of a Comic-Con exclusive figure might preclude TLG releasing a figure of the same character design again in a wider release, but there's no way to know that for sure. The Superman figure from Comic-Con last year ended up showing up in the regular DC Universe Super Heroes sets, while the Batman and Green Lantern figures from the event did not. Meanwhile, with relatively obscure characters like Bizarro, who's to say TLG would ever put them in sets even if they hadn't been released as event-specific exclusives? Going one step further, what makes exclusive figures like this any different than third-party custom figures produced in limited quantity? I've seen a number of high-quality custom figures I would enjoy owning, and most of the time that opportunity isn't available to me. Sometimes these are figures that will likely never be released in any considerable quantity, either by third-party customizers or by TLG themselves. But in the end all that amounts to is a figure I've gone all my life without owning, and there's no reason I can't continue to do without it.

Two bricks 47458 cannot be placed next to each other with the "flared" sections meeting. This is possible IRL, and is not an illegal connection as there is a very visible gap left between the two pieces.

I don't know... on the page with Stormer and Speeda Demon, there's a bubble reading "The Hero Factory TV series on Nickelodeon from August" (or something to that effect; I'm using Google Translate). Does that suggest a new episode, or just that they'll be replaying older ones? Hard to say, but I suppose German HF fans should keep their eyes open in the month of August to be sure. In other news that's a gorgeous catalog. The Shop at Home catalogs I'm used to in the US are much less visually impressive, with all the sets organized into neat boxes rather than against large full-page backgrounds.

Those Breez, Surge, and Rocka drawings are very imaginative. Instead of the really complex sci-fi armor from the sets and some of your other drawings, this simpler armor is somewhat reminiscent of modern military body armor Gresh and Kiina also look nice. I like how you gave their armor unique textures, and how you simplified their weapons into more practical blades rather than the ornate weapons from the sets. The Bohrok image you linked is also brilliant. The design keeps the somewhat pudgy proportions of the Bohrok sets, but rather than looking comical it looks very fearsome and alien-like, as it should. The segmented neck plate is at the heart of this appeal.

Well, I'm pretty certain just2good wasn't talking about the "moving fortress" from the TV show but rather set designer Mark Stafford's snake train model, which was based on the Emerald Knight. You can tell this one is meant to be a train due to the smokestack and the "coal car" (in quotes because it is filled with snakes rather than coal).

Incidentally, has anyone shared this before? It looks pretty neat IMO. Not an essential for most of us AFOLs who by now probably have our own dedicated storage solutions, but I can see this becoming a very popular item for kids who are fans of the Ninjago theme.

Good review. Personally, I like the connection of Bulk's rocket launcher more now that I see that it can move up and down and doesn't require a lack of back armor (I had originally thought the Technic beam was part of a rigid construction like on Black Phantom). And I hardly think it looks "cheap"... a HF-based connection would probably be more efficient and thus cheaper. However, one thing I don't like is the heavy amount of red on it, which is nowhere else in his color scheme. The gun also looks OK on that shorter arm, seeming as though it's incorporated into the arm, but you make a good point that flexibility is limited by this design decision. While I like the large amount of titanium metallic on this set, and think there's plenty of silver, I do think his feet (and the foot on his back) might have looked better in silver metallic or titanium metallic. The black doesn't flow too well IMO. I ought to make a minor correction: the US price you list for him is actually the price for the smaller hero sets. Bulk and all the medium-sized sets will actually cost USD 12.99 when they are released on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. No idea about the price in GBP, though. The same is true of Voltix, but I didn't pay attention to that part of your Voltix review so I'm not sure if you got it right there.

It'd be neat to get a definite answer (instruction booklet design in general is an aspect of set design we AFOLs get surprisingly little insight into), but I'm pretty certain it's to make it easier to "count" the holes and identify where pins go. I don't think the parts will change because molding them without those gaps would probably present problems during the cooling process. In the case of the Haunted House it's hard to tell what TLG's justification for the high prices is. But in the case of the B-wing, that set's main structure relies on lots of big pieces as far as I can tell-- lots of large plates for the wings, which make up the majority of the model, large pieces for the base, large pieces for the cockpit shaping, etc. Overall I can easily see how these things could add up to a large price per piece, if not as high as it seems to be by your calculations (the USD price-per-piece seems a lot more realistic: USD .13 per piece, which equates to roughly GBP .086 per piece. So it seems to be a combination of the already-uneven pricing between countries spread out across a set with a larger-than-usual price per piece. And in case you aren't convinced the size of parts makes a difference in pricing, consider that Jabba's Palace has a price-per-piece of USD .1674 and the Malevolence, priced exactly the same in the US, has a price-per-piece of USD .1090. Yet if you measure them according to weight instead of piece count, Jabba's Palace has a price-per-kilogram of USD 66.6611 while the Malevolence has a price-per-kilogram of USD 72.2831. So which has the fairer price depends heavily on whether you measure them according to piece count (which favors sets made of smaller, lighter parts) or weight (which favors sets made of larger, heavier parts).

I wouldn't be surprised if his characterization in Ordeal of Fire were the reason he gets such formal-sounding lines. His characterization does seem to have shifted pretty radically in Breakout, which is a shame, since he had such a unique personality before. His new personality does a great job driving the plot of the episode and is certainly a lot more complex than his understated presence in Ordeal of Fire, but I hope a future episode might put forth an effort to reconcile these two different characterizations rather than ignoring the issue entirely.

Plus, turning this into a "row house" would remove some of its charm. It's easy to picture it as a historic house that through development became surrounded by tall buildings, though. So the fence option is probably best. The real challenge would be how deep it is. It's 24 studs from the front step to the back wall, leaving only eight studs margin if you make it the same depth as a modular building... and that eight-stud margin would almost certainly have to go toward the sidewalk. But I suppose it's not a huge problem, as some of Jamie Berard's modular building MOCs are even on 48x48 baseplates, so it's not like making a building deeper than usual is a game-breaking issue-- it just might require that you rethink your city block.

Very good observation. AFOLs are already a "house divided" in some respects, favoring very different themes and having very different sensibilities about how those themes should be presented. But if what we like in common is LEGO, then seeing what we like, but made of LEGO, comes with the territory. There's no "novelty" to it, and so it's a lot harder to pile our support on any one concept. Another reason "rabid fandoms" might support projects with more fervor than typical LEGO fans is that they might look at the projects with less of a critical eye than a LEGO fan might look at a non-licensed project. For instance, a fan of The Legend of Zelda might support a Legend of Zelda project just for the novelty of it, especially if it's presented as a good-looking and realistic-looking project. On the other hand, a LEGO fan will look at a licensed or non-licensed proposal a lot more critically. They will be judging it not based merely on how much they like the concept, but also on how it compares to existing LEGO sets-- how high its quality is, how well it "fits in" with other sets, and at the same time how it manages to set itself apart from existing sets. Something I've noticed in addition is that I've had a lot of difficulty coming up with project ideas myself, and part of this has to do with figuring out what AFOLs will like. Some of my personal favorite ideas, like a modular road system or Hero Factory re-imaginings of the original six BIONICLE characters, would be incredibly divisive. Other ideas are difficult due to worries about "brand fit". Most of my building tends to be within existing themes, and the trouble with doing that is that you then have to compete against the sets in those themes-- both in terms of support, since people will not support a themed proposal they consider weaker than the sets already available within that theme, and in terms of the final product design, since TLG might reject it if they consider it too similar to what they already plan to have on store shelves. The easiest way to get around these concerns is either to dig up an old theme that hasn't been touched in a while but still has a lot of appeal, like the Modular Western Town proposal, or to make up your own theme. But making up your own completely original theme is hard, especially when you know that there will likely be only one actual product released-- not much to base a theme on. It's much easier in some cases to turn to a licensed theme. With those, the hard work of making something that stands out against the tapestry of ideas has already been done for you, and the challenge becomes taking those ideas and making them into a compelling and well-presented product design.

Right... because the Ultimate Collectors Series sets never had stickers before... To be fair, these look like round stickers on square parts, which can be bothersome, but at least they don't have any pattern that requires them to be applied "right-side-up", as in the case of the tail stickers on last year's LEGO City Space Shuttle. In all seriousness, I think this model looks pretty incredible, but it does have some flaws that I could see upsetting some AFOLs. For instance, it uses a lot of large pieces, which is in many cases probably necessary to keep the design fairly stable but which is probably a big reason for the set's high price-per-piece. But I love how the build is mirrored for a smooth, clean look on all sides, rather than using a "studs-up" build like many minifigure-scale Star Wars vehicles which leaves one side studded and one side anti-studded on wings which should be symmetrical. The windscreen is a bit iffy, I agree, and I kind of wonder whether including a windscreen at all was the ideal option when it could perhaps have been done similarly to the UCS Millennium Falcon's windscreen, though of course the B-wing's windscreen is a less rigid shape. In general, the design of this set seems sleek, sturdy, and efficient. Looking on Brickshelf, I don't see any UCS B-wing MOCs that are nearly as shapely as this one, though if people can link me to examples I won't be upset to be proven wrong. On a side note, it tickles me pink to see a Hero Factory fist piece used near the engines. Not the part I would have expected to see on a set like this by a longshot!

I think the reason there aren't any sets based on Brave probably has to do with the new license for The Lord of the Rings. TLG probably didn't want to have two medieval-fantasy themes out at once and so they chose the one which they figured would have the strongest lasting potential.

I don't think Ninjago and Dino really influence each other that much. Even though Eurobricks classifies them both as "action themes", they have very different market strategies. Ninjago is extremely story- and character-driven, with lots of minifigures with distinct identities. It also has a "gameplay" aspect in the form of the spinners and booster packs. Dino, on the other hand, has an emphasis on vehicles and creatures, fewer complex action features (I'm thinking things like the "transforming" feature of many of this year's Ninjago vehicles or the splitting-apart feature of last year's Fire Temple, among others), and a much simpler story. Even the target age range for the themes is different-- Dino has a minimum recommended age between five and seven (depending on the set) and a maximum recommended age of twelve for all sets. Ninjago has a minimum recommended age between six and eight (again, depending on the set) and a maximum recommended age of 14 for all sets. Furthermore, I should add that LEGO has already announced that there will be a new theme introduced when Ninjago ends, which more likely than not will be tied to the new cartoon they will be airing after the Ninjago TV series concludes. If this theme targets the same demographic as the Ninjago theme did (and why shouldn't it, when the Ninjago series was hugely successful with that demographic?), then it won't really leave room for Dino to take over the shelf space and target audience that Ninjago left behind. Now, I'm still hopeful that there might be Dino sets next year, but personally I think the reason there were so few this year has less to do with competition between themes and more to do with TLG wanting to keep the first wave on store shelves for longer in order to get more people to buy them. This isn't unheard of-- in 2010 and 2011 there were only new Kingdoms sets in the middle of the year and none at the beginning of the year. This could be a similar situation, but reversed. In that case, I don't think we'd see a much larger selection of new Dino sets next year than we had this year, because again TLG would likely want to keep them on store shelves for longer than they could if they introduced new stock semi-annually. Of course, it's also possible that Dino was only planned for one wave. But if there's going to be another wave, I just feel there's no reason to expect the schedule of new sets to increase in frequency next year, when limiting the 2012 sets to a single wave was probably deliberate.

Personally, I prefer the short arms, especially on the smaller figures (21-22 modules tall). There's no reason the hands should have to dangle far below the character's crotch unless the hero has armor on his lower arms that requires the additional attachment points. On the taller figures, longer arms are slightly more acceptable, since the torsos of the taller figures are woefully small relative to the overall height anyhow.

Not just kids played LU, it's true, but to be honest the target group was the group TLG was counting on to make the product sustainable. If TLG could have brought in enough money from adult fans to keep LU running there's no reason to think they wouldn't have, but frankly too few people (kids and adults alike) were paying the subscription for the full gameplay experience. And unlike non-MMO video game titles, it can cost a lot to keep an MMO on store shelves since there's the inherent expectation of staggered content updates, plus the need to constantly maintain the servers the game operates on. And what do you mean by "the series could be meeting its end anytime now"? At Bricks Cascade in early June it was announced that the series was planned for at least six more waves. Chances are it will be extended even further than that unless sales plummet. And given how successful they have been, there's no reason to think they would get rid of the theme unless they introduced something similar to replace it, in which case they could just re-imagine the new MMO around that. While they certainly won't carry over every feature from LU, I think we can expect that the new MMO will allow the same level of character customization, since that's typically been a creative hallmark of LEGO games, and I can't think of any reason TLG would want to take a step backwards in the sophistication of LU's customization options. So even if you can't remake your exact character from LEGO Universe, I'm hopeful that you'd be able to create a character who was just as pleasing to your personal tastes.

Nice to know that some EB members will be going! Incidentally, is anyone planning to attend the LEGO community panel on Friday, 3:00-4:00 p.m. or the LEGO Ninjago panel on Sunday, 10:30-11:30 a.m.? It'd be nice if someone could report back to Eurobricks about any new information revealed at either panel.