Aanchir

Alright, I'm not quite happy with what we see in this preliminary pic either. But I'd like to point out several things people seem to be ignoring: A set with just the Black Pearl's crew would not work at all, because that doesn't allow for any actual conflict-based role play. There have to be some adversaries for Jack and Will, and I think Davy Jones and his crew are as good a set of adversaries as any. Don't get me wrong-- I would have loved to see Cotton (and his parrot), Anamaria, and other members of Jack's crew as minifigures. But frankly, they couldn't have been included in this set unless they were added in addition to Davy Jones's crew or in place of the other main characters already included. Since it's a preliminary pic, I imagine the sails will probably be one of the most likely things to change before the final version. Glad someone else pointed that out, because I was too afraid I was just misremembering the films; however, the sails were the first problem with this model that stood out to me, and one of the things I feel needs to change most urgently. In terms of size, perhaps this is just another area in which I'm inexperienced, but besides a couple from my childhood that were just two prefab hull pieces in length, I've never seen a pirate ship set that could be considered "small". So it's not on par with the Imperial Flagship in size. It's still a fairly large pirate ship with as many sails as the Queen Anne's Revenge-- certainly larger than any pirate ship sets I've ever owned. Lacking detail is a charge I'll concede. The front in particular isn't very substantial-looking-- the figurehead looks like it's practically just floating there, which doesn't look good at all. With that said, all we've seen is one preliminary picture. We haven't seen anything of the interior or the stern, which could both potentially have a lot of detail. Furthermore, it's slated to be $20 cheaper than the QAR, and not a D2C set. Knowing those two things, I don't think anyone could expect it to be the "flagship set" of this theme. If we're lucky, then January might bring us an extremely-high-priced, extremely-detailed set of something even more breathtaking like the Flying Dutchman. After all, that's a ship that couldn't easily be rendered in detail on the same budget as this or the QAR, and with enough detail to make a great D2C set. If Diagon Alley could be released the first January after the theme's debut, the same could apply for a D2C set in this theme.

Really? Huh. When the products page first got updated, Witch Doctor's instructions weren't included, and I hadn't been checking back regularly since then. I figured there'd have been more talk about it if they had already debuted, but I guess it wasn't very big news anyway. As for Witch Doctor's build, I disagree that titan builds are supposed to be messy. If you look at some of the best-designed BIONICLE titan sets like Brutaka or the 2008 Takanuva, they are sculpted strategically to be impressive from all angles. Even ones with atypical postures or anatomy, like Kardas or Nocturn, still manage to maintain a unified aesthetic that doesn't separate them from smaller sets that rely more on specialized details rather than the overall shape of their build. Witch Doctor, on the other hand, has a much sloppier-looking design. I've started building him on LDD to see if he somehow succeeds at making his Technic-intensive build work for him, but I've gotten to step 25 (where you start building the arms) and am not impressed so far. His legs are pretty hideous from side view, and his torso looks awful from side view or from behind. Didn't like the hollow look of the hero sets' torsos? Witch Doctor's torso is even worse, since rather than having form-fitting armor that seals up the body from most angles, his armor struggles to even cover the front of his torso frame, and doesn't even come close to sealing up his sides or back. His poseability is limited by his hip and ankle joint design, and his feet are on the whole inferior in design to Fire Lord's (which at least were relatively foot-shaped and to scale with the rest of the model). There is hardly even an attempt to cover up the nasty, blocky exposed Technic that the construction of his legs and arms depend on. It hurts to be unable to find many redeeming factors in Witch Doctor's design, since from its creativity you can easily tell that lots of work was put into it by the designers. However, regrettably, it feels like all that effort was wasted on trying to make the set as creative as possible and not on streamlining it so it actually looks good. From experience trying to design BIONICLE MOCs over the years, I know that it takes hard work to make a design smoother while also making it use fewer pieces. Unfortunately, I don't see this in Witch Doctor. The set seems to value quantity over quality in many ways, using its overwhelming size and creative building techniques to distract viewers from the fact that these techniques really do more harm than good for the set's appearance. He's brilliantly creative, but I'd much rather if TLG spent their time trying to work out the many flaws in simpler, Fire Lord-style titan sets before trying to tackle something of this scale and level of complexity.

Thanks for the review. I love this set from what I have seen. The luxurious dark red interior is very nice, as is the sleek and accurate shape of the vessel. One question: when this was being exhibited at Toy Fair, there was nothing locking the nose of the ship closed, making the top flip open if the ship was turned upside-down. Does the final ship remedy this problem, or is it still restricted to right-side-up play? The minifigures definitely impress me. Darth Maul's "horns piece" might not be a perfect fit (it would be nicer if it had less of a seam between it and the minifigure head, especially in the back where it's very obvious), but I feel the size is tolerable, and I'm very grateful to TLG for designing it since the inability to use Darth Maul without a hood was something that always bothered me about the first wave of Episode 1 sets in 1999. All of the figs have back printing, which is a great detail. I like the use of Medium Nougat (BL's Medium Dark Flesh, introduced last year in the Prince of Persia theme) for Captain Panaka's skin tone, as well as the use of Transparent Bright Green (introduced last year in the Atlantis theme) on Qui-Gon's lightsaber. While Transparent Bright Green isn't as "glowy" as Transparent Fluorescent Green (BL's Trans-Neon Green), it's more consistent with the other non-fluorescent lightsaber colors. The new Qui-Gon Jinn is a great likeness of the actor's stoic depiction of the character, and Padme's face is much better than that horrendous face used for her in her first appearance as a minifigure. In fact, the only thing that really bothers me about the minifigures is Darth Maul's face. The way his chin narrows so visibly looks simply incompatible with the cylindrical shape of the minifigure head, and I'd have much rather if his face had been distorted a bit to have a wider chin. Of course, with his tattoos this may have been difficult.

HeroFactory.LEGO.com has been updated once more, this time with Witch Doctor's building instructions. My goodness, what a messy build. I suppose we'll have to wait for a review to tell if the end result looks as messy as the intermediate building steps, but I'm not optimistic. He's definitely a great parts pack, as evidenced by the already celebrated 39 red ball joints, but also his numerous other joint pieces-- four of 90616, ten of 90622, eight of 90613, two of 90605, and twenty-eight of 93571 (the new y-joint piece). Still not totally impressed with the final model, however. You can tell there was a lot of work put into it, but the end result is a blocky construction that hardly looks as sleek or refined as other Hero Factory sets and characters.

Also keep in mind that most of the cars characters are loaded down with printed parts, some of which are printed on multiple irregular surfaces.. Grem only has two printed parts, each of which includes a single flat decoration. That could be as much of a cost factor or more than how well-known the characters are. Out of curiosity, how many parts did this set come with? None of the major database sites (Brickset, Bricklink, or Peeron) have a piece count yet.

Huh. His helmet definitely didn't look sleek; I was speaking more about his torso. But I was personally only going by official pics, photos, and the TV episodes, since I never had any first-wave sets myself, so I could be flat wrong. It definitely looked sleeker than the rookie torso to me.

That's just because LDD Manager uses Bricklink color names, whereas LDD uses official TLG color names. In real life, the color LDD calls "Dark Stone Grey" is the same as the color Bricklink calls "Dark Bluish Gray". If you want to learn which Bricklink color names correspond to which TLG color names, LDD Manager includes a "Color Reference" file. Just click "LDD Brick Finder and Color Reference" when LDD Manager first opens, and then click the second tab. It's not a perfect conversion chart since the Bricklink color names themselves are imperfect-- for instance, Bricklink often refers to several metallic colors with just one name, or alternatively sometimes has several names for a single metallic color. But with most colors this is one of the most accurate and up-to-date color conversion charts on the Internet.

It has three of those... flap... thingies. There's probably a third cannon behind that-- hence, three cannons, not two. Note that my poor understanding of nautical terminology is one of the the reasons I don't post often in this subforum. I'm sure there's a better term for those things besides "flaps", so forgive me for my stupidity on such matters.

Apparently not! According to this interview with set designer Mark Stafford, this was actually considered by the concept designers for the first Space sets. Of course, in later years of Classic Space, this didn't work so well, as additional colors of spacemen were added to the Space theme without any obvious real-world analogues. Nowadays, the Classic Space theme and the "Neo-Classic Space" fan-theme are typically considered to be exploration themes with one unified faction of many-colored astronauts and very little conflict. This is probably in part inspired by the box art for these sets, which shows the always-smiling astronauts of those days working peacefully side-by-side. But this cooperative vision of the future was clearly not meant as a constraint on kids' imaginations, as the sets included enough lasers and color-coded uniforms for kids to use the sets for more conflict-based role play.

I recommend LDD, because rather than just moving the parts into place according to coordinates, the parts "click" together more naturally. Additionally, LDD lets you see the model in three dimensions as you're building it, rather than just showing 2-D elevations of it and later creating a 3-D image with rendering software. This can lead to a more natural building experience than with LDraw software. LDD's colors have a 1:1 relationship with official LEGO color names and numbers, and most colors you will ever need for building are available (besides, in some cases, certain "speckle" colors, chrome colors, and metallic colors). And through Superkalle's regular contact with the LDD team at TLG, errors can be reported and corrected, and information that would be hard for AFOLs to find (such as certain part numbers) can be put to use in the programming. The disadvantages to LDD are numerous, of course. Its parts palette is somewhat limited-- while it tends to get new parts more quickly than LDraw, it lacks a lot of older hinge styles, and often doesn't get parts from certain themes (it has very few Toy Story figure parts and no Fabuland or Technic figure parts, for example). Decorations and colors are somewhat limited, as mentioned above. Since LDD is proprietary software, you can't just download "parts packs" off the internet-- you're stuck with the available palette in whatever mode you're using. The "more natural building experience" mentioned above doesn't let you nudge parts easily to find the best alignment-- instead, everything must be hinged in a way that avoids collisions. This can be frustrating in (for example) a model that makes heavy use of flex cable. Occasionally (although this is rare), the fact that the parts "click" together means that illegal or impossible connections will be allowed and legal connections will be impossible due to poor programming. LDD's software is constantly being improved, but it hasn't been around as long as LDraw and so often has more bugs to work out. And as mentioned, LDD's auto-generated building instructions are often exceedingly poor. In general, I tend to prefer LDD to my experience with LDraw software, but depending on your typical building/designing process for your MOCs it's purely a matter of preference which software is best. And neither is ideal for all types of building. I hope you find one that works for you, though.

Here's the full collection of LEGO clocks from ClicTime. Another noteworthy one coming out this year is the Ninjago clock, which is the first one to come with an accessory. If anyone's interested, these minifigure clocks are at 1:6 scale, as are the LEGO Brick clocks. Not sure if other LEGO electronics not by ClicTime are at the same scale. If so, then you could easily stack (for instance) a minifigure clock on top of a LEGO Brick radio. If not, I guess there's not much point in them being intercompatible, unless you want more than one clock in the same room for some reason. EDIT: Nope, the other LEGO electronics from Digital Blue (including radios) are 1:10 scale. The flashlights from Play Visions look like they're at 1:6 scale, though (the Darth Vader flashlight is 7.5 inches, so the math seems to work out)!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this one of the first 3#### polybags to have a name printed on it? The ones I recall seeing just have the number without any name, much like the 2#### Brickmaster polybags. Anyway, that set does have some nice parts for just a giveaway. Out of curiosity, did you put the "visor" on backwards, or do the instructions tell you to put it on differently from the box art?

Bulk was somewhat sleek in his original form as well, although this was partially just because the first wave of heroes had almost identical builds. Out of the first six Heroes, I'd say that Stringer was probably the chunkiest design.

Really clever! I had no idea what to expect when I entered this topic. Cute cartoon characters built on a foundation of NPU certainly exceeded my expectations!

I doubt it, since it's just an ad for something you haven't gotten rather than something that's explicitly a "reward" (like the Agent sticker in the actual Hero Recon Team package). I'd be more likely to think that it's a regional thing-- after all, it wouldn't make much sense to advertise Hero Recon Team in countries where it's not available. The ones offered to online reviewers by TLG could very easily be the "bare minimum", without any regional goodies. On a side note related to the stickers, do you know what I'd like better than either sticker that's appeared in HF sets? A sticker of an actual Hero Core. It'd look great worn on a T-shirt (for the kids) or put on a laptop (for us AFOLs who wouldn't dare waste it on something we'd have to tear it off of later).

Great review. Bulk 3.0 is one of the 3.0 heroes I know I'll be getting, even though I'm a bit uncomfortable with my own decision on that. I'm not sure how much of it is me liking the set's design and how much is just me being a "completionist" (something I want to avoid after experiencing that as a BIONICLE fan). His parts are definitely very nice, and I like his physique and symmetry. The transparent green name badge is cool, although I much preferred the design of the 2.0 name badges, and out of the 3.0 name badges Bulk's is one of my least favorite. I just don't like the design of that wolf pattern. Bulk's color scheme is very nice and echoes his previous form very nicely. His canister is well-designed, and after reading the directions for his combi model online it's one of the ones I'm most impressed with. The Hero Recon Team sticker is a cool inclusion, although since it's basically the "Agent" sticker from the actual Hero Recon Team purchase with different text, it makes the Hero Recon Team offer a little disappointing.

Personally, I hated most of the chess/tic-tac-toe sets, for the same reason most people seem to really like them. They're little more than glorified minifigure packs. Now the Castle Giant Chess Set, that's where it's at. Artfully-designed chess pieces and an equally-intricate board. My twin brother has attempted to design Kingdoms, Pirates, and Ninjago chess sets on LDD based on this set's template, and I hope one day we can make one of them in real life.

Just corrected several sets only to have Firefox crash. I will not be correcting any of these sets again anytime in the foreseeable future, because I simply don't have the patience. However, note that every set I was able to correct had errors. If you have posted a set in the past three pages, attempt to correct your own set's errors, assuming that every set posted has at least one error and probably multiples. I suppose this is as good a time as any to do what I've been hoping to do for a long time. I will be taking a hiatus from correcting LXF files in this topic for the rest of the month unless I change my mind at any point. I would have liked it if I could have put off this hiatus until I was confident that Eurobricks members had the skills and experience needed to avoid errors in their models for the most part, but it is becoming abundantly clear to me that unless I follow Superkalle's suggestion and take the time to put together a "checklist" other members can go through to correct their own models, this will never be the case. So this will be my main LDD project in the next couple weeks: creating a step-by-step guide explaining how a person with very limited knowledge of LEGO's colors and parts can correct errors in their models. I have no doubt it will be many times more infuriating than actually correcting the models myself. There's a reason that despite getting good grades in many of my high school and college classes I have never thought much of people's claims that I would make a good teacher. I will still be doing color-corrections on Eurobricks LDD RCB 3, just as I agreed before that RCB began. But color-correcting everybody's LXFs of actual sets has become too tedious to keep up with for the time being. Best of luck to all this site's fine LDD builders at finding or avoiding the errors that we are all prone to making.

I think it's more likely that this is just a way of trying to make the organisms of the Hero Factory universe more consistently robotic in nature. If it were meant to reveal a big secret then it would probably be better hidden. As it is, the fact that there was no biomechanical plantlife in BIONICLE always kind of bugged me, and so seeing explicitly electronic plantlife here is in my eyes just a really cool design decision by the folks at LEGO and/or ADVANCE, not something that we should be reading into too much.

Models on DesignByMe cost a flat rate of 10 USD in addition to the cost of the pieces. Additionally, the individual pieces tend to cost up to 25% more than they do on Pick-A-Brick (which has the same parts selection as LEGO DesignByMe mode of LDD). With larger models, you'll pay less per piece than on a smaller model because you're only charged the flat 10 USD rate once per model, but you'll always save even more by purchasing the same parts through Pick-A-Brick. Bricks in Design-By-Me or Pick-A-Brick have the same price in all colors. Generally, larger pieces are more expensive than smaller pieces, but there are also other considerations. Parts with printing or pre-assembled parts are generally most expensive of all, so on PaB many minifigure torsos are .68 USD apiece, and the horse is .75 USD Not sure about any price list, but as I mentioned the prices tend to be 25% higher than the online Pick-A-Brick prices for the same pieces. So, for instance, a .24 USD Hero Factory part would cost .30 USD through DesignByMe (in addition to the $10 cost of the custom box and instruction booklet). To my knowledge, TLG might reject any official sets put in the online DesignByMe gallery (which is what you order parts through). However, sufficiently modified models ordered through the DesignByMe gallery should be OK. For instance, there are enough Hero Factory parts on DesignByMe to build a model slightly resembling an existing Hero Factory set. If you were to build set 2065 but change all the red parts to blue and all the yellow parts to red, it would likely be permitted. LEGO's Terms of Moderation don't mention anything about copying official LEGO products, just prohibiting models that copy other companies' products which TLG would be violating trademark law by reproducing. At the same time, I doubt they'd appreciate their own products being copied In general, of course, most sets would be cheaper as actual sets or as Pick-A-Brick purchases than as DesignByMe purchases.

Just noticed the update to the Hero Factory website myself! I totally didn't know about it until I went to check for updates on HeroSector01. I can't believe there wasn't any discussion of this going on here! I love the animations on the products page for the new sets. I'm especially impressed that the figures actually interact with their environment, making these animations one step more advanced than the second-wave products page animations-- and I was extremely impressed with those to begin with! Another thing I like is that the movement of the characters is based on the animals that are the basis of their design: thus, Raw-Jaw lumbers around in an apelike manner, Furno glides fluidly to the ground from on top of a branch, and Stringer patiently sniffs the air before striking. There are things I dislike about the new products page animations, though. Fangz's front limbs are bent rather unnaturally, for instance. And the animal-like movements do not necessarily fit the personalities of the heroes-- however, I suppose this is more a consequence of the heroes being designed around animals that didn't reflect their personalities rather than any fault on the part of the people making the animations. And yes, products page updates include a "Building Instructions" link for each set, so those of you who are uncertain about how certain sets are constructed can now satisfy your curiosity. The Building Instructions page also has instructions for the new combi models for the 3.0 heroes!

Yes. See this topic. It will apparently be released exclusively for the Nintendo WiiU (which won't be out until next year) and Nintendo 3DS (which I guess would be what it's released for this Autumn).

Technically, the wrinkle lines are Medium Nougat, and I personally love 'em. True, they are used an awful lot in the collectible minifigures (and nowadays even elsewhere-- most of the Alien Conquest figs with facial wrinkles use this color, as does this guy). But just consider that the alternative way of "adding character" in previous years would have been garish black facial wrinkles (and occasionally horrible uncanny valley like many minifigures in the Western theme). In the case of the Tribal Chief and the new Inuit ice fisherman, who now use the subtle facial wrinkles to add that touch of ethnicity that in previous years would have been created with terrible racial caricatures, I think we've really come a long way (incidentally, the ice fisherman would probably have the same gaunt cheek lines whether this color were being used for printing or not). Today's use of Medium Nougat facial wrinkles on so many minifigures doesn't change the way the faces are designed-- it just makes the faces (which on the collectible minifigures have to be unique in some way or another) look more natural compared to previous methods. Series 3, actually. Previous series used black lines for facial wrinkles and cheek lines, which compared to the new minifigures tend to look obvious and garish. Just compare the cheek lines on the S2 Pharaoh or Surfer with those on the S3 Elf.

I'm talking about "bigger" in overall size/weight, not in terms of piece count. Yes, the Taj Mahal had an enormous piece count, but almost all of those pieces were fairly tiny detail pieces-- the largest pieces were plates, baseplates, and Technic bricks. MMV, similarly, had a lot of smaller detail pieces rather than big pre-made castle walls. And so despite a higher piece count, the MMV wasn't that much larger in terms of overall scale than the typical LEGO castle. You have a good point about how the price of MMV was pretty minimal for a set that stunning, and that TLG could easily release a larger set at a higher price point, but I still feel a castle that meets the criteria people seem to be asking for in a castle would be far too expensive even for a D2C set. People don't want a small or open-walled tower, which would mean a larger, more spacious keep would be required-- I'm guessing at least an 8x16 overall footprint. The castle walls, if they are intended to be an actual structure rather than just thin walls, would also need to have a fairly large footprint. Add in minifigures-- which can always be counted on to drive the price up further-- and there's only so much expansion that TLG could afford. Note also that most sets over $150 have been Star Wars sets. This is partly because Star Wars sets have to be more expensive than regular sets due to licensing costs, but also because these are some of the only sets that can be counted on to be popular enough to sell even for such outrageous prices. Star Wars sets have an enormous fanbase that extends even outside of the typical LEGO fan community. This is not the case with Kingdoms sets, which have a much smaller fanbase both among kids and AFOLs. I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see a better LEGO castle set-- when I was a kid, I had a lot of fun trying to build castles of my own, sometimes based on David Macaulay's book Castle which went into great detail about the architecture and function of medieval castles. At the same time, I think it's just not realistic to expect much more than the sort of castle TLG has been offering us for years now. The Flying Ninja Fortress is the closest thing I can think of to a castle with the bulk people are hoping for, and even that probably wouldn't satisfy people's demands since it's only a front wall and two side walls. Naturally, of course, if TLG does release a castle of this level of detail, then I'll enjoy the surprise a great deal. I rarely buy LEGO's D2C sets and certainly wouldn't buy this one, since I'm not a Kingdoms fan myself. But at the same time, I'm always happy to see TLG's designers going above and beyond expectations when it comes to D2C set design.

I think it was to be expected that the tommy gun couldn't fit. After all, the tommy gun is one stud wide at its widest point, as is the violin case. There's no way you could fit one inside the other unless the walls were paper-thin. It's a real pity, since both the tommy gun and the violin case are so well-designed that it wouldn't have been logical to redesign either one. Perhaps TLG might one day release a violin that's compatible with this violin case, expanding its versatility. I don't think the Brickforge one would fit, being as large as it is, and I don't know if TLG could release a smaller one that still looked as natural in a minifigure's hands as the Brickforge one. But one can always dream... Thanks so much for all these pics!