Lego Star Wars, nothing but...Lego Staaaar Wars;
if they should...bar wars, let this one stay
By which I mean Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy.
Why they even bothered with the prequels is beyond me. When
I first came across the first one at Gamestop, you could have
knocked me over with a feather. Lego Star Wars is so exactly
what I was going for in my head when I was a kid. It's the
same way I felt during the opening sequences of Toy Story
and Finding Nemo - how on earth did they know what it looked
like inside my imagination when I was seven? What else do
they know about me at LucasArts and Pixar? I don't like being
so easily manipulable emotionally, but, well, here we are,
might as well enjoy ourselves.
Star Wars has always worked a lot better as a video game
universe than a cinematic one - in retrospect, the movies
are like watching George Lucas play the most amazing video
game of all time. My favorite "serious" Star Wars
game is Rogue
Squadron II, which basically consists of the big space
battles from the original trilogy, with all the graphical
bells and whistles. But so as much fun as it is to play through
the Battle of Hoth in a realistic-looking setting, it's way
more fun to play it in Legoland.
Lego Star Wars looks great onscreen for the same reason Katamari
Damachy does: the graphics are simple geometric abstractions
that suit the computer medium better than realism does. Fewer
polygons and complex textures on the screen means more computer
horsepower to do nice smooth rendering of lots of different
objects in motion. And while the graphics in Rogue Squadron
II are cool now, in three years they'll be laughable. Meanwhile,
the graphics in Lego Star Wars will still look fresh forever,
the way the graphics of Pac-Man and Super
Mario Brothers and Starflight
will. Good design never goes out of style. Dig some screenshots:
