Brickset: LEGO set guide

Roberternst has found a gallery on an Austrian toy trade website which features loads of photos of new sets including the second series collectable minifigs. See how many you can identify!

In response to discussions on another thread about Star Wars minifigs I thought it would be useful to list those that are included in the August sets:

8098 Clone Turbo Tank: Anakin, Clone troopers (2), Battle droid, Cad Bane, Aayla Secura, Ahsoka

8095 Grievous Starfighter: Grievous, Nahdar Vebb, Caretaker droid

8097 Slave 1: Bossk, Boba Fett, Han Solo, Carbonte cast for Han Solo

8089 Hoth Wampa Cave: Luke, Zev Senesca, Wampa, skeleton

8096 Palpatine's shuttle: Palpatine, Anakin, Clone pilot, Medical droid

8093 Plo Koon's Starfighter: Plo Koon, R7-F5

I have just made an enhancement to the site which many of you have requested: you can now mark a set as owned AND as wanted.  I've also made a few other tweaks 'under the bonnet' which should make the site load slightly quicker and used a new means of updating the site so if you notice any anomalies anywhere, let me know.

I hope you find this useful.

As suspected, the LEGO staff at the North American Toy Fairs are a lot more permissive of phototograpny on their stands and photos from the Canadian toy fair are now appearing online. Here are a few galleries:

• CTV News (Canadian news channel?)
• Tilius' gallery at Brickshelf
• Eurobricks (probably the same as one of the above)

As you know, Brickset isn't a general LEGO news site or LEGO blog; our focus is very much on new set releases and availability, and on being a resource for collectors. However, once in a while, we cover more general LEGO news...

There's a very good article on the BBC News website, part of their 'Tech Know' series of articles, covering adults who build with LEGO. The video and written article contain interviews with members of The Brickish Associaton, the adult LEGO user group in the UK.

Click the link above to read and watch a great bit of journalism, sympathetic to our hobby.

1092: Technic Control II
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Following on from our publication of exclusive new Fabuland, Scala and Minitalia images last month, I have now uploaded images of early Dacta sets from 1972-1988. Being educational sets sold only to schools, these sets are extremely rare and this is the first time that pictures of the actual sets themselves, rather than catalogue scans, have been published. They are not even included in the LEGO Collector book.

I still can't say where these images were taken, but you will find out: probably in March! I'd like to thank bluemoose for post-processing them and producing some really clean, clear images.

10211: Grand Emporium
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The next modular building, 10211 Grand Emporium, is now listed at LEGOShop.com, and will be shipping at the end of February in North America and Europe.

Here are quick links to the shop: USA | UK

I was anticipating that LEGO would 'big-up' its launch because, you may remember, they asked me to remove the images we posted at the beginning of January so as not to spoil the surprise. I guess that given none of the other fan sites pulled the images, they decided not to bother.

Update 6th Feb: For some reason the set has been removed entirely from LEGOshop.com: the links above lead nowhere now. All very strange, particularly given it's already for sale in UK brand stores.

I have a couple of annoucements to make:

• The wallpaper archive, launched 2 weeks ago now has over 900 wallpapers in it! It started off with my collection of around 400 and since then I've been inundated with additions and I'd like to thank everyone who has sent them to me: sjuip, Michael N, Mitchell, Kevin30, Carolyn, Brickmatt, Christopher and last, but certainly not least, because he contributed over 400 Bionicle ones: Bruno! Thanks to you all. Please keep them coming!
• The more observant among you (Alemas :-) ) will have already noticed that I've added additional images under the main one on the set detail pages. I've had the feature running for 2 days but didn't announce it straight away in case it overloaded the server and I needed to remove it. It doesn't seem to have so it can stay. I hope to enable you all to contribute set images soon so we can get a good collection going.

That's all for now but keep watching this space: the next batch of our exclusive images of rare old sets will be published soon!