Last summer, my wife and I had our living room window replaced. As part of the process, we had to remove a chunk of the wall as well which allowed us to redesign that space a bit. In the end, we decided on some storage bins with seating on top - but that seating quickly became home to our LEGO Winter Village over the holiday season!
Unfortunately, I didn't think to take any proper photos of the Winter Village and now the village has been put away until next Christmas. In its place, however, my son wanted a LEGO Mario course and that's what I did yesterday on my day off!
The course runs the entire length of our front window. The one I built for him features Yoshi's house, a water area, a Donkey Kong mine cart track (my son's Christmas present which he built over the past few days), a sand area, a mid-level fortress, a lava area, a poison swamp area, a cloud area, and finally, Bowser's Castle.
The mine cart set gives me instant flashbacks to DK Country on the SNES! |
It was difficult for me to get a photograph of the entire course but hopefully, you can get a sense of the grand scale of it in the photograph above.
You begin in the green pipe which starts the timer! |
The LEGO Mario sets are pretty fun sets, especially for kids. Almost every set has moving bits and all of the Mario sets have at least one bar code that the Mario (or Peach or Luigi) electronic figure can interact with. For me, I enjoy the finer details of the Mario sets including the pixel-perfect tree builds!
The halfway point fortress! |
Another nice thing about the LEGO Mario sets is that they use fairly standard colors to indicate the region that they belong in (yellow = sand, blue = water, etc.). Thus, it's simple to add more length to the course using the appropriate colored plates that you already own in your collection.
The final test for Mario: King Koopa himself |
The worst part of the LEGO Mario sets is that they are super weak builds to try and transport and/or store. I had to do a lot of rebuilding while putting together the course! I'd also say that the sets take up a ton of real estate...I couldn't even fit in all of our Mario sets in this layout (though I could have made things much more jam-packed but then my son wouldn't have been able to properly play which would ruin the entire point of this exercise)!
Overall, I enjoy most of the Mario sets and I've actually reviewed several sets previously on the blog. I don't know how long Mario and company will stick around as our window display but for now, it's all Mario, all the time!
This course is huge! Had no idea Lego released this many Mario sets. I'm sure this keeps your son entertained for hours.
ReplyDelete