Set Review ➟ LEGO® 43114 VIDIYO Punk Pirate Ship
The Punk Pirate Ship is not a ship but a stage set for a VIDIYO band. And VIDIYO is LEGO’s interactive follow-up to the Hidden Side theme. The deal with this interactive stuff is that you can purchase a LEGO set for somewhere between five and hundred dollars (or euros or what-have-you), and with the mere addition of a thousand-dollar smartphone or tablet, your kid can have fun with the plastic. Yup. Something like that.
So, let’s get into the box and see what’s up. Predictably the set is…er…shipped…in a box twice the necessary size, half-full of nothing. LEGO’s nothing if not consistent in this area. The area being not filled, that is.
It strikes me that I wanted this set, but so far all I’m doing is bitching about it. Let’s hope things take a turn for the positive.
Conceptually, being that this is ostensibly a punk band theme, it strikes me that such an elaborate ship-theme stage is basically the antithesis of punk. Kind of think the punk band would be more appropriately placed in Apocalypseburg, and God Save The Queen, we’re going to destroy the venue. It won’t matter to a ten-year-old. Unlikely. But the band that should be on this set is obviously Alestorm. I’m making up the fact that I hear the licensing deal on that fell through.
Okay, on to the build.
We get five bags of parts, a perfect-bound instruction manual, and a couple loose ship hull parts.
First to be assembled is the Shark Guitarist minifigure and a platform.
Shark Guitarist is delightfully silly with a yellow mohawk, skull-and-crossbones tattoo on the side of its head, protruding tongue, pirate vest, and a three-stringed-electric-bass-anchor instrument. Shark Guitarist also conveniently has arms and hands as trying to play the anchor guitar with fins would undoubtedly be difficult. The snazzy decoration on the back of the jacket is unfortunately covered by the shark head.
As to the platform, one attaches “beatbits”…decorated tiles, of which many are included here…to the sides of the platform, and these get scanned by the a free app downloaded onto a smartphone, and that scanning process does something-or-other. More on that later. I could also say moron that later, but I’ll bet that bit of language acrobatics won’t translate into Spanish well.
Anyway… this platform thing doesn’t serve any purpose at all, as far as I can see, other than as a beatbit and minifigure docking station for the scanner. I’ll propose we hold a contest to see what can be made of these platform pieces and brick separators. If you come up with something, get in touch so Jose can hook you up in the TOP MOC section of the next issue of the magazine.
Oh, by the way, we do get an orange brick separator, which is a good thing, because while I’m busy thinking up snark for a review I invariably misassemble the model and need to go back and fix something like twenty steps later. The separator comes in handy.
One last aesthetic note on this platform is the color. While the black-and-turquoise fits with the general VIDIYO color scheme, putting a black-and-turquoise Shark Guitarist on it pretty much obscures the minifigure. Some contrast here would have been nice.
The balance of bag 1 is used to build the ship-stage base.
Sac le deuxième
Bag 2 starts with the Mermaid Violinist minifigure. And her attitude is all punk. It’s definitely punk to play violin with a magic wand instead of a bow. She has her sash safety-pinned to her waist, she stole her haircut from my niece about seven years ago, and she has a snarl on her face. She is punk cranky! There’s a joke to be made here about a fiddler crab, but I’ll leave that to you.
The balance of the parts in the bag continue the build of the ship-stage, and there aren’t any particularly notable aspects to the build this far.
Bag 3
Bag 3 introduces us to Squid Drummer, which, by the way, is the real name of a real punk musician somewhere in the world. Also, if I remember correctly, a fellow by the name of Squid Drummer was a midfielder for Ilkeston back in the seventies. Maybe I’m remembering that wrong.
Squid’s head is rubbery plastic and he has a skull tattooed on his forehead. He also uses magic wands to play his instrument. Presumably by hitting things with them and not, you know, waving them around magically.
I don’t know about this band’s dedication to punk, given their proclivity towards heavy metal imagery…skulls and chains and studs and such. Not seeing any piercings…hmm.
Things finally start to get interesting with the stage build. The drummer’s platform gets decked out with a kit and cymbals. The ship’s wheel, which turns, is also added here. Two performer platforms, round coral circles required by the VIDIYO app, are added, along with a hinged seashell decorative element. Capping it off is a stud shooter so the kids can shoot their eyes out band can shoot t-shirts into the audience. I guess.
A questionable backdrop is added behind the drummer stand.
A number of thematic decorative elements are also added to the backstage area.
Bringing us to…
Bag 4 has us build the final portion of the aft. It is comprised of two side walls which can swing out, enhancing the width of the stage if viewed from the front or completing the “ship” look if swung in. Studs on 2x2 jumpers limit the inward swing of the walls.
Pivoting speakers and lights are also added. Both these elements are selectable elements from within the app, and care must be taken with the assemblies at build time so the app doesn’t have problems later. (Yeah. Right.) The lights need to be built such that either the full yellow or the full blue side faces forward when the lights are turned to their logical limit. Failing to correctly orient the 2L thin technic arm used as a stop as shown in the directions…which can easily happen if you are casually breezing along in the build, or if you are me…such that the light shows half-blue half-yellow to the app scanner makes the scanner unhappy.
Correct arm orientation shown on left; incorrect arm orientation shown on right.
Speaker assembly sits on a turntable topped with a 2x3 plate with rounded end.
Stops limit the rotation to 180 degrees.
Speakers and lights rotated forward position.
Speakers and lights rotated back position.
Topping off with the crow’s nest
Bag 5 holds parts to the ship’s crow’s nest. This, like the speakers, is a two-sided affair with a shark’s head on one side and a skull on the other. The two heads share a set of large headphones. The assembly sits on a ratcheted turntable and is limited to 180 degrees of rotation. The two-sided head is a selectable element from within the app and is topped off with a coral circle for figure placement. Whether that position is actually usable in the app, I may never know.
And now, the app
Put gently, in my opinion, it is worth e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g I paid for it.
I download and install the free app. Okay. Launch the app, it wants to download another 474 megabytes of information. So if your mobile device has limited available space, you’ll probably want to think twice about onloading a gigabyte’s worth of info for this “experience”.
One has to pick a free band member to start the demo. Then one has to choose a band name. Note I said choose. This wasn’t at first obvious to me. I thought I would get to name my band, but, nope. I had to poke a button and canned band names go by. Kind of had my heart set on naming my fish band “Smells Like Atlantis” but I ended up with one of the awesome canned names like “cardboard box” or “old ironing board cover”. Well, maybe not that, but it was so not memorable that I don’t remember what it was. Anyway, the however many band names are in a list, and there is only a “next” option, so if I saw one I sort of liked two names ago, there wasn’t any obvious way to get back to it.
There is lots of interstitial animation. After one makes a selection there is a subsequent grandiose onscreen hopping and jumping around with noise and lightning bolts and whooshing and ado that takes what seems to me to be an inordinate amount of time. All I could think of was watching Entertainment Tonight back in the 80’s when in the span of a half-hour program, eight minutes were devoted to commercials, sixteen minutes were devoted to promotional segments: “When we come back Larry talks about his life-threatening hangnail operation! Clip, Larry: ‘I had a life threatening hangnail! It was life threatening!’ And later Samantha discusses working with a constipated malamute. Clip, Samantha: ‘The big doggie, he just couldn’t…couldn’t…’ Stay tuned!”, and six minutes was devoted to actual content. All the hopping and jumping and lightning and such is probably a winner with the kids. I just want to get to the next screen.
Somehow I stumbled my way through the demo with the free virtual band member. I got an idea what one is supposed to do with the whole “make a video” premise of the app. I think a song is about 90 seconds long, and basically you move your phone cam around, pointing at the stage as if you were the videographer, while the VR bandmembers gyrate. It’s like a bad YouTube video of a concert shot by a drunk with a cell phone. Got it. Awesome. Totally. Freakin’. Awesome. Don’t mistake that statement for sarcasm. Or that.
The UI is a mess. Sometimes the user target, the thing one is supposed to poke with a finger, is the blinking icon and sometimes it is not the blinking icon. Sometimes the app wants the device to be held in landscape mode, other times in portrait mode. There’s lots of tipping the device one way and then the other. This was bad enough with a small smartphone. I can only imagine my level of frustration if I was using a 10-inch tablet.
One is guided with outlines on screen where to match up with whatever is in the real world, then press some on-screen button, ride the lightning, listen to the whooshing, reset the minifigure and beatbits, and repeat. Scanning the beatbit platform can be fussy. Shark Guitarist can’t be holding his guitar or the scan fails. Likewise Punk Lindsey Stirling can’t be holding her violin with bow in front of her. The sides of the beatbit platform are hinged, but if they aren’t positioned straight out to the side, the scan will also fail. Don’t know why we need a hinged platform here. Don’t know. Also don’t know why the beatbit platform could’t have been integrated into the model. But it isn’t. That whole thing is effectively divorced from the build experience altogether.
Scanning the stand in this configuration works.
This way, not so much.
The process of scanning the figures, then the stage model, sucked the interest right out of me. But I would persevere because the audience needs a review!
The pirate ship model provides six positions for the location of band members. And I happen to have some bandmates. So I figure, hey, hey, let’s have a big band. Nope. Software limits a band to three members. Disappointing. So. Welp. I guess here we go with the power punk trio of anchor, violin, and drums.
So, now I’m set to go. I happen to have my minifigures in position on the coral circles of the model. This is wrong. One must not have the figures on the model. The virtual figures will be on the model. Well, not the model, but the virtual model the app serves up after many icon pokes and a thunder and lightning storm.
Okay, here we go. WTF? This is the same song as the demo song. I’m sure I picked a different song. And, well, whatever. Then the video gets choppy. And stalls. And chops. And the app crashes. Okay. I guess the audience does not need a review. That ended forever my interest in the app.
Son decided he needed to try the app, because, of course, Dad’s a moron, and he’s going to show Dad, by gum! For son, the app crashed when it came to scanning the boat. Tried again, crashed scanning a bandmate. I sense a pattern. He never got to the point where he could make a video and he tried more than once. Dad is less of an moron.
Clearly this software is too sophisticated for an hobby programmer like me and even more problematic if you are a teenage dishwasher. I’ll make a point to ask the borderline evil genius nine-year-old neighbor kid once he gets finished changing the oil on the Gator and defeathering the chicken for supper. He ought to be able to set us straight right away.
The Randolph T. Fielding Absolutely Administrivia Section
Axle Holes: The 2x2 cylinder bricks come with asymmetrical axle holes while the 2x2 plates have a symmetrical axle hole.
Ship’s Wheel: Compared to older (4790) versions, the ship’s wheel is of a softer plastic, has a slightly whiter (milk chocolate) appearance than the usual reddish-brown, has a new part number (52395), and a split pin. The LEGO logo is center aligned on the angles between the spokes on the 4790 and is center aligned on the spokes on the 52395.
Left to right: 4790 brown, 4790 reddish-brown, 52395 “milk chocolate”.
Left to right: 4790 solid pin, 52395 split pin.
Shark Head: Shark head is dual-molded. I have a suspicion that the yellow is required by the app for some purpose and making sure that “yellow paint won’t come off the mohawk” is a consideration.
Strut: The 3940 strut is supplanted by a newer version, 19798. 19798 has an overall fine pebbled surface where 3940 had a coarser pebbled surface only on the upper rod with the rest being relatively smooth; 19798 has an overall “satin” appearance. 3940 has a round center hole and 19798 has a slightly octagonal hole. 19798 also has a more pronounced seam.
The “satin” appearance is evident in 19798 on the right, above. Note the reflections of the studs are diffused in appearance compared to the hard reflections in 3940 on the left.
The End
Thanks go out to LEGO for sending the set. Standard disclaimer here that I thought up all the words in this review by myself and wasn’t in any influenced by the corporate suits. As if they would have influenced me to say anything I’ve said here.
Dudes, just want to let you know I really like the set. It is fun. It is more fun just adding my own minifigs wherever I want on the stage and playing that way. I had a time keeping my kid away from it long enough to take photos for the review. I had to undo some kid playtime activities to finish. So there is interest in the physical. The virtual, not so much. The app sucks. I have spoken.
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