Lego has always been expensive (adjust the prices you remember for inflation and you might see they haven't really changed), but they are worth it. Like Siannah said, they last forever. I have 20+ year old Lego kits, with the instruction books, that I have now handed down to my son. All the pieces still connect with the pieces from brand new sets and for the most part, still look OK (except for the ones I painted... long story). That was the old little one. The new one is huge, has a fully rotating cockpit and a lot more extras.

Just checked it out. Pretty awesome actually.

Yeah but doesn't it have something like 40,000 pieces?

If you're into legos I'd recommend the brick stuff, build and program your own robot!

Mindstorms NXT? Man, if I could afford it, I'd have a bunch of those suckers doing my evil geeky bidding :-D And let me tell you one thing, my kid wouldn't be allowed anywhere near it. If he loses one of his LEGO men, I'm out a couple of bucks. If he loses any part of the NXT kit, it's probably a $50 servo motor or something. So hands off! These are Daddy's toys! ;-)

If only I could afford the damned thing...

My 8yr old loves lego and they are the only thing he asks for for any gift occasion or his allowance. So he has more lego than any kid I have ever seen but the joke is on him because of lego he wont be going to college.

I know college costs have risen out of proportion to income like crazy, but when did it go out of vogue to pay your own way? I did.

I have to say I always loved LEGO. As a kid I had only small house and some station becasue it was too expensive but I always read through LEGO catalogues, longed for it and imagined all the things I could do with those marvelous castles and other stuff.
Now it's still too expensive but I am going to buy some soon anyway. And it's probably going to be something from Star Wars.

According to their pages ISD's got only 423 pieces and costs around 68 dollars here. Biggest one set they have is Milenium Falcon with over 5000 pieces but its price can't be checked. It seem it's not available anymore. Second largest I've found is Death Star with 3800 pieces prized ca. 670 dollars here in the Czech Republic.

My brother was a Lego maniac and I was addicted to Playmobil. We had lots of battles Lego vs. Playmobil. Playmobil always won. :P

I suffer from a bad case of Lego Mania.

I gave mine away at about age sixteen, I believe. I had an entire drum full of blocks and pieces, as well as an entire bucket full of people of all sets from medievel, pirates, space and even the short ninja run they did, along with the weapons, armor, shields, horses, etc.

Hell, I even used to custom make little katana out of the pirate sabers.

Lego is great. I still have all bricks I got in my childhood and will give them away to my children soon. Even today I like to build Lego Technic models :)

Hell, you can custom create your own structures and get specialized brick packs made and shipped to you to build that structure.

I really wish I still had my lego, that way I could plan maps out in a more interesting way.

That's why you (or at least I) rarely got any of the kits as a kid, mostly the pieces to build your own stuff with, and occasionally some of those booklets with a bunch of plans on how to make some models (like cars that the LEGO characters couldn't actually fit in, and such).
I often bought multiple copies of the cheapest kits just to get parts to build something bigger with (like a ridiculously small $2 kit where you got a ghost, a knight and 4 castle wall pieces, some arc stuff and a door - with enough of these you could build a small fortress).
I think the most expensive kits I got when I was a kid was a $20 submarine, a rather big space robot and a pirate treasure island. My older brother had some ridiculously huge sci-fi sets he got when he was a kid in the early 80's though. A monorail thing taking up two 5x5dm base platforms, and a huge space ship.