LEGO Star Wars - the Complete Saga - video game review:

[Deja Q]

Right. Having read all the reviews and then deciding to plonk big big money down on this game, I felt I had to compile a small small review. So here it is:

Putting a Star Wars game into the market is always risky, because most of them seem to be bland and one-dimensional. Not since the 1980 vector-based arcade came has there been a Star Wars game WORTH playing.

And why is it worth playing? Because it takes key sequences from the movies, adds some goals and coins and more baddies than what they could do on the big screen in 1980 (but without going so garishly overboard in 1999) and allows YOU to play them.

It gets better; whether it's easier for the console to draw series of blocks, Lego wanting more licensing royalties, or if somebody decided that mixing a legendary genre with a legendary building block set might actually be a work of genius, we do not know. Regardless, it's a brilliant idea.

Best of all, this isn't the usual "3 lives and you're done" -- you can keep getting killed and you'll magically reappear. Remember this because I'm going to refer to it later on...

I could froth on and on about how this game is so great, when everyone else has said why. So, why do I knock off a star?

Simple: In order to play ANY of the movies' sequences, you first have to drink 126 cups of coffee and meander through some of the dreary "Phantom Menace" games. If you're the type of person, like me, who'd rather endure the bubonic plague and a running cold water in tooth cavity while watching paint dry instead of watching movie prequels 1-3, you're not going to want to really care because you want to get at the actually good stuff (episodes 4-6).

Which is why being able to die constantly is so terrific! If there's a scene you really want to get over with, but know you have to finish it before you can get onto something fun, just whiz through it and not worry about a thing. If you had 3 lives, snuffed it, and hard to start over from the beginning, at some point every person reviewing here would rate the game a big fat 1 star, and that'd still be generous.

For that ability alone, to die over and over and it having no effect on actual game play, I really shouldn't have withdrawn a star... but the first three prequels barely qualify as part of the saga IMHO and the repetitiveness really got on my nerves... I will say this: The pod racing game was rather enjoyable. I just didn't like feeling I'm playing the brat who ends up the most vile person in the universe, but nothing's perfect - it's about the game, not the people who scribbled up the movie with crayons in the first place.

Incidentally, I wasn't entirely annoyed at meandering through "Phantom Menace". For a while, it was great fun slicing Jar Jar Stinx over and over again with my light saber. Maybe I'll do that some more later on today... :)

But add my voice to the choir - reliving these movies by BEING the action is a stroke of genius, and taking the best films from Hollywood's golden age helps too.

Hmmm. One other thing -- after enduring scene after scene of boring slicing and dicing with light sabers in ep 1, it was rather nice getting to the wider array of sequences in the other movies. Especially "Empire Strikes Back", for all the obvious reasons. :)

[DarkTirade]

1. I got Lego Star Wars II, the one that just has the original trilogy.

My first big complaint: They fucked up the port to the PC pretty badly. I got Lego Indiana Jones before that, and it was fine. An occasional glitch here and there, but nothing that made the game completely unplayable. And when I updated to the newest video drivers, that did away with 90% of the glitches anyway.

But the PC version of Lego Star Wars II... phew. First off, it won't even INSTALL on some systems. Including mine apparently. I had to download a 15 meg patch just to get it to install. And there was no way to find this out without going online and searching around to see if anyone else had the problem. You'd think for a game that's been out as long as this one has, they would have put an updated version on the CD or at least left a little note in the booklet or something. But no. They didn't.

Second of all... they also had a problem where it wouldn't let you program in your own buttons on the gamepad/joystick. Supposedly this 15 meg patch fixed that.

It didn't.

And for some reason all the buttons are off by 1. So after getting used to the controller scheme in Lego Indiana Jones, suddenly I have to learn a whole new one... and I can't just change it to fit what I'm used to. Which is a pain in the ass. If it didn't have the unlimited lives I would have probably given up in frustration within 10 minutes. I lost a shitload of gold because I kept jumping instead of shooting and getting shot in the face. But I still managed to finish that first level on the Corellian Cruiser.

My other complaint, one that's shared between this one and Lego Indiana Jones... no save points. The only way to save your progress is to finish the entire section of the game. Which is a problem A) If you were getting game-closing glitches like I did in Lego Indiana Jones. I went through the first level in Raiders four times because it kept glitching up. And the second level... I worked my ass off to finally beat it, and as I walked through the LAST GATE to get to the exiting cutscene... it froze up. :banghead: And B) these games are of the 'cute little fun' variety. Which means that it's the sort of game you'd let your kids play, or boot up to spend a few minutes having fun before you have to run off and do grown-up stuff. Unfortunately, since there are no save points, that means if the kids or you have a time limit as to how long you can play, you could be shit outta luck that way too.

All in all, Lego Indiana Jones was fun. And if I can stop being frustrated with the bad port of Lego Star Wars it looks to be fun too. But I can't give 'em a perfect score either. One of the few games one could actually enjoy playing with their kids though, for those of you with kids I highly recommend it.

Oh, and the AI is abysmally stupid. That's my last complaint now. :P

[Deja Q]

2. Yeah, one can only save AFTER the level ends...

Oh, I dig both games, but some thought was missing... especially with the Wii remotes; light saber fighting isn't quite what I had expected. (Not bad, but not quite as fluid...)

Mind you, Mario Galaxy is the same way re: saving...

[DarkTirade]

3. Well, in a lego game I wouldn't expect fantastic lightsaber fights. :P

Like I said, cute little fun game. I like cute little fun games. These ones just had a problem with the 'little' part from time to time.

I do think that this format is a great way to do the movies because a normal straight-up transition from one medium to another rarely works well. But in this format they can change things to make it work as a game rather than a movie, and that isn't a problem because the formula is slightly different anyway.

After it stopped glitching up, I really enjoyed Lego Indiana Jones. My one last complaint (err... after my previous last complaint) is that A) you can't drop weapons and objects without pickup up another one. So if you picked one up, you're stuck with it. and B) when you're doing single player, they make it so that the AI controlled characters can't actually kill anyone. Just stun them. But they can still run out of ammo with whatever weapon they've picked up. So you might have just picked up a (*&%ing rocket launcher... but if a single enemy shows up on screen when you're trying to do something with the other character, the AI will use up the rocket launcher trying to kill the bad guy... that they can't kill. D'oh.

Still, overall it's cute and fun. As Lego Star Wars looks to be.