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i81icu812 posted:Unsure. It is a good sign that it is now on amazon. It is a bad sign that the rest of the Monster Fighter line appears to be going EOL this year. My gut says it will stick around for a few more years, as it has only been out for a few months. Before it showed up on amazon there were rumors that it would be one and done. The Zombies on the other hand disappeared after just a few months in store and has since doubled/tripled in price. Medieval Market Village just went out of production, what, a month ago? The corresponding Castle line's been gone for two+ years, if I recall correctly. I'm not super-worried about the Haunted House disappearing soon, especially if this  buy buy buy wave continues.
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Jan 3, 2013 02:39
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^^^^ Yeah, I'd guess HH sticks around. It is a really nice set. And Castle is coming back! Just after MMV EOLs and just in time for Joust to go EOL.ireladd posted:I wish I hadn't been in a financial pinch a year and a half ago. I had a Lego Creator Carousel sealed that I got from Toys R Us for $125 because of some customer service gently caress-ups and sold it for a little over $500. Now it's going for $1000. Oh well, it helped me a lot at the time to have that money and I still have an extra sealed Green Grocer that I got for $75. I would caution against the Death Star as people have been saying it is about to go EOL for the past... 3 years? The price per piece and sheer number of minifigs in the Death Star is nice though. Confirmed EOLs like the Shuttle, Diagon Alley, Medieval Market Village, or the Imperial Shuttle would probably offer better return for your investment when you factor in time. There are probably tens or hundreds of thousands of fire brigades stockpiled at this point. Shuttle Expedition looks to be out of stock pretty much everywhere online now, ditto MMV. Looks like amazon is one of the last places with Diagon Alley in stock. Ninjago will probably also do well when the new cartoon comes out in 2014, though it may be too late to really get in on that rush.
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Jan 3, 2013 03:05
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I'm pretty cautious about 'investing' in Lego, it seems like something that could get saturated or fade out a bit like in did in the 90s. I still remember all the money I wasted on baseball cards when I was 11 because I thought they would be valuable someday  The manufacturers caught on that people were really into stockpiling and collecting, so the market just got flooded with way too many cards. The kids have a Green Grocer and a Grand Emporium mixed into their play pile, but the idea of rebuilding either is daunting, even if the value goes nuts. God knows how many pieces they've lost, I've found a bunch every time I empty the vacuum cleaner.
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Jan 3, 2013 03:49
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VW van is a fun build with lots of neat details and not too repetitive. It's a little fiddly when it's together though with some of the SNOT stuff falling off if you look at it funny. And the popup part on top I wouldn't mess with unless I had the instructions handy. Looks amazing on a shelf too.
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Jan 3, 2013 04:30
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InfinEight posted:The fact that there are people that save the boxes will never cease to mystify me. I've picked up a few in-box sets from the 80s and early 90s, and I don't know what to do with them. I just wanted the set, but I don't want to keep the boxes. But I also don't want to throw these 20+ year old boxes away because maybe someone would want them. Except the Mission Commander box is in really rough shape...should I just cave and toss them in the recycling, or try to move 'em on Bricklink for like $5?
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Jan 3, 2013 04:30
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I hadn't built anything in a long while so I went hog wild on this racing theme.   I see a lot of people posting mocs made in LDD or whatever. That's cool, but I find a lot of the nostalgic fun of playing with Lego comes from rooting around looking for the piece you want. Sometimes in vain and having to improvise with what you can find. Or coming across a piece you hadn't even considered and finding a cool way to incorporate it. This is also why I don't organize at all, most of my mocs are kinda stream-of-consciousness.
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Jan 3, 2013 04:33
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smackfu posted:VW van is a fun build with lots of neat details and not too repetitive. It's a little fiddly when it's together though with some of the SNOT stuff falling off if you look at it funny. And the popup part on top I wouldn't mess with unless I had the instructions handy. The #1 thing to beware of with the VW Camper: the loving bags aren't numbered  You should still buy it, though. As for boxes, I can't say I keep them pristine but I have the ones from anything big I buy. Modulars, the Ferraris, Winter Village, etc. When I was little I would cut the fold-up panels off my big sets and also save the back panels that showed you what else you could build. Still have them too.
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Jan 3, 2013 05:12
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Fledgling Gulps posted:I see a lot of people posting mocs made in LDD or whatever. That's cool, but I find a lot of the nostalgic fun of playing with Lego comes from rooting around looking for the piece you want. Sometimes in vain and having to improvise with what you can find. Or coming across a piece you hadn't even considered and finding a cool way to incorporate it. This is also why I don't organize at all, most of my mocs are kinda stream-of-consciousness. I build in LDD primarily because my collection is currently in its infancy. Otherwise, I agree with you.
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Jan 3, 2013 05:37
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InfinEight posted:The fact that there are people that save the boxes will never cease to mystify me. I don't get why people wouldn't keep them. They don't take up a lot more room than the bricks themselves and most have cool pictures on them. I have a couple dozen sets in ziploc bags in their boxes then the obligatory huge-rubbermaid-o-lego and certainly I wish I had kept all those boxes from when I was a kid (and the instructions too).
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Jan 3, 2013 05:46
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I set myself the restriction of using the bricks from my small creator vehicles plus the spare parts from my larger collection. I didn't want to break out the buckets of lego. I was originally going to make a snowman. I managed to make a workable face, but I didn't really have the means of finishing the head let alone the body. So I swapped it up to a racer. I wanted to make a twin-cockpit vehicle. I sort of just threw it all together with trial and error. Then I got to greebling it up, and went with a split-personality battle racer. One half space age lasers and poo poo, the other medieval.    Also, I have tried to never throw out boxes. Definitely not instruction manuals. I have all my childhood manuals, the boxes mostly too.
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Jan 3, 2013 06:17
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I got bored New Years Day and made this. I think it turned out pretty well:
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Jan 3, 2013 08:49
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Fledgling Gulps posted:I hadn't built anything in a long while so I went hog wild on this racing theme. Bricks are more enjoyable to build with indeed, but i don't have a vast enough collection to be able to build stuff nor the financial stability to get a collection of bricks. Also having the motor skills of a spastic rabbit doesn't help.
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Jan 3, 2013 12:57
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InfinEight posted:The fact that there are people that save the boxes will never cease to mystify me. I have the cut-off front flap of the Mega Core Magnetizer on my wall over my bed. It's pretty rad lookin'. They seriously need to bring back the big purple grid all the old Space box fronts had. Seriously. poo poo owns. You don't need PERCEIVED ACTION to make an awesome box cover. 
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Jan 3, 2013 13:25
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The old boxes were great, I would spend hours looking at my brothers boxes with all the alternate builds that you had zero instructions for which made them all the better when you would take apart the set and try recreate it best you could. The new boxes? Not so much but from the stuff I remember in the 80's with my brothers lego was what made me love it and sad that my parents wouldn't ever get me any even if I asked. I did buy a used but still in box model team yellow jeep because it was the first set I ever really played with and it was like being a kid again except I didn't have to sneak around to play with it. The old instructions were great too. Look how much you get done on the first page of the instructions, I was 5 or 6 and didn't seem to have a issue now the instructions are so bloated. http://www.flickr.com/groups/1566428@N21/ This flickr has the back of a bunch of the old boxes, why wouldn't you want to keep those.
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Jan 3, 2013 14:38
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Merchant of Death posted:Look how much you get done on the first page of the instructions, I was 5 or 6 and didn't seem to have a issue now the instructions are so bloated. That's not too different from instructions today.
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Jan 3, 2013 14:47
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front wing flexing posted:That's not too different from instructions today. http://cache.lego.com/bigdownloads/buildinginstructions/6039839.pdf These are instructions from a new creator car that has roughly the same piece count as the old jeep. In 6 steps you use a total of nine pieces, the old style? they used 32 pieces in 3 steps, take away the 10 technic pins and bushings and it is still 22 parts in half the building steps.
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Jan 3, 2013 14:53
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Man most instructions these days are literally one part added with each picture, maybe 2 pictures per page. They're just drawn out over more and more pages.
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Jan 3, 2013 14:56
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Merchant of Death posted:http://cache.lego.com/bigdownloads/buildinginstructions/6039839.pdf These are instructions from a new creator car that has roughly the same piece count as the old jeep. In 6 steps you use a total of nine pieces, the old style? they used 32 pieces in 3 steps, take away the 10 technic pins and bushings and it is still 22 parts in half the building steps. So? The old instructions were afwul in terms of processes and colors. Besides, the creator sets use a lot of simple techniques with mostly basic pieces and that car isn't even a good example of building.
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Jan 3, 2013 15:01
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I doubt the driving force behind minimizing instruction length in the olden days was "kids are smarter". It was probably "it's cheaper this way". Also that grid background for the parts breakout on the old instructions is a terrible design choice. Pirate Ken posted:I read somewhere a month or so ago that one of the companies that does ratings and blister packaging of sealed LEGO sets. Which is really upsetting and disturbing. Hopefully this is an anomaly and not a trend. smackfu fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Jan 3, 2013 |
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Jan 3, 2013 15:03
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smackfu posted:I doubt the driving force behind minimizing instruction length in the olden days was "kids are smarter". It was probably "it's cheaper this way". I don't doubt it was done because it was cheaper, which is what they should be doing again with sets costing so much. They could cut almost every instruction booklet in half and having 2 different books for a set with under 300 pieces is excessive. Give me more bricks, less paper.
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Jan 3, 2013 15:19
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Merchant of Death posted:I don't doubt it was done because it was cheaper, which is what they should be doing again with sets costing so much. They could cut almost every instruction booklet in half and having 2 different books for a set with under 300 pieces is excessive. Give me more bricks, less paper. And then you alienate the young consumers from the actual money making sets all to save, at most, a half a buck on printing.
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Jan 3, 2013 15:22
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Merchant of Death posted:I don't doubt it was done because it was cheaper, which is what they should be doing again with sets costing so much. They could cut almost every instruction booklet in half and having 2 different books for a set with under 300 pieces is excessive. Give me more bricks, less paper. I think there's a couple of issues here... 1) Simpler instruction steps. The current creator set you compared it to is ages 7-12. Model Team was basically Technic guts with brick-built bodies, IIRC, so that was aimed at an older crowd. So no surprise they have different complexity levels. Something like the VW bus isn't any simpler in step instructions than that old set. 2) Cramming the same instructions onto less physical paper. The old one looks bad to me in this regard. If it costs a few cents in paper to spread it out, I prefer that.
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Jan 3, 2013 15:42
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smackfu posted:2) Cramming the same instructions onto less physical paper. The old one looks bad to me in this regard. If it costs a few cents in paper to spread it out, I prefer that. Yeah, most of the sets I get are big display pieces like Joust, Haunted House, the big ships from Pirates etc. The main difference I'm seeing between those instructions and the ones that were posted is that there is a lot more whitespace nowadays.
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Jan 3, 2013 15:45
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Mr. Yuk posted:I got bored New Years Day and made this. I think it turned out pretty well: This is insanely cool, well done!
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Jan 3, 2013 16:59
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Sloppy posted:I'm pretty cautious about 'investing' in Lego, it seems like something that could get saturated or fade out a bit like in did in the 90s. I still remember all the money I wasted on baseball cards when I was 11 because I thought they would be valuable someday So any time you get involved with a speculation based market, be it baseball cards, beanie babies, tech stocks, oil, or dutch tulips, you have to plot your exit strategy. poo poo simply will not pile up forever. Right now, it's great to speculate in LEGO because there aren't enough speculators to disrupt the market. Most are guys like me, providing liquidity in the market -- we buy when people want to sell (Walmart's half off sale) and we sell when people want to buy (a year from now when someone realizes they really want that Maersk Train set). In return for holding on to product, we make a nice profit. But at the end of the day, it's legitimate collectors and builders buying stuff, they're not buying the Taj Mahal with the expectation of selling it to someone else for a huge profit six months later. Now, if people start speculating, that's exactly what's going to happen. And at some point, the collector is priced out. When that happens and people are buying just to resell, things get dangerous and people end up getting hurt. If you see prices going up exponentially higher in the next year, buy some stuff, hang on to it for a little while, and then sell out when the profits are nice and fat. Don't get greedy and if you miss the high point, don't keep waiting for it to come back.
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Jan 3, 2013 18:38
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Merchant of Death posted:and sad that my parents wouldn't ever get me any even if I asked. I did buy a used but still in box model team yellow jeep because it was the first set I ever really played with and it was like being a kid again except I didn't have to sneak around to play with it. The old instructions were great too. You had to sneak around your parents to play Lego? Plastic bricks, the gateway drug  einTier posted:So any time you get involved with a speculation based market, be it baseball cards, beanie babies, tech stocks, oil, or dutch tulips, you have to plot your exit strategy. poo poo simply will not pile up forever. Yeah, that's a good point. At the end of the day, worst-case scenario is you have to spend a few weeks building sets!
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Jan 3, 2013 18:46
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einTier posted:buying the Taj Mahal My Taj Mahal is sitting in a foot locker because my LEGO room is being painted 
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Jan 3, 2013 18:47
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Sloppy posted:You had to sneak around your parents to play Lego? Plastic bricks, the gateway drug Yup, it was considered a boys toy so I could only play with my brothers when we were being babysat. When I asked for them for myself, or got caught playing with them I would get scolded and told that they weren't mine and I couldn't touch them. Most of the time I just got to watch him play with them. I have made up for it in the past year and a half.
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Jan 3, 2013 19:02
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Merchant of Death posted:Yup, it was considered a boys toy so I could only play with my brothers when we were being babysat. When I asked for them for myself, or got caught playing with them I would get scolded and told that they weren't mine and I couldn't touch them. Most of the time I just got to watch him play with them. I have made up for it in the past year and a half. Sorry about your physiologically abusive parents/childhood.
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Jan 3, 2013 19:12
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Mr. Yuk posted:I got bored New Years Day and made this. I think it turned out pretty well:  I also got into the Final Fantasy building mood.
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Jan 3, 2013 19:14
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Is the Midi-Scale Star Destroyer worth $50? I want it, but it's a hefty price tag for me to swallow.
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Jan 3, 2013 19:25
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nahanahs posted:Is the Midi-Scale Star Destroyer worth $50? I want it, but it's a hefty price tag for me to swallow. $30-35 is the usual price.
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Jan 3, 2013 19:28
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el burbo posted:
Holy poo poo yessssss 
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Jan 3, 2013 20:26
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Okay, time for the Ghost Train rundown I mentioned a few days ago. Massive post incoming. First off, Monster Fighter Frank Rock, with his less-seen badass face:  I don't mind his other face, but this one is less smarmy, and more kick-rear end-and-chew-bubblegum. Note the can of Diet Dew. There will be a few of them, let's all laugh now. Ha ha ha.  A few pages into the prop plane. I'm tempted to say this is my favorite part of the set, honestly. Some good building techniques, a couple fun details, and a decent color scheme. I really like the Technic skeleton it has (something I enjoyed about the Darth Maul Interceptor, as well.)  The wing/landing gear assembly. Like I said, I liked the Technic skeleton, and the way that the blue pins held everything together.  The goo-shooter thing. I dunno, I imagine it's like the slime in Ghostbusters 2. And, of course, flick missles! Yay! (or not  ) The only thing going for them on this one is the color. I'll forever be a sucker for trans green. Rotor assembly. Loved how they built the rotary engine details. My daughter built most of the set, and this was one of the things she did. This part? Not so easy for someone with developing fine motor skills.  The completed plane. I almost left the barrel off, but gently caress it, it's supposed to be outlandish. Also, the pistols as exhaust pipes were a fun touch. I love when they use weapons for things you don't expect (see also: Hagrid's Hut giant spider legs). Starting on the train:  ...the hell? Metal? In my LEGO set?  Oh, that makes a little more sense. Axles. I'll allow it. This time.  Some of the detailing, especially on the engine, are pretty neat. Like the door into the boiler, with a teeny tiny fire inside.  The completed engine. Several pieces, including the face, glow in the dark. I think the greebles are just about perfect, and that green fire out of the smokestack is killer. I'm not a huge fan of the roof of the cab, though. It looks cool, for sure, but it comes off if you so much as nudge it.  The bat wings on two of the cars move when you roll it along. This is undeniably cool, but the mechanism itself is a little wonky. First, the rubber on the tires doesn't have that much grip, so they tend to not work on a smooth surface like a tabletop. Second, the wings are held on by those little wrench clips, which tend to slide out of alignment and bind up on the wheel or the car itself. When it works, it's awesome. When it doesn't... well... not so much.  The completed set. Sorry about how dark these ended up, we were building for quite a while and it when from day to evening to nighttime, and I couldn't line up a decent shot with just my dining room chandelier for light. Overall, it was a fun set to build--at least the parts I did. My wife worked on the engine, and my daughter was involved in most all of the build process. Since the gimmicks are a little wonky, I don't think it's much to play with, but the airplane is well done and way swooshable. The train is a little underwhelming, in my opinion. I mean, it's obviously rad because it's a loving ghost train, but it's just not much to look at after you get past the engine. Plus, I don't think it would be very easy to retrofit it with some kind of motor, and the cars themselves wouldn't work on a track with the wheels they have anyway. I don't have any Train stuff, so I don't really know. I do think it is one of the best set in its price range, though. You get three new ghost minifigs, Frank Rock, the girl that appears in the Mummy set, and a plane and train that both ooze character. Plus it's a good resource for train parts, and the mechanical bits, when they work, are really cool and have an interesting design. So there y'all go. I think I'm done until I get the Haunted House (probably after taxes are done), so no mega-posts til then. Unless I find something cool at Target in the next couple weeks. 
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Jan 3, 2013 20:34
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Merchant of Death posted:
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Jan 3, 2013 20:42
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885 new parts/colors in 2013!  http://www.brickset.com/parts/browse/years/?year=2013 http://www.brickset.com/news/article/?ID=5340
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Jan 3, 2013 20:47
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djfooboo posted:885 new parts/colors in 2013! http://www.brickset.com/parts/?part=6016636 Flounder!? E: Must be: http://cache.lego.com/media/bricks/5/2/6027622.jpg
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Jan 3, 2013 21:25
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It looks like they have a duplo little mermaid set planned? I'm most impressed with this Metroid lookalike but theres a lot of awesome stuff in there. http://www.brickset.com/parts/?part=6029105
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Jan 3, 2013 21:28
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nahanahs posted:Is the Midi-Scale Star Destroyer worth $50? I want it, but it's a hefty price tag for me to swallow. It's a bunch of fairly basic parts and bricks. I'd find a parts list and just price it out on bricklink.
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Jan 3, 2013 21:39
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Are there any spray adhesives that help a completed kit stay together better?
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