2010's edition of Lego's annual The Brick magazine features a four-page spread on the making of Bionicle's successor, Hero Factory. An interview with Jes Vestergaard on pages 44 through 47 reveals many interesting nuggets of information, among them how long Hero Factory has been in the pipeline (two years), what playtesting involves (public urination, apparently), and a tidbit that should make BZPower members smile: Verstergaard and his fellow designers lurked on Bionicle fan-forums to see what Bionicle enthusiasts liked and wanted. They then tried to tailor-make Hero Factory to please the Bionicle fanbase. Quoth Vestergaard, aiming to please: "We found that plasma is a big hit, and the leader of the Heroes, Preston Stormer, actually has an ice‑plasma weapon.” The mag also contains other Lego-related news, like the announcement of an upcoming Lego City video-game and multilingual overhauls of Lego.com.

LEGO makes it into the news all the time - and I don't mean just BZPower's news. And why not? LEGO deserves all the coverage it gets for the creativity it inspires in us. Read on to see what sorts of things people have done with LEGO bricks this past week.  

That's what it looks like in the latest episode of the Mata Nui Saga. While the big robots fight overhead, Makuta's army washes in to take on the Glatorian on the ground. And now one question burns on every one's mind: Why do all the Skakdi look like Nektann? (Oh, and who's going to win?)

As amazingly only one person has reported, Bionicle.com has received some fresh content. Chapter 4 of the Journey's End has been posted for you to download, so go get reading! The saga of Mata Nui keeps going on, if only we knew what was going to happen next...

A wealth of concept art images for the first two Bionicle films have surfaced online in the gallery of Dave Max, who helped design character models and scenery for said movies. These images shed a great deal of insight onto how the designs evolved and how the creative process worked in adding a human element to these plastic toys. A gallery for the first film can be found here and the second here. A gander would surely be exciting and intriguing, even nostalgic, for any longtime Bionicle fans.

As Mata Nui fights his dark brother inhabiting his former body, he recounts the tale from his new, smaller form. This time, power continues to be a struggle, and on top of that energy is being used to pull moons. Listen in on to just what is happening over on Bionicle.com with Chapter 19 of the Mata Nui Saga.

Due to some unforeseen technical issues, the server maintenance has been delayed. We'll do our best to give you a heads up before it actually happens.

It has been pointed out that Lego recently made public the website for Legoland Florida, which can be found over here. There's not much up there at the moment, mostly press releases and photos from the announcement, but I'd be interested by the "Jobs" section if I were going to be living in Florida in the next couple years. Who wouldn't want to work at Legoland? I believe this is also the first time we've gotten anything resembling a date for the park's opening, though the press releases place it only at "late 2011." Well, that's at least something, isn't it?

BZPower reader GlatorianJaller writes to alert us that Lego products have made Yahoo! Shopping's list of "The Coolest Toys of 2010," determined post-Toy Fair. Specifically they praise the new Lego Board Games and cite happy news: "In 2009, two of the biggest trends dominating the toy industry were the popularity of construction toys such as classic Lego building blocks, which saw sales rise more than 30 percent in the U.S., and a return to family-friendly board games." The shrewd folks at Lego may have found a winning combination; as shown here, they are already accumulating accolades.