According to the LEGO obsessed crew at Brickset, there will be at least five set pieces turned sets of LEGO pieces, featuring various Prince of Persia predicaments. These include Quest Against Time, Hassasins Hide Out, Fight For The Dagger, Battle of Almut and The Ostrich Race. That last set of LEGO appears to be the only one which may contain a shirtless Jake mini-fig, if that's the sort of thing you might be into.

All five sets—well, save for Hassasins Hide Out, which is not pictured—look like a lot of LEGO fun, but the set to own is clearly The Ostrich Race. It's not often that LEGO ostriches come along.

Prince of Persia LEGO Playsets [Brickset - thanks, Conor!]

It's two great tastes that taste odd together! The combination of Slipknot and Simon & Garfunkel is very much how I'd imagine a jelly doughnut filled with pickle relish would taste. Luckily you don't have to buy them together. Still, Slipknot's "Duality," "Psychosocial," and "Sulfur" could be just the right counterbalance to the soothing classics "I Am A Rock" and "The Sounds of Silence." It's the sort of odd pairing I don't think anyone has attempted. I'd daresay that if you played all five tracks on random in an MP3 player it might commit suicide.

One of the artists' additions are also playable in LEGO Rock Band. I'll let you figure out which.

Also coming next week is Light Resolve's "Dreaming of Love," which is only appearing on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Rock Band Music Store. Sorry Wii owners. You can go listen to the track on the group's MySpace page if that makes you feel better.

We featured Alex Kobbs' impressive LEGO recreation of the Zanzibar multiplayer map back in 2007. Now he's getting ready to release a 25-minute long feature set in that level, featuring an epic battle between the forces of Red and Blue. You can keep up with the project's progress over at the Kooberz Studio blog.

I get that this is a family title, and blood or gore would be inappropriate, gratuitous or otherwise. But seriously, the wrathful spirit makes the Nazis line-dance? Really? They got permission for cartoon violence in the rating, can't it just, I dunno, blast them into several pieces? Maybe a ginormous Lego spirit who comically stomps them flat? Do something funnier than this? Wow. Some payoff.

Lego Indiana Jones 2 [CBS News.com via VG247]

The Brandford Rant Institute of Cosmic Kinesis was founded in 1984 by inter-dimensional theorist Bradford Rant to study the possibility of intersecting alternate universes, and they may have finally hit pay dirt. They've been tracking mysterious LEGO pods that have been falling to Earth from origins unknown, apparently drawn to locations that contain a significant number of LEGO bricks and large amounts of imagination.

The scientists who maintain the Institute have set up a website to track the progress of their discoveries, having already posted a video documenting the discovery of the first pod, found in LEGOLAND Park in Denmark. That discovery only led to more questions. What are the mysterious words on the side of the pod? Why are the pilots so damn cheery? What does it all mean?

The next Pod is somewhere in North America. Can you help them find it?

This is obviously some sort of alternate reality game for some sort of LEGO product, and we've got a hunch that it could be for LEGO Universe, Net Devil's upcoming MMO. When you start talking LEGO and parallel universes, it's the logical conclusion to come to.

Visit the Bradford Rant Institute website yourself to see if you can help solve the mystery of the LEGO pod people.

I kid. That guy to the left is "Enemy Mechanic," aka the Von Kaiser/Bald Bull hybrid who duked it out with Indy under the flying wing in Raiders of the Lost Ark. According to Video Games Blogger, the rest of the characters are:

1. Cairo Digger
2. Crystal Skull
3. Enemy Mechanic (pictured)
4. Indiana Jones
5. Lao Che
6. Major Arnold Toht
7. Marion Ravenwood
8. Mola Ram
9. Mutt
10. Native
11. Professor Henry Jones Senior
12. Rene Belloq
13. Short Round
14. Spalko
15. Willie Scott

I'm not sure why the Crystal Skull is listed as a playable character if in fact it's just an "object" in the game. "Native" is self explanatory, and Lao Che was the gangster from the opening sequence in Shanghai from "Temple of Doom."

LEGO Indiana Jones 2 Characters List [Video Games Blogger]

"So why did I decide to build an NES?," writes Dave Sterling. "I think mainly just to see if I could. I've never done something I would consider ‘art' or ‘sculpture' in LEGO and I really wanted to give it a try and see if I could recreate something directly to scale."

His creation is 1/16th of an inch of the actual dimensions — bravo!

MOCOlympics Round #6: Dave Sterling vs. Crimso Giger in Atari: A LEGO® creation by Dave Sterling [MOCpages.com via Brothers Brick via Gizmodo]

That's it! People build Gradius ships out of LEGO for the whole month, post them on Flickr, we all applaud and say together "what a brilliant idea this was, thank you".

Vic Vipers @ Flickr [via Game Informer]

Revealed during LEGO World Fair this past October, the statue is made from over 40,000 LEGO bricks, is 5.9 feet tall and weighs over 110 pounds. The statue was sold on eBay for over US$5,000 with all the profits going to the Ronald McDonald House Charity in The Netherlands.

4万ピースを使った巨大マリオのレゴがオークションに出品される！ [アタシ的ゲーム情報]

Odd choice. Batman has already had a Lego head.

Thanks to reader Davis who spotted this in Brooklyn's High Street station.

Lego Batman [Flickr]

Bionic Commando: Lego Armed [Capcom-Unity]

The Lego series lost me after the first Star Wars game was released. Batman was interesting, and nostalgic, but not that much fun to play. I own the first Lego Indiana Jones game but haven't been able to force myself to play for more than an hour. I guess the charm of the concept just came and went too quickly for me. Seeing classic scenes recreated in Lego form is novel, but when the core gameplay is more or less the same, it just isn't enough for me.

Now, if they did a Lego Indiana Jones Dance Party game...

So if you own Rock Band, Rock Band 2 and LEGO Rock Band, you can put all your songs in one place, and never have to swap discs ever again. Like Rock Band 2's import feature, there'll be a small fee, but as Rock Band 2 showed, people are willing to pay for that convenience.

Rock Band News: Lego Songs Exportable, Deets on Queen, White Stripes [Wired]

These screens show not just a taste of the diversity you can expect from the game's characters, environments and LEGO creations, but also how you'll go about building your minifig avatar.

Maybe this isn't exciting for you, but damn if it doesn't do just the trick for me. Why the hell do we need a LEGO Rock Band? This right here. Take the same gameplay everyone loves and give it a new, humorous purpose, and you've got a Rock Band game with charm that goes beyond simply playing the music. I kinda dig it.

The series - which we first told you about in February - will be released to cash in on the movie, which is due to hit theatres next April. And while the presence of a LEGO ostrich screams instant purchase, we're going to be holding off until we get confirmation from LEGO that the Prince's shirt is removable.

There's a full gallery's worth of close-ups over at jmenomeno's Flickr page.

San Diego Comic Con 1 [jmenomeno @ Flickr]

[via Offworld]

These delightful LEGO Pikmin are the work of Norwegian Filip Felberg. These are some of the highlights, but to see more of Captain Olimar and his sentient vegetables - along with Felberg's other Nintendo-related LEGO sets - hit the link below.

Filip Johannes Felberg's photostream [Flickr, via GSW]

Not to be confused with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, the Marvel action-RPG coming this fall from Activision, Marvel Super-Hero Squad was shown in New York to be a lighter-weight more cheerful title. The new Ultimate Alliance is an all-platforms, tons-of-characters game based on the anguished events of Marvel's Civil War comic. Super-Hero Squad is a Wii/PS2/portable game based on a cartoon featuring short versions of Wolverine and friends.

That doesn't mean Super-Hero Squad isn't worth a look.

What Is It?
Marvel Super-Hero Squad is a co-op brawler that pits any paired combo of Wolverine, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Falcon or the Silver Surfer in a beat-em-up story that has them punching, kicking and throwing star-spangled shields at bad guys in order to save the fate of Super-Hero City, the place where these heroes hang out. It also features a battle mode that can involve up to four players using heroes and villains to bash each other silly.

What We Saw
We played about five minutes of a co-op adventure mission set in a military base, trading off control of Wolverine and Captain America with a THQ rep. Controls were simple with a couple of buttons on the Wii remote for jump and attacks, a shake for a special move. Then we battled that rep on a platform somewhere up in Asgard, pitting Wolverine against the Hulk. Regardless of who controlled Wolverine, the Hulk was toast. He's just too big, too dumb and too slow.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is set for an October 20 release, which puts the game pretty far along. We played off a debug version.

What Needs Improvement?
Camera: The game is different from the Lego games in two key ways. One, it doesn't have Lego pieces, and thus has far fewer collectibles. Two, it's not played from a fixed and mostly side-scrolling camera angle. Marvel is played with the camera trailing one of its heroes in more of a traditional third-person action perspective. That's fine for one player, but when we tried co-op, the camera did not zoom back and Captain America kept getting lost off-camera – only to have him awkwardly re-spawn into the battle. This is crucial. A bad camera breaks this game. A better one would make this a viable parent-and-kid co-op alternative to Lego.

The Hulk: Seriously. This guy needs to find a way to beat Wolverine. In head-to-head battle mode, that clawed mutant could run circles around him, slice him up (no blood, of course), and knock him off an Asgardian platform with ease. The Hulk needs help.

What Should Stay The Same?
Spartan, Solid Design: Lego games are littered with pick-ups and power-ups. By accident or design, Super-Hero Squad appears to benefit from less of that distraction, encouraging attention to remain on the basic brawling.

Cartoon Graphics: What we saw on the Wii was clean and colorful. Nothing too complex, but engagingly chunky versions of Marvel's heroes look right to us.

Final Thoughts
Marvel Super-Hero Squad doesn't appear to be a deep game. And it's not for people who take super-heroes very seriously. But as light fare that presents its license with joy, it looks like a promising amusement for Marvel-loving kids and the parents who dare game with them.

The game is set for October 20 release on the Wii, PS2, PSP and DS.