Aanchir

OK, my apologies. This may be old news, but there's a for the DC Universe Super Heroes sets, focusing on the Two-Face Chase and Batcave sets. One incidental thing it confirms is that the Batmobile is compatible with the Batcave set, in that it can fit through that set's gate unimpeded! That's pretty well-planned IMO, and I'm glad they're advertising that (even if not too prominently).

I genuinely hope that sometime we get a female character in the Super Heroes Ultrabuild line, seeing as that could inspire TLG to make some Hero Factory armor pieces that are suitable for building female characters. Of the heroes and villains I know, I think Catwoman's probably one of the best candidates on the DC side of things, as she does not have a particularly revealing outfit in most incarnations, is fairly well known, and doesn't have much "gear" that might be awkwardly represented as in the cases of Joker and Captain America. (Batman, Green Lantern, and Iron Man all look fairly good IMO, and Hulk is pretty decent in everything but the colors of some parts). Of course, the likelihood of a female character in the "Ultrabuild" sets is limited by the fact that female action figures don't tend to sell as well as male ones. This is also the reason why there are few female characters in the BIONICLE and Hero Factory themes, and why those that there are rarely are obviously female in physique. In a licensed theme I can see how TLG wouldn't want to take that risk, especially since with licensed characters they don't have total creative freedom and so can't "sidestep" the gender issues as easily.

For me, Evo is one of the best heroes in the upcoming wave. His color scheme is well-organized, his proportions are reasonable, and he overall manages to present a very unique body and weapon design without too much fluff. The other set next wave that most gives me this impression of being well-planned and designed is Splitface, who also has a cohesive weapon and strategically-organized parts and colors. But of course he does such with more of an organized chaos, and at a higher price point. Many of your flaws are valid, like the lack of back armor (I reckon in his case this was probably because they wanted to keep him in the "small" price-point) and the lack of definition in some of the mask details. I wonder if perhaps there was some reason the crisp edges of the render were left off the final mask... for some reason, it just ends up feeling a lot less sharp and well-defined than the 1.0 masks, and the render at least suggests that this wasn't originally intended in the part's design. Maybe Front could enlighten us. For back armor, I'd recommend perhaps sticking an extra yellow foot piece into an online Pick-A-Brick order, if you ever happen to make one.

I'm not visiting relatives until this Friday. But the weekend was busy because of my graduation (woo!) and after that I've been having computer troubles until just this morning when I finally seem to have gotten everything sorted out. I'm flattered that people noticed my absence. Anyway, I don't want to pass any really in-depth judgments of the summer sets until we have seen them in at least a slightly more finalized form, since some aspects of them seem very preliminary. In many cases colors are all we can make out clearly, and those are easy to change. Voltix is cool, and hopefully the videos we've seen suggest correctly that the final color scheme is more subdued. Still hard to tell if that's bright red, dark red, or bright reddish violet making an appearance on the legs and tubes. My guess is bright red just because tubing already exists prominently in that color. Bulk is cool, and I feel his weapons suit his characterization. A silver MTIS would also be very welcome, if that is what it is. Core Hunter sounds awesome, and the set design doesn't seem to disappoint. XT-4 is innovative, although I'm hoping and praying that the "villains fusing together" idea is thoroughly debunked by the time we get clearer pics of him. With people leaping at shallow resemblances between Meltdown, Corroder, and Toxic Reapa, I dread how people will react to another one-eyed yellow villain set. Stringer is cool, but the blue is a peculiar color choice. I'm sure if they go through with it he'll still look awesome, but it seems a bit sad after the color schemes of many of the other characters remained mostly intact save for occasional colors being removed or neutral colors being added. Nex's new helmet is hard to gauge. It reminds me of General Grievous a bit, but it still maintains some reflections of Nex's old helmet, if not as blatant as Evo's. Stormer is gorgeous, but of course some things like his lower legs seem a bit confusing to me from a structural perspective. His knee joints, for instance, are very non-traditional in how they are assembled. He gets bonus points for apparently being the first hero to wield a sword. I hope he doesn't tower over the other heroes too much. I also still can't figure out his two-toed feet. He is, without a doubt, a great source for the new friction joints. With at least four, he has more than have been spotted on any other sets to my knowledge. Overall I look forward to better pics, but as of right now I don't think there's much we can do but speculate. I'm personally more excited about the winter sets and the videos that are surfacing of them. If Rocka's torso looked awesome with the pattern extruded, then Evo's looks even more so. His personality in the video doesn't seem drastically at odds with the little we'd seen of him before. It's jarring hearing him talk so much, but he can't exactly give Stormer the silent treatment by radio when on a solo mission. And his means of taking out Toxic Reapa seems to really suit his character, using heavy force but using it strategically.

I'm impressed that the summer sets continue to show variety. A seaplane isn't even remotely the type of thing you'd stereotypically associate with girls. Apparently driving and flying are both passions Stephanie holds!

Thanks for linking this! I'm definitely impressed, especially by the four-headed dragon. Since before we even got the Ninjago dragons, my brother and I have wanted to build a four-headed one with the parts from all four. But it was next to impossible to get one with a working color scheme using just those pieces. TLG managed wonderfully by reducing the color scheme almost entirely, but leaving some colored accents printed on the now-white dragon heads to show which belonged to which dragon. And the end result is of course every bit as epic as it should be (at least, as far as can be seen). The giant snake the four-headed dragon is battling also looks pretty impressive, even if it's not remotely as brilliant as some of the snake vehicles we've seen from a sculptural standpoint. The mech for Samurai X is a bit absurd-looking, and not extremely high on my list of sets to get, but I love the two mini-snakemen and their catapult. I imagine they'll play the role of comic relief in the TV show after Lloyd grows up a little. The last vehicle set is epic-looking, but it's hard to tell what its role in the theme will be. It apparently comes apart into sections. For me, the most appealing aspect of that set so far (besides the luscious pieces) is the Anacondrai general, who hopefully will come in another set so my brothers and I don't need too many ZX ninja duplicates (though it doesn't hurt to have them). Spinner sets look decent, even though whether I get any of them will depend on whether the contents of them are more efficient to procure that way than in the larger building sets.

I love how not only is this guy's torso uniquely-armored compared to other characters, but the end result is quite unique in physique and posture compared to other sets. It goes to show how even sets using the default torso bone don't have to be structurally identical, with only aesthetic differences. IMO all three of the small villain sets for next year demonstrate how the Hero Factory 2.0 building system isn't about to run out of potential anytime soon.

Pretty sure that's still just a render. Check it out in high-resolution here. Personally, I like the use of renders for Hero Factory sets, primarily because nowadays they've gotten to the point that a render and a photo are almost indistinguishable, and yet renders tend to produce a crisper, more photogenic likeness of the set, especially at high resolutions. As long as the render isn't misleading (incorrectly built, posed in a way that is not possible in the actual set, or just plain inauthentic looking like many Aqua Raiders box images), then I have no problem with this trend. It really surprised me when TLG went back to this style, since it's a style they haven't used in instruction booklets since perhaps the 80s if not earlier. Granted, it's now been modernized so that the shading other than the black contour lines is more authentic. It does solve that problem of colors being hard to tell apart, but at the same time, I kind of dislike it because the instruction images no longer resemble the actual model as strongly. I kind of agree. This guy looks weaker from behind than Fire Lord in some ways because his torso design doesn't feel quite as cohesive to me (though of course the complex design used for Fire Lord was only really necessary because of the extremely awkward and ugly shoulder supports). I wish Hero Factory could come up with a way to make the leg supports more like those in Takanuva, which both filled in the hip area (which really needs it in the HF titan builds) and was less obtrusive from the back and sides than the style Fire Lord, Rocka XL, and Black Phantom used. And with that said, Fire Lord's leg suspension was better than Black Phantom's IMO because it narrowed towards the spine rather than sticking out from the waist quite as much as Black Phantom's. I like the color of that sphere; I was expecting it to be much closer to Transparent Bright Green than to the Transparent Fluorescent Green used on his back weapons. Either color would have worked for this set, but for other sets like 6217 Surge, I much would prefer this more yellowish-green color. Of course, it's possible that like the classic Zamor spheres, this is an arbitrarily-blended color that we can't count on to be consistent between sets. Anyway, great review! I'm not sure if this set will be near the top of my list of sets to get, as he's very similar to the Fire Lord set I already have. But with that said, he's also much better than Fire Lord in almost all ways, so he's still on the list in the very least.

That set list sounds really fake in some ways and really real in others. Meanwhile, something I'd like to point out is that Breakout story wouldn't necessarily need to continue for Stormer and the purple villain set to be summer sets. Consider that neither Breez nor Thornraxx was visible in any of the clips from that video (at least, not that I saw). Thus, it's possible that for some reason the designers just switched Breez and Thornraxx with Stormer and that purple villain for the Breakout story, and thus that the next wave's sets will get their own story, minus Stormer and the purple villain and plus Breez and Thornraxx. Anyway, it's odd to me that the list places all of the summer HF sets after the winter HF sets, when in the past this usually has not been the norm for a year of sets. The tendency is often for sets of the same size to be placed together, whether they are for the first half or the second half of the year. Of course, since that tradition has already been broken by the next wave of sets placing Black Phantom in the middle of groups of small and medium sets, anything's possible. Still, I would expect the new year of sets to use certain unused "intermediate" set numbers like 6213-6215, 6219-6226, etc. I'm not rejecting that possibility that they're real but I'm extremely skeptical, especially considering that this only surfaced once we had already learned of the potential for a new Stormer set, that being the only real clue that this list is genuine.

That's a terrible overgeneralization. Licensed sets often have just as good set design as other sets; they just are replicating different things. One could just as easily argue that LEGO City sets are dependent on real life rather than set design, and in that statement the ludicrousness is obvious. Whether a person prefers a licensed theme or a non-licensed theme, it is almost always because they feel some connection to the subject matter of the set, whether that's a favorite scene or vehicle from a popular movie, a historical time period they are particularly fond of, or some subject relating to their real life (as an example, I am a huge fan of the Graduate from Minifigures Series 5 because I am graduating from my current college tomorrow ). And people don't always buy licensed sets just for the minifigures-- after all, until recently the Ultimate Collectors Series Star Wars sets didn't have any minifigures at all, or even many specialized elements, and yet they were still immensely popular. Naturally, there are people (particularly those who aren't dedicated LEGO fans) who buy licensed sets just because of the movie tie-in. Among these, many of them also care more about the minifigures than about the sets. But to generalize licensed themes and the people who buy them in such a way is a gross disservice. I haven't bought any Star Wars sets in a long time, but this year one set that ended up on my Christmas wish list is Anakin's and Sebulba's Podracers. And this wasn't because for some reason I feel I need minifigures that fail to match the rest of my Star Wars figs (even if they're in most cases better-designed). It's because I feel the models themselves depict the subject matter far better than the Mos Espa Podrace set I so enjoyed during childhood. If TLG were to release an updated re-imagining of the classic set "Pizza to Go", then I'd be just as enthused to obtain it-- probably even more so because it would be at a lower price point, both as a smaller set and as a non-licensed set.

What they're trying to achieve is to maintain their reputation as a clean and friendly family company. Even if something inappropriate was on a site they ran that was geared towards adults, it would still be something inappropriate on a site they run. And keep in mind that kids can still see a lot of the stuff on Rebrick, even if they can't have profiles there. And that the age cutoff isn't 18 or some other age people can agree is mature, it's 13. If a kid is on the site and their parents find them looking at something inappropriate, they're likely going to blame the website-- especially since "Mom, it's just a LEGO website!" is probably how the kid will try and defend their actions. People seem to ignore that TLG's family-friendly policies aren't just altruistic or legalistic. They're not just doing it because they are concerned for the welfare of kids, nor just because they're afraid of legal repercussions, but also because they're concerned for their own reputation. This applies to the violence policy (another oft-debated topic in recent weeks here at Eurobricks), to their websites' "play nice" policies, and to every other policy involving the appropriateness of content they host, produce, or promote. There's also the fact that age limits aren't just about the appropriateness of content. For instance, here at Eurobricks the age limit of 18 isn't strictly because the mods want us to be able to post a lot of inappropriate stuff, but more because they want us having mature and intelligent conversations.

Because presumably the colors chosen for the generic characters are just so that they aren't confused with other characters appearing in the episode. All the operators are colored the same color, after all, as are a lot of the workers at HF. For comparison, Von Ness showed up in the crowd in Ordeal of Fire despite having long ago transformed into a larger form and having been imprisoned in a staff in the episode immediately previous ("Thresher", this time the actual character model, was in the same crowd scene). Clearly the animators aren't too concerned with whether background characters coincidentally resemble character models from episodes made several months previously. As it is, that green doesn't even entirely match Thresher's color (Thresher was about the same color green as Breez in Rise of the Rookies, whereas that background character is a darker green). My guess regarding the wormhole thing is that some villain manages to use Von Nebula's staff, which is locked up nearby. Realistically, all Black Phantom would need to do is sneak his bug-thing in (not a hard task; he seems to carry it everywhere) and send it to either retrieve the staff or activate it (my guess is the latter, considering how chaotically the wormhole appears and blows a huge hole in the prison).

No. The animators reuse character models all the time, but this isn't even an example of that-- it's just a green Hero with Stringer's (not Bulk's) 1.0 helmet in retracted mode. There's also a bluish-green Hero with Breez's 1.0 helmet, and a yellow and red hero with Bulk's 1.0 helmet. I figure the green hero-- like both of these two-- is just a generic background character. Also, I'll be mildly disappointed if Von Nebula's staff isn't the source of that wormhole, just because it would be such a conveniently accessible plot device for that setting. I don't expect Von Nebula himself to return, though.

Technically, we have some (small) news. Visiting octopus.LEGO.com confirms that the project's name is now Rebrick, and its site is now rebrick.LEGO.com. And while the site itself is still empty, we do have news on Rebrick. See here. I've sent an e-mail and hope for a response! EDIT: I am slow, it seems. Well, good to have news anyway!

I've been listening to the Ninjago TV show soundtrack a lot lately. Jay Vincent, the composer, has a lot of it available for listening on his website. It's really cool, and much more pleasant to have stuck in your head than the pop-inspired theme song.

Actually, I think the Roman Soldier's helmet color is lacquered silver of some kind (Bricklink's Metallic Silver), not Silver Metallic (Bricklink's Flat Silver in post-2010 sets). But I agree, the soldier would be better with a silver torso or at least back printing of some kind.

Brickset recently had a news article linking to this thorough and well-written article about planning and designing the LEGO Friends theme. I liked some of the observations: "Encouraged by what it had learned about boys, Lego sent its team back out to scrutinize girls, starting in 2007. The company was surprised to learn that in their eyes, Lego suffered from an aesthetic deficit. “The greatest concern for girls really was beauty,” says Hanne Groth, Lego’s market research manager. Beauty, on the face of it, is an unsurprising virtue for a girl-friendly toy, but based on the ways girls played, Groth says, it came, as “mastery” had for boys, to stand for fairly specific needs: harmony (a pleasing, everything-in-its-right-place sense of order); friendlier colors; and a high level of detail." "The key difference between girls and the ladyfig and boys and the minifig was that many more girls projected themselves onto the ladyfig—she became an avatar. Boys tend to play with minifigs in the third person. “The girls needed a figure they could identify with, that looks like them,” says Rosario Costa, a Lego design director. The Lego team knew they were on to something when girls told them, “I want to shrink down and be there.”" Overall it's this sort of thorough research that leads me to put a lot of faith in TLG's more ambitious, less traditional endeavors. Unlike what we as fans sometimes assume, there's a lot of time, money, and attention put into making sure new sets are a good idea before they go to market. And while that's no guarantee that TLG has anticipated all the variables that could make or break a new concept, it at least means that they usually have more knowledge going in than the typical AFOL.

Someone knows how to lay AFOL concerns to rest. Anyway, all of this is very good news, and I appreciate that the Cuusoo team is maintaining a dialogue with AFOL fan communities rather than planning all their changes and revisions behind closed doors. I know many younger users on fansites like BZPower will be upset by the increased submission age, and I'm curious what effects that might have since under normal circumstances younger users are a core market. However, in the case of Cuusoo I'm sure that not only are AFOLs a more significant audience in terms of voting power, but also a better audience for many of the "niche" products that Cuusoo so far has been shown to deliver. Meanwhile, the fact that younger users will evidently still be able to vote means that they are still a part of the decision process, and of course all a younger user has to do to submit an idea of their own is to connect with an AFOL or older family member like their parents whom they're willing to entrust their idea to. The chance of success of the Minecraft products is still entirely up in the air, but this would apply for any proposal that happened to be the first to make it through Cuusoo after its international debut. I look forward to more details on the logistical aspects of the Cuusoo platform, like how sets will be distributed and marketed.

Rocka, Black Phantom, and Splitface are all at shop.LEGO.com, and new pics of several sets are on cache.LEGO.com. Jawblade Surge Splitface Furno No Breez or Thornraxx pics yet, though. Still, glad that Thornraxx review is coming along well! Great job with the bag-building! Meanwhile, additional notes regarding the video: since the presence of a new Stormer implies that the summer HF sets will be simultaneous story-wise with the winter ones, that makes it pretty likely that yes, we will see new versions of the Heroes who didn't get new versions in the first 2012 wave. Unfortunately, only the new Stormer appears in that particular video clip. EDIT: Also, there's a Youtube channel called Official Hero Factory, and while they don't have any new videos, they do have this lovely-- but unfortunately terribly grainy-- background image.

Best revelation in the video, for me, is that there is a new form of Stormer. Which uses the Hulk's new giant chest piece. Seeing as Stormer looks like a real set design, I'm guessing that one villain with the purple tubes and Black Phantom's helmet will also be a summer set. It strikes me as too complex a design to be just a random background character. I look forward to seeing the TV special so I have some additional context. The giant wormhole makes me think, to my surprise, that Von Nebula (or at least his staff) will be brought up again as a plot device explaining how the villains escape to the far reaches of the galaxy. Story-wise, I'm not expecting the best storytelling, but here's hoping it will at least be less painful to watch than some scenes of Savage Planet, and will have plenty of subtle callbacks just as Savage Planet and Ordeal of Fire did in their best moments.

Many people just have a larger collection of yellow minifigure heads and prefer to use only them, either for consistency, for tradition, or just out of preference.

I have a feeling the horn should be sharper, so it looks more like the cutlass you've chosen as a cutie mark!

The point is that realistic modern combat is against TLG's policy because a lot of people have really negative feelings associated with it. For instance, many people have lost family members in wars. Nobody's lost family members fighting in a paramilitary force against an alien invasion. That's the factor that is most integral to TLG's violence policy. There's further detail in the Progress Report on page 26. Besides, even if TLG were choosing to be inconsistent with their policy, that's their prerogative. But the policy is in fact there-- it's not just some relic of a bygone era that people are remembering, or just an arbitrary pattern that AFOLs observed and decided to give a name to. In fact, the violence policy is arguably stronger as of 2010 since it is now a codified policy rather than simply an unwritten rule. In any event, TLG's violence policy has absolutely no bearing on whether a LotR theme is possible. They might choose not to do a theme based on violence in the films, and if so, again, that's their prerogative. There's nothing forcing them to be consistent, especially since the appropriateness of violence in movies is such a subjective matter to begin with. Some people think laser fire that causes no visible injury is non-violent, while others feel any firearm is inappropriate for a family film. And in the end the impact of what TLG's potential customers feel, however inconsistent that might be, can be as big an influence on their decisions as any written policy.

Hispabrick magazine has out-of-package photos of the Series 6 Minifigures, generously provided to them by Jan Beyer. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what side-printing any of their legs might have since they neglected to take side-view photos of any of the figs. Still, we get some amazing pics-- the Bandit's face is wonderfully swarthy-looking, and the Sleepyhead has a double-sided head with an adorable face for when he's sound asleep!

But when you narrow things down that far, lots of things start to look the same. That doesn't mean they're not different in their details. AFAIK none of the Power Rangers characters had to tame dragons (although I could be wrong; it's a long-running franchise I know very little about). Remove the "vehicles" and "elements" parts (the latter of which I didn't even think TMNT and Power Rangers had, and you have Knights' Kingdom II. Remove the "vehicles" and (possibly) "supernatural" parts and you have BIONICLE. Remove the "elements" and (again, depending on your perspective) "supernatural" parts and you have LEGO Alpha Team. But none of these themes is very similar to Ninjago: there is no character remotely resembling Zane in either (which is surprising, considering that BIONICLE had over 100 characters), nor is there any character strongly resembling Nya. Ninjago has a lot of things in common with other series, but a lot of that is just because those are storytelling techniques that have been proven to work. Color-coded characters can be found in loads of toylines like My Little Pony that have very little in common with Ninjago (well, other than the original Ninjago TV special having some parallels to the first two MLP:FiM episodes). The same applies for gimmicky (if you want to call them that) vehicles, especially in LEGO themes like Alpha Team. Elemental powers appear in Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, Captain Planet, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Supernatural villains are common to a lot of fantasy stories including Lord of the Rings, The Mummy, and Pirates of the Caribbean. All in all you just named a bunch of extremely fiction tropes that Ninjago happens to share with other things. That doesn't mean there aren't unique characteristics that make Ninjago enjoyable, nor does it mean that the characteristics it shares with other things are automatically impossible to enjoy in the show's unique context. Great design! Instantly recognizable! Here's mine.