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Let’s Go Sith!

Monday, April 5th, 2021

I made this:

It’s one of many new mosaic kits that LEGO has released. You can assemble one of three images, and I chose Darth Maul.

The instructions say to assemble the mosaic separately as nine tiled pieces with 256 studs apiece, but since this would require having all 12 colours going simultaneously I instead chose to do it by colour.

This way I saw it slowly come together as I worked, and I think I felt this method is much quicker than what the instructions suggest.

To be honest it wasn’t exactly fun, especially when I got to black. I had to place 877 of these identical black studs one at a time! My fingertips were aching when I was done!

All told it took a few hours over two days. Given the tedium of assembly and the (presumed) greater tedium of dismantling it I very much doubt I’ll ever make the other two designs!

It’s bigger and heavier than I expected (but does come with brackets for wall mounting) but looks good from a distance. It would have looked better using the smaller flat pieces rather than studs, but I can see why they avoided that since it would have made disassembly extremely difficult.

Overall it’s more of a curiosity that a success. I don’t think I’ll be buying any more of these, but it does make me more interested in designing a mosaic of my own…

Posted in Art, Crafts, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys | Comments Closed

LEGO Bonsai

Tuesday, January 26th, 2021

It also has a cherry blossom mode, with pink flowers, that I’ll probably make in the spring.

Posted in Crafts, Nature, Toys | Comments Closed

LEGO NES

Wednesday, December 30th, 2020

Earlier this year LEGO released a set of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and I bought it online within moments of it being listed.

It builds in two parts, the console and the TV. I built the console first. It was a fairly easy build, but the engineering is impressive (amazing even) since it has a working cartridge tray (which locks into place) and the model reproduces to uncanny detail every aspect of an actual NES including all the plugs and sockets.

Here it is finished. You can see the (LEGO) Super Mario Brothers cartridge in the tray.

Next game the TV. While I would have been perfectly happy had the set been the console alone, the inclusion of the TV takes it to another level since they actually include a scrolling playfield to simulate the game itself.

This works by creating a belt mounted on tracks, which then turns via a crank mounted on the side. This works seamlessly and smoothly and is just another example of how clever LEGO engineers have become.

Here’s the TV interior with the scrolling belt attached:

This was a great kit to build, and for old school gamers such as myself the nostalgia value is through the roof. This is easily my favourite LEGO kit to date, and one I’ll likely keep assembled and on display for a very long time.

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys | Comments Closed

Hot Button Baseball

Sunday, November 8th, 2020

I bought this a couple of weeks ago:

It’s a product from 2005 and yes, I paid $7.99. I found it in the budget bin of a weird store that sold toys and sports memorabilia. It caught my eye because it seemed to have a Barcode Battler vibe, and for that reason alone I needed to know more. Here’s the back of the package:

And here is the device itself unpacked:

Lots of buttons and what I originally thought were sensors lined up down the sides! It’s fairly compact and had promise. But how did it interact with the cards?

Speaking of which the cards themselves are plastic and transparent, with an amazing amount of littles codes lined up on each side. The backs have stats on the players, so (I suppose) they would be of interest to sports cards collectors as well?

The game is played by making teams with a limited amount of cards (the rules for making teams ate simultaneously restrictive and vague), then slotting the cards into the device like I have here. Then you…. well you just push the red button and watch lights flash randomly.

Randomly choosing a light is all this thing actually does! There’s no score keeping, no bar code reading, no calculations or anything. You push the red button, a light randomly lights, and then you decide what that means in the context of the baseball game yourself. In the example above ‘Go’ was lit, which means something different from if anything else was lit.

All the other buttons? They toggle things on and off on the screen for scoring purposes. It would be easier and faster to just use a piece of paper!

So this thing is just a random number generator linked to a bank of LEDs. A curiosity perhaps, but hardly a compelling game.

I packed it away into a box, never to be seen again 🙂

Posted in Toys, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

Castle Grayskull

Sunday, September 27th, 2020

Today I finished building this:

It’s a 3500 piece model of Castle Grayskull from Masters Of The Universe. It looks like LEGO but it’s actually ‘Mega Construx’, which is a LEGO ~~ripoff~~ competitor. The kit came out for $250 but I got it for quite a bit less on Amazon, both because I love the design and because the reviews were overwhelmingly positive.

The packaging is beautiful and opening the massive (and heavy!) box revealed lovely art and a fantastic manual. The 50+ bags of pieces are separated into four smaller boxes each with their own art, and the entire thing screamed quality.

The kit was built in five parts, each of which took 2-3 hours. It wasn’t a trivial build, but not as challenging as the more complex LEGO technic kits. However the mega construx pieces are slightly lower quality than LEGO and occasionally were difficult to actually push together! As a result it was physically more difficult to make this set than your average LEGO kit 🙂

There’s also the occasional bit of molding flash visible (as you can see above) and the manufacturing of the pieces isn’t as perfect as LEGO, but overall I was extremely impressed with how well the set was designed and went together. I had routinely dismissed LEGO competitors before making this kit, but now I’ll have to keep my eyes open in case anything else of this quality is released.

That’s the front of the finished castle…

And that is the back. Note the curved walls and roof, and the 100+ individual little brown pieces used for roof tiles. It’s a tall kit, very sturdy and heavy. I feel if I dropped it it would hardly break!

Of course it opens and has massive amounts of ‘play features’ including several doors, a jail cell (with creepy inhabitant), a moving throne, a cannon, ladder, moving lift etc. It came with six minifigs (and I bought a few extras myself) which are a good LEGO-scale equivalent of the original guys from the 1980s.

I’ve always loved LEGO castles and for many years have wished for a highly detailed and large kit (perhaps of Neuschwanstein) so when I saw this I bought it as much for it being a castle as the (cool!) MOTU origin.

It was great fun to build and looks wonderful up on my bookshelf. But there’s still a spot free if LEGO is inspired and finally releases a detailed castle of their own…

Posted in Crafts, Models, Retro, Toys | Comments Closed

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