Built an entertainment center to house some of my collection. I need to dust :( is an interlocking plastic brick construction toy brand that can be used to assemble a variety of objects. The Lego Group founder Ole Kirk Christiansen began making wooden toys in 1932, two years before launching the Lego toy company. In the late 1940s, Lego began producing plastic interlocking bricks called “automatic binding bricks.” Since then, the company has sold a variety of different building sets, including themes for cities, space, pirates, animals, the ocean and several different time periods. Robotics sets have also been released, with the first line titled “Mindstorms” sold in 1998. was launched, which provides product descriptions, games, videos and an online store. On July 10th, 2000, the website Brickset was created, serving as an online database for LEGO collectors. On February 11th, 2006, the Lego Wiki was launched, which accumulated over 24,900 pages in the first eight years.
On December 9th, 2007, the official LEGO Facebook page was created, garnering upwards of 5.19 million likes in the next six years. On March 23rd, 2008, the /r/LEGO subreddit was launched, which received over 45,100 subscribers in the first five years. On September 21st, 2008, Redditor noname99 submitted photographs of a giant LEGO battleship (shown below) to the /r/pics subreddit, where it gained over 1,700 up votes and 170 comments prior to being archived. On May 27th, 2010, YouTuber horseattack uploaded a video of a printer built out of LEGO parts (shown below, left). In the following four years, the video accumulated more than 4.79 million views and 4,100 comments. On December 21st, 2012, YouTuber danmovproduction uploaded a stop motion parody of the game League of Legends using Lego pieces (shown below, right), which gained upwards of 1.57 million views and 3,200 comments in eight months. Bionicle is a line of toys created by the LEGO Group in December of 2000, which initially launched in Europe before being released in Canada and the United States six months later.
A significant following for the sets grew online, with several fan-sites launching for custom creations, fiction and artwork. The franchise was moderately successful and continued on for the next decade before it was halted in summer of 2010 to make way for a new franchise “Hero Factory.” Following the discontinuation of production, the story was continued by head writer Greg Farshtey on a offical Bionicle website known as BioncleStory in the form of web series and podcasts. A custom LEGO creation is referred to as “My Own Creation” (MOC) and MOC creators are known as “MOCcers.” Some MOCcers paint, remold or even create custom parts and masks in order to make better looking sets. The MOC database MOCpages was launched on February 4th, 2003, where users can share their own custom LEGO sets (shown below). Brickfilms are movies made with LEGO bricks that are produced using stop motion animation techniques. On January 28th, 2014, Google launched Build With Chrome, a website where users of Google’s web browser can digitally construct scale models of objects and buildings with LEGO bricks.
Created in collaboration with LEGO as part of the Danish toymaker’s marketing campaign for the upcoming 3D animated feature film Lego: The Piece of Resistance, Build with Chrome also allows its users to geotag their creations to a real location in the world, share them publicly and browse creations made by others through its integration with Google Plus and Google Maps. “I Hope You Step on a ” is an expression often used as a retort in rage comics and reaction images to express resentment towards someone who deserves punishment or ill-fortune, such as accidentally stepping on a LEGO brick. On January 8th, 2016, the LEGO Star Wars II-Core Facebook page was launched, featuring image macros referencing the 2006 action-adventure video game Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. On November 29th, the page highlighted an image macro of a patient receiving an MRI while their doctor plays a Lego Star Wars game (shown below). Within one week, the post gained over 1,200 reactions and 300 shares.
In early December, several Lego Star Wars memes reached the front page of the /r/me_irl subreddit (shown below). On December 5th, Redditor acfman17 asked about the recent “influx of lego star wars memes” in a post on /r/OutOfTheLoop, receiving upwards of 730 votes (87% upvoted) and 60 comments in less than 24 hours.MinifiguresTrapped in corporate for two weeks of training. Someone get me out of here!!! ‘Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ has just enough comedy to get you by The gang's all here in "Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens." At this point, most sane humans have had enough of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” but big corporations like Lego and Warner Bros. think you want more BB-8, Rey and the whole intergalactic gang. So with no less than 13 promotional trailers targeting kids and families on YouTube, the onslaught of “Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has begun. Beyond Nintendo’s Mario and “The Legend of Zelda” games, one could argue that the sweetest of the long-running series of family-oriented games is the Lego franchise.
There are times when I actually enjoy the Lego games more than those lauded Nintendo games. This is one of those times. Lego games have been published since 1997’s “Lego Island,” an odd offering that had the frowning, stubble-faced Brickster using the mere smell of pizza to disintegrate the lock on his prison cell. The Lego releases became more admirably complex when England’s Traveller’s Tales took over in 2005 (with, you guessed it, a Star Wars game). At that time, the characters didn’t even talk. They just made silly, quirky noises full of emotion (which somehow worked if you believed, as I did, you were playing inside an almost-silent movie). Compared to other Lego games, “The Force Awakens” is a larger, more open-world offering, expansive in the way some games for adults are. But there’s a tried-and-true formula — sometimes magical, sometimes banal — to the Lego games catalog. “The Force Awakens” doesn’t stray far from this blueprint, but those who believe playing is like downing candy are trying too hard to be pretentious.
The blocky characters exude humor, from signature winks to the ardent-but-lunking way they pad about. Add some nifty, Pixar-style satire for adults, and you have a Lego game. There was pressure to get this one right because last year’s “Disney Infinity 3.0 Star Wars The Force Awakens,” also made for kids and families, was generally awesome. (And it’s a complete shame that Disney recently shuttered the studio that made these toys-to-life games.) Traveller’s Tales and TT Fusion have shown their research chops by going back to the source. Lego toys, the ingenious Danish invention which means ‘play well’ in English, are about building things. So in Lego games, you collect pieces called studs, you find piles of things to construct which, when they are released through controller button taps, turn from pieces into machinery or vehicles. These help you solve puzzles and move from one level to the next. With “Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” you can play 200 characters from the film in a game that follows, in close approximation, the movie’s plot.
All of the actors involved in the movie, including Harrison Ford, recorded lines for the game (although Daisy Ridley sounds as if she recorded her muddled Rey bits on a cell phone). Once inside, I enjoyed seeing two Ewoks on a tree limb, tuning up a trumpet and horn, readying to play the Star Wars theme. Happily, I figured out how to employ a band of Ewoks to help me push logs onto a pesky Walker below. I had a choice of two or three things to build and I constructed a turret gun and a ladder in the right order to move ahead in the verdant forests of Endor. Then, just as Han Solo tossed an enemy one-handed from a vehicle, something awful happened, something that had never happened to me in my history of playing Lego games. It was worse than that moment in Lego Jurassic Park when a character was eternally stuck jumping, trying to leap out of a crevasse. This time, the game crashed. I lost all of my progress — along with much of my goodwill — and had to start the game all over again.
Had I stopped out of frustration, I would have missed an emotional Darth Vader, sniffling and shedding tears when presented with Luke Skywalker’s childhood drawing of daddy Darth as a stick figure. I would’ve missed BB-8 playing soccer and basketball during a blazing battle. And I would have missed rubber ducks appearing for no reason whatsoever. Seeing them on Jakku was pleasurable in a weird way. “The Force Awakens” is the biggest of the Lego games, and while that hugeness can add to its epic, space opera nature, the narrative sometimes loses the pace needed to sustain an action adventure. During long battles there’s a distinct lack of that signature humor making it, at times, feel more like “Halo” or “Gears of War” with Lego characters. And, if you want to replay levels to find the gold blocks you missed, it takes even more time. But, if you’re patient, you’re rewarded with the momentary joy of esteemed actor Harrison Ford asking for “Wookiee cookies for Chewie.”
If you’re an enduring Star Wars fan, you’ll uncover the heartrending story that explains why C3PO has a red arm. And the curious fan will find out how Han and Chewbacca got those creepy Rathar monsters with octopus-like tentacles, giant maw and razor-sharp teeth onto the Millennium Falcon. Despite the amount of original content, there is too much leaning on past successes. The Lego recipe hasn’t changed much, so the collecting of studs and gold bricks — searching high and low in every nook and cranny in this vast world to find them — becomes repetitive. And since so many around the world already know “The Force Awakens” story through the movie (and last year’s Disney game), you wish the developers had gone the extra mile with even more levels and plot points that move beyond the theatrical offering into the vast treasure trove of Star Wars lore. Ultimately, it’s a beautifully animated action-adventure game with occasionally spectacular views from space and of magnificent landscapes on various planets.