Review: Lego Ghostbusters Ecto-1

Ghostbusters turns 30 this year and you can speculate as to whether that had anything to do with this Lego Cuusoo (now Lego Ideas) becoming a reality. For those not in the know, Lego Ideas is a website where anyone can announce their idea for a new Lego set to the world. The ideas are voted on by the public and once it reaches 10,000 votes Lego take the set into consideration for making it into a 'real' set. There are a bunch of criteria as to whether this final step can be taken, for example it must be 'family friendly' and have no licensing issues.

Ecto-1 was one of those sets to make it through and a jolly nice set it is too.

Toyology review: Lego Cargo Heliplane

There's really no competition for the best toy of all time. Without a doubt it's Lego, who've been producing bricks since 1949 and, despite the current trend of looking down on plastic toys, is a firm favourite with everyone across the world.

With the abundance of 'themed' Lego sets - you can get everything from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to The Simpsons in Lego form now, not to mention Chima, Friends, Castle etc - it's rare that we buy a 'basic' Lego City set so it was a nice change to receive this one for review from Toys R Us.

Plus it comes with a Lego chainsaw!

Review: LEGO TMNT Turtle Lair Attack (79103)

It was a long time coming.

Way back in January Pixel Dan posted a review of the TMNT Lego lair set. As chance would have it, as I hit 'play', my 4yo son appeared. 'I want that,' he declared. 'Um, okay,' I replied, 'but it won't be in the shops for a while yet.' TMNT Lego wasn't due to hit until mid-February, which meant a long few weeks of 'Is it summer yet?' on repeat, for 4yo had somehow got it into his head that it wasn't released until then. Which was fine because once it had been released he would have to wait until the price dropped a bit, Lego being a tad expensive.

Eventually, after threatening to send 4yo to live at Pixel Dan's house so I wouldn't have to listen to him go on and on about it, I found a site which was offering the Lair with £10 off. Deciding this was enough of a discount if it'd quiet my son, I placed an order.

2 weeks later and the Lego still hadn't been dispatched. Despite being available when I ordered, it was now 'out of stock' and showed no sign of being in stock any time soon.

Would the 'is it summer yet?' never end?

With order cancelled, the search began anew. Coincidentally at this time I came across Flubit.com, a website  which claimed to beat the best price for an item you could find online.

Worth a try, right?

By this time Amazon was now offering the Lair with a tenner off the RRP, equaling the price I'd been prepared to pay earlier. Would Flubit be able to beat it? My guess was that they'd come up with an offer a few pence below Amazon.

I typed the URL into the Flubit homepage and waited...

A little over 24 hours later I'd received my offer. Flubit had managed to knock a fiver(!) off the Amazon price. Impressed, I definitely was and will, without a doubt, be using them again in the future.

I paid my pennies (which was the only downside to the whole Flubit experience - the site wouldn't load properly on my Playbook so I had to kick the children off my laptop to pay) and a few days later I had a Turtle Lair Attack to give to 4yo. Now to find out if it had been worth the wait...

While 4yo will happily put smaller Lego sets together, he wanted to play with his Lair now, which meant poor old me had to put the main part together while he sat and did the mini-figures. I wanted to do a little video of building it however 4yo wasn't prepared to wait while I set up the camera.

There isn't a huge amount of pieces with the set. The licensed sets tend to be smaller compared to the completely Lego-owned stuff at the same price point (presumably the license cost is factored in). For the RRP it's a little expensive, however it's a bargain considering what I actually paid.

Review: LEGO Hobbit An Unexpected Gathering (79003)

It's rare that I review Lego. The main reason for this is because that seconds after a model has been constructed the children decide to 'explode' whatever's been carefully made, making pictures a little problematic to take.

As I begin writing this review Bilbo's house, Bag End, is in one piece. It will be a minor miracle if it's in this state by the end. Indeed, even as it was being built many sections had to be rebuilt due to a marauding 2 year old.

Toyology Review: Duplo Creative Cakes

We don't own any Duplo. We skipped over it and went straight to 'proper' Lego since we've collected bucketloads of the stuff since I was small (besides, they don't do Star Wars Duplo). So Creative Cakes was a completely new (kind of) play experience for us all.

The set comes in a reasonably strong cardboard box, with a plastic lid that doubles as a tray for your baked creations. The briefest mention of the word 'cake' was enough to capture my (note quite) 2 year old's attention and she sat for ages clicking the bricks together to make a variety of vaguely cake-shaped objects.

It's Lego and therefore very hard to fault in any way, however I will nitpick at it being very, very pink. As far as I am aware it is common for both girls and boys to have a play kitchen/shop/similar, which this set would compliment very nicely. Unfortunately since - for no really good reason - the colour scheme is heavily girl-targeted, very few boys are going to want it - or at least not be bought it by an adult. Which is a shame because, as I said, this goes perfectly with a play kitchen.

(If there is indeed a more gender-neutral set available, then I apologise.)

Other than that, this is a great set with just enough pieces to allow a number of different cakes to be made. Included is a booklet with some ideas pictured, but really the cakes are all down to the imagination of the child.

Review: Cars Lego

A couple of years ago Lego acquired the license to produce toys based on Disney properties and have since been making tie-ins to almost every new film, with varying degrees of success. One of the latest was Cars 2...

I bought these two little sets simply because they were cheap. You can't really go wrong with Lego at the best of times, so cheap Lego is like...a really, really good thing...


Cheap.

They're not the most pieces-intensive sets ever made and McQueen is mostly formed from 2 specialist pieces (I'm not a fan of Lego bricks that are created specifically for one model), but they kept the children entertained for a while building them...then rebuilding them 5 minutes later when they'd 'exploded' back into their constituent pieces again.

As I said, you can't go wrong with Lego - everyone loves Lego - and therefore everyone will like these sets.

Probably.

With Cars 2 now being 'so last year' these may be a little difficult to get hold of now. The price has either shot up or dropped down ridiculously low, depending on whether retailers are trying to get rid of old stock or dealers are trying to make a silly amount of profit.

Opinion: The cost of Lego

From talking to people and reading stuff on the internet, it seems that most people are of the opinion that Lego is expensive.