Lego my Lego Eggo
As a child, I loved me some Lego. I played with those things all the damned time. With a huge container full of miscellaneous parts you could build anything you wanted. The only limit was your imagination, how many pieces you had, and if you happened to have a crowbar and blow torch to separate those flat pieces that would seem to bond on a molecular level if you ever stuck two of them together.
As time went by the Lego folks started cheating. They started making sets with pre-fab pieces. Entire castle walls already assembled. All you had to do was place them in the correct location to build your castle, but make no mistake, that’s all you could do with em, because who would want to build a spaceship with stone wall looking pieces. Now, if you wanted to build a spaceship or car or house, you had to convince your parents to buy you the sets with those pre-fab pieces. The Lego world I had grown up with had died. I imagine you will eventually have completely built objects that just have the Lego name and Lego bumps on them. No assembly required.
Skip ahead a few years. I can’t tell you why someone thought Lego + Star Wars made sense, but if I could meet George Lucas I would punch him in the face. As it has since spawned fake-Lego Spiderman, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, and countless other Lego bastardizations. To make it worse, these wouldn’t just be Lego toys, there would be video games. When I was younger I would have just built Lego crap for my action figures to play in, but that required imagination and the kids of today aren’t allowed to have that anymore, the fun has to be given to them in a way that keeps them from fucking it all up.
With all that out of the way, we can come to the world of today.
I have just received the Lego Indiana Jones game in the mail. I got the game for my kids because they have become huge Indy fans thanks to all the recent showings of the original, aka good, movies in preparation for George Lucas destroying yet another piece of my childhood. Anyway. The game is utter crap and reminded me exactly why I hated the Lego Star Wars demo I had tried out. Hunting around a world for hidden pieces of Lego bits so you can build Lego junk to get your Lego incarnations of movie characters through the Lego version of the movie it’s based on. You know how the story is going to progress because you’ve already seen the movies. There is no dialogue, just cutesy Lego animations. There are endless villains that attack you while you are trying to figure out the puzzles for no other reason than to annoy the piss out of you because for all the damage they are doing to your character, he will just immediate respawn right where he fell. Oh yeah, there is no fun.
My kids, they love it. Just like they loved Indy 4 and think Jar Jar is funny.