Mike Walsh's LEGO® Blog » Caught My Eye

LEGO Games Tour coming to Raleigh

Mike Walsh — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:32:49 +0000

We received our copy of the LEGO Club Magazine this week and it contained a flyer advertising the LEGO Games Tour. I noticed that Raleigh was on the list and it is coming up in a couple weeks. The Games Tour will visit Raleigh July 16-18, 2010 and will be at Moore Square in downtown Raleigh. Moore Square is where Exploris is.

You can find more information on the tour on the Downtown Raleigh web site.

AFOL A Blocumentary

Mike Walsh — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:45:38 +0000

While I dislike (despise?) the term AFOL, this video (direct link here) is very well done and worth 25-30 minutes of your time to watch.

AFOL A Blocumentary from AFOL on Vimeo.

What is it about the term AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) that I don’t like? It is hard to put it into words but it is the word “Fan” that I don’t care for.

I am not a “fan” of LEGO but I enjoy creating things out of LEGO and I enjoy the LEGO hobby. I refer to myself as a hobbyist or enthusiast but never as a fan. In fact, there is a lot of things about LEGO that I am probably not a fan of (e.g. the lack of product offering in the $5 – $20 range, the inability to buy train cars individually, etc.). Despite my feelings about the term “AFOL”, it isn’t going to go away and the video is well done.

Toy Fair 2010 Pictures

Mike Walsh — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:36:39 +0000

A few years ago I found a link to a site called Altered States Magazine. ASM had very good Toy Fair coverage, particularly of LEGO. These days pictures from Toy Fair are pretty prevalent but ASM still has very good coverage.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the 2010 trains. At least none that I saw in my quickl scan through. Link to ASM’s Toy Fair Coverage: http://toyfair10.asmzine.com/gallery/lego/

Cool background on the Emerald Night

Mike Walsh — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:14:34 +0000

I am not sure how I missed then when it was posted, but I just saw the link today on Eurobricks (which admittedly I don’t visit very often).

There is some pretty cool footage in the video and some insight into the LEGO Vault. There is also an brief view of the LEGO Hobby Train which I worked on. The model shown was designed by Holger Mathes.

2010 LEGO Train Sets

Mike Walsh — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:13:04 +0000

I saw a link to this image on the WamaLUG mailing list.

You can read a bit more about 2010 LEGO Trains in this article on BrickSet. A couple of initial thoughts:

It is nice to see LEGO Trains coming back and as expected, they are Power Function based.
I really wish LEGO would release individual train cars. The lack of expandability is, IMNSO, the single biggest reason why LEGO trains don’t succeed in the market.

They are interesting but I don’t see myself buying any of them unless they are really good deal. I recently sold four trains that I still has NISB to help me buy a camera lens I wanted. So for me this is both good news and bad news. Good news that Trains continue on, bad news that they still don’t believe that there is a market for individual cars. One of these days I need to dig up the White Paper on marketing LEGO Trains that I wrote when I worked on the Hobby Train project and post it. When I originally wrote it (about five years ago) I was asked not to post it on the web but that was so long ago, it probably doesn’t matter any more. I went back and read it about six months ago and I think it is as accurate today as when I first wrote it on a flight back from Munich.