Top Hat Sasquatch

We’ve mentioned LEGO’s new Kickstarter-esque site CUUSOO a couple of times before on the ‘squatch and since that time it’s grown quite a bit. The LEGO Minecraft set has actually been produced (review coming soon!), and many more projects have passed the 10,000 supporter mark needed for LEGO to step in and review their potential.

Users post some amazing builds there, but most of them seem to be projects that LEGO would never make, like the awesome Shaun of the Dead pub set or the countless OMG Please Make Phineas and Ferb sets! that you’ll find on the site. Most of the time I see a CUUSOO project that would require LEGO to get a license from a company, I ignore it.

But then again the Minecraft set was licensed (albeit from a small company) so it’s always a possibility. I hope that’s the case for this amazing Portal-inspired CUUSOO project because I’d love to see it become a reality. A group of talented builders have mocked up an extensive collection of Portal LEGO products including multiple sets and a Heroica-style board game. The sets are modular and would let you make your own Portal puzzle room, which is brilliant.

The sets all look great, and surely if LEGO can get a license from Mojang they can get one from Valve, but time and a few thousand more supporters will tell. Make sure to check out the project’s page on CUUSOO and be sure to vote for it if you’d like LEGO to consider making it a really-for-real product!

Via The Brothers Brick

Did you know there is going to be a LEGO movie? You didn’t? Well, there is, and it’s being made by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the duo behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street. The big news today is that LEGO versions of Batman and Superman will appear in that film, but I extracted a much more awesome headline out of that story.

Will Arnett is going to voice LEGO Batman. If this isn’t the best idea in the history of pretty great ideas I don’t know what is. If you’re a fan of Arrested Development or just Will Arnett in general, chances are you’re a fan of Batman and LEGO too, and if not, hearing Arnett voice LEGO Batman on the big screen will surely change your mind.

I’m pumped for this movie. Variety has a quick description of the plot, which revolves arond a generic LEGO character (well, it worked for The Muppets), voiced by Chris Pratt.

Pratt will play Emmet, an ordinary, law-abiding, rules-following, perfectly average Lego mini-figure who is mistakenly identified as the most extraordinary MasterBuilder. He’s drafted into a fellowship of strangers on an epic quest to stop an evil tyrant from gluing the universe together, a journey for which he is hopelessly and hilariously underprepared.

Count me in. I’m sure since this is a WB production we’ll only see the DC superheroes, but I’m fine with that. The working title is LEGO: The Piece of Resistance, but I wouldn’t put too much money on that not changing before the release date in 2014.

Check out the article on SlashFilm for more details.

Brave is a rather brave venture for Pixar. It’s the company’s first female lead, but more importantly, Pixar is coming off the lackluster Cars 2, a movie so bad I couldn’t finish watching it and my four-year old has never requested it again. So far the gamble seems to be paying off as audiences are embracing the firey-haired Merida and the story of her struggle for independence. If you’re one of the millions who have already seen the movie, you can relive the adventure at home as a Disney ebook, and also as a motion comic, both available for iOS.

If you’ve read my reviews of Disney ebooks before, you’ll know that Disney does a pretty decent job of getting and keeping kids’ interest through the use of quality artwork, good music and sound effects, and interesting animations. Brave is no exception. In fact, in a lot of ways, Brave exceeds any previous efforts I’ve seen from Disney’s ebooks.

First, the artwork is absolutely stunning throughout. I said before with The Jungle Book that many of the “pages” were screen-capture worthy. With Brave, nearly every page would make a great background for your iPad. Read More

I didn’t mean for the site to become a baron wasteland the past few days, but I’m currently on vacation in the boonies camping along Lake Michigan, and apparently this town hasn’t discovered cell phone signals or the Internet yet.

Luckily this coffee shop is fairly civilized, and so I thought I’d distract you all with a classic Disney short from 1950 featuring my favorite animated short subject matter: vacations. For some reason, most of my favorite shorts revolve around recreation, like my all-time favorite, Mickey’s Trailer.

Shorts with Donald Duck and Chip ‘n’ Dale are also favorites of mine, and seeing an actual chipmunk (I named him Dale) while camping made me think of this short. Make sure to check back soon because we have some crazy awesome stuff coming in the next couple weeks.

You can read more about Trailer Horn over at DisneyShorts.org.

There’s a reason I never got into the popular world-building game Minecraft. It’s not because I didn’t want to. It’s because I’m afraid of what it would do to me. You see, back in the early ’90s, I was pretty well obsessed with playing SimCity. The ability to simultaneously play God and city planner was an overwhelming combination.

I played SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimTown, SimAnt—pretty much every Sim variant up until The Sims. That’s when I realized I had a problem. That’s when I knew I had to quit cold turkey.

I stumbled across this video showing gameplay of the all-new SimCity scheduled for release in 2013. Watching it gave me that same high I experienced way back when, plus then some. They’ve taken the already great game and put it on steroids. Not only is the design better than ever but your world can now coexist with others in a sort of, multiplayer sim world.

It looks like I’ll be falling off the wagon come next year. I better saving up on sleep now.