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Off-Topic Questions Thread - closed. Open new threads for specific questions please.


KRS

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1 minute ago, johnnyboy said:

Is it?  Lepin are mercilessly knocking off and undercutting legit Lego.  People LOVE Lego.

I suppose. I didn't realise that Lego was much of a thing once you got into adulthood, but I've been reading about it for the last 20 minutes and apparently there's a whole massive community of adult Lego builders! 

Actually, I've been in Hamley's a few times at Christmas and sort of wanted to buy Lego.

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5 hours ago, Kaz Hayashi said:

B&M do a naff version old led Mega Blocks or similar. They do sets too and it's better than the pound shop stuff. However, you know it's not real and it feels cheap. But for a large cops and robbers set with cars included, you're talking £5.

I think there's that perfect age which lasts about a year where they are old enough to play with it, but aren't fussy about authenticity due to school yard politics. 

Are you looking for particular sets Surf, like a specific theme?

Mega-Blocks have the Halo license, don't they? 

I'm not after anything in particular, I'm just stockpiling it until the lad comes of age, although it's inevitable I'll end up getting a load of the Star Wars stuff (and Classic Space if anything gets reissued for next years 40th anniversary). 

So far I've just got a mix of the typical stuff. Cars, planes, fire engines, beach hut, etc.

I wonder what the odds of getting my  old Lego back off my sister are. Lego's ace. I think of it as a form of therapy.

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I remember having a suitcase full of Lego. An accumulation from my oldest brother down to me as the youngest over a 12 year period.

I also remember my Dad making me a milky cup of tea (WTF), and me then proceeding to vomit heavily into said suitcase full of Lego after drinking it.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Nostalgia Nonce said:

Lego's ace. I think of it as a form of therapy.

That's how I see it. If I have a hectic time of deadlines with work I'll often get a set to turn off my brain for a few hours, to the point that work have been known to buy me Lego. My home office now has a Death Star and the ghostbusters HQ. 

And Lepin have got to the point now where their sets are almost matching Lego and you can get cool unofficial sets like this. 

 

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-font-b-Alien-b-font-2020pcs-Building-Br

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1 hour ago, chokeout said:

That's how I see it. If I have a hectic time of deadlines with work I'll often get a set to turn off my brain for a few hours, to the point that work have been known to buy me Lego. My home office now has a Death Star and the ghostbusters HQ. 

And Lepin have got to the point now where their sets are almost matching Lego and you can get cool unofficial sets like this. 

 

XingBao-04002-font-b-Aliens-b-font-Genui

-font-b-Alien-b-font-2020pcs-Building-Br

I agree fully with you and @Nostalgia Nonce about it being a form of therapy, much like a lot of people think the same way about jigsaws. It's Lego is more fun and it has the nostalgia factor.

Regarding the Alien figure... this is where I struggle with Lego. It's looks fucking ace don't get me wrong, but I find it difficult to accept it as lego. When you look at its build, it doesn't shout Lego to me. Still cool though.

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5 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

I got bought and built an AT-AT Lego set just after Christmas. Was great fun. It sits on top of the TV cupboard and the kids know better than to touch it. 

This you?

 

 

Lord_Business_physical.jpg

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This got long so TLDR: Lego is awesome and Chinese knock-offs are cheap, good quality and make stuff Lego don't.
----
I got super into Lego again last year when me and the girlfriend moved into a proper house with a Welsh dresser and I decided I'd adorn it with Lego sets instead of rubbish plates that never get used.

Started off by going through my box of childhood Lego and separating it into the sets I used to have and using BrickLink to fill in the gaps, of which there were many. Turns out buying Lego by the brick can be a pretty expensive hobby... 

Anyway, I bought a few Jurassic Park sets on eBay super cheap because the seller had taken the minifigures out. Turns out that's a thing now, people will buy sets just for the figures and then sell them on. Bought a set of 8 Chinese knock-off minifigures for a fiver to replace them and was actually shocked at how good quality they were.

That kinda got me hooked on cheap Chinese (boot)Lego - I actually have a buyer in China now and although it's not a great deal cheaper than buying from AliExpress, I quite like the guy and somehow his packages get to the UK in just a few days rather than the several weeks other orders can take.

Largely, I've just been buying minifigures, the Chinese manufacturers pump out custom figures like there's no tomorrow. I think I ended up with about 80 Lego Batman Movie minifigures where Lego themselves only produced 20-odd. At 50p a figure, I just don't even think about it. I picked the ones I liked and mounted and framed them.

There's whole sets of X-Men figures where Lego themselves only made Wolverine, Storm and a really bad Cyclops so I've got the official Blackbird and Sentinel set that's now displayed with the full team of knock-offs.

I recently bought He-Man and Skeletor minifigs and then built a custom Battle Cat so they goes nicely with my Ghostbusters, TMNT and Back To The Furture sets as all my childhood toys in Lego form. I then decided to start looking at building my own Thundercats from Chima parts, as that's pretty close already, but now there's a Chinese company bringing out Thundercats minifigures. So, I'm pretty sure they know their audience.

There's a company called Sheng Yuan who even brought out a set of WWE figures (Big Show, Triple H, Undertaker, Kane, Rey Mysterio, Booker T, The Rock and John Cena) and aside from a few issues (Cena comes with black, spiky hair and Booker T comes with straight, shoulder length hair but whilst those pieces can be replaced The Rock figure is, annoyingly, white), they're really well made.

I have bought a few actual sets and with companies like Lele and Bela, there is a noticeable drop in quality but the one actual Lepin set I own (the Ghostbusters firehouse, which was around £100 as opposed to the £270 the official set goes for), the quality is very closely comparable to Lego.

So, along with the fact that all the loose bricks I've been buying for older sets have been second hand, I've dropped easily a few hundred quid on Lego over the last 12 months and none of it has actually gone to Lego, which would make the Adult Fans Of Lego community look at me like dirt but as much as I've spent, trying to do the same with official sets would have been impossible and it's kept my interest in the product to the point I'd happily buy official sets if there was something I wanted and that's not something I've said for probably years.

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17 hours ago, Silky Kisser said:

I remember having a suitcase full of Lego. An accumulation from my oldest brother down to me as the youngest over a 12 year period.

We had this! Not a suitcase, just a big plastic storage box.

Most of my toys as a kid were hand-me-downs from my older brothers, so it had all of my older brother's (by about nine years) Lego in there, and maybe even my eldest brother (twelve years older than me), and then accumulated all of my twin brother's and my Lego through our childhood, before being passed on to my little cousin, and then from her to my oldest nephew, and from him to his younger siblings. I hope we can keep this up for generations.

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I had a big box of Lego, too - mostly donated by family and friends. When I got a bit older, my parents were able to afford the odd small set. Best toy I ever had; I honestly can't think of any other that had as much longevity and gave me as much satisfaction as my old Lego.

It's probably cliché to say by now, but I genuinely feel it's the best toy for any kid: it encourages creativity like nothing else. Not just in terms of what you can build, but also the stories you can come up with surrounding them.

Truly was a bittersweet day when I handed on my Lego to my little nephew; I reassured myself he would get as much joy from it as I did, and that it would get a new lease of life being played with by a kid who thinks it's the best thing ever, rather than just sitting in a box in a cupboard.

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43 minutes ago, Au said:

This got long so TLDR: Lego is awesome and Chinese knock-offs are cheap, good quality and make stuff Lego don't.
...................

Etc, etc....

Great post and some very interesting info Au. There's a few bits a want to research now, I might give you a shout if I need a bit of info about particular sets.

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