Childhood Memories ....

[Enjay]

Bah! Kids these days don't know they are born. When I was a lad, there weren't all these fancy custom shapes for trees and heads and 'plane wings etc etc. We just had the standard block sizes and had to work with them. The only "luxuries" we has were wheels and transparent windows and maybe a few other bits. :P

I still remember my best creation. All the kids at school were buying a toy version of the James Bond moon buggy from "Diamonds are Forever" (I think) but I managed to make my own one out of lego. It was much bigger than the official toy (because of the limited range of blocks that I had to work with). It worked pretty well and looked quite good even if I say so myself. I kept it for months until something happened to it - some member of my family stood on it or something.

This is the thing I'm talking about.

[pavera]

You made a lego version of that by yourself? Awesome.

I had a lego table in my room with 100s of lego blocks in a little drawer, and I would spend hours building sprawling castles upon said table. I'm not quite sure whatever happened to that table. Much like Enjay, I just had building blocks but no pieces for specific things.

[Fletcher`]

[kristus]

I once built a boat out of classic lego peices. It was very colorful. But it had all the essentials. I loved my legos.

I remember finding my brother fast asleep on the floor using a pile of lego as a bed I came home from school. :p Always wondered how he could do that.

Enjay said:

I still remember my best creation. All the kids at school were buying a toy version of the James Bond moon buggy from "Diamonds are Forever" (I think) but I managed to make my own one out of lego. It was much bigger than the official toy (because of the limited range of blocks that I had to work with). It worked pretty well and looked quite good even if I say so myself. I kept it for months until something happened to it - some member of my family stood on it or something.

This is pretty much what I did with my boat. I wanted a Police lego boat. But we were poor so I built one with the blocks I had.

[DuckReconMajor]

I enjoyed the smaller sets more centered around playing than building, as I'd always get bored putting together the bigger sets, plus the bigger models always wanted to fall apart when you picked them up. My favorite were the space ships. I had this one spaceship (about 15 pieces) that I loved, but I lost the pilot in a bean bag chair, which my dog peed on and we had to throw away :( Then my sister had this Lego boat that actually floated. I don't remember what I traded her for that (might have just taken it), but I could have given her all the toys in my room and it would have been worth it.

However, though building and playing with the bricks were fun, the one thing I couldn't get enough of were the mini-figs (Lego men, whatever you want to call them). Where most kids fantasized about being big and flying, I fantasized about being small. When I made them walk, instead of making them hop, I'd actually grab both legs and move them back and forth.

P.S. did you know you can place bricks, items, etc. on Lego people's hands? If you look at the flat end, you'll see that it's the exact size of a Lego brick stud. I had so much fun with this when I found out.

[Sharessa]

DuckReconMajor said:

I enjoyed the smaller sets more centered around playing than building, as I'd always get bored putting together the bigger sets, plus the bigger models always wanted to fall apart when you picked them up.

Yeah. I had the biggest of the Spyrius ships and it held together very well. I think it may be my favorite of all the lego kits I ever had. But I also had the largest Explorien and UFO spaceships. Those things would snap in half if you didn't hold them right, which was pretty annoying. I don't think either one lasted more than a couple months. Those big kits were nice for giving you just about any piece from the set you could want, though. :P

P.S. did you know you can place bricks, items, etc. on Lego people's hands? If you look at the flat end, you'll see that it's the exact size of a Lego brick stud. I had so much fun with this when I found out.

What's more amusing is when you figure out that you can fit a 2x1 brick between the legs and torso of a Lego person. O hay, some 2x1s have little sticks on them that fit into the holes of other 2x1s. Instant Lego porn!

[DuckReconMajor]

Oh, I nearly forgot.

[Super Jamie]

One of my favorites:

[Sharessa]

So yeah, I busted out my Lego bricks for the first time in forever because of this thread. I'm sadly missing a bunch of pieces I remember having, but luckily I still have my 9v motor, plus all my flats, the police boat chassis, and most of the parts to my big UFO ship. I also found 30 Lego guys, about 10 of them Spyrius. :P

Also, I found this site which I think has instructions for just about every Lego set ever made. It's a bit slow, though. Also, the Lego website seems to have many of the newer ones. I was also pleased, looking around at that site, to find the prices haven't really risen in the over 10 years I haven't been buying them.

[DooMAD]

Epic win.

[Sharessa]

Lego sanitation system? Umm, eew?

[Maes]

Danarchy said:

Lego sanitation system? Umm, eew?

Just don't give the bricks to children afterwards ;-)

[DuckReconMajor]

Haha his butt will be covered in stud marks.

[Khorus]

I had a section of my chest of drawers for LEGO. I think I had 1 or 2 sets and a ton of the normal blocks. I didn't care much for the sets as I was much more interested in building random abstract things.

[Maes]

DuckReconMajor said:

Haha his butt will be covered in stud marks.

There are studless, top-smooth lego pieces, you know ;-)

And let's not even mention the pleasantly textured surface of sloped bricks...mmm.

[Lord_Z]

Here is the pride of my Lego collection. Over the last week I have been rebuilding these in hopes of restoring my entire collection and for the most part it went very well. I even sorted all the parts based on their colors. It saddens me that I cannot find a few of the parts but it is mostly there.

[Super Jamie]

Lord_Z said:

Here is the pride of my Lego collection.

:O Awesome!!!

[Enjay]

Lord_Z said:

Here is the pride of my Lego collection.

Impressive. Most impressive. ;)

It does, however, also show what I was saying about specially shaped bricks that are really only of use for that one model versus what I had "back in the day" when only the standard shapes and sizes were available.

[exp(x)]

Yeah, I always disliked specialized pieces except for stuff like the Technic gears and axles.

[Fredrik]

I have a wardrobe full of mostly Technic. Studded all the way, baby.

I was an engineer back then. I loved designing huge construction vehicles full of pneumatic cranes and rotating platforms, and helicopters (though I never got them to fly). Preferrably with some of those blinking lights on top. Some of my masterpieces included a motorized walking robot and a gearbox with three gears plus neutral and reverse. Sadly, I never had enough pieces to realize my ambitions for world domination.

Pirate ships, castles, and spacecraft were fun to build, too.

[Sharessa]

Lord_Z said:

Here is the pride of my Lego collection. Over the last week I have been rebuilding these in hopes of restoring my entire collection and for the most part it went very well. I even sorted all the parts based on their colors. It saddens me that I cannot find a few of the parts but it is mostly there.

Hax, those are sets. :P Still, that's pretty awesome. I'm still impressed my friend was able to make that T-16 with just normal pieces from space sets back in the mid 90s.

Anyway, those new castle sets are looking more and more interesting. They have dwarves and orcs trolls now. I might just pick up one. If anything, they can double as D&D minis.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Danarchy said:

Also, I found this site which I think has instructions for just about every Lego set ever made. It's a bit slow, though. Also, the Lego website seems to have many of the newer ones. I was also pleased, looking around at that site, to find the prices haven't really risen in the over 10 years I haven't been buying them.

Wow, talk about nostalgia. I found every kit I owned on that site, including a few I had forgotten about until I saw them there. What's surprising is how many of those I have never seen before. There were a lot of awesome spaceships that I would've loved to owned, which were out in the same years that I bought a lot of my stuff.

Enjay said:

It does, however, also show what I was saying about specially shaped bricks that are really only of use for that one model versus what I had "back in the day" when only the standard shapes and sizes were available.

Maybe not with the Star Wars stuff (I never owned any of those), but I know a lot of the model kits I owned reused a lot of the same specialized pieces. The earliest kits I owned (from the late 80's/early 90's) also reused a lot of pieces you could find in the base sets, plus a few minor specialized things like some slopes, windshields, lights, hinges, etc. Later the kits became smaller and used a lot more specialized pieces as a result, but the majority of them were still shared between every kit I owned; they just weren't in the base set.

I don't think I really got into Lego until I had amassed enough model kits to get lots of those pieces. The models you could build with them generally looked a lot better, and were more interactive. I hardly ever kept my kits as intended, unless I really liked the model. If they made a base set that came with those pieces, instead of just the large ones, I would've bought it instead because the model kits were really pricey. The last base set I bought, sometime in the mid 90's, didn't even come with wheels anymore.

[Lord_Z]

Danarchy said...
Hax, those are sets. :P

Yeah but they are still very fun to build :) It's like Enjay said, due to some specialty bricks, it would be difficult to build some of them with normal bricks. Not impossible mind you, just difficult :P

Danarchy said...
Anyway, those new castle sets are looking more and more interesting. They have dwarves and orcs trolls now. I might just pick up one. If anything, they can double as D&D minis.

That is pretty much the reason why I got one of these. It was not so much for the game but for the mini-figs. I will say though, that it is tricky to move those skeletons from space to space.

[deathbringer]

I'm glad i got out of Lego just as the Star Wars stuff started to come in, and then all the other licensed stuff (apart from, of course, the Shell licensed city stuff from circa 1990 that was later replaced by "Octan"). It's so much less imaginitive, though we had a few more specialised pieces (such as the saucer sections from UFO's) they still allowed for imagination and interpretation. I made up my own space wars called "Galactic Conquest", the mainstay of which was "Spitfire vs ME109" style battles using two basic fighter designs. I could probably still build those straight off now with muscle memory!

Me and a friend were both involved in it, with occasional inputs from my cousin. Nearly everything i had was of my own design (except for newly bought stuff that i kept in it's original form for a week or so because it annoyed my mum if i didn't), though i "used" some of the Lego names (like the piratical Spyrius, and the old Mtron, who were from Earth in my stories), but i also had my own made up things, the "good guys" were primarily FW (Forest Warriors, formerly Forest Warders) and the "bad guys" were evil aliens called Starkill.
My friend liked the lego names more than i did and he especially liked Spyrius and thier forerunner Blacktron. Though he also made up his own things like "Oddmans" (who were pirates/scavengers who built ships from junk they found). He also used one of the unusual Spyrius/Exploriens (don't remember now) guys who only came with one set to make up his own character called Captain Sharpe, who was a sort of lone crusader for justice who fought against Spyrius).
My cousin was the best out of both of us at building lego models (though he also had the least pieces he always made them one colour and had some brilliant designs), unfortunatley during the period of childhood when we did this he had no imagination and just made stuff based on Star Trek, so we had to incorporate the Federation into our things. Though he also had the least input so they were quietly shelved. Later he did get into the spirit of "make up your own stuff" and came up with "Matt Forces" (with himself as supreme ruler of the world, naturally) which was later turned into "The Empire". Thier flagship was the "Empire Star", which looked awesome (though was built at a totally different scale to my stuff, if he had built it at the "lego men can fit in it" scale it would have been the size of a house)

[Creaphis]

Yup, I've still got two bins of Lego that are sitting about eight feet to my left. I wanted to say two "big" bins, but they don't actually look as big now as they used to. I played with it a lot, and probably spent more time following instructions and building sets than I did making up my own stuff, though I did a lot of both. I would also play with the models once they were built. I was always very good to my Lego - all of the original instruction booklets are still meticulously preserved in one binder. Aside from casual play with my Lego, mostly solitary, I remember two especially grand undertakings. I once built a vast fleet of spaceships, and a simple spaceport, merely from the stock pieces in my collection and the contents of my imagination. After I ran out of the pieces that are more naturally at home in spaceships, like transparent domed windshields, antennae, and satellite dishes, the creativity really got started - and the ships more clearly showed the signs of budgetary crisis. I also once assembled every Lego set I own, in their intended forms, and then lined them up in my basement in chronological order. On one end, a medieval fortress lay under siege by an unlikely alliance of pirates and dinosaurs. Spaceships performed aerial reconnaissance on an underwater base at the other.

I also share the sentiment that Lego just isn't as good as it used to be, because evidently I'm only two steps away from waving a cane at those goddamn kids in my dahlias. But seriously. Now everything has a licensed IP and the pieces have no versatility. You can't play with that stuff anymore. I'm struck by the idea of preserving my Lego for the theoretical benefit of some hypothetical future generation but then I remember that a lot of the fun of Lego wasn't having it, but getting it. Give a kid all of his Lego all at once and he has nothing to look forward to. The solution: I will separate all of my Lego bricks into their original sets and give them to the child in question one at a time, on special occasions. This child will also watch Looney Tunes on Saturday mornings instead of modern, cheaply-animated, puerile garbage, and will be tricked into thinking that it's new.

I should note that some of the new, not just electric, but electronic Lego stuff looks pretty interesting. There may be hope for the future after all.