Aanchir

Disney didn't own the Marvel license when Mega Bloks first began their partnership with Marvel. Disney only bought Marvel a couple years ago, even before the Disney-LEGO licensing partnership began.

Very nice. Although after reading a comment in the Alien Conquest topic earlier, I'd like to see a photo of the underside to see what it ends up looking like in the final set. I love the Alien Commander's military uniform and the fact that the news reporter's glasses are crooked on her "scared" face! The printed tile for her clipboard is amazing, although I think it would have made far more sense if it were a Reddish Brown tile with a White print instead of the other way around.

Not sure if anyone's mentioned it, but all the new Harry Potter sets are in the latest catalog. Unfortunately, they're not available yet from LEGOshop.com in the United States, and probably not in other countries either. It says pre-orders start on the 16th, and then June 1st is when shipping begins. The catalog does suggest combining the new Hogwarts with last year's. So I may end up getting that just for that sole purpose, since last year's Hogwarts Castle set is the only one of last year's sets I've gotten so far. It's nice that they're physically compatible, although I hope they're also visually compatible.

Because of the way the sidewalks are built, actually, it would be unbelievably easy to just swap the lamps around with 2x2 tiles in order to space them out properly. If you don't mind modding your sets, that is.

Looking at this model greatly improves my appreciation of Scorpio, but that's in part because there's a major error. Between the two pairs of legs with silver cladding on the feet, the real set has two tiny and inconsistently-designed legs that almost look vestigial. You can make out the foot of one of them here. These two legs have black foot cladding instead of silver, and if the earlier preliminary picture at Gizmodo is to be believed, have bright yellowish green leg cladding instead of black. This eliminates any sort of consistency in the leg designs, severely diminishing my appreciation of the set. Also, I believe the angle connectors on Scorpio's head ought to be number 5 (112.5 degrees) rather than number four (135 degrees).

I believe some of the LEGO reps at Toy Fair said the underside was unfinished, hence why there are exposed, colored wires connected to the not-yet-finalized sound brick. Hard to be sure since we have yet to see a proper review of the mothership, but the build itself could very easily have changed significantly since that version shown at Toy Fair. EDIT: Just discovered that the latest catalog lists an Alien Conquest Battle Pack as item 853301. It contains both types of Alien Trooper, two ADU soldiers, and the businessman from the tripod set. Not sure if it is or isn't made in China, but I'd assume it is, so let's not start the Chinese plastic debate here until someone owns the battle pack and can tell us whether or not it shares the quality issues that the occasional Chinese-made products have had.

I'm a 90s kid, so needless to say my memories of my childhood LEGO will be a lot different than a lot of people's. Many of the themes I liked as a child were the ones that just happened to be current then. I had a sizeable collection of Islanders, Dragon Masters (the US name for Dragon Knights), Spyrius, Aquazone, Exploriens, Fright Knights, Wild West (the US name for Western), Adventurers (the desert wave only), and UFO. In general I didn't accumulate town/city sets very compulsively, besides Launch Command (the US name for the first Space Port subtheme of Town in the mid-90s). I have to say that my ownership of a LEGO Mania Magazine subscription, full-size wall posters, and other merchandise advertising these themes didn't hurt my love for them, and these factors are part of the reason I never got a huge collection of certain other themes like Dark Forest. In the late 90s I became attracted to various Technic themes-- Speed Slammers, Cyber Slam (the US name for the Bright Violet, Bright Bluish Green, and Bright Yellow part of the Competition theme), then Throwbots (the US name for Slizers), RoboRiders, and as 2001 rolled around, BIONICLE. I briefly collected Star Wars sets, but was much more driven to complete a collection of BIONICLE sets, and as licensed themes became more and more expensive I bought less and less System in the coming years. System sets I did invest in were usually character-based, like Knights' Kingdom II and Exo-Force. Exo-Force is probably a key reason why my interest in System sets returned, as like Knights' Kingdom it gave me a healthy supply of useful BIONICLE-like pieces along with the more traditional bricks. In 2008, when I was on the verge of AFOLdom, I became interested in the Agents theme, and that helped bring me to where I am today as a collector of action/sci-fi themes like Power Miners, Space Police III, and Atlantis. I never had a proper "dark age" unless you count the period from 2003-2007 when I rarely bought anything that wouldn't contribute to my BIONICLE part supply. And interestingly, this is when I was most active in the online BIONICLE community, through which I first became aware of the AFOL community. Perhaps there really is some merit to the tired AFOL argument that BIONICLE "isn't true LEGO". However, I'd instead argue that it was a vastly different kind of LEGO that, depending on your perspective, either isolated me from traditional brick-built themes or kept me interested in LEGO during what might otherwise have been my dark age. If BIONICLE hadn't been a part of the picture and I had entered my dark age in 2003, then who knows how many years it might have been before that dark age ended and I took my place as an AFOL? I have many embarrassing memories of my time in the BIONICLE fan community: debating furiously over the smallest and silliest topics, writing blog entries and terrible fan fiction that demonstrated the shallow ideas of love I had acquired from high-school English classes, and creating MOCs and art that showed a similarly shallow understanding of sexuality. But in general I think the BIONICLE fan community was a safer and more nurturing place to grow up than the wider world of popular teenage interests, and since it eventually brought me into the AFOL community I can't help but think my time in it was for the best. Today, at age 20, I am being forced to reconsider my teenage years as a BIONICLE fan once again, having felt a similar pull from this year's sets in the Hero Factory theme as I felt when BIONICLE first made its debut (but having felt this pull for different and more mature reasons than a naive fascination with anything deep or mysterious). I never plan to go back to the person I was as a part of the BIONICLE fan community, but there are echoes of that in who I am today, and I hope that I can make use of those echoes rather than keeping them around just because I can't let go. P.S.: My capacity to write long, rambling, and introspective essays is a key example of one of those echoes. I hope I didn't bore you!

As of right now, Mega Bloks has the license for all Marvel characters. Some people speculate that once that license expires (which nobody is sure when to expect), LEGO might acquire the license since LEGO has such a strong licensing partnership with Disney (which owns Marvel). However, until then, Avengers sets aren't an option for TLG.

New Dark Red has the same material ID (154) as Dark Red has always had. So it won't be any significant variation from other Dark Red parts (and in fact is almost certainly the same Dark Red color you would find in any current sets) Chances are the only reason for the "New" in its name is that it may have been re-formulated, something that often happens with LEGO colors if they have significant problems but not significant enough for the color to be replaced entirely. Since Dark Red is known to have a wide range of variability in its appearance, this might have been a problem significant enough to warrant re-formulating the color. Granted, I've never known TLG to use the "new" terminology at all for any colors, even ones that have been re-formulated a significant number of times like 131 Silver (a now-obsolete color that was replaced last year by 315 Silver Metallic, since the many times they tried re-formulating it weren't sufficient to solve the color's inherent problems with inconsistency). But this is just the best guess I have for why a color that was once known merely as Dark Red even by TLG is now called New Dark Red on Pick-A-Brick and LEGO Digital Designer. Yes, Brick Yellow and Sand Yellow are the same as Tan and Dark Tan, respectively. The Peeron Color List is an excellent resource for learning which official names used by TLG correspond to the Bricklink names more frequently used by AFOLs.

Well, in the very least they're now on S@H. Also, for at least a month now the Space Shuttle has been available from certain Borders bookstores.

Have you seen the latest one? I haven't, and I'm curious if the writing is as bad as the original four-part miniseries. The scenes from it that showed up on LEGO.com seem a lot more impressive emotionally than any scenes from the first four episodes, but then again since all of these scenes are from a single 30-minute episode they could easily be squished together to the point of meaninglessness in the actual thing.

For starters, because Mega Bloks had the Spider-Man 3 license. I also don't know how profitable the Spider-Man license was for TLG.

The use of "a" for feminine names and words is Latin in origin, and actually occurs in a lot of languages more often than it does in English (let me also take the opportunity to say that it was a formation I generally hated in BIONICLE names unless the original name was from Latin or another romance language-- far too many fan characters had female names that ended in "a" for no reason). But personally, that's not the impression I get from the name Rocka at all. Instead, it reminds me of the word "rocker" with the end slightly corrupted, much like "gangsta". It doesn't at all strike me as a feminine name, and in fact the consonant and vowel sounds make it seem harsh and masculine to me. But those sorts of impressions are really subjective. EDIT: On a side note, I wonder what Rocka's first name will be (assuming Rocka is, in fact, a last name in the same way as Nex and Evo). You do have a good point that some of the names like Fangz would be extremely weird as species names. I can't easily picture a character saying, "Look out! A Fangz!"

Technically, "dark tan" isn't officially called dark tan. It's called "Sand Yellow" by TLG. But it is indeed an excellent way of demonstrating the point, because people will continue to call it dark tan, and it's largely a matter of perspective whether you consider that an accurate name, and which name you prefer to use (the more official one, the more familiar one to fans, or a name of your own that you consider most suitable). There are other colors with even more diverse names-- Bright Light Orange to a Bricklink user is Flame Yellowish Orange to a LEGO designer or LDD user and Keetorange to a BIONICLE fan. Trans-Medium Blue to a Bricklink user may be Transparent Ice Blue (or sometimes just "ice blue") to a BIONICLE fan and Transparent Fluorescent Blue to a LEGO designer. A BIONICLE fan's Metru Brown is Bricklink's Dark Flesh and TLG's Brown. And let's not even get into all the names for TLG's Medium Nougat... With baseplates, I think the matter is also a very subjective one. A plate (that is to say, thinner than a brick) used as a base can technically be called a baseplate without being inaccurate. And in a review like this, I don't think there's any problem calling it one since that is what it is used for. However, it is somewhat misleading to use a term that is contrary to the terminology used by almost all other people who are in situations where they have to describe LEGO parts or identify them from a description. TLG officially calls the thinner ones base plates, and Bricklink calls them baseplates, but that doesn't mean that calling a thicker, 3.2mm plate a "baseplate" is inaccurate as long as the context shows what part you're referring to.

We don't know anything about whether or not there will be four series this year. And the stated release date from Toy Fair for Series 5 is September, so it would be more likely to start showing up in July or August.

I haven't seen any colors that obviously stand out as Medium Azure, but it's not as obvious a color as Aqua. And even Dark Azure was hard to recognize as a new color in some Toy Fair pictures unless someone told you it was new. It's true, I'm not sure how fond I am of the number of blue colors we have currently. But consider that these three new blue colors can kind of be considered modern-day replacements for Light Bluish Green (BL's Aqua), Medium Bluish Green (BL's Turquoise), and Bright Bluish Green (BL's Dark Turquoise), which haven't been seen in years. It's true I'd have preferred something a little further towards the green shades, but I have greatly regretted the disappearance of that portion of the color palette so anything filling that empty space in the palette satisfies me. There will be between 60 and 70 colors on the palette after the addition of these six. In 2003, there were more like 90 to 100, possibly more (all the physical color palettes I have seen from that time have some rather glaring omissions). So it'll likely be some time before the reduction of the color palette is completely undone, and in the meantime I'm sure some rarely-used colors like Light Royal Blue (BL's Bright Light Blue) may end up getting removed from the palette to compensate.

It'd be OK for Rocka to be a girl, but frankly the set makes more sense as a guy to me since the helmet/headdress resembles a male lion. Could be just a female character with a "masculine" personality, but that would be way too heavy symbolism for a kid's plastic toy. As much of a shame as it is, there simply don't seem to be any females in the next wave of HF. But then again, that was the same as pretty much every BIONICLE "villain wave" up until Gorast first showed up. So as much as I hate the gender imbalance, we're not actually moving backward unless 2012 turns this into a trend. In my personal opinion, a bigger problem with the next wave of Hero Factory is the color imbalance. I'm very disappointed that Scorpio is the only set with a "cool" primary color, and that warm and neutral colors dominate most of the designs. Then again, I was a big fan of the vibrant and systematic color schemes of the 2.0 heroes, and Stringer and Bulk couldn't really have come back without messing that up.

Sorry, by "top" I was referring to the uppermost surface of the minifig torso, not the article of clothing. But IMHO, the dancer's pink sides are no more bothersome than the fact that Hula Dancer's bikini top fails to wrap around the sides. Yes, it's imperfect, but these are minifigures and after a while you get used to dealing with unavoidable design imperfections. I understand that it just seems to bother you more than it bothers me, and that's perfectly OK. Different people are bothered by different things. Personally, the fact that the Series 2 Lifeguard's leg printing doesn't have a black line separating the swimsuit from her skin color bothers me, since that makes the leg decorations inconsistent with the torso decoration. But in my case, I have no trouble ignoring color differences between the top and side surfaces of a minifigure torso and the adjacent front and back decorations.

I don't think small updates like changing the greys and brown to the modern versions would detract too much from the sets' appeal. The things that are more likely to cause problems in releasing LEGO Legends today are discontinued parts, like the old hinges. Sure, you might be able to make an old set look just as good with newer types of hinges, but it'd lose its authenticity.

There's discussion of this going on in the LDD subforum. Discussion of the new update starts here and continues for a page or two. Superkalle has a list of new parts in this update here.

How? 323 Aqua is the only color in the Cars theme that wasn't on the palette since last year. Other colors like Sand Green and Magenta (124 Bright Reddish Violet) are obscure, perhaps, but are fairly old colors that have been in sets both before and after the color palette simplification between 2003 and 2005. Just to clarify, these are the six new colors which we know are upcoming this year and possibly next. Only the third one has appeared in this theme. The first has shown up in Alien Conquest, the fourth will be showing up in some extended-line products, the fifth will be used in Collectible Minifigures Series 5, and the second and sixth haven't been spotted at all in any LEGO products. Chances are most of these will end up being used in 2012's new girl-oriented theme.

The Pet Shop gave us plenty new, like a toilet and a fishbowl. Having something new and having a coffee machine aren't mutually exclusive.

On the boat with the Brick Yellow deck, you have used one 2x2 45 degree inverse slope (3660) where you should have used two 1x2 45 degree inverse slopes (3665). I won't make you change this because I'm not sure about it, but I have for a long time had a sneaking suspicion that flags in sets after 2008 should use part 60779 (which is the newer of the two part numbers) rather than 2335. However, I never remember to check my own collection to verify this. You can maybe compare pre- and post-2008 sets from your own collection if it's not too much trouble-- 60779 has a slightly different clip shape than 2335. But I'm mainly saying this not because you need to change this but to ingrain it in my memory that I need to stop putting this verification off. Your model only has three Medium Stone Grey 1x1 round plates (6141). Bricklink and the instructions say there should be five. The missing two belong on the jumper plates on the back of the boat. Your model only has nine Dark Stone Grey 1x1 round plates (6141). Bricklink and the instructions say there should be 13. The missing four belong on the jumper plates on the back of the boat. Your model has 11 Bright Blue 1x1 round bricks (3062). According to Bricklink four of these should be Earth Blue. The giant sword (60752) should be 131 Silver rather than 315 Silver Metallic. Your model has two Medium Stone Grey 1x2 Technic bricks with pin holes (3700) where it should have 1x2 Technic bricks with axle holes (32064). The dinosaur tails (40379) should be 294 Phosphorescent Green rather than 50 Phosphorescent White. I have a number of these in this color and can certify that it doesn't match other Phosphorescent White parts. However, it's made with a plastic other than polycarbonate, hence why it's not transparent but more of a milky color like the transparent portions of many BIONICLE weapon pieces. The 4x4 hinge plates (44570) can only be hinged at angles that are multiples of 22.5 degrees. You have them hinged at 15 degrees. The Transparent Yellow 1x1 cone should be part 6188 rather than part 4589. The sword (3847) and frying pan (4528) should both be 131 Silver rather than 315 Silver Metallic. The four Medium Stone Grey 1x2 plates with vertical bar should be part 4623 rather than part 88072. 88072 actually made its debut this year, and so shouldn't appear in any older sets. The piston housing (53586) and exhaust pipes (61072) should be 131 Silver rather than 315 Silver Metallic. The 1x2 plates with slide (32028) should all be 194 Medium Stone Grey rather than 315 Silver Metallic. The flick-fire missile (entire construction of parts 61184, 6269, and 59900 in Medium Stone Grey) should be duplicated. Although the instructions are needlessly vague on this, the set's inventory on both Bricklink and the instructions calls for two, and there are two pictured in many of the official pictures. Again, the four Medium Stone Grey 1x2 plates with vertical bar should all be part 4623 rather than 88072. You have two of the wrench piece 55300 when the set only has one (used as a launcher for the flick-fire missile). There is a white skull (3626) missing from your model. It should be on a Warm Gold jumper plate in the back of the model (on top of the hinged wall). Your model has a 1x4 Brick Yellow palisade brick (30137) where it should have a 1x4 Brick Yellow Technic brick (3701). Part 2587 should be 131 Silver rather than 315 Silver Metallic. Your model has only four Dark Green leaves (2423) when it should have six. Both of the missing ones should be attached to the front-left module of the temple. The hands of the two Ugha Warrior minifigures should be 192 Reddish Brown rather than 38 Dark Orange. Again, the Dark Stone Grey 1x2 plates with vertical bar should be part 4623 rather than part 88072. Also, this isn't an error, but it'd be really cool if you could float the sections of the temple to the heights they'd be at if they were on the baseplate. But it's not the most common baseplate, and I wouldn't be able to tell you how high that would make everything have to be, so unless you know that for yourself that'll have to wait until the baseplate is actually available. Great work on all these sets! Indiana Jones was a great theme, and I've really enjoyed the few sets from the theme that I've acquired over the years!

Also, keep in mind that the last of the LEGO Legends line, 10176 King's Castle, was supposed to recreate 6090 Royal Knights' Castle. It failed oh-so-badly. Being forced to use then-current parts and colors crippled the design, replacing the tasteful asymmetry of the original with a more boring and blocky symmetrical design, the ghost looked terrible using the then-current 294 Phosphorescent Green rather than the discontinued 50 Phosphorescent White, and in general the design was changed dramatically. I think this set could be seen as a last-ditch effort to make the LEGO Legends line profitable, and if anything it demonstrated that the sets could not be made more current without removing what made them appealing. I'd much rather if LEGO continued making new set designs that can properly take advantage of developments in set design, rather than trying hopelessly to compromise the old designs with modern building techniques and design standards and thus creating design monstrosities that are visually inferior to both modern and classic sets.

Interestingly, the bad guy boxes tend to show more than one of the same set, suggesting that these monsters are indeed entire species rather than being unique. Still not happy with Waspix's feet. We're so close to being free of the old-style joint! And furthermore, there's that one style of Ben 10 foot that hasn't been used since said theme. In my opinion it might have worked equally well to the Av-Matoran foot. Also, Raw-Jaw's Quaza spike seems silver at the tip. This might just be a bad render (like how some of Witch Doctor's parts aren't actually connected), or it might be evidence of the first ever three-color co-injected part. Given that the CGI pic only has two colors, I'm leaning toward "bad render". But in any event, Raw-Jaw remains my favorite "bad guy" set from the next wave. Lastly, the backgrounds to that box art are amazing. Someone at Advance deserves a pat on the back!