It's hard to believe that this is the first original trilogy regular stormtrooper large action figure LEGO has made for their Star Wars lineup. You'd have expected it to have appeared in the first wave.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
LEGO Star Wars Stormtrooper Commander large figure review 75531
It's hard to believe that this is the first original trilogy regular stormtrooper large action figure LEGO has made for their Star Wars lineup. You'd have expected it to have appeared in the first wave.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
LEGO Star Wars Jedi Starfighter + Hyperdrive review 75191
Nice toy, well-built, easy to handle. Rough price. Really rough price.
Apologies for the inlet lips being backwards (but they look better this way!).
LEGO Spider-Man Homecoming: ATM Heist review! 76082
Ha! One more theme completed! It's true, only two sets were released this season for this movie, and neither is particularly substantial.
LEGO Spider-Man Homecoming: Beware the Vulture set 76083 reviewed
At last, this set finally showed up on store shelves in my region!
LEGO City Heavy-duty Rescue Helicopter review 60166
It's helicopter time again! This one has a good build and looks good on the outside from a number of angles, but I feel there's something lacking for its grand size.
Monday, May 29, 2017
LEGO City Jungle Halftrack Mission review 60159
Ya win some, ya lose some. I thought I'd really gel with this set because of the semi-realistic halftrack, but it wasn't to be.
Mega Construx Destiny 2 Cabal Gladiator Battle review
The hype is real. This particular set has some issues, but I can't wait for others in the line to be released.
Who am I kidding? I can't wait for the game beta!
Sunday, May 28, 2017
LEGO Star Wars Jakku Quadjumper review! 75178
I failed. Failed to contain my personal opinion of this set early in the video, it was just too overwhelming to artificially hold back.
LEGO Batman Movie Bane Toxic Truck Attack review! 70914
Yessss! Something, something, something else complete. This does it for the LEGO Batman Movie theme for this season.
Also, quietly over the past few days I've completed my seasonal updates to my studio setup and post-production processes. I make incremental changes throughout the year, but I usually try to do something more significant before a big review season hits (I was just a little late this time). You should see noticeably better color reproduction going forward and a minor improvement to video sharpness. I've also improved rendering speeds very slightly, but unfortunately not enough to make a noticeable difference in my overall rate of production.
Saturday, May 27, 2017
LEGO Star Wars First Order Transport Speeder Battle Pack review! 75166
The unofficial 'working' title of this set during its development was "TR-8R Twins Transport." Seriously. Look it up*.
* You won't find anything, because conspiracy... or bad jokes.
LEGO Batman Movie Two-Face Double Demolition review! 70915
Almost done with the new LEGO Batman Movie sets for now! It's good to get more substantive sets that aren't dominated by a bat-thing.
LEGO City Sea Plane Rescue review! Coast Guard set 60164
It's hard to believe this has the exact same number of pieces as the last set I posted up, because this one is so much larger when complete. This illustrates the folly of relying exclusively upon price/part ratios to determine whether a specific product gives you a good value.
LEGO Batman Movie Scarecrow Fearful Face-off review! 70913
Small, inexpensive set from the second LBM wave here, but with some nice parts and two named characters.
Friday, May 26, 2017
LEGO City 2017 Cargo Terminal review 60169
Now this is a wholesome, back-to-basics cargo-sorting set that can hang with the best of all time. Great play value, easily adds to many other themes of the past & present, modern builds, generic, but good-looking minifigures, and a surprisingly reasonable price to part ratio, to boot.
LEGO NEXO Knights Stone Monster Accessory Pack 853677
I like NEXO Knights. I like minifig booster packs. I liked even the last NEXO Knights minifig booster pack from this season, when they brought the number of figures down to 3. This one, though, doesn't seem worth the price at all. Even if it was cheaper, it's still disappointing with the stripped-down selection of reused figure parts and basic accessories.
LEGO Star Wars: The Arrowhead set review! 75186
Yeah I don't care if you've never heard of The Freemaker Adventures, or if you have heard of it and/or seen it and dislike it. This seems like an interesting ship build no matter what the source material.
Thursday, May 25, 2017
LEGO Batman Movie: The Batwing set review! 70916
This is a textbook example of the evolution of LEGO's design standards. Just a decade ago, a flying craft of roughly this wingspan would have had 400-500 parts, a somewhat janky action/transformation feature and questionable structural stability. Today we get 1,000+ pieces that interlock on multiple axes in a dense miniature juggernaut with generous greebling and many studless surfaces. To me it's a clear cut case of a relentless dedication to maximizing quality while negotiating immovable economic realities.
Mega Construx Halo 3 CTF Arctic Warthog set review
Fantastic, this set combines great nostalgic stuff from the past with modern quality and features. After numerous Mega has finally truly arrived on the Warthog scene.
LEGO City Jungle Exploration Site review 60161
I have not much to say in text about this set, because there's so much covered in the video. Everything you see above comes in one box, so it's a pretty righteous playset.
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
LEGO Star Wars Rathtar Escape review! 75180
What we're gonna do right here is go back. Way back. Back into... Wait, SW:TFA wasn't that long ago, I guess, eh? It just feels like it, to me at least.
LEGO City Fun at the Beach minifig pack review 60153
Here's LEGO's newest 15-person minifig booster pack. It probably won't garner quite as much positive feedback as Fun in the Park did, but it should. I mean sure, last year's set came with a mini-baby. But this one comes with a lobster. Respect the lobster.
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
LEGO Minifigure Fidget Spinners MOCs
One of these days, I promise myself, I will stop being such a hard-headed contrarian when it comes to things I consider to be fads. Every single time some new concept goes effectively viral world-wide, I avoid it like the plague, for fear of somehow losing creativity and initiative. That's dumb of me, and I know this, and I've known it for a long time, and yet I continually refuse to change. Argh.
Thank you all, though, for always trying to motivate me to break down my unnecessary mental barriers and give some of these things a go.
LEGO Star Wars Darth Vader Transformation review! 75183
What's that you say? Bad pun incoming? NNNNOOOoooooooo.....
LEGO City 2017 Coast Guard Headquarters review 60167
Here's the top-of-the-line representative of this year's Coast Guard sub-theme of City. Just ignore the name. The HQ building is tiny, but there's a lot of other stuff to make up for it.
Mega Construx Halo Warzone Wasp Strike review
And now for something... completely different. Building this set filled me with impetus to break free from my self-imposed confines of normalcy and do my first out-of-studio review in quite a few years.
LEGO Star Wars Bounty Hunter Battle Pack review - 75167
This is definitely a type of set I'd never have expected LEGO to make, with the vast majority of the price and value in the form of named, licensed characters. Typically every company wants to split up named characters into as many different products as possible to entice people to spend more. This is the opposite, and I am deeply grateful for it.
Technically this is a Freemaker Adventures (non-canon) set, but who cares?! The figures are legit!
Monday, May 22, 2017
LEGO City Jungle Cargo Helicopter review - 60158
My first dose of the new Jungle Exploration theme is a good one. This is one of the more modest sets, but it's wholesome, easy on the eyes, and good for play. Hopefully there's more of that to come.
LEGO Star Wars Scout Trooper & Speeder Bike review - 75532
Well, this isn't as good of a set as I originally (from pictures) thought it would be, but that's not so bad because my initial impressions were of near perfection for the medium. In reality, the finished product in-hand has just minor, arguable flaws.
LEGO City 2017 Bus Station build & review
Videos:
Saturday, May 20, 2017
LEGO Batman Movie Ultimate Batmobile build & review videos 70917
This thing is serious, and seriously silly, a 3-hour semi-advanced build packed with brick-built details, angled & sideways building, and nice parts usage.
Videos:
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Vintage LEGO Rocket Base 358 from 1973 reviewed
Happy Flashback Friday or belated Throwback Thursday :) One insignificant piece in this set is a bit too new and a few are a bit too old (all direct & close substitutions), but overall it's a pretty faithfully preserved piece of history from before the dawn of the minifig era.
LEGO Star Wars 2017 Republic Fighter Tank build & review - 75182
It begins. I don't live in the UK, so I wasn't able to get all of the first summer wave sets starting the week before last. I also don't live on the southeast seaboard of the US, so I wasn't able to start loading up on them last weekend. Where I live, things are often slow to appear on shelves, but I get what I can, when I can, to bring you timely new content as quickly as I can. The big, big release hasn't hit yet for me, but the very tip of the iceberg is upon us.
Videos:
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Looking back at recent work
I believe it was February when I announced that I would significantly throttle back on reviews and divert attention towards New Jang City and custom MOCs. Said diversion was a success, but now the next major LEGO release & set review season is about to begin, so let's take a look back at what I was able to accomplish during the break.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
The Little Engine That Could in LEGO
I had a reprint of the original version of The Little Engine That Could when I was probably 3 years old, but I completely forgot about it as an adult! I've been on the lookout for a good opportunity to make a tank engine style steam loco, and somehow this thing happened out of the (medium) blue. It runs very well, but my depletion of parts for the Blauhaus Building forced a bunch of aesthetic compromises. Most importantly, the boiler should be a bit taller and it should have a more consistent cross-section. Perhaps eventually, once I have more parts, I'll revisit this, but for now, I must consider it a very successful and happy little project!
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Update to the underwater layout beneath New JANG City
Good times! I couldn't bring myself to part with the Silent Mary, finding it oddly intoxicating to look at on display, almost beautiful in its wretched ugliness. Thankfully I've found a great place to keep it long-term where it integrates sensibly into my existing LEGO world.
Finally, a red LEGO Rail Rider
Red had to happen, and I wanted purple to happen in some capacity as well, so I went ahead & killed two birds with one stone. (Disclaimer: No actual birds were harmed in the making of this video.)
LEGO Star Wars Imperial Speeder Bike from 2009! polybag 30005
This was my lone out-of-production set review of the week, and though the thing is quite tiny, it's not half bad.
May 2017 LEGO Dimensions releases reviewed
Fan interest in LEGO Dimensions continues to taper down towards nothingness, but some of the remaining minifigs & mini-builds are cool to check out regardless. Many also make me think, "Who'da thunk?"
Videos:
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Trains, trains, more trains, always with the trains
After focusing on train-related items with my custom builds over only the past
My LEGO Sticker Collection & organization system
In addition to working on more custom builds, in recent weeks I've also finally organized my spare official LEGO sticker sheets into the standard photo album binder setup that I've used in other hobbies in the past. I figured I'd share a look at it in case it can give anyone any good ideas to do something similar or better.
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
LEGO Wonder Woman Warrior Battle review! 76075
This DC Comics Super Heroes set was released all by itself last week, alongside nothing else from the line. In the US it's a Toys R Us retail exclusive, though also available directly from LEGO Shop at Home.
Monday, May 8, 2017
Duh-duh duum, duum, duum... another one bites the dust!
The final box-stock holdout among my modern locomotives has at last been sent to the scrap heap and from its remains, new life has sprouted forth! The build of this switcher did not go at all as I had planned; it actually went much better. About a third of the way through I made a pretty significant change to the design concept that turned everything around (both literally and figuratively) and led me down the path to a very different aesthetic style than I expected to pull from these parts. What started out as a string of experimental failures, then, morphed into something very unfamiliar, yet personally satisfying.
Saturday, May 6, 2017
Build & full review of the 2017 LEGO Star Wars UCS Snowspeeder 75144
The latest big one is upon us! It took one full day to get the build video up (long drive out to buy the thing, followed by the build, then editing & all), followed by another for the review, but my work with this impressive display piece is now complete.
Videos:
Soooo... more MOCs then, while I still have the chance?
Another day, another LEGO train MOC
I wish this was about 5% less blocky looking, but it does me a great service by displacing an official LEGO loco from my layout. Now I just need to deal with the engine from set 60052, and I'll be in great shape!
Friday, May 5, 2017
LEGO Star Wars May the Fourth R2-D2 polybag review
Happy belated May The Fourth to all! LEGO had a pretty nice free-with-purchase polybag for us this year.
DK Books exclusive LEGO Wonder Woman minifig
I has a book. Do I really care about the book? No. It's cool & all, but I'm mostly here for the bundled mini-merch.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Stops Copies Me's
It's deja vu all over again as I duplicate (and ever so slightly improve) a locomotive I first introduced back in 2014. When it comes to train stuff, multiple is almost always better than one.
Tuesday, May 2, 2017
Custom LEGO "Blauhaus" Building complete
It has been built, given a name, and transferred to its intended home in New JANG City, and the entire process didn't even take long at all. I'm going to keep the momentum going and start on my next structure soon.
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