Review: Star Diamond Blocks Soldier Deformation: 5-in-1 Robot set PART TWO

This is the 1st robot in that big box i got containing Star Diamond's biggest box of robots in brick form.

The unboxing post is here: Unboxing the Beast

The day I got the box is described here: A ton of bricks

And here was my first non-Lego robot: Ausini Guarder


Unboxing the Red Robot:

Opening the huge box gave me 5 smaller boxes inside.  Each box contained the parts for an individual robot.  A good assortment of bricks were inside the box.  And what do I see but something similar to Lego's brick removing tool.  That's awesome because you normally only get the brick remover from big costly Lego sets.  This box had 5 of them, 1 for each robot!

The instructions were in really nicely produced sheets.

There were two sets of instructions as the other one contained instructions for combining this robot with some of the other robots in the set.

When you open the manual it shows a colorful and well illustrated step-by-step guide to complete the model.

And here are the brick pouches again.  A nice assortment of reds and blacks.  And I still find it extremely satisfying to get that green brick remover tool.

I think it's great that everything is disassembled.  You need to connect almost everything.  Even the hinges.  Lego for one already has the hinges pre-constructed.  With Star Diamond they make you assemble them.

Lego has always had great rubber wheels.  In fact they are one of the biggest manufacturers of rubber wheels on the planet.  Star Diamond is tops as far as the Chinese manufacturers go in terms of wheel quality. Most of their models have rubber wheels similar to Lego (some of the small kits now contain plastic wheels unfortunately).  And the quality of the tires and mags are at Lego levels.

Building the Bot: 

Following the instructions sheet we start with the legs.  It is great to note here that despite not using toothed gear parts for the leg joints they provide a surprisingly stable and tight set of joints. This is a far cry from the loose joints of the Sluban flamingo transformable model I made a few weeks back (Here's the review for that one: Space Flamingo ).

Nice!  Even with the body attached it can still stand up on its own.

Here we have the body almost done.  The whole structure can still be supported by the legs.

And here we have the gun for the mecha.

The arm and the gun

We are almost done building this bad boy.

A couple of folks mention that he looks similar to the Transformer's Cliffjumper.  Yeah I can definitely see the resemblance there.

One arm attached

Even with one arm connected the model can still stand on its own.  That's a good sign.

One more arm and this journey is done.


The complete bot:

With the tight joints you can put the completed robot in almost any pose you can imagine.

Now complete!

It is a pretty handsome looking bot once everything was done.

Face front!

Nice!

With the gang:

Posing it with some of my other stuff for a size comparison.

The review of the yellow Guarder robot is here: Guarder

From left to right:  Star Diamond robot, Ausini Guarder robot, Gundam Farsia, Lego Green Lantern
 

Another picture with the gang!

One last group pic!  Green Lantern is happy in the back!

My decision to buy the big 2,000 peso box was well worth it.  If the rest of the robots in this set will turn out this way then I am in for a treat.

Watch out for the other 5 bots as I finish building each one.

Lego Robots Life #001

Oh no!

A love triangle!

Lego Robot minifigs: Black from Series 8.  Male Wind-Up Robot from Series 6.  Female Wind-Up Robot from Series 11.

We must be careful my love! He might know about us!

I've caught you both!

He is mine you crazy robot girl!

“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” 
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

Review: Lego Minifigs Series 11 Part 1

One of the Lego themes that people are fond of are the minifigs sets.  These are sets that concentrate on the little Lego people called minifigs.  When the minifig came out it was a generic template of semi-articulated figure with a yellow head, two eyes and a smile.

The minifig was first introduced in 1978 and has since gone an extensive evolution.  For a complete history of it's evolution you can look at this article on Gizmodo: Gizmodo's Evolution of the Lego Minifig.

The current Minifig special sets started coming out in 2010 with minifig series 1.  It is now up to minifig series 11.  Along the way of course there have been special sets with 3 or 4 figures (Read my review of the special rock band set The Lego Rock Band minifig collection and Series 10).  Similar to other small toy collections minifig sets were supposed to be bought individually and you get a random surprise each time.  

Well people love it so much that various techniques have arisen to remove the randomization from the process.  I started buying complete unopened sets with Series 8 as I had become friends with the staff of the local Lego store and when a box would arrive they would set aside a complete set for me.

Series 11 took me by surprise and I the staff at the store was also new.  This left me with no advance order for the set.  So it's partly frustrating and partly fun that I now have to track down the entire set individually.

So today I rushed to Hobbes & Landes Greenbelt 5 and was able to get 7 of the 16 figures in Series 11.  Good thing too!  H&L had an on-going 10% off sale on Lego until November 3.

Here's 4 of them:

No. 10 The Welder

Need to weld something?

The Welder offers a nice welding helmet.  Oh and look at that gruff look!

The welder with his helmet on.  Take note of the Acetylene tank!

The helmet is nice of course and the tiny Acetylene tank has a nice decal on it!  The torch attachment also provides a convincing resemblance to the real thing.


No. 15 The Constable

Ok so the constable was a fig I got from my holiday trip to BGC.  It was the only Series 11 packet left in the store and that tipped me off to the shipment of Series 11.  He has nice retro cop stylings.  The cop hat is great plus the truncheon he carries is a good throwback piece.

I am the law here!

The constable kinda reminds me of Batman's own Commissioner Gordon.

No. 11 The Chemist

The chemist reminds me of the fuel engineer from the exclusive Shell minifigs set.  Similar to the Shell female she also carries two chemical bottles with her.


No. 16 Female Wind-up Robot

OH Where is my robot love???

The female wind-up robot provides the perfect partner for the male wind-up robot from Series 6!
It has the same retro stylings as her male counterpart but instead of blue trimmings she has pink!  I truly dig the big wind-up know at her back.  That piece provides plenty of fuel for future projects like making a minifig  wind-up person!

Awesome!

Here's all four of them:

I'll continue the review once I get the other figures in.  Oh and for the sharp ones here you'll probably be pointing out that I only reviewed 4 figs when I mentioned I bought 7 today and 1 when I was in BGC.  That's a total of 8 figs you say, well I'll let my girlfriend build the other 4 so that review will be coming up.

Till then enjoy this one! 

WIP: Star Diamond Blocks Soldier Deformation: 5-in-1 Robot set PART ONE

Okay so this huge Star Diamond box is lying around in my room and I haven't found time to actully work on the kits within.

Remember this was part of that haul chronicled in this blog entry: Recent pick-ups?

One of the purpose of this blog of course is to make people aware that there are good alternatives to Lego out there.  You just have to look around some and eventually you'll stumble on one.

(You can revisit my previous posts regarding this: Alternative brands to Lego and Where to get alternatives to Lego in Manila?)

Aside from my other hobbies like playing the bass guitar or building Gundam model kits, Lego and brick toys have always been a passion.  Putting together ROBOT BRICK TOY MODELS are pure heaven (see my Sluban Flamingo Transformable Spacecraft )  Gundam was becoming expensive and Lego was one of my first loves.

It's pretty awesome that so many kits are coming out now that are baed on robot/mecha designs (Too bad Hasbro's own Kre-O line has left me disappointed.)

Anyway the monster box you see below was worth all of 2000 pesos!!!!!  I put my Green Lantern Hal Jordan Lego and 1/144 HG Farsia on top of the box for size references.  Man it's a huge box.

Inside the box are actually parts to form 5 individual robots that are also sold in separate boxes.  You can think of this as some kind of collector's/completist box.

Below are the 5 individual robots included in the box together with their model numbers in Star Diamond's Block Soldiers Deformation series.

Here's the BIG BAD himself!  All 5 Bots reassembled as one huge Mecha!  Making this combined form robot number 6 that I can build from the instructions that come with the box.

BIG BAD Robot Number 6!

Remember how I said these are actually individual sets that Star Diamond eventually crammed into that MONSTER box?  Well when it first came out you can buy two and combine them to form a bigger bot.  Well Star Diamond included the instructions for combining two bots as well as acknowledging it in the reverse side of the box.

The three other robots that you can build (aside from the 6 on the front side of the box).

The Star Diamond logo.

The Blocks Soldier Deformation logo.

Yep the whole box totals to about 808 pieces.  Very nice!  A Lego set with the same brick count would most likely cost me an arm and a leg!

How far I got.
Since it was already about 1 am I got as far as opening 2 of the boxes!

The neatest thing was in the box.  Do you see that green bottle opener like thing?  That is a Lego part separator.  It's only available in bigger Lego sets and not all big sets would have it.  It's supposed to facilitate removal of stubborn bricks that you can't pull apart by hand.

I was overjoyed that this Star Diamond set comes with it.

The knock off Lego part separator

Apparently all the smaller boxes had one! DAMN!

So at this point in time I was too sleepy to start building.

This is definitely to be continued...stay tune folks for the next installment!

WIP: Some cool sets I recently picked up! Thanks to Kendrick Chan's sojourn to Divisoria!

Will you look at these!

I got a ton of brick toys because my friend Kendrick Chan shopped around in the cheapest shopping district in Manila - Divisoria!

For those who need to know where to get their fix here are my old blog entries regarding place to shop at and brands to look for: Where to get brick toys!  and Brick Toy Brands to Watch Out For!

Divisoria is sweet brick heaven if you are looking for the best in China-sourced brick toys!  

For the price of one big Marvel lego set (around 5,000 pesos) you could get a lot (and I mean a lot) of China brick sets from top manufacturers like Star Diamond and Enlighten.

So let's see my haul:

1.)  Star Diamond Super blocks deformation 6-in-1 robots

This box cost me all of 2,000 pesos.  Yep go read that again - 2,000 pesos.  The huge box comes with 6 medium sized robots (about the size of a 1/144 fully built Gundam HG kit).   That's about 333.33 pesos per bot. That in itself already makes the kit worth it (since a single kreo of smaller size comes out to 600 pesos).  

But wait there's more!  

Each robot also has a vehicle mode similar to Kre-O.  You have to disassemble the robot form and rebuild it to form the vehicle mode.  Now if you know me you also know that I hate Kre-O.  Why?  Because they make OFFICIAL Transformers brick sets that DON'T TRANSFORM!  Why even bother calling them transformers???

In this Star Diamond set I don't mind it at all since the robots look cool and they didn't exactly label themselves as Transformers!

And even more!

The medium size robots can pair up to form a much bigger robot!  So my 6 robots become 3 bigger robots!  3 bigger robots!  3 more cool robots!  Just Awesome!

And even more!

The piece de resistance is the final form of this kit!  All 6 bots can be disassembled and reforemed into one big robot!  Think Constructicons!  Think Aerialbots!  Think Bruticus!  

Yessir the set comes with instructions to build everything into one beast of a robot!

AWESOME doesn't begin to describe the contents of this box!

Times like this I wish I had no work so I can proceed to actually building this monster of a box!

In the next few weeks I'll slowly do reviews of each bot and then proceed to combine them until
I eventually get to the big robot at the end!



2.) Star Diamond 20-in-1 boxed set

This boxed set costs 450 pesos.   It contains 20 boxes of what you might call micro build sets in Lego.  What's awesome is that its a sci-fi themed box and most of the kits have robot forms.  All 20 boxes in the set form one micro vehicle and most of them have a second build in robot form!  I got this box as a gift for my girlfriend's nephews who are both star pupils.

I'd bet they would love this set!  It's taking all my willpower not to open the box and build em myself.

More robots!  More brick toys!

Yep.  Boys will definitely go crazy over cars and robots and planes.

Nice sci-fi themed vehicles!

Armour warriors indeed!

Yes.  Robots!

Oh.  My.  Each box actually has THREE forms!

Its like a mini-Lego Creator set!

Battroid! Gerwalk! Valkyrie!

3.) DeCool Hawkeye

For 35 pesos you can get DeCool minifigs that are knock-offs of the Lego superheroes minifigs.  That's the part that's not cool of course since LEgo and Marvel actually own the rights to making Marvel brick toys.

Kendrick gave me one to try out and it actually looks and feels like the Lego version of Hawkeye!

Looking good in those shades Hawkeye!

So thanks KC for these boxes!

It cost me all of 2450 pesos for all of these!

Wait for my reviews of the big box on top!