Over the years I have been on the receiving end of many toys, lots of which were construction toys - Below I have picked a few I received which I thought were more interesting than others and perhaps why.
Lego Technic
Unfortunately Lego Technic was expensive, so I didn't have much of it.
(Apart from the above digger and a few other models.)
There is probably much controversy over this statement, but I personally believe Lego Technic was far better and superior than the original Lego blocks - And not only because you could pull it apart without spending a few days getting corrective surgery of your fingers afterwards. Lego Technic was, I thought, an amazing development of original Lego; original Lego was fine of you wanted to build square-bottomed things like houses, but anything less cube-like and Lego was ready to buckle under it's own and instability and net weight. Lego Technic allowed you to build shapes in any direction without too many complications - The only problem I found was the added angles often made it very hard to join two pieces together at a point.
One of the many things I loved about Lego Technic was the introduction of pneumatic pumps and cylinders, and controls for them. Unfortunately I found that a lot of the pieces had air leaks and couldn't actually move much weight (but a couple together had enough power to snap a few other connected pieces). Lego must have noticed this and then proceeded to make "Lego Mindstorms" - Replacing pneumatics with motors and computers. It has always looked positively fabulous, but I've never actually had any.
Magnetix
Magnetix - Now, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that whoever designed this did not have any electronic equipment in their house, because I'm pretty sure this toy's magnets would wreck havoc with them if they did.
Magnetix annihilates one problem that Lego Technic had - It's almost impossible for any of the pieces not to connect due to wrong angles, it uses ball bearings - So angles don't matter. Ball bearings give the product two disadvantages - Weight and Cost - Metal is heavy and expensive, heavy produces stability issues again. However, metal is also magnetic, so it would be a useless toy without it. (although I found they created a magnetic plastic which they could use - MY IDEA)
Here are some other modular, construction, toy, thing-a-me-jigs I found up.
Q-BA-Maze
There are two things that are great about this - It's simple (It has three different pieces in a variety of colours), and so it is cheap to make and easy to use. It is also very versatile and visually appealing; however abstract it may be.
Uberstix
I'm not sure what this is, or how it works, but it looks incredibly versatile!
Coasterdynamix
I'm not 100% sure this is in the "toy" section, but it is modular and it's construction... and I like it.
I don't know too much about this; I can't decide if it is a one-time build, or whether you can re-design it and whatever else - Either way, it is very cool and I want one.
Perhaps I should think more along the lines of games, rather than evaluating toys...
Fatal Flaw #4; Modularity. I like modular items way too much.
At what point does a toy become a game ... ?
ReplyDeleteWas that a rhetorical question? xD
ReplyDeleteNot necessarily. Caillois's "paidea" and "ludus" are points on a continuum ... (See Caillois, _Man, Play and Games_)
ReplyDeleteBTW, don't let your blogging slip ... there doesn't seem to be a post on defining video games (from 7th October)
ReplyDelete