My Avengers team is growing little by little with Captain America who has just joined the Hulk and Iron Man ... The three minifigs are the work of Christo, and Captain America is really superb. The shield is silver, and the minifigure is perfectly screen printed.

LEGO must release its official version of Captain America in the LEGO Super Heroes Marvel range by mid 2012. A prototype of the minifig was also presented at San Diego Comic Con in July 2011.

The shield is covered with a sticker on this prototype, but it should be screen-printed in the final version, or in any case it would be better if it is, otherwise, the community risks crying scandal ....

Two new mini sets have appeared: This is the 30056 Star Destroyer et 30058 STAP. Little information about them, nothing in particular concerning the mode of distribution of these mini sets which will undoubtedly have to be bought on Bricklink for a few tens of dollars.

We already have a Star Destroyer in mini format in the Star Wars range with the set 4492 released in 2004 and whose design seems to me a bit more successful than this one ...
We have also been entitled in the past to a Battle Droid is EPPS with the set 30004 released in 2009.

Nothing very innovative then, but if like me you like minis, you are probably already checking on Bricklink if they are already referenced ... and they are: 30056 Star Destroyer & 30058 STAP. No seller is yet offering them for sale. Wait & see ...

We had already had a vague intuition on this subject: The new version of C-3PO suffers from some serigraphy problems. On the different visuals of this minifigure that we have seen so far, we had the weird impression that C-3PO, just crashed on Tatooine with R2-D2, was looking elsewhere ...

This is due to the new serigraphy of the eyes of this minifigure, which on some copies is very far from being centered unlike the one presented above by Huw Millington on Brickset (with beautiful photos to see in his flickr gallery). And this variation in impressions is not an isolated case. Many AFOLs already report burrs and other offsets on the serigraphs of minifigs in the Super Heroes range.

In the past, screen prints were not always perfect, but it seems that these problems are more and more present. We have all had in our hands a minifigure that is poorly screened or whose printing is slightly offset with an overlap of colors. Nothing serious in itself. But on C-3PO, this shift induces a completely different facial expression than the minifig. And I find it all of a sudden becomes much more awkward ....

I put below an example of a minifigure whose gaze is completely distorted by this shift, admit that it is very average ... 

This is a question which will make more than one jump but which deserves to be asked.

A set review is good, it allows you to see more closely a model, minifigs, a box ... but more and more, these reviews are botched, spoiled by those who offer them with blurry photos , the carpet in their living room or the checkered tablecloth in the kitchen. In addition, the high-definition visuals offered by LEGO, retouched or not, circulate regularly well before the sets are actually marketed and are of much better quality than those offered by fans.

What the fans think? Personally, I skip this part more and more often: these hasty reviews are mostly decorated with two lines of text, which, when they are not full of spelling mistakes, do not have no interest other than describing what you see in the photos. I would not come back here to the rating at the limit of the debility granted to sets by certain sites or forums .... These ratings have no interest and for good reason: they are not indexed to anything, correspond to nothing and are used just conclusion to reviews that have no such as the name.

On one side we find the Awesome Reviews, those where everything is brilliant, incredible, top-notch, grandiose, with notes to make a college student green with envy and a conclusion that recommends buying the set in question immediately on pain of being a looser for life.
On the other, we find the pathological reviews, with dozens of pictures of the box, instructions, stickers, the box, the inventory of wisely aligned parts, the box and more of the box .... All served with an over-analysis of the content, even if it means falling into obsession. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against discovering pictures of a set I'm looking forward to, quite the contrary. But I am a big boy and I make my own opinion without having to go through the usual logorrhea of ​​superlatives. And above all, I want to keep certain sensations for my own unpacking with the discovery of the contents, the bags, the parts ... The ridiculous ritual but essential for any self-respecting AFOL.

There are more and more excellent quality video reviews posted on Youtube by passionate AFOLs or on sites like The Brick Show who have made these mini-shows their trademark. And it is not worse. They have the merit of showing the set and the minifigs from every angle in less than 3 minutes, with a minimum of unnecessary comments (you can always mute the sound) and possibly detailing the various features of the model. I ask no more.

I posted you recently on Brick Heroes video reviews produced by Artifex. They are a good example of clean, efficient work that gets around a set in minutes. Difficult to do better, the technical level of the realization is high. I also spend a little time skimming Youtube to watch some videos of the young French-speaking scene which presents sets in the form of clips of a few minutes. The production is amateurish, the commentary hesitant, the credits annoying, but we generally learn more than a review of 15 photos and three lines of conclusion.

I don't wait for a review to decide whether or not to give me a particular set. In the worst case, we get so many images of the new stuff coming out that my idea on the matter is settled long before anyone decides to post some pictures.

 And you, what is your opinion on this subject? Do not hesitate to post your comments....

I'm enjoying these two photos posted by Huw Millington (Brickset) on his flickr gallery to come back to the great novelty of this set 9492 Tie Fighter : the new conical piece on astromech droids.

R5-J2 is one of those droids decked out in this dome that opens up new possibilities as to the models that may be offered in the future. This droid, seen a few seconds in theEpisode VI: Return of the Jedi, was assigned to the second Death Star.

In 2012 we will also be entitled to R5-D8, another droid equipped with the same dome, in the set 9493 X-Wing Starfighter. This Droid was in the service of Jek Porkins and his X-Wing during the Battle of Yavin ( Episode IV: A New Hope).

The series of astromech droids are easy to distribute: those with round dome are of class R2, R3, R4, R8 or even R9, those with flat conical dome are of class G8, R5 or R6 and those with pointed conical dome are of class R7.

In the R5 series, the best known models are arguably R5-A2, seen around Mos Eisley on Tatooine in theEpisode IV: A New Hope, R5-D4 bought by Owen Lars from the Jawas in the same episode or even R5-M2 seen during the Battle of Hoth in theEpisode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

In fact, the different episodes of the Original Trilogy are peppered with astromech droids in many scenes and some don't even have a specific name or bio.

So many models, which could now become reality and integrate our collections of minifigs even if they are not necessarily significant in the Star Wars universe.

By the way, if you like astromech droids, go to this site, you will be served ....