What would you buy and 8 year old

[linzoid]

for birthday/christmas? my 8 yr old ds is very mature for his age and always has been. The last couple of years it has becoming increasingly harder to buy for him. He doesn't seem to play with much anymore and where i could go to any toy shop and buy tons for my 4 yr old i am stuck for ideas with the older ds. It doesn't help that his birthday and christmas are close together and he never follows the crowd and gets into gameboys or yugio cards and such like....help!

Is he the one eight-year-old in the Universe who doesn't like lego?

Well, hard to say without knowing what he's interested in, but my ds is the same age, and his most played with possessions during the last year are:
-Lego Studios (for making Lego films on the PC)
-Explorer Globe (electronic, games where you race against the clock or other people to identify countries, he's learnt a lot and loves it)
-microscope
-any other lego, as zebra implies!

I bought a book from the BookPeople a few weeks ago which says it's suitable for 8 years upwards. It's a dinosaur book and is a 3-D T-rex. It's brilliant (so good I bought it for DS 7 years early.....).

Basically it's an exploded model of a T-rex with different parts on every page (skeleton, blood circulation etc) and information about it. Very truth ful too (i.e. "we can only guess what this looked like and might be very different" ). I paid £6 from the bookpeople and it's not on their website so you might need to ask them.

Otherwise the Letterbox catalog has good stuff for older kids.

Not very imaginative but DVDs / CDs??
Something cool for his room like a lava lamp or something
A voucher for a day go-karting
A pet rat!
Agree with Freddiecat re letterbox