The Brothers Brick

I sure hope we never see the end of ninja LEGO creations. Here’s Nelson Yrizarry’s “Ninja Training Camp.” Natually, it’s totally sweet, with a secret entrance, lookout holes, and everything else a ninja clan needs to get ready for their next mission.

Be sure to check out all the pictures in the Brickshelf gallery, which includes lots of action shots of ninjas training:

I was never a fan of the Resident Evil games (the controls were just too nightmarishly clumsy). But who cares — I always like to see minifigs based on video games. Richard McCarthy recently posted a batch of cool minifigs based on the series.

Here’s the S.T.A.R.S Alpha team from the original Resident Evil:

And the crew from Resident Evil 4:

Hurray! marakoeschtra has added two more castle characters — an “illuminator” and two “treasure guards”:

Not to be outdone by the recently released, official 7783 Batcave set, Brickshelfer book316 has posted a highly detailed Batcave that incorporates many elements that should be familiar to Batman comic book fans.

Be sure to click the image below and check out the full gallery for detailed close-ups:

Andrew Horvatits has just posted a whole fleet of tiny little hoverships. Check out the interesting use of Life on Mars Martian torsos, minifig legs, and minifig hands:

(Preview via Flickr, full gallery on Brickshelf.)

Here’s another great sculptural creation from Felix Greco, an adorable green space bunny with his robot dog:

(Via Builders Block.)

The Legend of Zelda holds a special place in my heart for a couple of reasons. First, like lots of people my age, I remember playing the game back in the eighties.

Second, I’ve actually had the privilege of working on a Zelda game. So, fast forward nearly twenty years, and I land at Nintendo of America. One of the projects I worked on was Wind Waker (credits on IMDb). As a bilingual writer in the Engineering department, I was one of the first people outside the development and test groups back in Japan to play Wind Waker. I’m very proud of the fact that I wrote the world’s first walkthrough for the game, which was used as the test plan for our “debug” project. My walkthrough also served as the basis for several official strategy guides. w00t!

So, I was pleased when Lukas W.P. posted this little beauty — a “Kokiri girl” (presumably from Ocarina of Time):

That reminded me that I never posted my appreciation for Flail’s gorgeous Wind Waker creations. They made the rounds of the gamer community a while back, but here’s Link and the King of Red Lions very nicely dropped into game art (click for the full gallery):

Here’s Link picking up the big black pig:

I’ve tried my own hand at a Link minifig, but meh.

Here’s hoping Twilight Princess will inspire a whole new crop of LEGO creations.

Brickshelf user Legokinsfolk (featured several times over on PPB) recently posted a Lara Croft minifig that uses Moko’s leg design and a rubber-band bikini design I’ve seen several other builders use. Together, they make an immediately recognizable Lara:

And since I never posted my own Lara Croft minifig here on DB, here she is:

Those of you looking for a LEGO Katie Holmes might be disappointed, but Brickshelf user Jimmy Lai has posted a cool minifig version of Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai:

And check out Jimmy’s awesome movie poster:

Without any explanation (other than to celebrate the end of midterms), Moko just posted these:

Weird, just weird. Still, pretty interesting.

Apparently I’ve been living in a cave. I thought 7783
Batcave was the next large set LEGO would be releasing. (Incidentally, it’s been showing up in stores a couple months early.) Well, crawling out of my hole, I see that LEGO employee Steve Witt has posted box art and the minifigs from an upcoming 7785 Arkham Asylum set. Sweet!

I’m not sure what the security guards’ muskets are about (“Holy blunderbuss, Batman!”), but the other figs are pretty cool.

(Click each picture to go to Steve’s Flickr page and check out the full-size versions.)

Space ninjas are both awesome and totally sweet (after all, they’re the second-most powerful entity in the universe). Here’s Linus Bohman’s awesome and totally sweet space ninja dojo:

In addition to a cool “Asian space” aesthetic for the architecture, Bohman has included some really cool minifigs.

French builder BaronSat presents a whimsical version of the Renault FT-17 tank from World War I:

Love the gunner’s bugle!

The little archaeologist who lives in my brain loves ruins. He did a little happy dance when I laid eyes on this beautiful diorama by Marcin Kitala (k1089 on Brickshelf):

I blogged Izzo’s ninja mecha a few days ago, but he’s continued posting new mecha since then. Here’s the latest, a steampunk mecha titled “Tin Machine,” driven by none other than the Adventurers theme’s archvillain, Sam Sinister:

I’m really enjoying the recent surge in micro-scale building (mainly in the Space community, though SEALUG member Justin Major showed off a really awesome modular city at this month’s meeting — should’ve taken pictures).

Classic-Spacer Jerac (Jerrec on Brickshelf) posted a micro medical frigate titled Grigorij Rasputin earlier this morning:

Here’s the Rasputin assisting another micro-scale ship — note the extended docking corridor and the small shuttles swarming over the stricken vessel:

Lukas, whose “Jade Empire” minifigs I featured earlier today, has also posted a steampunk dragster:

This kind of reminds me of Bekr’s “Smoke Signal” (which I blogged a few months ago). I think Bekr’s vehicle has better detailing (called “greebling” by us LEGO geeks), but it’s nice to see more builders creating steampunk stuff, and I like the minifigs Lukas uses.

I posted some “Eastern Block” minifigs a while ago, intending to follow up with minifigs from other fan-created Space factions, such as “3vil,” “Pre-Classic Space,” and “Jade Empire.” I never got around to it, but Flickrite and LEGO blogger Lukas has posted some cool Jade Empire minifigs.

Here’s an officer:

And the officer with some troops, including a sweet space ninja:

It’s been a while, but marakoeschtra has updated his castle characters with a pair of “gold carriers” and a “bush robber”:

Japanese LEGO blogger Hiron has been posting work-in-progress pictures of his MS-09F Domtropen mecha (from one of the Gundam TV series). Hiron has announced that DOM is complete, so I thought I’d post a couple of the pictures he uploaded to his Brickshelf gallery:

Very cool. For those of you who aren’t LEGO builders yourselves, I want to point out a building technique Hiron uses called SNOT, which is an acronym for for Studs Not on Top. You can read all about SNOT on BrickWiki, the open-content LEGO encyclopedia.

I featured Antony Lau’s wonderful “maxifig” creations back in December, and he continues to post new creations, from people to vehicles.

His latest vehicle seems to be a noodle truck, and I love noodles. Antony’s truck makes me hungry for phad thai, udon, chow mein, soba, pho, ramen — you get the idea:

I’ve made a number of updates to the LEGO blog lists over in the navigation area on the right. The LEGO Blogs in English section now includes several new LEGO blogs, as well as more established blogs I’ve found via Technorati or on other blogs.

I hate to play favorites, but the LEGO Blogs in Japanese section now includes an updated list of my favorite Japanese LEGO blogs (I also just updated the main list over on PPB).

Thinking beyond these two languages, I’ve added a LEGO Blogs in Other Languages section, where I’ll be adding links to non-English, non-Japanese blogs.

If you have a LEGO blog not listed in any of these three sections, just leave a comment on this post (I’ll get an e-mail).

I don’t want to bump the post from last year because it’s pages and pages long, but I’ve updated my list of Japanese LEGO blogs.

Changes include fixing broken links, updating the titles of renamed blogs, removing links to deleted blogs, and adding new blogs.

Among the many additions, highlights include the addition of The Sekiyama Railroad Newsletter (a LEGO Trains blog), Be-bonest, How Many Studs to LEGOLAND? (sort of the English-to-Japanese equivalent of PPB), and legostyle-BLOG (Izzo’s new blog).

I’ll be updating my (very partial) list of Japanese LEGO builders at some point as well. In the meantime, I hope you find the blog list useful and interesting as well.

“Meh” pretty much sums up my current feelings toward Superman. Smallville has been less than entertaining for a couple seasons now, I’m not especially stoked about the upcoming movie, and then there’s this. So, Superman = “Meh.”

In that spirit, here’s my Superman minifig, about which I feel pretty “Meh” (he’s missing something fairly important, after all):

Classic-Castler Jens (Schlimps on Brickshelf) presents another cool creation that uses rare-colored parts — a Nazgul, or Ringwraith, from The Lord of the Rings:

According to several members of my local LEGO club (SEALUG), rare-colored parts are likely the result of a quality control step in the manufacturing process known as a “color test.”

When The LEGO Company performs a color test, they create a limited run of a LEGO piece in a specific color to help determine what kinds of stresses the acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) can endure in that particular color. For example, a clear minifig was created some time ago, and the speculation at our recent meeting was that this better revealed the kinds of discoloration (due to friction or stress) that might occur where parts are joined together.

If you’re more familiar with the LEGO manufacturing process and I’ve gotten something wrong, feel free to correct me in a comment!