Last night, Diana and I both finished out everything there is to do in Lego Pirates of the Caribbean on the Xbox. We hit 100% and did all of the achievements, for 1,000 gamer points. This is only the second game I've done that on, the first being Lego Harry Potter.
What can I say, I'm an achievement whore. We have all of the Lego video games now. They appeal to me because they have a ton of replay value, and they're generally fairly easy to make forward progress on. Even though I've owned most of the video game consoles made in the last 15 years or so (except the PS3), I can't say that I'm a hardcore gamer. Video games are a fun distraction that I engage in short spurts. Other notable titles in the last year are Halo Reach and Portal 2. I've got a few games that I either haven't finished or haven't even booted up (Alan Wake, Fallout 3, Forza, Dance Central).
But anyway, Pirates was one of the most solid games in the series. It was certainly one of the most beautiful that Travelers Tales (the dev shop) has put out. The game covers all four movies, which didn't matter all that much since I couldn't get through the third, and have little desire to see the newest one. It's still funny how they modeled the Jack characters after Johnny Depp's drunken pirate thing. It was one of the cleaner, well tested games, too, though we did encounter one or two instances where a character got stuck, requiring a level restart.
As I mentioned, I did everything on Lego Harry Potter as well, and I think that really is the crown jewel of the series. Its overall art direction matches Pirates, and there's just so much to do. That it works well with the stories we know is also a plus. We did need to look up a few things, but there are a lot of levels, some of them huge, and we really enjoyed ourselves.
The original Lego Indiana Jones was also very solid. I'd say that Pirates ties it for second place. Lego Batman was pretty good in terms of game play, though the levels were kind of short, and honestly there is no familiar story to speak of.
And that takes us to Star Wars. The Complete Saga, originally distributed as "I" and "II," covers all six movies. As the first Lego games, some of the levels are a little rough around the edges, with some less than intuitive level designs here and there. They're not crappy, but some lack the conventions that worked well in the subsequent Lego games. These game conventions are what make the games accessible for relative non-gamers like Diana, in that they establish familiar patterns, and if something doesn't fit that pattern, you don't waste time trying to do it. For example, if you can jump to a place, using a female character (they jump higher), you expect a flower symbol indicating that, otherwise you're wasting time trying to jump to it.
Lego Indiana Jones 2 was somewhat of a disaster. The problem is that it had these giant hub levels, which had all kinds of stuff to do, while the individual levels for each movie (including the fourth one) were relatively short. We just didn't enjoy that one as much. It was frustrating because it wasn't even obvious where you would find the levels. We played through it, but it was not ideal.
Lego Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the one I got just before Pirates, had promise, but they deviated too far from the original formula. Its overall art direction and design was completely brilliant. The standard platform levels are beautiful, and jumping around as Yoda is good fun. However, they didn't make many of those levels, opting instead to create a real-time strategy template that was used for countless levels. The controls for it suck, and some of them are too hard. I kind of let go and figured that 100% just wasn't going to happen. I was really disappointed.
The next Lego game that I'm aware of will be the rest of the Harry Potter series, in November (the first game was the first four years). Beyond that, I'm not sure what they've got planned. They've gotta be a license to print money, because the appeal seems fairly broad.
Good times. These games combine what I liked about early platform games with the adventure style of the old Sierra Online titles from the 80's.
No comments yet.