Legos are pretty awesome. I think we can all agree on that. “Star Wars,” now, not so much. I mean those old movies (finally out unharmed on DVD) are pretty awesome, but the new movies offer a VAST amount of late-night amusement by making fun of their dialogue and acting. They are bad movies, and if you’ve only seen them once and claim otherwise, watch them again and note how the presence of an awesome thing like lightsabers can cloud your judgment. I should probably mention the name of the game in this first paragraph. “Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy.”

The main reason I never played the original “Lego Star Wars” was the prequel setting. It was amusing when I played the demo of the first level as Lego Obi-Wan and got to build Legos with my force powers and slice up Lego droids with my Lego lightsaber, but then Lego Jar Jar showed up, and shortly after the demo crashed and I didn’t care to reload it.

Fortunately, “Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy” focuses, oddly enough, on the original Star Wars trilogy. You know, Han Solo was there and awesome, Yoda was a puppet and not a silly animation, and only 35% of the movie was special effects.

The game itself is an action title reminiscent of the old arcade beat-‘em-ups of yesteryear. Run through a level, beat up a bunch of bad guys, you know the drill. Those games are great fun in cooperative mode, which “Lego Star Wars” excels at. A second player can jump in at any time by pressing start. If only “Halo” worked like that.

Another reason “Lego Star Wars” is such a blast to play is that it takes a cue from MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator): there is very little penalty of death. When emulating classic arcade beat-‘em-ups like “The Simpsons” and “X-Men,” you just press a button to insert a new virtual quarter. You have unlimited lives, and the game remains fun for the time it takes you to play through it.

Traveller’s Tales, the developer of “Lego Star Wars,” reasoned that since it is not an arcade title, and they don’t need to make money by making the game an insanely difficult quarter-muncher, they can make it nice and easy. It’s great to just chill out and play while having idle conversation and berating your partner for shooting you and making Legos fly all over the place. It is also, thankfully, far longer than the average early 1990s arcade beat-‘em-up.

Refreshingly, “Lego Star Wars” also throws in some light puzzle solving, usually involving building things out of Lego blocks and/or switching between your characters to use one of their strengths. Only droids can use certain switches. Jedi have to be used to rearrange complex Lego structures — stuff like that.

The game also features flight levels, where you control an X-Wing or Snowspeeder or various other famous “Star Wars” vehicles in a simplified flight interface. You feel wonderfully out of control as you dart across the landscape, your ship automatically dodging and banking to avoid hitting walls or rocks or other ships.

One of the endearing qualities of “Lego Star Wars” is the tongue-in-cheek fashion with which the game takes on the classic story that we are all overly familiar with. It’s like a cartoon parody of the original trilogy. There is no dialogue; all drama is handled with silly pantomiming and “Sims”-style gibberish.

I do have a few issues with the game, but they are minor. The first is that lightsabers are not as powerful as they should be; generally, blaster-wielding characters can kick more ass based solely on range. The Force is similar; usually I can’t use it on enemies. It’d be great to have the ability to push them with the Force and have them fly off in various Lego bits.

The camera is also an issue. It has a hard time, at least in multiplayer, keeping both players on the screen, and occasionally it will choose to follow one player and force the other into an abyss. This generally results in much name-calling another playful banter; the lack of a major penalty for death keeps this from being a major issue.

I guess I should make a note: I played this exclusively in cooperative mode. It may suck with only one player, or at the very least be slightly boring. It’s a fantastic cooperative experience, though, and one I would recommend highly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 9:45 am and is filed under games, reviews.