About Chris

Chris Malloy (porschecm2) has been a LEGO fan nearly all his life, having started with System bricks at age 3. He is the co-author of Ultimate LEGO Star Wars, and his creations have been featured in several books and The LEGO Movie. He also helped develop the first LEGO Minecraft set, 21102 Minecraft Micro World: The Forest, which has gone on to inspire a whole theme of sets. He's been active in the online community since 2002, and regularly attends LEGO fan conventions such as BrickCon and BrickCan. He enjoys building in a wide range of themes, but keeps returning to Castle, Space, and Pirates. Check out his LEGO creations and photography here.

Posts by Chris

Martini Racing VW Van by Malte Dorowski

It’s no surprise that Malte Dorowski’s most recent vehicles are gorgeous, but the added accessories and matching colors make this set of vehicles even more outstanding. The stunning Porsche 935 Malte built back in March, but he’s now paired it with a Volkswagon van, accessories, and a crew. This is an excellent use of the rarely seen Technic figures.

VW T1

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Prepare to be Pillaged!

This awesome creation by Eero Okkonen shows just how awesome Bionicle and Hero Factory based figures can be. This fierce Viking warrior named Ragnfast stands ready to do battle with both his axe and his mug.

And here’s a close up of the other side of Ragnfast’s shield.

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First Look at New Hobbit Sets [News]

Revealed just a short while ago at the San Diego Comic Con, this first official look at one of the new Hobbit sets is exciting! While there’s no official description to accompany this photo (yet) for those who weren’t at the SDCC, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: [it’s] a Hobbit-hole, and that means comfort, aka, Bag End. And it looks gorgeous. Also, that’s a big hammer.

Bag End

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Marvelous Makeshift Micros

Flickr user iridescent nohow has been quietly filling his photostream with delightfully ingenious little microscale vignettes. His clever parts usages are par excellence, and they often come at a scale a great deal smaller than most LEGO microscale creations. It’s well worth your time to peruse his photostream and ogle the magnificent miniatures he’s created, such as the scene below of Alice’s rendezvous with a certain infamous hatter of dubious sanity, followed by a terrific mountain temple.

A Mad Tea-Party
Temple

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Guy H. Getting All Decked Out With Steampunk Playing Cards

That fantastic gentleman of steampunkery, Guy H., aka V&A Steamworks, has concocted a plan wherewith he shall mix up our plastic toys with our card playing and brass goggling.

His latest endeavor is a Kickstarter project to fund the creation of a terrifically designed full deck of Steampunk Lego playing cards. He’s packed it out with lots of fictional Victorian interest, like Jack the Ripper, a nunchuck-wielding Abraham Lincoln, and my favourite: an amusing choice between Edison and Tesla for the King of Clubs. Impressively, he’s even getting these printed by Bicycle. Evidently, however, the only way you’ll be able to purchase one is by supporting the project, so, gentlemen and ladies, prepare your pocketbooks.

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From Dust It Came...

This is a splendid little diorama by flickr user SweStar, depicting the summoning of a Stone Golem. The uneven base is very nicely done, and the builder has found a great way to incorporate the spirals of transparent 1×2 plates.

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The Forest Sanctuary

Almost shockingly, I have managed to build something. I’ve been having quite a lot of fun lately playing with Neo-Classical architecture in microscale, and the recent abundance of good microscale pillar pieces, like the telescope piece, are conducive to that. Anyway, here’s the Temple of Ehlonna, goddess of the Forest, who makes her home in a great ancient tree.

Temple of Ehlonna

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Masked Arsonist Gets Bricked

Matt De Lanoy’s latest mosaic shows off the infamous flamethrower from Team Fortress 2 and his delightfully insane Pyrovision, where he lives in a world quite his own.

Pyrovision

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In Space, No One Can See You if You’re Stealthed

Jack McKeen’s Spaceghost craft is modeled after the F-117 Stealth Fighter, and looks like a mashup of the Nighthawk and the Space Shuttle. Jake’s done a terrific job of capturing the aesthetic of NASA craft while adding his own flair to it, creating a very unique entry to the ongoing Real World Space Fighter contest on flickr.

SPACEGHOST01

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Soviet Missile Launcher Looks Ready to Strike

Flickr user D-Town Cracka has created this beautiful piece of technological terror, the 2K11 Krug, a Soviet-era surface-to-air missile launcher that’s still in use in Russia today. It’s chock full of excellent details and great piece usages, and it even has a deployed mode where the travel lock swings out of the way.

SA-4 Ganef / 2K11 Krug

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[News] LEGO to Try Their Hand at New MMO Based on Collectible Minifigs

Today Funcom announced that it has entered a partnership with LEGO to create a new massively-multiplayer-online game. This time around it’s based on the phenomenally popular collectible Minifigures, which LEGO has been licensing out with surprising frequency, with them now appearing on everything from suitcases to pencil carriers and lunchboxes. Funcom’s most recognizable game to date was the dubiously successful Age of Conan MMORPG, which like nearly all MMOs that are not owned by Blizzard, withered away quietly to the deserts of free-to-play a short time after release. Funcom touts that the game will “focus on maximum accessibility,” which doesn’t bode well for sustaining the long-term interest and depth required to support such an expensive endeavor as an MMO necessitates. I am curious, however, about what sort of plot and world Funcom intends to tease out of what is, essentially, simply a random collection of figures. The press release is scarce on details, but that’s to be expected this early in development:

LEGO® Minifigures are the inhabitants of an unimaginable number of spectacular creations put together by both kids and grown-ups over the past several decades. Whether it is a knight in shining armor, a brave firefighter or just an oddball in a gorilla suit, these figures breath life into elaborately constructed cities, castles and even space stations around the world.

I do sincerely hope that this game will be more successful than LEGO’s last ill-fated foray into the world of MMOs, but the MMO market is notoriously hard to get even a foothold in, much less create a rousing success.

See the full press release from Funcom here.

via RockPaperShotgun.

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Brickworld 2012 Chicago Wrap Up

This past Sunday concluded this year’s Chicago Brickworld, and I’ve finally recovered and rested up a bit from the trip (and subsequent cold). This was only my second Lego convention, and I think it’s safe to say I’m hooked. The convention space at the Westin hotel was enormous. I’m sure many of you will have already seen the video walk-through that Nannan and I did of the three display rooms, which runs over 45 minutes and still isn’t comprehensive. Evidently they’re looking at moving to an even larger space next year that can accommodate all of the displays in a single room, which would be quite something. Unlike Brickcon, the other convention I’ve attended, the majority of the displays are arranged by builder, and not theme. I think there’s a lot of merit to both ways–while it’s awesome seeing huge tables full of sci-fi MOCs, it’s also quite fun to see all the different sorts of things a single person builds.

P1000131

It was great fun getting to meet the people behind the avatars of so many great builders, such as fellow TBB’er Nannan and his counterpart in perpetrating unusually large dioramas Tyler Clites, LDM, and Si-MOCs, among many, many others. One of the highlights for me was a Saturday night unscheduled M-Tron building competition (generously organized and judged by a great guy whose name escapes me currently). After looking at so many terrific MOCs for three days straight, I was itching to build, and with 90 minutes and a large and hilariously haphazard collection of pieces, about a dozen of us sat down and pounded some mean MOCs out.

096

There were too many fantastic MOCs (including the one featured in the previous post) to possibly highlight them all, so I’ll just conclude by saying that you should definitely check out the Brickworld flickr pool, and even better, attend next year and meet lots of other great LEGO fans and see the stuff in person.

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