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Comment by hateful | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that they don't really make Legos anymore anyway. Almost every piece is specialized for design you buy. So it may as well be an DYI action figure. There's no creativity in using the set to build your own things. No re-usability. That and the price.

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After helping my 4 year old build dozens of kits over the past year or two I've noticed many patterns of use with those 'specialized' pieces. They're absolutely reusable, to the degree that by looking at a box I can pretty much know that it's going to have a couple of [whatever] because it has arm or leg joints, a turret, etc.

What I have seen is that the parts that come with typical kits are WAY more advanced than the race cars, castles and pirate ships I used to have. I'd say a good percentage of the bricks used to be bricks I'd only see in the advanced Technic kits from back in my day.

I will say though that I went and bought a bucket of generic bricks because a lot of the bricks that come with the standard kits today aren't super awesome for a four year old that wants to build simple buildings and stuff like that.

Not even remotely true. Have you walked down the Lego aisle of a Target, Wal-mart, or a toy store? Lego has tons of sets with bulk generic pieces, as well as sets that come with plans for 2 or 3 different objects. They have licensed sets too—but that's just it, they have a lot more sets than they used to. They make sets for many different people.

When i bought sets for my son (5) i was worried he would break them and I would have to put them back together. The best thing that has happened is i let him destroy them and now he takes the pieces and builds his own things using creativity and engineering. Best thing to do is to let go.

Not entirely true. They separated a separate line out for that: Lego Classic.

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Classic

The large, multicolor set runs about $48 in stores.

> I would argue that they don't really make Legos anymore anyway. Almost every piece is specialized for design you buy.

Even the specialized sets have a fairly small share of specialized pieces, and they still sell generic, non-specialized sets.

Plus, even the “specialized” pieces are (by design) easy to repurpose.

My 12 year old self agreed with you. The Technical sets and Space sets were cool in a way, but had too many pre-fab parts! Lego just wasn't want it used to be. Might as well build models! And the prices, wow.

This was about 1980, by the way.

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