Aanchir

That dragon is gorgeous. And the green ninja's spinner doesn't look bad either. The crown has studs on it, which is a first. Also, what's the color of the lower half? It almost looks like a metallic green color, but if it is then it must be new since the last one (Lemon Metallic) has been off the palette for many years.

Haven't found too many good pics of the summer Friends sets from the German ToyFair, but I did come across this and figured I'd share it. It's better detail than the leaked retailer's catalog pics we've seen in videos, so I figure it's worth sharing.

I'm almost certain that, as Rocketbilly suspects, Bulk simply has a shoulder-mounted or arm-mounted weapon and not a third arm, much like Toa Inika Nuparu's Zamor Launcher or Furno's jets. Keep in mind that sets can be built incorrectly at Toy Fair. Even their official art can be inaccurate in fact, considering the latest incarnation of Furno with his asymmetrical leg shells in his official art.

Nex and Bulk both look brilliant. I especially like Nex's helmet and weapon. Unfortunately the pic isn't big enough to see what the two heroes' chest patterns look like. XT4 is posed a little wonky, so he's hard to judge. And Core Hunter is hard to decipher since his colors are so dark. Bulk does have a lot of titanium metallic, but his colors are pretty well-arranged (bright orange and titanium metallic on the limbs, silver metallic on his head and body). It looks to me like his feet are the same Titanium Metallic ones as Evo's, although they could be black. I'm hoping for Titanium Metallic as that makes for one less color prominently featured in his color scheme (he has black bone pieces obviously, but that's all tucked away under his various armor). Likewise, Nex's colors are well-arranged, although the white is a bit overpowering. The seemingly medium stone grey (light bluish grey) bones don't help. I don't think an orange torso would be necessary for him, but as it stands I think it'd be preferable (although my position on that could change if we get a better look at his torso pattern and it works better as orange on white than vice-versa).

All this stuff is incredible. I'm so glad they have a display that shows off all the sets' functions-- it's so much cooler to see them in action, even in the case of the Destiny's Bounty which has been out for a while! The functions of all the new sets are amazing. Also, some of the NRG ninja have lightsaber handles in Warm Gold (Bricklink's Pearl Gold). I know a lot of people have been wanting those. The Pythor figure looks epic. More pics: Full display Minifigure-go-round Samurai X Lloyd Garmadon The Ultra Dragon (9450) Samurai Mech (9448) and Great Devourer (9450) Destiny's Bounty (9446) Ultra Sonic Raider (9449)

Those are brilliant. Did those actually make it into LEGO Universe, or were they simply planned for a future update?

Awesome design! The choices of parts lend it a very organic overall form, whereas the textures of those same parts suggest a mechanical design. Together, these characteristics make for a very visually interesting MOC. Many Hero Factory parts wouldn't have worked nearly as well for this particular design, since the smoother textures would probably clash with the more intricate textures and detract from the overall appearance. The use of the Mistika version of the Hau Nuva for the head is imaginative, but my favorite part use overall has to be the use of the 2001 Matoran arms for the MOC's shoulders. It's also great that there's very visible suspension on the rear legs. Not only does this probably allow for a wider range of poses, but it makes the creature as a whole more intimidating in appearance.

Stylin'! I like the use of transparent green along his abdomen. The guns are amazing, and a non-AFOL looking at a picture might at first glance think them to be customized parts, rather than a purist construction using several Technic parts. I mean that in a very good way. The squished corrugated pipe in the front of the body is a unique way of creating a mouth/vent, and really suits this MOC. My only criticisms are that the legs are aesthetically very simple compared to the torso and arms, which makes them look a little out-of-place on this MOC, and that the Reddish Gold parts from Knights' Kingdom don't quite match Technic parts in Warm Gold. That latter criticism might not matter much on certain MOCs, but on one like this where the various gold armor pieces cover broad sections of the body, it's really noticeable.

That's useful info. Thanks for correcting me! I wonder if we might see transparent bone pieces in the future, then... Granted, I'm not sure what types of figures would look especially nice with transparent bone pieces. I did like Toa Inika Jaller and Toa Inika Matoro, as well as Takadox and Nocturn, and those all used transparent joint pieces.

Having a "For Girls" category on shop.LEGO.com isn't all that new. While it may seem a bit sexist, I think it's perfectly understandable that TLG would want to try their best and make sure that gift-givers can make an educated guess about what types of toys the recipient will enjoy much. It's the same justification as for the age recommendations on LEGO boxes. It's perfectly possible that a person less than ten years old will enjoy a larger Technic set, or a person older than 14 will enjoy a Ninjago set, or that a girl will enjoy a Hero Factory set. But this sort of differentiation is basically the same kind of broad recommendation that a retail store worker would give if a gift-giver were unsure what their gift's recipient will appreciate best. In my case (perhaps because I'm a boy), what always bothered me most during childhood wasn't the fact that gender-based toys existed but that there was a stigma attached to girl-oriented toys that kept boys from enjoying them, and no similar stigma attached to "non-pink" toys that kept girls from enjoying them. I didn't realize until I was older that girls and parents of girls did in fact sometimes avoid boy-oriented toys. I'm sure the fact that my parents kept "aggressive" toys and media like Power Rangers and Transformers from me is partly to blame for my continued ignorance. What I saw, though, were things like toy cars that girls and boys alike could enjoy, "pink" toys that only girls were allowed to enjoy, and "aggressive" boy-oriented toys that neither boys nor girls should want to enjoy. Of course that didn't stop me from getting Paradisa sets "for Mommy" and then "helping out" by building them for her. I even had a big pink drum of Tyco bricks (gasp) which I have since taken great pains to eradicate from my LEGO collection due to partial incompatibility. As I grew up, I sort of began to understand that girls and boys did like different things to an extent-- sometimes just because girls didn't want to do something "boyish" and vice-versa. And of course when it comes to toy sales, this factor is amplified by parents who project their own biases onto their kids. I'm sure TLG is well-aware of these contrasting interests just from focus group studies, where they might notice things that girls tended to agree on that boys did not. Their more recent anthropological research in preparation for the Friends theme certainly reinforced this. Whether girls inherit gender biases by nature or nurture, these biases can become ingrained in girls' interests well before they enter grade school. Now, as for whether a theme has to be quite as girly as Friends to get a significant amount of sales with young girls, that's up for debate. TLG is already taking a gamble by creating a girl-oriented building toy, seeing as girls have traditionally been a tiny minority in the sales of their more successful themes. A gender-neutral theme, if possible, would probably be preferable to just having Friends as the only obvious outreach to girls. But the release of the Friends theme is about more than testing the viability of a theme that considers girls' interests more closely. It's also about TLG's image. I've had a close friend confess to me that her own parents would get LEGO bricks for her brother and not her. In the 80s the company did attempt to paint themselves as gender-neutral, but I think the fact that they made that decision suggests that even then they were having difficulty convincing parents that building toys could be for girls as well as boys. The fact that dedicated girl-oriented themes started to emerge around a decade later suggests to me that this attempt did not have the desired results, and TLG still saw girls as an untapped market in the early- and mid-90s. Even if the mid-90s were a time of very bad decisions by TLG, there was still reasoning behind those decisions. TLG saw a populace of children who were no longer as interested in building toys as they had been years before. TLG tried to diversify to a wider audience, and of course that is what is often blamed for their economic suffering in the early naughts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they had the wrong idea with these attempts. That can be seen in the success of video games like LEGO Star Wars after TLG's less-than-stellar attempts at video games in previous years. In my opinion, throughout the 90s and early naughts, TLG had good intentions, but was just going about things the wrong way. This is part of the reason I hope LEGO Friends is successful-- not because I have any particular reason to want LEGO sets designed for a category of individuals I will never fall under, but because I would like it to be recognized that girls are, in fact, a viable market for building toys. Once that enters the public consciousness, it will be a lot easier for TLG and other companies to create not just girl-oriented toys but also gender-neutral toys that their consumers will be able to readily recognize as such. On a side note, I think the measure of whether the public recognizes building toys at their core as gender-neutral will be if TLG's competitors begin to release their own successful girl-oriented building toy lines. I've particularly got my fingers crossed for My Little Pony Kre-O.

The problem with transparent bone pieces is the physical differece between the material used for transparent parts, polycarbonate, and the material used for solid-colored parts, ABS. Polycarbonate, unlike ABS, has a great deal of friction with other polycarbonate parts. Anyone who has attached a transparent cone to a lightsaber blade can attest to this (to those who haven't, don't try it-- removing the cone is extremely difficult and usually creates scratches in the lightsaber blade). A polycarbonate part connected to an ABS part can be taken apart and put together without much difficulty. The same can be said of two ABS parts. Even two polycarbonate parts can be attached and separated easily if their connection is not particularly strong, like a stud-to-anti-stud connection between two basic bricks or plates. But two polycarbonate parts attached with a high-friction connection, like a ball joint, will often be extremely hard to separate. As it is, both BIONICLE and Hero Factory have had ball cups and ball snaps in transparent colors, but never an actual ball joint to connect to them, and I imagine this is probably the reason. Incidentally, this is also the reason why completely-transparent minifigures have never been released in sets. Most of this information comes from here.

I've looked at Hero Factory parts that might be desirable on LDD and have tried to prioritize them. All ID numbers are Design IDs, with Bricklink IDs in rectangular brackets where applicable. All names are Bricklink names. These ones are high priority-- they all appear in sets this year, and for all I know some of them might already be in the works for a future LDD update: These ones are medium priority. They appeared in the Hero Factory theme and have been used in more than ten sets each. So I'm selecting these based on the likely demand rather than personal need or preference: Other than these 20 parts and parts already mentioned by other members, there are 30 other Hero Factory/BIONICLE parts I'd like to see on LDD:

Yeah, flesh-colored bricks definitely exist-- see here (it's the bag labeled "Colour: 18 NOUGAT").

I'm still quite fond of Bulk, although his colors seem somewhat awkwardly organized. It's really hard to tell because they're looking at him from such an awkward angle. I still think his overall build looks brilliant, and I look forward to getting a better look at him. He looks genuinely bulky, which is one aspect the 3.0 set was criticized for lacking. Stringer is posed badly in that pic I think, but if his weapon is indeed a guitar as it seemed in the retailer's catalog he wins by default. The transparent torso seems to be about the same color as his head piece (Transparent Fluorescent Blue/Bricklink's Transparent Medium Blue). It's somewhat easy to warm up to him having blue instead of orange, surprisingly, perhaps because cool colors are so underrepresented in the Hero lineup, or perhaps just because like in Power Miners the color is around the same distance from the primary color on a color wheel. Nex also looks cool, but it's hard to make out any details that weren't visible from the retailer's catalog, besides the tubing on his back. I also can't determine much about Core Hunter. Likewise, XT4 is almost impossible to make out any detail on. Some people suspect he may be Flame Yellowish Orange (Keetorange), but I'm not so sure. In the brief time he and Evo are both on camera, they look the same color, so I'd attribute any inconsistencies in their color to either bad lighting or prototype parts with misleading textures. In some ways, Voltix's color scheme still looks cluttered, but at the same time my overall impression of him is very positive. Some purple on his legs would have been nice, but in general his color scheme sticks to about three main colors-- Titanium Metallic, Medium Lilac and Bright Red. IMO, the yellowish colors of his head, weapons, and lightning bolts don't harm his color scheme any more than the green of Toa Inika Jaller's head, Zamor Spheres, and sword hurt his three-color color scheme. The blue tubing and blue color of his lightning horns are the only things that possibly feel like overkill. Pretty sure it's the same weapon he had in the retailer's catalog (two of Batman/Breez/Black Phantom's swords back-to-back as one giant broadsword). It's just a different color than it was in the retailer's catalog.

Toy Fairs sometimes have sets on display in a preliminary stage, which could give people false impressions of the sets. If you put a lot of effort, time, and money into making a set look just right, then you don't necessarily want the first pics of that set to spread all over the internet to be of your crappy unfinished version. And as Legoman273 said, hype is definitely a factor. You want the full details on new products to come out only when they'll have the most possible impact. In the meantime, slowly releasing pics like TLG has been doing with their posters builds anticipation for the big reveal. You don't have long to wait-- it's less than two weeks until the New York Toy Fair, where the most photos of new sets always tend to emerge.

Well, that's not necessarily true. The December LEGO Club Magazine gave us stats for Samukai and Jay DX, neither of whom had cards, so it's possible something similar could happen with Pythor and the other generals. EDIT: Just saw the new episode, Never Trust a Snake. It was entertaining, but overall quite a bit underwhelming. Given what was going on in the episode, I feel it should have been much more dramatic.

Good point! Yes, I think you're correct, the torso seems to be some type of transparent blue. I hope it looks good in the final set... Keep in mind that that in certain materials (like the one used for the Vahki's eyestalks), transparent colors can look extremely opaque (or in the very least, nowhere near as glassy-looking as would be needed to show transparency unless backlit). Based on this picture of Black Phantom's sword piece, it may be a material that has that effect-- and if the prelim pics are the least bit reliable, then that's the same piece being used for Stormer XL's sword (although the color here is different than in the prelim pics).

Pick-A-Brick may be more expensive than Bricklink in most cases, but sometimes it's cheaper to accumulate certain parts in large quantities from Pick-A-Brick. I've noticed this with Hero Factory parts, which tend to come in few sets in particularly large quantities and which aren't valued especially highly by many AFOLs. So glad to see so many new Hero Factory parts. I expect before long many of them will show up on Hero Recon Team, but Pick-A-Brick can be cheaper I think, especially since you can order parts in any combination you want rather than just in a combination that makes a fully-armored Hero figure.

Someone on BZPower linked here, where there's a video of the new HF sets from (presumably) the London Toy Fair. Not too much detail, but we can see many of the sets. I'm very intrigued by Stringer, who definitely isn't Earth Blue but also doesn't quite seem like regular Bright Blue. I'm wondering... could it be a new glow-in-the-dark color? I'm probably being silly though; it could just be Bright Blue. Here's a direct link to the video on Vimeo. It's easier to watch there.

The set's release has been delayed, but it's not known for how long. It could be that it's been delayed until summer along with Thornraxx, since it's been observed that the summer wave is smaller than the winter one based on the sets we know currently. Sets have been delayed in the United States like this before-- the final wave of Power Miners in 2009 was split 50/50 between winter and summer here, as was the final wave of Atlantis in 2010. The LEGO City Space sets all came out around a half a year later in the United States than they did in many other countries. I certainly hope it comes out soon. Breez is the Hero Factory set I intend to get first, and I don't intend to order it from overseas to do so.

He is the same blue color (Earth Blue), as far as I can tell. For some reason the characters page on the Ninjago site, along with most other online renders of the Hypnobrai serpentine, makes them look far more pale than they should. I love the Epic Dragon Battle. My twin brother and I had wanted to make a four-headed dragon using the Ninjago dragon sets, and it turns out TLG beat us to it! Also, its function sounds interesting. Even if it ends up really bulky, I don't think I'll mind its design-- it reminds me somewhat of the Exo-Force Aero Booster, another almost impractically bulky but brilliant set design.

Actually, I think microfigs are better-suited to 1:2 scale modular buildings like this gem than to the 1:4 scale Mini Modulars set. I love the mini-modulars, but I think making figures to scale with them would require some tiny custom figures like these (the closest I've seen to purist at such a small scale).

I think it's a bit improbable for the collectible figs to just go "out-of-fashion" so easily, though. The minifigure itself has lasting appeal, and similar collectibles like Pokemon cards have had a great deal of staying power even when for a long time they seemed to be just a passing fad. I don't really expect the collectible minifigures to end anytime in the near future unless for some reason the price of producing them at their typical quality becomes too costly to charge a price people are willing to pay-- because the cost of production is the main area in which the collectible minifigures surely have a disadvantage compared to perennial blind-packaged products like collectible trading cards.

LEGO has said that LEGO Friends sets are for girls. That doesn't preclude the possibility that other themes are also acceptable for girls; they just aren't specially-designed for them like LEGO Friends sets are. LEGO's Shop site has a category labeled "For Girls" that includes many sets other than the Friends theme, including almost all licensed themes and AFOL-oriented Direct-to-Consumer sets-- the sets most likely to appeal to an audience of diverse genders. While there are some girls who can easily recognize the value in TLG's gender-neutral or boy-oriented themes, there are many others who have grown accustomed to companies custom-tailoring toys towards their interests, and this is the audience TLG has so far been largely failing to take advantage of. It should also be noted that TLG's ad agency, Advance, is the same agency they've been using since the 70s-- and they have taken great pride in the success of the Friends theme.

Very stylish! I especially like the torso. The way the head's "chin" nestles in the area between the side-fins of the Kualsi is really nice-looking. The legs and arms are also cool, although it seems a bit unusual to me how the arms have a very smooth style similar to Hero Factory while the legs have an extremely intricate, detail design similar to BIONICLE. It's really only the lower legs that have this problem-- the upper legs mostly organize the detail by color, so the "high-detail" pieces are Metallic Sand Yellow (BL's Flat Dark Gold) and the "low-detail" parts are black-- the same way the textures and colors are organized on the torso. The back-view pic makes his legs look somewhat frail and boring (and makes the contrast between the arm and leg styles even starker), but I'm not sure how easily this could be changed or how important it would really be to do so. Making the upper legs slightly thicker on the inside of the leg could help this, although I kind of like the bowlegged look he has from front view. Great MOC overall. You did an excellent job at using BIONICLE and Hero Factory parts side-by-side without either looking terribly out-of-place.