When I was a kid, my brother and I had a bunch of Legos to play with. We always had our eyes on some new model, of course, because we were insatiable. But we spent most of our time pulling thing apart and creating our own designs, eschewing printed manuals in favor of some instructions manual in our heads. Though most of the experience has been lost to time, I do recall some truly rad creations. The thing about Legos, though, is that you need a lot of them before things get really interesting - it’s not the sheer number of blocks so much as the selection. My brother and I were lucky, since there were two of us and we had great success in convincing my parents to purchase new sets for birthdays and the like - but there were still a few years of multicolored houses and freakishly mutated contraptions before our creations began to look legit. Fortunately, a solution looms large on the horizon: The Lego Digital Designer.

The Digital Designer is basically a virtual lego environment - a sort of primitive version of 3D modeling. It’s free to download and use, and creations can be uploaded to the Lego website to share with other people. Best of all, you can order your creation from Lego, and they’ll ship you the parts you need and the software will generate a building guide. The possibilities for customized gifts boggle the mind!

There’s a bit of an issue with parts, though - there’s not that many of them. The total number of bricks available is 763, but this turns out to be only a tiny fragment of what’s out there. I was hoping to construct a Supervillain Hideaway on the moon, but the cratered baseboard I was hoping for wasn’t there, and the only large option was entirely green. Not terribly lunar. Technics parts are also missing, as are many other special bits. Even so, it’s worth checking out - especially because I’m betting Lego will add more parts if people are using the software!

Image is a Lego Alien by Arvo. See more lego creations at Brickshelf.

Filed under: Toys | Games — Max @ 9:13 pm