There is no such thing as StarCraft LEGO. Blizzard’s deal with the awful Mega Bloks puts paid to that dream. Luis Castenada’s custom Terran Marine here only makes that realisation even more painful.
Aside from a custom head and some paint, the entire thing is LEGO. How he worked out the detail on the legs and shoulders is something I don’t think I want to know.
Starcraft-Marine [Flickr, via Brothers Brick]
Comments
9 responses to “LEGO StarCraft Marine Is Jacked Up And Good To Go”
As a Lego kid I never, ever understood why so many big name movies and games and etc would release special mega blok things and not go with Lego. Barring Star Wars, of course.
Mega bloks must be cheaper, easier to deal with, or just hungrier to make deals. I’ve got a few of their transformer models, from last xmas when they were selling them for $10 a pop. They’re pretty good, but the minifigs are fairly average.
I’d give megabloks 3.5/5 and lego 4.5/5. They’re comparable and they work together well, so if you see one you like at a good price, I’d still pick it up.
Can’t have too many plastic blocks!
From what I heard, Lego won’t take any franchise it deems too violent. That’s why Starcraft, WoW, Halo have all had to go through Mega Bloks.
The irony is Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are incredibly violent franchises, but they do it in a way that’s still PG-13.
Star Wars is not ‘incredibly violent’ outside a few scenes from Revenge of the Sith. The Star Wars/LEGO license began around 2000 with Phantom Menace release. Ditto with the Harry Potter license which predates the violent 7th book. It comes down to franchise appeal to children and AFOLs, and the ability to design models. LOTR is still very appealing to kids.
Until a few years ago, there were no official ‘gun’ accessories for Lego minifigures and even in Star Wars sets, blasters were replaced by megaphones. To this day, there is no military Lego theme, and even the City Police subtheme still excludes guns. Lego’s not the only one, a reverse example would be VW and their refusal to license their car models out to perceived ‘violent’ franchises like Transformers, but are very happy to partner with Lego like the recent UCS Kombivan.
Jacked up and ready to go*
Dear Santa
why the mega bloks hate?
I’ll give you that their individual pieces aren’t quite as well made (although that’s only ever been a problem for me once and the slightest dab of glue fixed it), and they don’t often use the more interesting pieces like lego, but they still work, and IMO they do better overall sets because they aren’t afraid to use non-standard blocks, hell I flat out prefer their little men most of the time (although I have seen some shockingly bad ones before).
I’d take lego over mega bloks for everything but my mans, but I’d still be just as happy with mega bloks to make starcraft sets.
P.S. they also did those baller halo ODST drop pods, so they get brownie points for that.
People dislike Mega Bloks because as you say, the pieces aren’t as high quality. They still feel ‘greasy’ even when clean and there are often imperfections in the injection moulding so you can get non-uniform colouring in the bricks. Mega Bloks also use sticker sheets liberally as opposed to the more expensive printing, and utilise building techniques that most Lego fans loathe like STAMPs (Stickers Across Multiple Pieces), which have a shorter life and you can’t exactly rebuild and MOC without messing up the adhesive.
The beauty of Lego is that there are very few exclusive pieces between the sets, almost everything is a pre-existing piece used very creatively eg. the minifig ‘chisel’ in the X-Wing’s intake, or flower pots in an engine. If you’re clever, you can actually build new designs using your own pieces and BrickLinking the difference. Mega Bloks are uncreative in comparison and will simply produce a whole raft of new pieces in a set when they can’t figure a way to utilise older ones.
Of course… all this is coming from the Lego purist in me. There are some Mega Bloks sets that I think are pretty badass like Starcraft’s and I might attempt to make later with Lego. But Starcraft lends itself well to building block toys, with their chunky Terran designs. WoW? Not so much.
I gotta say, mega blocks are awesome, I have most of the good halo mega blocks and have never had an issue, in fact I had more of an issue with my lego millennium falcon peices not fitting quite right. My 10th anniversary warthog fell of the shelf the other day on to tile and only took light damage and no actual damage to the bricks. That said my favourite kit is my super star destroyer and its lego. Hope that thing never falls lol