In the first of what will be many Spider-Man Mega Bloks reviews - not that he found a really great sale or anything - Chris tells us all about the 'Mega Blocks Amazing Spider-Man Building 2 Playset,' known better as The Daily Bugle.

When times are a little tight and I'm waiting for my paycheck to roll in, or if I'm just dropping into an 24-hour store to relieve a little late night consumer boredom, there's nothing more satisfying than coming across an unexpected bargain toy or DVD to review on the site. So you can imagine my giddiness when, early in my planning for Spider-Week, I found a whole damn shelf full of Spider-Man Mega Bloks on clearance. There were Spider-Man robots and Spidey heads full of building blocks, and this, the Daily Bugle.

As you can see, this is part of The Amazing Spider-Man line, so its not really related to the movies at all. I waited a long time to buy this. No matter how deeply discounted the other Spidey toys were, they kept marking these things down by ridiculously small increments. I guess since they were the biggest playset on the shelf, the price gun monkey in charge of the clearance aisle thought he'd do the store a solid and make sure they got their money back on this thing. Well, let me tell you right now that if you pay more than $12 for this thing, you're paying too much.

Don't get me wrong, this is a decent little toy. Its just that it doesn't have enough going on to justify the $20 price tag. Mostly, its just a hollow storage case for Mega Bloks, and not a particularly great one at that. It just doesn't hold enough to make it a useful container. But the playability features they did work in are actually pretty nice. The set comes with magnet-footed Spider-Man and Carnage, and a shitload of little tiny blocks to represent bricks which are presumably being used to repair or add on to the Daily Bugle building. It also features a little zipline for the figures to slide on, a dump device you can use to drop bricks on enemies from three stories up, and a very cool Green Goblin billboard/wanted poster, presumably placed there to capitalize on his appearance in the first movie. I tell ya, them Mega Bloks people don't miss a trick.

The thing that really nudges this set from the realm of 'no thank you' into the land of 'totally worth it if its on sale' is the fact that the building is not complete as is. You've still got some more construction to do. Above you can see the set next to a Spider-Man Mega Bloks robot that I'll review later on this week. The bot is about nine inches tall, to give you an idea of the size of the Daily Bugle. You see that handle on top of the building? That would look pretty stupid on a real building, yet storage cases that double as playsets have been plagued by that kind of thing since I was a kid. You need handles on a carrying case, but they look stupid when you want to use it as a toy. So what do you do? If you're Mega Bloks, and your company is all about building blocks anyway, its easy. You just cover it up.

The brick hopper and billboard I told you about earlier are all part of a massive rooftop battle area, which not only makes this much less a plain old storage case and a lot more of a really cool toy, but also serves to hide the handle very well. This pic was taken before I was completely finished building the thing, but other nice little add-ons like the street lamps over the doorway and ledges under the windows allow you to use any Lego compatible building blocks to customize the Daily Bugle to your liking. Being able to design and build exactly the kind of playset a kid wants to have is a damn nice feature in a toy, so for customization potential, this set gets full marks. Construction doesn't take too long, so you'll be playing in no time, and despite the lack of better features and reliance on the magnet feet gimmick which really doesn't add much to the set, I think this would be a nice addition for any Spider-Man fan's collection. I got mine for $11 and I think I got my money's worth.

Until next time, true believers, this is Chris signing off.