{"id":6569,"date":"2012-08-18T10:46:46","date_gmt":"2012-08-18T15:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=6569"},"modified":"2013-08-28T01:47:11","modified_gmt":"2013-08-28T01:47:11","slug":"on-building-a-mega-bloks-set","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=6569","title":{"rendered":"On Building a Mega Bloks Set"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, the day Shore Leave began, I stopped at Target.  I needed to pick up some supplies for the weekend, and while I was there I took a look at the various LEGO and LEGO-like sets that they had.<\/p>\n<p>And, there on the shelf, were the Mega Bloks <i>World of WarCraft<\/i> sets.  Some of them, at any rate.<\/p>\n<p>I picked up one of the low-end sets, the <i>Gnome Flying Machine<\/i>, but it wasn&#8217;t until last night, as I was listening to the Nationals\/Mets game on a staticky AM radio station, that I finally put the set together.<\/p>\n<p>Why did I buy it?  I&#8217;ve never played <i>World of WarCraft<\/i>, after all.  (I did, however, plot out a <i>World of WarCraft<\/i> novel several years ago, for reasons I don&#8217;t recall, and maybe I should think about doing something original with it&#8230;)  Partly of out curiosity.  Partly just for fun.  And partly because I was curious to see how these sets compared to the LEGO <i>Lord of the Rings<\/i> sets or the early-2000s LEGO Castle sets (a period when it went through a <i>WarCraft<\/i>-esque phase).  Mega Bloks <i>World of WarCraft<\/i> may not represent Tolkien&#8217;s <i>The Lord of the Rings<\/i> at all, but the sets would make a nice stand-in for Kirill Yeskov&#8217;s <i>The Last Ringbearer<\/i>. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>For being a 90-piece set, it took a little longer than I&#8217;d have expected to build, maybe twenty minutes.  The set itself was fairly simple.  It wasn&#8217;t an intricate as, say, the <i>KRE-O Transformers: Starscream<\/i> set.  But some of the pieces didn&#8217;t go together easily (exhaust pipes or the minifig attachment, I&#8217;m looking at you), and the style of the instructions themselves required some decoding.  But when it was done, it looked pretty nice.<\/p>\n<p>In the last year, I&#8217;ve built some LEGO, I&#8217;ve built some KRE-O, I&#8217;ve built some Character Building, and I&#8217;ve built some Mega Bloks.  To me, LEGO and Character Building have a very similar feel (and I think that Character Building feels more like older LEGO, to be honest), KRE-O builds right but looks and feels off, and Mega looks right but feels and builds off.  (One major problem with Mega is that the minifigs aren&#8217;t usable with baseplates; you have have put studs on their feet to affix them.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m unlikely to take the plunge and buy the <i>Stormwind<\/i> set &mdash; yes, it looks fantastic, but it&#8217;s expensive and I have no place for it &mdash; but a couple more of these smaller sets, or the Goblin Zeppelin, wouldn&#8217;t be out of place in my collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, the day Shore Leave began, I stopped at Target. I needed to pick up some supplies for the weekend, and while I was there I took a look at the various LEGO and LEGO-like sets that they had. And, there on the shelf, were the Mega Bloks World of WarCraft sets.<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=6569\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;On Building a Mega Bloks Set&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[188,46,221],"class_list":["post-6569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-the-last-ringbearer","tag-the-lord-of-the-rings","tag-world-of-warcraft","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}