The Decision is in – No LEGO Rifter for You! January 11, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, lego.Tags: CUUSOO
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Remember the LEGO Rifter from last year?
10K Votes Achievement!
It got proposed.
It got CCP support.
It got the votes.
It got reviewed.
It got shot down.
The official word from LEGO CUUSOO last month:
Results of the LEGO Review for EVE Online Ships – Rifter
2012.12.20
First and foremost, congratulations again to czar for reaching 10,000 supporters on LEGO CUUSOO, and toward everyone for all of the support of the EVE Online Ships – Rifter project! The Summer LEGO Review has concluded and the LEGO Review Board has arrived at its decision about the four projects in review.
The supporters we received for the EVE Online Ships – Rifter project allowed us to examine the feasibility of another niche gaming-related product. However the Rifter presented a more challenging business case when considered alongside other potential products in this Review period. Therefore, the LEGO Review Board has decided that this project does not meet the requirements for the business case.
czar has been a pleasure to work with throughout this process and has shown a lot of passion and enthusiasm for his idea and LEGO bricks. We also recognize the intense interest of all of you who supported this project, and we are sorry to deliver this disappointing news.
For further details on the results of the LEGO Review visit the LEGO CUUSOO blog at http://legocuusoo.posterous.com
Ah well. It was something of a faint hope, given the size of the model and the relatively small audience EVE has compared to other properties LEGO could pursue… like that Minecraft set, which was in short supply over the holidays.
Still sold out in the LEGO online store!
I suspected that Jester might have been right in his prediction on the whole thing, though the statement from CUUSOO reads more as a lack of economic viability than a statement that EVE Online is full of bad people. The target audience age range, 6-11, was not mentioned as it was with the proposed Firefly themed set.
Still, we can dream.
Still Want
Maybe some day. Meanwhile, can we blame CSM7 for this too?
LEGO Lord of the Rings The Video Game Announced June 4, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, lego, PlayStation 3, wii.Tags: LEGO Lord of the Rings, Traveller's Tales
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Back in December, when LEGO announced that they would be doing Lord of the Rings based kits, my first thought was, “And a LEGO video game as well, right?”
LEGO Kits Coming Summer 2012
Well, now I have my wish. Traveller’s Tales, LEGO, Warner, and a series of other companies involved in the whole thing have announced LEGO Lord of the Rings The Video Game!
A LEGO Fantasy!
There is also a video… ahead of which YouTube has placed a 30 second ad. They know what people want I suppose.
Direct link to the video here.
Now all that is missing is a date. I did not see one anywhere. Maybe it will be something for the Christmas wish list.
LEGO Rifter – 10K Votes Achieved! April 25, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, lego.Tags: CUUSOO
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The LEGO Rifter project at LEGO CUUSOO which I mentioned a little over a month ago made it to its first milestone. It got the 10,000 votes necessary to be considered for conversion into an actual LEGO kit.
10K Votes Achievement!
Now we just have to wait and find out if and when this will make an appearance at the LEGO Store.
CONGRATULATIONS to EVE Online fans for achieving 10,000 supporters on LEGO CUUSOO! Great!! ow.ly/awkHU—
LEGO® CUUSOO (@LEGO_CUUSOO) April 25, 2012
Meanwhile, what of other EVE ships. I see a LEGO Mymidon being proposed already, and there is the “which other frigates” poll thread in the EVE Online forums.
And will we get a minifigure to go with it?
Addendum: The official LEGO Response
Congrats on 10,000 Supporters, czar!
2012.04.26
You’ve done it! You and all of the EVE Online fans voting for this have together achieved 10,000 supporters for the EVE Online Ships – Rifter project. We’re fans of awesome spaceships too, so we’re excited about this one.
You’ve built quite an impressive LEGO Rifter. It captures the essence of the ship with LEGO bricks, and it will serve as a good starting point as we explore the possibility of transforming this into a LEGO product.
Congratulations on achieving 10,000 supporters. We now officially advance this project to the Review phase.
So the LEGO master builders will try to come up with a sellable version of the Rifter. I hope they use more rust colored bricks.
LEGO Rifter? Do Want! March 23, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, lego.Tags: CUUSOO
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Updated: 10K votes achieved!
Images of this EVE Online frigate, the Rifter, possibly one of the most recognizable ships in the game, rendered in LEGO form have been making the rounds for a while now.
LEGO Rifter
The model itself is up on LEGO’s CUUSOO site that allows you to submit your LEGO creations for consideration to become actual LEGO kits. There are of course rules, but you get 1% of the net sales.
This, by the way, is how we ended up getting a Minecraft LEGO set.
But to be considered, a kit needs to get 10,000 supporting votes. The LEGO Rifter, as of this moment, has 3,490 votes for it on its page. That is about a third of the way there.
CCP is clearly excited about the prospect of there being a Rifter kit from LEGO. One of the log on ads this week asked people to go vote for the model.
CCP supports the LEGO Rifter
But the whole thing needs about 6,500 more votes, which means people need to go to the site and create an account and vote.
So can you take a minute and go vote for the LEGO Rifter?
I know, another account on the internet, just what we all need. You can log in with Facebook, though that carries its own minor annoyances. But just go do it.
And while you are there you can look at some of the other proposed LEGO projects. There are some Mass Effect kits being proposed. And some Doctor Who kits as well. As one article put it, it is like Kickstarter for LEGO.
The Annual LEGO Minifigure Round Up January 22, 2012
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, lego.Tags: Minifigures
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As happened last year, the new year seemed to be about the right time to try and round up all our LEGO minifigures and put them back into their original configuration.
That first means finding them all… and all their various parts. That gets tougher every year.
Laying out the minifigures
I tend to leave the minifigures in their initial forms. My daughter and a few of her friends however, like to take them apart to mix and match. And then loose pieces go missing, largely thanks to one of our cats who also loves LEGO.
Still, I think I got a lot of them back together.
Indiana Jones minifigures
Star Wars minifigures
Harry Potter, Speed Racer, and more...
So they are… mostly… back together and into their various storage drawers waiting to be taken out and rearranged again over the course of the year.
LEGO Lord of the Rings: The Video Game – It Could Happen December 16, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, lego.Tags: Kotaku, LEGO Harry Potter, LEGO Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings, Traveller's Tales
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This is the reason I keep Kotaku in my RSS read… for every hundred Japanese trends or cos-play articles, there is a gem I never see elsewhere… like this one.
Coming Summer 2012
As foretold by prophecy… or at least by my nearly four year old blog post… there could be a LEGO Lord of the Rings Video Game. There will at least be LEGO Lord of Rings sets, but how can they do that and not a video game?
Actually, I would bet there are going to be three games, if any video games come to pass.
Anyway, I asked for and got LEGO Harry Potter… what else from that post might happen?
Probably none… I was being kind of silly. But of the most serious two I asked for, one came to pass and the other looks like a solid “maybe.”
So I’ll be spending the rest of the day muttering, “That’s so cool! Oh my God really? Could it happen? That’s so cool!”
LEGO Universe End Game November 8, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, lego, Misc MMOs.Tags: club penguin, LEGO Universe, Toontown Online
15 comments
It seems that the troubled story of LEGO Universe now has an end date.
A press release went out last week and email notifications started going out to users after that letting everyone know that LEGO Universe will be shutting down on January 31, 2012.
On March 5, 2007 a press release went out announcing that LEGO and NetDevil would be joining forces to create a LEGO themed MMO.
At that point, in the MMO world, NetDevil was primarily known for its troubled Auto Assault online game, published by NCsoft, which would be closed down in July of 2007.
LEGO Universe, after a couple of missed dates, eventually went live just over a year ago, on October 26, 2010. And it has had problems ever since.
Originally a traditional “buy the box, pay a subscription fee” model MMO focused on kids and claiming to offer parents ease of mind on safety issues, it failed to distinguish itself on all counts.
Its well established main competitors (e.g. Club Penguin, online since 2005 and Toon Town, online since 2003) offered free to obtain, free to play options along with parental controls on par with LU, while pay to play games like World of Warcraft offered superior parental options.
So the only real draw was LEGO base game play, and LEGO Universe failed to stand out in that department as well, as so accurately documented by Oz over at Kill Ten Rats. In our own house, my daughter tried the game and went quickly from enthusiasm to boredom. She stopped playing and has never asked to play the game since.
NetDevil bowed out of the LEGO Universe drama with a press release on February 24, 2011, which also pretty much ended their existence as part of Gazillion Entertainment, which purchased NetDevil back in July of 2008.
In June 2011, LEGO announced that LEGO Universe would go to a free to play model, the current panacea for all ailing MMOs these days.
All of which brings us to today’s email blast from LEGO.
Hello Adventurer, today we are very sad to announce that LEGO® Universe will be closing on January 31, 2012. This was a very difficult decision to make, but unfortunately LEGO Universe has not been able to attract the number of members needed to keep the game open.
We realize how sad this will make the many players who have enjoyed LEGO Universe and we are committed to providing open communication with both kids and parents as we transition through this difficult time. We understand this is a challenging change and apologize for not being able to give parents forewarning before the general announcement.
We are thankful to have had the opportunity to share this adventure with an amazing community of players. We hope you will continue to enjoy LEGO Universe for the last few months. As a thank you, if you are a paying subscriber on December 31, 2011, we will provide you the full game for the final month for free.
Again, we want to thank the fantastic community of players who made LEGO Universe such a vibrant, fun and creative experience.
Hello Adventurer, today we are very sad to announce that LEGO® Universe will be closing on January 31, 2012. This was a very difficult decision to make, but unfortunately LEGO Universe has not been able to attract the number of members needed to keep the game open.
We realize how sad this will make the many players who have enjoyed LEGO Universe and we are committed to providing open communication with both kids and parents as we transition through this difficult time. We understand this is a challenging change and apologize for not being able to give parents forewarning before the general announcement.
We are thankful to have had the opportunity to share this adventure with an amazing community of players. We hope you will continue to enjoy LEGO Universe for the last few months. As a thank you, if you are a paying subscriber on December 31, 2011, we will provide you the full game for the final month for free.
Again, we want to thank the fantastic community of players who made LEGO Universe such a vibrant, fun and creative experience.
Sincerely,
The LEGO Universe Team
The Details:
- The game will be turned off on January 31, 2012 at midnight (EST).
- All current subscribers (1, 6 or 12 month plans) who still have active subscriptions on December 31 will receive a refund for any remaining game time remaining after December 31 as well as free play from January 1, 2012 until January 31.
- For example, if you purchased a 6-month subscription on September 1, 2011 (which would expire on February 29, 2012), you would be refunded $16.66 for the 2 months following December 31.
- We will begin processing all refunds on February 1, 2012. All refunds will be made to the credit card used for the original subscription.
- If your subscription expires before December 31 you will need to purchase an additional 1 month subscription by December 31 in order to get the free game play in January (again, any unused game time as of December 31 will be refunded.)
- LEGO Universe game cards can only be used until December 1st 2011. Unused game cards after December 1st can be converted to LEGO Shop @Home gift cards for the same value.
- Please note: Details on how to convert unused game cards will be posted on December 1.
- You can continue to enjoy the free to play zone until January 31, 2012 but your last chance to convert to a paying subscription is December 31, 2011.
There is an additional FAQ with more details available.
And so a sad end to a game with such promise. There is no curse like failing to live up to ones potential. And I am sure this was a hard decision at LEGO. Once you have all that effort sunk into a project, once everything is in place, once the machine is running, it is tough to just turn the switch off and send everybody home.
But LEGO has been through tough times of its own. The first decade of this century saw them stumble and really have to rethink how they did business after many years of simply succeeding because they were LEGO. That lead to a series of tough decisions that brought them back from the brink and set them to focus more on profitability than market share.
And that focus is clearly being felt now. LEGO Universe isn’t hitting its goals and is going to be cut.
I am sure this is sad news for those who play the game. I certainly find it sad, if in a more abstract sense, since we haven’t played it for months at our house.
In the end though, they appear to have failed to capture the essence of what makes LEGO building sets popular.
What should have been the direction for LEGO Universe? Less “block-based WoW” and more “LEGO Second Life?”
(The latter with more parental controls and less some smaller quantity of flying penises, of course.)
Begun the Count Down to Christmas Has! September 25, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, lego.Tags: LEGO Advent Calendar, Star Wars
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If it wasn’t enough that Star Wars: The Old Republic was practically slated for a Christmas release, the LEGO people have their own irresistible angle on the season.
A Star Wars LEGO Advent Calendar.
We already get the LEGO advent calendar every year as it is. But when you throw Star Wars into the mix… well… there is already one sitting on our kitchen table even as I write this. It isn’t even October yet.
But I am a little paranoid. The LEGO City advent calendar sold out from the online LEGO store pretty quickly last year, though I was able to walk into our local LEGO store and grab one off the shelf no problem. So I wasn’t going to tell you about it until I had mine home and secure.
Okay, so maybe Yoda in the Santa role is a bit odd.
He doesn’t seem like the candy cane and presents type to me, but I always picture the Degobah Yoda, when he was a senile cranky old coot. And since the Star Wars Holiday Special is canon (at least C-canon), who am I to quibble about Yoda in a Santa suit?
Beside which, tiny little LEGO ships!
I couldn’t say no.
(Watch out though, Toys R Us is currently charging $10 more than LEGO is for the calendar.)
The Slow Rise & Sudden Demise of LEGO Universe June 17, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, lego, Misc MMOs.Tags: Animal Jam, LEGO Universe
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At least at our house.
I have been interested in LEGO Universe since it was announced. LEGO is kind of a big thing at our house. And we love all most of the Traveller’s Tales LEGO games. So a LEGO MMO seemed like a natural.
But we never quite got around to buying it.
You can only really play so many subscription MMOs at a time, and when LEGO Universe came out, World of Warcraft was still popular at our house. So I did not see the need to rush out and drop $40 on the box. I could wait and let things settle.
Time went by. The price of the game was cut in half. $20 for LEGO Universe.
And while Cataclysm was fading for us somewhat by this point (the instance group was face rolling content while my daughter had played all Summer in the beta with a fully equipped level 85 character and was getting bored and not willing to level up through the content) $20 still seemed like a bit much when my daughter had Animal Jam, with the benefits of being free and browser based, to occupy her gaming time.
And more time went by, LEGO took over LEGO Universe from NetDevil, and began offering the game for $10 via the LEGO Online Store.
$10… that was tempting. I’ve bought games I know I’ll never play for $10. I bought City of Heroes: Going Rogue on Steam for $10 in a fit of bargain basement insanity over the holidays, along with Hearts of Iron III. (And at least I’ve played Hearts of Iron some, or I did until the new Combat Mission title came out.)
But even at $10 I passed.
The game was still available for $10, with free shipping last I checked.
Then I got a reminder from the LEGO Store that I had some VIP points to redeem. With those applied to the price of LEGO Universe, I finally hit a price point I could not resist.
$5.46 turned out to be the right price
Yes, for five dollars and forty six cents, I could commit to LEGO Universe.
It arrived in the mail and we installed it on my daughter’s iMac. I created an account and we launched the game and waited for it to patch. And waited. And waited. And went to bed and got up the next morning. And waited a bit more.
And then we could play!
And play my daughter did.
Meanwhile I tinkered with the parental controls. Said controls suck.
Well, maybe “suck” isn’t the right word.
They are on par with most free to play browser based games I have encountered, which is to say they appear to be a rudimentary after thought of very limited value, though it is hampered by the LEGO Universe web site, which I did not very friendly in helping me get to things I was seeking.
And there is the fact that I have been spoiled by Blizzard’s parental controls. I have griped about how they took a workable UI and made it worse, but it still allows me the option I want when it comes to parental controls, the ability set time slots when my daughter is allowed to play. I do not want to have to constantly police her computer for online games when she is supposed to be making a birthday card in Kid-Pix or writing up her science fair project. (Which involved LEGO as well.)
Still, for a boxed monthly subscription game that pushes the parental controls and kid safety aspects of the game, I was disappointed.
But my daughter was very excited about the game and played that first weekend, totally forgetting about Animal Jam, the kid focused browser MMO associated with National Geographic.
It was her game of choice the following weekend, though we did have to do some more patching as they had just dropped a new update that week. But still, she seemed to be enjoying the game quite a bit, and called me over to show me the house she was building and a few other neat things.
But the weekend after that, LEGO Universe was forgotten.
My daughter’s favorite game was Animal Jam again.
I did not get a chance to play it with her. I only ordered one copy remembering, perhaps falsely, that there was some sort of “family account” associated with the game. However I was unable to find any reference to this on the rather jumbled LEGO Universe web site, so perhaps it was something they mentioned as a possibility before launching.
I asked my daughter to list out what she liked and did not like about LEGO Universe, to see why it did not stick with her. This is what she gave me:
Likes
- Cool gear
- Cool dance moves
- Cool pets
- Dungeons which other people can go in
- Groups
- Build your OWN home
Dislikes
- You cant say LEET, UBER, HAX. IRL, HALLO stuff like that
- You have a limited speech
- You have to PAY for JUST a month
- you cant make new characters on different servers
- YOU HAVE TO WAIT FOR LIKE 89 HOURS FOR THE PATCHES TO DOWNLOAD! (no wonder they don’t have many players)
- It is frustrating!
Now, some of her dislikes reflect the kid safety aspects of the game. (And her exposure to Barrens chat.) The one option I had in parental controls was the ability to limit communications.
And, of course, the whole patching thing happened to hit her two weeks running. Patience is an almost unknown virtue in a 9 year old.
But I also think part of the reason that LEGO Universe did not stick with her is that she is developing her own interests. LEGO is clearly my influence, and while she has not rejected it completely, it has begun to fade in favor of her own ideas. Right now, for example, she is very much into the cat society Warriors series of books, having devoured two dozen of the titles so far this year.
So she likes to draw cats and play with things that are cat related. She even pays more attention to our own cats and has taken to combing them regularly. Yay for good side effects. She likes to make up cat names in the theme of the books, which I am told (by her) follow the format of <thing> + <cat body part>. So you end up with something like Brambleclaw. Of course, I fail at this, coming up with names like, Toastertail which gets the response, “Dad! Cats don’t know what a toaster is!” My explanation about knowing a cat that got its tail singed by a toaster falls on deaf ears.
Animal Jam, which lets her play as a cat, trumps a game that merely lets you play with LEGO bricks. (Penguins are also out.)
So LEGO Universe, which was met with an initial burst of enthusiasm now sits idle. And given its monthly subscription nature, it seems unlikely that we will return to it. The game competes squarely against many browser based MMOs that offer at least some play aspects for free. Thus when my daughter to come argue her case with me about why I should allow her to subscribe to a given game, a case that is much easier to win if she can say, “I’m already playing it,” LEGO Universe seems destined to lose.
And so it goes.
Who will speak for LEGO Universe? Not I.
LEGO Star Wars III – The Clone Wars April 15, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, lego, wii.Tags: LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean, LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Star Wars III, The Clone Wars, Traveller's Tales
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It is no secret that we are quite enamored with most of the LEGO games that Traveller’s Tales has put out.
We own almost the whole set, and have played them all. Our current household ranking of the games, from most to least favorite, is:
- LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy – Maybe our most-played game on the Wii, this was TT’s second LEGO game, and they nailed what makes the games fun. Lots of puzzles, hidden surprises that make you want to replay levels, and breaking things… lots of smashing things into their little LEGO parts.
- LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 – We call this one LEGO Harry Potter: Movies 1-4, since the game follows the movies and not the books. But it does follow the movies very closely. We found that we could watch the movie for a given year, then could play through that year in the game without ever needing a hint. The spell system was fun. My daughter could not wait and played through the game without me, which was a first.
- LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga – Combines the Original Trilogy with a reworked and more fun version of the original game. We played it through, though replay value was tainted a bit by the fact that we had already played episodes IV through VI to death.
- LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures – Lots of fun, though light on content. Made us go watch the movies again. The Temple of Doom segment, like its movie counterpart, was our least favorite.
- LEGO Batman: The Video Game – Fun, though we are not as into super heroes around here as we might be. Introduced the split screen concept, so my daughter and I would stop playing tug of war, but the flicker and playing on a partial section of screen was more annoying that the tug of war. Also, the controls on the driving levels needed some improvement.
- LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues – Like The Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, proof that more is not always better. Split screen flicker got worse, the cut scenes were too frequent, and they tried to make the lobby area part of the game with its own requirements, which turned it into a confusing mess. My daughter played with the level creator more than we played the game, but the level creator didn’t seem to have a lot of real purpose in life.
- LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game – The first game in the series, and TT was still figuring out what was going to be fun. This game is hard… that lava jumping level was a royal pain and there were a few levels we could barely start, much less finish. All the levels were reworked in the spirit of “puzzles and breaking stuff” in The Complete Saga. Fortunately, TT quickly figured out what made the games fun and hit the mark squarely with LEGO Star Wars II.
So we had to get LEGO Star Wars II: The Clone Wars.
We received it in the mail about two weeks ago and it is currently vying for the second or third spot on our list above.
It follows the story, or at least the first two seasons, of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series which we have been watching every Friday night at our house. And while I have not been paying the closest attention to the series, I recognize situations that have come up over the course of the series.
The game introducing a new engine for the LEGO series which seems to help the Wii along as it tries to render things on screen. The downside of the last few games, including Harry Potter, is that the Wii seemed to be quite taxed to keep up with what it was being asked to do. That goes away, to a certain degree, with LEGO Star Wars III.
The flicker that bothered me seems to have been reduced. Of course, those of you who grew up in the age of LCD monitors might not know to what I am referring, but flicker used to be a serious annoyance on CRT based monitors and tube TVs used as monitors. The reduction in flicker might, of course, be attributed to the fact that we no longer have a tube TV, but a nice big LCD screen.
This bigger screen, since the game expands out to play on the full 16:9 screen, and the reduction in flicker makes split screen play more bearable. I still am not fond of it, and neither is my daughter, and I wish it was an option that you could turn off, but it is not. In fact, there are sections of play where two players work on separate parts of a level on a divided screen.
So my daughter and I make do by using the “drop out” option that lets one player leave the game so the other player can have the full screen to perform some task that really needs the whole screen to accomplish. This is something of a weakness of the game, in my opinion. Any number of times you have to take over some huge laser cannon and blow up an objective in the distance, only to have your screen cut diagonally across your view by you partner who is trying to knock off some droid troopers who have just shown up.
The game itself has all the things we have become used to in TT’s LEGO games, unlocks, hidden items, fun puzzles, and lots and lots of LEGO objects waiting to be smashed to pieces, an aspect of the game that is more satisfying in some visceral than it probably should be. And it never gets old! Never!
There are some new features. You can now command a platoon sized group of clones, using them to target specific structures that need rapid fire to destroy. There are a number of battlefield scenarios where you have to destroy separatist structures and capture their power sources to build Republic structure. This includes a mini-map at the top of the screen which the Wii, its output limited to 480p, is unable to display clearly. I would like to see the whole thing on 1080p output.
And then there is that clone troop with the Gatling blaster in the Ryloth missions. I could just run around shooting that thing all day long.
Reviews of the game have come up in the “mediocre” range of 6.0-7.5 on a lot of sites. The DS and 3DS versions, which lack a number of the new features, score at the low end, while the home console versions rank a little higher. The main complaints, paraphrased by me, seem to be “not much new, and what is new gets over used.”
I cannot really argue with that.
We are only 30% into the game, but it still seems like a lot of fun us. If you wanted more LEGO Star Wars, you’ll probably like it. That is where we stand. We wanted more and we got it.
If you did not like the past versions, you probably won’t like this any better.
And I am looking forward to the next installment from TT, LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean.
I might have to make another pass at my old post about Five LEGO Video Games I Want. If they can do Pirates of the Caribbean, the door is open to other ideas.
[Keen and Graev have a nice review of LEGO Star Wars III posted.]
