Left 4 Dead DLC, Battlefield 1943 Live, Lego Battles

Tidbits for those of you who don't obsessively trawl the gaming news:

- Left 4 Dead downloadable content on its way in the form of a "Survival" pack, featuring one new game mode (Survival) and two new Versus campaigns. I assume these are less "new" campaigns than they are adaptations of Blood Harvest Death Toll and Dead Air, the two single player campaigns that didn't make the jump to Versus first time around. (link)

- Battlefield 1943 (a sequel to Battlfield 1942, which I like to refer to as "the one that didn't suck" - take that, internet!) is getting a release on XBox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, which makes me all happy inside. (link)

- The next Traveler's Tales Lego game will not, apparently, be the rumoured Lego Harry Potter or Lego Lord of the Rings but instead the much less exciting Lego Battles, which features no licensed properties but does have plenty of action from classic Lego lines such as "Castles" and "Pirates". Yay? (link)

Lego Batman

Regular readers of The Dust Forms Words know that I've had a tumultuous relationship with the Lego games. The original Lego Star Wars was an upstanding gentleman of a game, but the sequels have done little more than steal beer from my fridge and pass out on my sofa. Lego Batman is the best and least stinky of those surly hoboes but it's still not the champion whom once I lionised.

The principle of the Lego videogame is simple; you walk into a world constructed of flimsy, breakable lego, and you start punching until your fists go numb. Repeat 30 times to complete the story mode, repeat 30 times more to finish the sidequests. It's a solid premise - who doesn't like punching stuff?

All these fisticuffs are, of course, dressed in the livery of a well-known franchise, and this time around it's Batman. This isn't the Batman of the recent movies, or even of the comics. It's instead a mash-up of the Tim Burton films and the animated series. It's a shallow exploration of the brand, and Batman devotees will be disappointed that the amount of fan-service on offer is approximately zero.

The place where Lego games go wrong is that the developers invariably feel that punching is somehow not enough, and throw some jumping into the mix. The jumping is the closest you will come in this life to feeling the tangible presence of Satan intruding into our mortal world. Apparently when a Lego minifig jumps it enters a kind of floaty demiplane where the rules of gravity warp and twist. Distance has no meaning and whether or not you land at your destination is dictated by variables understood only by MC Escher.

What's worse, platforms are possessed of a kind of malignant sentience and scorn the tread of your little Lego feet. Frequently you'll land squarely on a ledge only to watch your avatar drift inexplicably sideways as if compelled by magnets, before plummeting over the edge to its doom. For bonus laughs, occasionally you'll respawn only to immediately be victimised by the same deadly drift again.

The Lego games are built around the idea of co-operative play. At all times you have not one but two heroes on screen, and a friend with a second controller can drop in and out of the festivities at their whim. This worked well in the original Lego Star Wars but has been a cause of histrionics and grief ever since. Both players are bound to a single screen, despite some puzzles which really need you to split up. Attempting to move more than a screen away from your partner will drag them along behind you, usually to their death, or cause them to pop out of existence and respawn closer to you, sometimes in a location which is either fatal or inescapable.

There's no option to play two-player over XBox Live or the PlayStation Network, but that's okay because the co-op here is a friend-losing proposition anyway. Sadly, letting the computer control your buddy isn't much better, as the AI takes a cheerful pleasure in getting in your way, pushing you to your death, and refusing to help you with the co-operative puzzles.

The buggy AI may serve to distract you from the rest of the game, which is also riddled with glitches. Respawns occur in broken positions, secret canisters refuse to appear, characters get stuck in inappropriate animations, and Achievements inexplicably don't unlock. There's only so many times that you can write the woeful playtesting off as all part of the childlike joy of Lego before it becomes time to bring out the murderin' axe.

Just to round it all out, Lego Batman features some of the worst level design to every appear in a videogame. Distances can't be judged, threats can't be evaluated, and goals are seldom if ever clear. You can rarely tell what can be smashed up and what can't, and occasionally there are wierd hierachies at work (you can't destroy a street light until you first blow up its light bulb). Boss fights range from the repetitive to the obtuse, and key locations are obscured by horrible camera angles and unbreakable scenery.

That's the bad. There's some good, but none of it in any way compensates for the bad. I mention the good only to explain why Lego Batman is, while objectively awful, still a better game than Lego Indiana Jones.

First up, Batman is awesome. This has been proven by science. If you built a scale replica statue of Batman out of human crap, it would still be pretty awesome simply because it was Batman.

Secondly, there's a good roster of characters, and they're actually fun to use. You're shortchanged on the hero side, as you only get Batman, Robin, Nightwing and the Barbara Gordon Batgirl (and Nightwing looks like he fell into the mutant-vat). But for the villains you get no less than two costumes for the Joker, along with Poison Ivy, Bane, Mr Freeze, the Mad Hatter, Man-Bat, the Riddler, Catwoman, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, Hush, Ra's al-Ghul, Two-Face, Killer Croc, Clayface, Harley Quinn and, for some reason, Killer Moth. It would have been nice to see even more familiar faces such as Zsasz, Black Mask, Talia, Oracle, Azrael, Huntress, Spoiler, and the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, but it's nevertheless a solid list.

The music uses the Danny Elfman theme from the first Tim Burton Batman movie, which is a fine piece of music. Unfortunately, it uses it exclusively, again and again, until your ears are bleeding and you're begging for it to stop. Some variety might have been nice.

Combat has been tightened up from the previous games. The hard-to-target whip from Lego Indy is gone and some very satisfying fists and guns have replaced it. Getting into battle is no longer a chore. You might even enjoy it. Also, while there are still waves of endlessly-respawning enemies, there's notably less than in the last two Lego games, and they're less inclined to turn up while you're trying to do something fiddly.

That's pretty much all the good points. If you've enjoyed the prior Lego games you're in for a treat, because Lego Batman is very definitely an improvement, but if they frustrated you to tears then you'll find all the same mistakes on display in Lego Batman.

Some Of The Finer Points Of Lego Batman

There will be a full review of Lego Batman in time; the short version will be that it's better than Lego Indy without being actually good. Some of its high points:

* You can play as the Joker, you can get his costume from the cover of The Killing Joke, and you can shoot Barbara Gordon in the spine.

* You can play as Bane and break Batman's back across your knee. (There is an Achievement for this.)

* You can punch Dick Grayson in the face until his head falls off.

That's a good start, but I was disappointed to find that Jason Todd is not present to recreate his fateful encounter with the Joker, and neither Black Mask nor Spoiler are available to continue the theme. I would also have liked, for comic effect, Thomas and Martha Wayne - when Martha Wayne breaks into her lego pieces she should spill little pearl-coloured studs.

I guess some dreams are not meant to be.

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

It's rage-inducingly frustrating, its comedy is hit-and-miss, and it's packed with gameplay and interface problems that could probably have been fixed by a team of reasonably talented monkeys, but the XBox 360 version of Lego Indiana Jones still manages to be a pretty fun game.

This is the third attempt by developer Traveler's Tales to mix the superficially disparate fields of "Lego" and "Harrison Ford", the first two being Lego Star Wars and its sequel. Lego Star Wars was a heap of fun, largely because it saw "difficulty" and "challenge" as outdated concepts that got in the way of busting up Lego with lightsabers. The second Lego Star Wars was not quite as unexpectedly good, thanks to levels that I'd like to call "bafflingly misguided" but which a layman might describe as "cheap".

Lego Harrison Ford 3 takes everything that was a bad idea from the last game and does more of it. If you're the sort of player that likes unhelpful camera angles, single-hit kills, unintuitive controls, poor targeting, and frustrating jumping sections, then buying this game is going to make you feel like magical pixies have invaded your house and installed platforming heaven in your media centre.

If you're the other sort of player, though, you'll probably feel a little let down. Only a little, though. Because Lego is still awesome. That's a scientifically proven fact.

For those who've never played a Lego Harrison Ford game before, here are the basics: you take control of a little Lego character (in this case Indiana Jones or one of his friends and enemies) and you run through 18 platform-centric levels based on the plot of three movies (in this case the first three Indiana Jones films). In each level the primary task is to reach the end, but along the way you'll fight angry little Lego enemies, bust up a bunch of Lego scenery, build a selection of Lego objects, and perform assorted ancillary tasks like deciphering glyphs, posing as a Nazi, or digging for buried treasure. You can die as many times as you like; the only penalty is that you lose a portion of any Lego "studs" you've collected so far on the level.

At all times you're provided with a companion. In single player games you can switch between the characters on the fly, and indeed you'll need to use both Indy and his sidekick to solve many of the puzzles in the game. Getting to try out a bunch of different characters is one of the high points of the game and it's as fun this time as it was in the Star Wars titles.

You can also play two-player co-op. Multiplayer sounds like an excellent idea in theory but in practice it's a great way to lose friends. There's no way to turn friendly fire off, so you'll regularly be accidentally killing your partner. Both players have to stay on the same screen, so most of the time either the camera will be zoomed so far out you won't be able to see what you're doing, or the camera will "drag" the slower player along behind the faster one, usually into some kind of lethal trap. Also, whereas the computer is capable of performing tricky jumps perfectly every time, with two human players each of the athletic sequences becomes twice as frustrating because a failure by either player will bollocks your attempt.

The story of the three movies is told largely by Lego cutscenes. There's no voice acting so the dialogue is done through Lego-themed mime. These interludes can be cute, but unlike the Star Wars games they're actually rubbish at telling the story. If, like me, you haven't watched Temple of Doom in a while you'll be left scratching your head as to exactly what the heck is going on. That's important, because a lot of the game's "puzzles" are actually less about deduction than they are about remembering what happened in the movie and copying it. The final puzzle of The Last Crusade, for example, is childishly simple if you've seen the movie but nigh-on unsolvable merely by reference to what's present in the level. Still, it's unlikely you'd be keen to buy an Indiana Jones game unless you had at least a passing familiarity with the movies.

While the game may be regularly frustrating, it's never actually hard, and even the most inept player won't find it difficult to reach 100% completion. There's about 12 hours of gameplay all told, which is great because it means you'll see all the content before getting to the end of your attention span.

Finally, many casual players seemed to find the second Lego Star Wars game far less annoying than I did, so it may be that if you're not a frequent gamer you won't even notice the many irritations that plague Lego Indy. If so, you're in luck, because you'll be able to enjoy the fun without wanting to beat the developers with a two-by-four.

Gripes aside, Lego Indiana Jones is a colourful, accessible and entertaining game that's suitable for all ages, and if it's not quite as good as its predecessors then that still leaves it in a better position than most of its competition. I give it a firm rating of "probably fun".

Lego Star Wars II Post-Mortem

Lego Star Wars II for the PlayStation 2 is packed with style, innovation, and great gameplay, and yet it just isn't as good a game as its predecessor.

I've actually had this one sitting next to my laptop for a while, begging me to post-mortem it so it can go back to its home on my game rack. Somehow I've just never gotten around to putting up the post - probably because I've already had the chance to vent about some of its problems.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Lego Star Wars is a fairly simple game concept - it's Star Wars, done entirely with Lego, formatted as a platforming-action videogame. The original title, which covered the plot of the three prequel movies, was an absolutely wonderful moment in gaming. It had intuitive controls, family-friendly difficulty, a great sliding scale of objectives, and more charm and humour than you could poke a lightsaber at.

If it had one problem, it was a lack of length. From one corner of the interblog to the other, players were unanimous in criticising the game for its overall shortage of content, best exemplified by the fact you could finish everything the game had to offer within a single day. Even I took a shot at the game (amidst an otherwise glowing review), although I did refrain from using the phrase "I've found longer games growing on food I left behind the couch."

When it came to creating Lego Star Wars 2, it should not be said that Traveller's Tales was deaf to criticism.

Let me say this straight up - Lego Star Wars 2 is about three times as long as the original Lego Star Wars. That's not to say it has more content. It's roughly on a par with the first game. No, it's just going to take you three times as long to get through it.

There are a lot of fine things that have succeeded by taking roughly thirty seconds of gold and stretching them out over inanely lengthy periods. The sport of cricket is one. The entire wrestling career of Triple H is another. Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is a third. Lego Star Wars 2 is sadly not one of those things.

The game proceeds largely as the first one did. Upon starting the game, you'll be plonked down in a central mission hub (in this case the Mos Eisley Cantina), and tasked to make your way through the plot of the three original Star Wars films using a variety of little Lego characters. You can do these in a fairly non-linear fashion - once you complete the first level, you can jump straight to Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi without having to complete A New Hope. Completing levels involves running, jumping and shooting your way around a variety of generic platforming levels, which are themed after particular segments of the movies.

Each level can be completed in both Story Mode and Free Play. Story Mode is a straight run through the level using the appropriate characters as assigned by the game. You'll play as (for example) Luke as he returns from the Jundland Wastes to the Lars Homestead. Generally you're followed around by an entourage of other characters, such as Obi-Wan, R2D2 or C3PO. You can change to any other character in your entourage on the fly. In addition, a second player can help you out by controlling a character.

In Free Play mode you have access to a much wider range of characters, chosen from a pool that you've unlocked. Various characters have different abilities, so you'll want a good selection of powers at your command. For instance, Obi-Wan and other Jedi can move Lego bricks through the power of the force, while R2D2 can open certain locks and hover horizontally for short distances. Many bonus sections of levels can't be reached in Story Mode, requiring you to return in Free Play with special characters to find all the secrets.

Each level has a set of 10 minikit canisters to find. Uncovering all ten (which usually requires playing in Free Mode) rewards you by putting a Star Wars-themed Lego vehicle on display at the Cantina, and by showering you with Lego studs (which are the game's currency). Each level also has a stud-collection target - finding that many Lego studs within a level rewards you with the status of "True Jedi". That's not all - there's also a red power brick on each level which unlocks a cheat or power-up for purchase at the cantina shop.

Each target you meet in the game will reward you with a Gold Lego Brick. These can be assembled back at the Cantina into a range of doorways which give access to bonus levels. None of these bonus levels are very interesting, with the exception of a short reasonably fun area themed after classic non-Star Wars Lego.

All that unlocking may sound like a blast, but it's really not. For example, you'll need to obtain the functionally identical True Jedi status on both Story and Free Play mode, which is every bit as tedious as it sounds. The canisters and power bricks are placed poorly, with the design philosophy apparently being to deceive and defeat the player, rather than reward them for creative exploration. You'll probably end up turning quickly to an FAQ to get them all, unlike in the first game where this goal was reasonably achievable without external aids. The fun in Lego Star Wars 2 lasts almost exactly the same length of time as it did on the franchise's first outing - it's just that this time when the fun's over the game is still going.

The level designs are mostly broken this time around too. Rather than promoting fast-paced see-what-happens gameplay in the tradition of the first game, there's an emphasis on solving finicky problems, backtracking, and getting killed a lot. As an example, you'll often need to disguise yourself as a stormtrooper to open certain door locks. This is accomplished by obtaining a stormtrooper helmet from a dispenser located somewhere on the level. Once you have the helmet, you have to get back to the lock while still wearing the helmet. The catch is, if you take any damage whatsoever, the helmet falls off, requiring you to walk back to the dispenser.

These sections are intensely aggravating. There's one bit like this on the Death Star which involves a lift which will have you wanting to apply fruit peelers to the faces of the game's developers. The result is uneven pacing, inordinately frustrating punishment for very small failures, and game segments which are less a challenge of your skill than they are of your patience.

What makes it all worse, of course, is the fact that many of the levels have unending waves of enemies, which just keep coming at you. Sometimes you can shut off these enemy attacks by closing doors or pulling switches, but more often you just can't. Strangely, the earlier levels are plagued by this problems more than the later levels, so if you perservere you may find your experience improving.

The game as a whole feels like something that's been created by many hands, rather than by a single guiding intellect. Certain levels are clearly designed by totally different minds than the ones that precede them. Courses of action that are encouraged in one area will be brutally punished in the next.

In all this game-bashing, I need to say that this is still a very good game. It's a top-shelf platformer that's a highly recommended buy if you're a fan of Star Wars, Lego, or just the genre as a whole. Each of the game's characters looks cute and highly true to the source material. Levels are punctuated by laugh-out-loud humorous cutscenes, with the little Lego characters engaging in a range of Jedi slapstick. The controls are reasonably tight, and there's a lot of fun to be had.

It's just that it's not as good a game as what came before it. What was cute, clever and fun the first time round is now mainstream, homogenised and mixed up with an extra-big helping of annoying. It's likely a lot of people who are choosing which of the games to buy will go with this one just because it's based on the better movies, but if you're a gamer of taste then play the original.

The Endless Legions

I hate games where enemies endlessly respawn.

Well, okay, that's a lie. In the context of an RPG it's not only acceptable, it's desirable. If the enemies don't respawn, then where will you harvest your precious, precious XP?

And in survival horror games, used intelligently and in moderation, it puts a little bite of desperation into the proceedings, and forces the player to keep moving, instead of just vegetating in their comfort zone.

But why in the holy name of Miyamoto would you include unstoppable rampaging respawning armies in what is allegedly an all-ages exploration-based platformer? And I'm talking here, of course, about Lego Star Wars II.

I've got a post mortem of this game coming. Short version: it's great, but it bollockses up everything that was clever about the first one. High on my list of criticisms will be the fact that almost every screen of the damn game, and particularly the early levels, is filled with an endless onslaught of stormtroopers. Forget exploration, puzzle solving, and free-roaming goodness - you'll be too bogged down clearing white-helmeted nazis off your back every three seconds to enjoy any of those things. It's a mark of shame that the game only really becomes fun once you've unlocked the invincibility power-up.

Can I just put a fervent plea out there, to all those game designers who might be reading? Please, please don't add unlimited supplies of enemies to your game unless you have a really, really good reason for it. There's no shame in your game being too easy. There is shame in your game being stupidly annoying.