Aanchir

The new pieces are the same ones as in the recent LEGO Design byME update, and to my knowledge they're all Hero Factory parts. I guess that wasn't what you were looking for. Sorry to disappoint.

"Wicked" is pretty good. It's not entirely faithful to either the Oz books or the movie The Wizard of Oz, but there are a lot of wonderful references to both that make it totally worth reading even if you're normally pretty insistent on believing in one particular canon. I'm pretty generous with adaptations, prequels, etc, because it's always fun to see people play around with a world someone else has created, lending their own perspectives to the story.

This is pretty amazing. I'm not totally happy with how the bride's dress is made (the 1x1 cheese wedges give the slope an awful "jump" as it reaches the back, and it would have been better with a single 1x2 double-cheese-slope anyway), but overall she's a gorgeous design. The groom, in contrast, uses mostly pre-existing parts (his torso is the Series 1 Magician's torso), and has less customization potential, but he's still awesome looking. The best thing is that being LEGO, people can customize the minifigures to look like them! If/when I get married I won't rule this out as a possibility.

The parts I've marked in bold are already on LDD. The others would all be useful additions, though.

Chrome gold is 310 Metalized Gold. So if that's what you used for the coins then it's correct. My dad had this train station when I was a kid. It's a real beauty.

To be fair, there are many other reasons that some people prefer non-licensed themes to licensed ones. Licensed themes are generally more expensive than non-licensed ones. Storylines tend to be simpler, allowing for more imagination both for TLG's designers and for MOCists. Some people also prefer the "sovereignty" of some of TLG's evergreen themes, and do not want to see non-licensed castle themes end even if it allows for licensed ones to take their place (as happened with LEGO Space and, some claim, with the most recent iteration of LEGO Pirates). Personally, I stopped collecting LEGO Star Wars a year or so after the switch to fleshies, and there have been many sets recently that have made me want to go back-- sets like this year's podracer sets demonstrate amazingly superior designs to their earlier equivalents. The things that are stopping me aren't the fleshies, since I rarely use licensed figure heads in non-licensed theme building anyway (and for the inverse there are plenty of licensed figure heads that are generic enough to be used across multiple themes). The things that are stopping me are the price and the fact that it is tied to a license. Notably, I have enjoyed a couple licensed themes in the meantime, namely LEGO Batman and the reboot of LEGO Harry Potter. Something these two themes share that is absent from LEGO Star Wars or (presumably) what people want in a LotR theme is a lot of creative liberty for the designers. LEGO Batman didn't have to worry about matching a particular Batmobile with any sort of precision-- it was more important for the sets to evoke the spirit of the locations and vehicles they represented. And LEGO Harry Potter has always focused less on exactly replicating any particular rendition of Hogwarts and more on including familiar scenes. The fact that they are licenses, not the fact that they include fleshies, is probably to blame for the fact that I didn't collect many sets from either theme I think fleshies are a small price to pay to avoid situations like Lando having brown skin and everyone else having yellow skin in the Cloud City set. That was just embarrassing and did much to undermine TLG's insistence from the beginning that the yellow minifigure is racially neutral. But while I haven't bought any Kingdoms sets, I'd be even less likely to buy LotR or The Hobbit sets. I haven't been interested in Tolkien novels or movies in years, and I'm having more fun with TLG's own intellectual properties like Hero Factory or Ninjago than I tend to have with licensed themes. I would marvel at new set images along with everyone else if LotR sets were revealed. But I doubt I'd buy the sets, and most of my attention would still go towards TLG's own imaginative properties.

I wasn't saying regular hands would be preferable-- I'd rather if they made Exo-Force robot arms in lime green for him, to clip onto the fist pieces. As it is, I guess his hands look adequately fistlike from certain angles, but the bars between the "fingers" are distracting to me. Meanwhile, if the gunmetal plates do stay then I think the reason why is obvious. He's a large set with a fair number of new parts and parts in new colors already. Modern set design is usually done within a certain budget, and chances are that for the price point of these Super Hero sets having that many pieces produced in lime could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

It uses alt text! Doesn't that give it like a two-sentence penalty? I definitely agree that moving those shoulder pieces to her hips would not be necessary. While it's fun to challenge yourself as a MOCist to make a female character look more "womanly", there's a cutoff point as to when it's necessary. Most sets of female characters can be gender-ambiguous enough to be understood as female, while many (like Breez 1.0 and 2.0) even have visibly feminine characteristics to their design without going overboard and explicitly sculpting out each female sexual characteristic. You're welcome to mod your set if you prefer Breez a little more decidedly feminine, but it's not a design flaw for her femininity to be subtler.

That could indeed be part of it. In the case of Star Wars, pretty much anyone who remembers the first film has at least a bit of nostalgia for it. Even if they didn't see it when it first came out, it can be one of the films that introduced them to the franchise, or even just a film that showed Where It All Began. With LEGO, the themes people will be most nostalgic for will almost invariably be the ones they remember from their own childhoods, which varies with age range. It might not be their first LEGO theme, either-- I have a particular nostalgia for BIONICLE, which didn't begin until I was at least ten years old. I think it would more likely be the theme that they invested the most time and attention towards. Some people look back fondly at Classic Space, while others, like myself, weren't even around to see it. I still appreciate it, but it's less because of nostalgia and more because of the "retro" set designs and historical significance. I never got any Blacktron sets except second-hand ones through yard sales and the like. But I think it's perhaps the quintessential villainous space theme, although I'd definitely have to call Spyrius (a theme I did live through) the most iconic. LEGO obviously does design some things with nostalgic value in mind. The Space Villain in Collectible Minifigures Series 3 was definitely designed to appeal to someone's nostalgia, whether it was the buyer's or the designer's. Space Police III was also designed with a lot of callbacks to older Space themes, including the extremely retro Rench minifigure. The semi-recent Town Plan set was a clear re-imagining of the older Town Plan, albeit with different buildings and a sense of nostalgia not only for older LEGO sets but also for historical architectural styles. But as for designing whole themes based on nostalgia, I don't really think that's within TLG's power. LEGO is at its core a kids' toy, and while certain sets and products can be designed to appeal to the periphery demographic of AFOLs, they are all still designed with the intention that kids can enjoy them (sometimes better than others, as seen with the Shuttle Adventure which was meant as a display piece and could not really hold up well during play). Any theme that is revived in any way has to be at least partially re-imagined to appeal to today's kids. And really, I would argue that a re-imagining would be truer to the original set designs than just a modernized redesign, as the original themes' appeal came from their ability to appeal to the kids of the eras in which they were released, and so a new theme that targeted only nostalgic adult buyers would be following the letter but not the spirit of the theme.

The samurai is only supposed to come with one katana. Unless you mean you were missing two katanas from two different samurai? In that case, that's a huuuuuge disappointment. Were there any "extra" pieces in place of the missing ones? Often when a part is missing, there will be another part mistakenly added in its place, hence why the weight check doesn't catch that something is missing. My younger brother encountered a quite egregious example in a certain BIONICLE set, where one of the silver shoulder armor pieces was replaced with a red 1x4 brick! So far I haven't had any collectible minifigures with missing parts, but then again I'm not an army builder so I might not be buying them in the same quantities as some other people here. I had thought the lack of reports of missing pieces in Series 3 and onward meant that weight checks had gotten more precise (which would also explain the lack of extra pieces in those series, since they wouldn't be as necessary to ensure a complete set), but now I'm not so sure...

To be fair, the Marvel pics here seem to be in the same prototype stage as they were at Comic-Con, as opposed to the DC pics which look like finalized renders. Note the texture of the faces of Hulk and Iron Man. So there is still a possibility of a change. Personally, though, if I were to make any changes to Hulk I'd give him actual fingers. Looks a bit weird without them. The armor could easily just be explained away as the sort of improbable costume changes action figure designers make all the dang time.

Erm... Splitface is actually the largest of the four lesser villains here. Note that he comes in the larger-scale Hero packaging and has a higher age range than Toxic Reapa, Thornraxx, or Jawblade. I think the difficulty of posing him is offset for me by the fact that he feels like a re-imagined Nui-Rama. Meanwhile, I don't really care much about repetitive names (especially Rocka vs. Rockoh and Scorpio vs. Skopio, because really there's no reason TLG should never use such a common name for a scorpion character as Scorpio just because they had an odd, corrupted version of the name two years prior), since this and BIONICLE are two different things. What does bother me is the fact that we're using such an absurd-sounding name at all when all the other villains have more intuitive English-derived names. That "rnr" in the middle of the name is extremely awkward to pronounce. Why of all things are so many people complaining about the lime green and red on Breez? That's always been her color scheme. Okay, it was transparent red in the 1.0 set, but you get my point. If anything, complain about the white. But as it is, red is only used for her weapons, the beautiful printing on her armor, and, for whatever reason, her thigh beams (that's the only place I think the red can be justifiably criticized). Meanwhile, I find it hard to get a "Christmas" vibe from lime green whatsoever... this also applied with some of the Christmas BBC contest entries on BZPower back in the day. On Furno I think they make plenty of sense, as they help balance out the white on his turbines and Hero Core, so it's not just concentrated in his upper body. Makes a bit less sense on Breez, but again I reckon that the designers felt white would be fair game since it was being used for all the Hero Cores. What bothers me more are the transparent red/orange/whatever shell on one of Furno's arms-- let's hope it's a sign name badges are sticking around-- and the fact that Breez's thigh shells are asymmetrical when she has such a balanced design elsewhere.

There are a few other parts I feel should be added to LDD: Minifigure torsos with longer arms (I don't know the Design ID for the assembled torsos or for the individual arms, but an example Element ID is 4565852) Minifigure hips with longer legs (again, I don't know the Design ID, but an example Element ID is 4562523) Mermaid Tail (53494) Mermaid Tail (95351) 8x8 cockpit dome (95198)

You seem to be confused on this. 3-D printers are extremely expensive. But 3-D printing services like Shapeways offer on-demand 3-D printing at a fairly low cost. It can sometimes be higher in cost depending on the material and the size of whatever you're ordering. But in general, 3-D printing is much cheaper than actually creating molds, hence why TLG themselves have a 3-D printer they use when creating prototype parts (as seen in some of the videos on the LEGO Cars website).

Okay... what am I supposed to be seeing here? I expected to see the collectible minifigures edited to have more realistic skin colors, which wouldn't have impressed me too much in and of itself. But here what I'm seeing are collectible minifigures with skin colors that are just a slightly pastier-looking yellow. They'd need slightly more pinkish skin if they are meant to look realistic. Figures who should have darker skin pigmentation like the Tribal Chief don't even have that. Overall, I can sort of figure what you were trying to do, but I'm not really impressed, and feel more effort should have been put into this if the intended effect was what I imagine it to be. If the intention was something other than giving the figs realistic skin tones, my apologies.

Yeah, that's sort of how I'm expecting the zipper function to work too. As for the material, I expect if they are resealable it will be moderately sturdy (sturdier than polybags or blister packaging, anyway) and semi-flexible.

Hey everyone, check out what I found! Remember how a lot of people's criticism of the Spinjitzu Dojo in the first wave of Ninjago was that it was just a facade and not a full building? Well, there are now building instructions on the LEGO Club website for an alternate model which (at least partially) corrects this! It's a bit small, and still only has two walls, but it's considerably more substantial. I'm sure by now anyone who had any intention of getting the Spinjitzu Dojo is either satisfied with the set, or has come up with their own use for the pieces, but I just figured I'd post this in case anyone was still interested.

There's no way of knowing for sure. I personally thought it had been discontinued after its first wave since there weren't any Kingdoms sets for the first half of 2011, but then there was a wave in the second half of the year. So it's possible that the same thing will happen this year. Alternatively, it might truly be over, but if so it's unclear what, if anything, would replace it.

Here's a wallpaper promoting the game. You get it in other sizes by entering the code "HOGWARTS" on this page.

To be fair, they're toy cars. It's the same market TLG was targeting with the Tiny Turbos, even before there was a license involved. Even before Cars existed as a franchise, companies like Hot Wheels and Matchbox were extremely successful in marketing toy cars, so for TLG to have their own answer to that style of individually-packaged toy car is not particularly unusual.

Zane actually does have his own vehicle-- in the snake truck set he has a small snowmobile. I find it strangely hilarious that the year after he had the smallest of the four dragons, he gets the smallest of the four vehicles. Let's all hold a pity party for Zane!

I MOC within official themes, but official themes that I like. I liked U.F.O. a lot when it was out, but my opinions of it quickly dwindled as I got more sets and realized just how inconsistent it was aesthetically with a lot of other LEGO themes-- especially when it came to its high-detail printed pieces. The large number of "<insert that tiresome argument>" pieces in the theme were probably another factor in my later dislike for the theme-- every time I tried to MOC something within the theme I had difficulty making it look like anything but a variant of one of the existing sets, except without any cool functions to make it interesting. More recent themes' aliens are a lot more likeable, but then again 1996-1998 was a period of time long before TLG hit their stride when it came to minifigure design (the bandits in Wild West were some of the first non-female minifigures who weren't variations on the classic smiley, but then again one of them had sclerae and a nose, a plague that spread to every Native American fig in that theme). Today you could use a lot of themes' minifigures interchangeably, even if aliens still stand out obviously as aliens and so forth. Really, as much as I appreciate some of the older Space themes of my lifetime like Spyrius (and even some of the ones I missed out on like both iterations of Blacktron), U.F.O. is a theme I prefer to leave in the past. At least the Mania Magazine stories, where the commander Alpha Draconis feared nothing but his own hideous reflection, can bring a smile to my face when I do look back at that theme. The second year used Bright Blue, not Medium Blue. But I get what you're saying. I guess we just have different tastes in color schemes. I've been a big fan of BIONICLE and Hero Factory, where color schemes with vibrant primary and secondary colors have been common (incidentally, I have much fonder memories of color schemes with vibrant colors to memories of color schemes from 2004-2005 BIONICLE which used darker, bolder colors alongside grey and silver). An example color scheme from this year's Hero Factory sets which I'm particularly fond of is seen in Furno 2.0, who uses bright yellow and bright red together rather well. An older BIONICLE example is Tahu, although with his bright red primary and bright orange secondary his contrast pales in comparison to Power Miners. Hard to say whether my interest in these sets inspired my love of this type of color schemes or the other way around.

Also, the new torso piece is the same one used for "Ultrabuild" Joker and Iron Man from the Super Heroes theme. In Joker you can see its attachment points, whereas on Iron Man it's used to attach a separate chest armor piece. That's not total confirmation of whether the 2.0 chest could work on this new armor, though, since the 2.0 chest can be kind of fiddly about what it will or won't attach firmly to.

Wonder if the mods could move all the 2012 discussion from the 2011 topic into this one... Anyway, I wouldn't think a purple Agori head would be any good. They've had purple transparent pieces before, but not all transparent pieces are equal, and in particular all colors the Agori head has come in so far have been of the fluorescent variety (Transparent Fluorescent Blue, Transparent Fluorescent Green, and Transparent Fluorescent Reddish Orange). There have never been any Transparent Fluorescent Purple colors-- the only other transparent fluorescent colors I know of besides the three used so far are Transparent Fluorescent Red (Tahu's original eye color) and Transparent Fluorescent Yellow (Gali's original eye color), both discontinued. That's no excuse for not even trying to use purple anywhere in Evo's color scheme. Transparent Fluorescent Blue would have been a better match than the eye color they chose, but for whatever reason it doesn't appear anywhere in the upcoming wave. In the very least they could have put some purple somewhere on his torso print, like they did with red for Breez, yellow for Furno, and white for Rocka. Breez is my favorite hero, followed by Evo. I can't really pick a favorite among the villains; I think they're all very creative besides the hopefully-prototype Black Phantom.

I think that depends entirely on how long it remains successful. As of right now, it's still the ninth most popular item on LEGO.com, far surpassing regular Design byME orders. So I don't foresee it going away any time soon. At some point, they'll probably have to drop certain parts from the service; they can't just keep adding a majority of the new pieces from every wave without at some point narrowing the parts palette. But they've still got plenty of time before they have to start doing that.