The DigestVideo

Games Of June 2012: Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes

The Lego series’ latest entry follows the “Do as we say, not as you do” school of game design.

By John Teti • July 10, 2012

In case you missed it: Yesterday’s installment of The Digest covered Lollipop Chainsaw.

Have you ever been playing solitaire, and somebody comes up behind you and says, “Put the red nine on the black ten”? That’s the type of thing that Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes does constantly. It’s far from unique among contemporary studio-system video games in this respect. And it drives me a little nuts.

Steve Heisler brings up an interesting point in this discussion: He wishes that the Lego games would feature more flexible building options—that players could have a little more leeway with how you used the bricks. I seem to recall that one or more of the games in this prolific series have tried something like this. Maybe the Harry Potter games? Neither Steve nor I have played all of them (not even close), but if you know, perhaps you can fill us in.

Sincerely yours, John Teti, stud fiend.

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  • KidvanDanzig

    These are really fun to watch while heavily sedated

  • Kilzor

    I tried to friend a stud fiend once, and, well, I learned really quickly that “fiend” is not the same as “friend.”

  • George_Liquor

    Start “seeing” voice actors.

    • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

      Interestingly, when Elfman came up, Steve didn’t mention not “seeing” soundtrack composers…

      Also, I’m with John in the (probable) minority that enjoys the Burton Batmans more than the Nolan Batmans. This is partly due to my congenital inability to take Batman seriously at all.

      • Effigy_Power

         The Nolan movies certainly were very un-cartoonish and quite a lot too heavy handed and serious.
        Still good, but yeah, the fun was out. Not that I enjoy the Burton-style fun that much, but at least there was some to be had.

      • http://www.avclub.com/users/merve,96925/ Merve

        My introduction to Batman was reruns of the Adam West TV series, so I definitely can’t take Batman seriously at all.

        • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

           The Adam West movie is probably my favorite Batman movie, too. While I think the heightened, stylized world of the animated series and Burton movies serves the concept well, too, the pure camp of the Adam West stuff best suits a premise so fundamentally ridiculous. The Nolan films are full of unintentional comedy – the Adam West-era Batman is in on the joke.

      • Baulderstone

        I’d have to say that the Burton films make better desert island movies, which was the comment made in the video. The Nolan ones are deeper, but The Dark Knight isn’t something I would want to pop in every day as video wallpaper.

        On the other hand, Batman Returns is just a lot more fun to have running in the background while I do other stuff. 

        • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

          I find most of Nolan’s films tend to create an illusion of depth through the use of a gimmick (It’s backwards! Nesting dreams!), but once you sort through that obfuscation it’s ultimately unsatisfying and occasionally a little dumb. The Batman movies give me this same feeling, too. They remind me of the Matrix movies in that respect.

        • Baulderstone

          @bakana42:disqus Yeah, I was trying not to rag on them, but I pretty much agree. They feel pretty deep the first time you watch them, but there isn’t really all the much to be gotten from watching them over and over in the way that truly deep films encourage. 

          I still like to see his films because the first watch is usually pretty good, but he is a little overrated. 

  • caspiancomic

     A game in which there is exactly one way to progress through a given area: bad. A game in which you are constantly and forcibly subjected to intelligence insulting hints: bad. But a game where both of those things are true at once? I know these things are marketed to kids, but kids are a) not dumb, and b) capable of learning.

    I also really like Steve’s idea of having the Lego contraptions being customizable to a degree, or even having an outright DIY approach to vehicle and gadget building. Maybe a system similar to the Gummi Ship builder from Kingdom Hearts? Except, you know, with a better user interface.

    (also it is like 2 am here and that crack about Lego: The Gutenberg Bible made me laugh so hard my dog woke up. Hats off, Teti.)

    • Electric Dragon

      I haven’t watched the video yet but “Lego: The Gutenberg Bible” makes me think of the brilliant Brick Testament.

    • http://www.avclub.com/users/merve,96925/ Merve

      Games just can’t seem to get hint systems right, can they? To give a couple of examples, Quantum Conundrum gives hints after failure or long periods of no progress, but failure or a lack of progress usually result from an inability to execute the correct solution, so the hints just end up seeming annoying. Tales of Monkey Island has and adjustable hints system, but the hints themselves are often misleading and direct the player to do things he or she can’t yet do.

      The only game I can think of that got it perfectly right is Stacking (which is a gem of a game that you should all play). The games gives a hint only if you ask for a hint. For each puzzle, there are three levels of hint: cryptic; straightforward; and giveaway, so the player can customize the level of assistance he or she needs. By the way, @caspiancomic:disqus, almost every puzzle in the game has multiple solutions, so it doesn’t display either of the problems you pointed out with Lego Batman 2.

      • caspiancomic

         I might have to check this Stacking out then, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it recommended. Also, in the past here we’ve discussed our favourite hint systems, and my personal favourite remains the Professor Layton Hint Coin system. It sounds like it functions similarly to Stacking, in that you can spend as many as four Hint Coins on a given puzzle, and every additional coin you spend gives you a less oblique poke in the right direction, climaxing with the final coin basically giving you the solution.

        • http://www.backloggery.com/colliewest Colliewest

          I’ve just started the first Professor Layton game. It seems you have fairly limited control over what you can do but that doesn’t bother me much because
          a) The game is so damned charming
          b) The hint system
          This combination prevents it ever feeling overbearing.

          It is requiring a bit of restraint not to just bust through to see what happens, but I suppose if we’re asking for less hand holding then that goes with the turf. I’d also ideally like less coins so it feels like you’re really spending something valuable, but that would also result in less flexibility from player to player, so I guess they’ve got it pretty spot on.

      • Effigy_Power

        I don’t know why game designers are shying away from letting the players figure out stuff by themselves.
        I mean, I do understand that you want to avoid frustrating people by making them replay the same thing over and over until it finally barely works out, but the opposite is just as bad.
        There used to be plenty of games with insanely nonsensical puzzles such as “The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble”, which was complex to a point of being somewhat of a psychedelic experience. The “Gobliiins” games fall into that same category.

        I do understand @JohnTeti:disqus’s anger about this, because it pretty much creates a game in which the player becomes the equivalent of the workers in Metropolis, moving dials to positions the machine tells them to. It becomes a dull and unengaging experience, since it allows for no creative input at all.
        Games may feature more possible endings than ever, but at the same time seem to severely limit the freedom to get there.

        PS: Haven’t played this one, so I am speaking in general.

    • The_Quirk

       Worse is that there’s STILL only one way to beat a level, WHILE PLAYING FREE PLAY.  I mean, being able to switch in Superman should theoretically make a difference, right?

    • Baulderstone

      I’d go do far as to say that kids games need less hints. When I  was a kid, I was a lot more willing to grind away at a point in a game where I was stuck. As an adult, I have a lot less patience with that kind of thing.

      The really absurd thing it that games didn’t overload on tips until we were into the internet age, when you can find a walk-through to any game you want on Youtube. If we get stuck, we can find the answer, it really isn’t a problem.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Whitehead/789605656 Dan Whitehead

    The first LEGO Harry Potter had puzzles where you could assemble bricks to form bridges and staircases etc. The lack of actual building is something that is increasingly strange, however. Something like Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts where you have specific parts that can be combined in multiple ways would be perfect.

    I don’t see the handholding as a problem though, as the skill range of the target audience is very broad. The hints will get you through the story levels once, but it’s really just teaching you how the gameworld works so you can go back and get 100% completion by yourself. The games have layers of interaction that are entirely dependent on player experience. A very young kid can smash their way to the end of a level and feel proud. That same kid a few weeks later can find every secret and unlock every character.

    I think they’re actually perfectly balanced. As adults who grew up from the 8-bit era onwards, there’s a lot we take for granted and if the LEGO games are somewhat didactic in the early going it’s only because they’re aiming at youngsters who didn’t come up with Mario, Sonic and Crash Bandicoot.

    • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

      But Mario, Sonic and Crash Bandicoot were also aimed at youngsters who didn’t come up with Mario, Sonic and Crash Bandicoot, and those games didn’t have the same degree of handholding.

      I haven’t played the game though, and it sounds like your larger point is valid. The guidance gets you through the basic experience, and you build upon it to further explore the world, which makes sense (though I wonder how much the tacit implication to follow the guide discourages kids from breaking off of the path and finding new stuff). Maybe it would be less objectionable if there were periods later in the base experience that let you use skills you had learned earlier through hand-holding, rather than saving that kind of application/discovery solely for “extra” exploratory gameplay.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Whitehead/789605656 Dan Whitehead

         What I was trying to say is that we, as older gamers, have seen gameplay ideas evolve incrementally. Mario, Sonic etc didn’t need handholding because they were literally left, right and jump. As game worlds grew more complex, so did the controls, but we absorbed it a little at a time. We have an instinctive muscle memory for a lot of control concepts – double jump, for example – that a four-year-old today will have no frame of reference for.

        That’s why I can’t criticise the LEGO games for using button prompts and the like. Every LEGO game is likely to the first game a lot of young players have ever encountered, and they’re teaching these newcomers how to play – quite brilliantly, I think.

        Don’t forget – the LEGO games cover a very wide player base, from very young pre-school age all the way up to eight or nine years old (as well as lots of adult gamers). That’s a huge spread to accomodate – the difference in logical thought, motor skills and so on between four and nine is vast. That the LEGO games are able to scale to suit both ends of that spectrum is very impressive.

        So a very young player can join their siblings game, make the LEGO man run around and smash things and that’s fun. As they get older/better, they can start playing properly, maybe finish a few story levels by themselves. At the upper end of the scale, they can try to get 100% completion, which means playing through the game with a fine-toothed comb. There’s very little handholding, if any, in Free Play. It’s up to you to find the secrets, solve the new puzzles etc.

        Finishing the story usually means completing less than a third of the game – especially in LEGO Batman 2 with its open world full of carnival games, zoo animals and other distractions – so to criticise it for offering a guide rail to get younger players started feels a little unfair.

        • http://gameological.com/author/johnteti/ John Teti

          Except, as I said above, nobody criticized the game for offering a guard rail. I criticized it for forcing a guard rail, which is quite different.

        • Effigy_Power

           Generally, if children are the targeted audience and they are meant to play the game, I find the best approach would be to let them figure it out.
          Problem-solving skills are developed through trial and error, but if the game doesn’t actually let you make errors, in order to avoid frustration, nothing can be learned.

    • http://gameological.com/author/johnteti/ John Teti

      That’s certainly a defensible take, but I’m tired of this game-design philosophy: It’s okay if the first X hours are didactic and stultifying, because later on you get to do more interesting things. I think we ought to place more value on our time like this. No other form of art or entertainment is held to this very low standard. In any other venue, there’s an implicit obligation to value the audience’s time and hold their interest from the beginning. I recognize that games have a learning curve, but that does not absolve them from this obligation. There is nothing inherent to games, including games with a broad target audience, that should require us to eat a huge, hours-long shit sandwich appetizer in order to get to the main course.

      You say that the “hints will get you through the story levels once.” Doesn’t that phrasing sound problematic to you? Why does the game feel the need to “get us through” these levels, rather than simply allowing us to play them? And if the hints are intended for the hypothetical kids who don’t understand the abilities of Batman’s power suit the first 200 times they are explained, then why not allow everyone else to disable those hints — the same way a bowling alley does not force everyone to play the first few frames of a string with bumpers over the gutters?

      Lego Batman 2, and many games like it, are built to prevent frustration at all costs. They operate in fear that someone, somewhere might get frustrated with the game and stop playing, so they sand down all the rough edges, put bumpers over the gutters, and tell us what to do at every turn.

      I was reading an article in The New Yorker asking, “Why Are American Kids So Spoiled?” and I was struck by this passage: “Druckerman talked to a lot of French mothers, all of them svelte and most apparently well rested. She learned that the French believe ignoring children is good for them. ‘French parents don’t worry that they’re going to damage their kids by frustrating them,’ she writes. ‘To the contrary, they think their kids will be damaged if they can’t cope with frustration.’” I’m with the French parents.

      I don’t think that Lego Batman 2 with a reduced set of hints would be a terribly frustrating game. But more to the point, I think it’s okay for kids to get a little frustrated. It teaches them to figure things out. Not only do I enjoy figuring things out today, I enjoyed it as a kid, too. I’m sure there are children who don’t play games for that challenge, or who are too young to grasp the puzzles, and if Lego Batman 2 wants to accommodate them, that’s fine by me. My objection is that the rest of us are forced to wait hours while a game in which you supposedly solve puzzles instead does all the puzzle-solving for you. I fail to see the logic in that.

      • RidleyFGJ

        This is a big reason why I will never hold Okami in the same regard as others; the puzzles are pointed out to you before you even get the chance to figure them out for yourself, and that defeats the whole point of even calling them puzzles in the first place.

        For all the handholding that Zelda gets accused of these days (most of it justified), it at least knows when to shut up when the puzzles show up.

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kevin-Johnson/501651 Kevin Johnson

          I’m playing Okami right now, and for about 30 hours, Issun does overdo the ‘explain shit’ idea, but they do cool it down. The frustrating part – making a brushstroke the game recognizes – is still a pain.

        • RidleyFGJ

          Kevin Johnson: It’s been a while since I’ve played it, but I seem to remember that the key to irksome objects not recognizing your strokes is that you do have limited camera control while you have the brush pulled up, which allowed you to do some fine-tuning to make them work.

      • doyourealize

        Eurogamer had an article a week or two about the loss of instruction manuals. Man, I used to read those things like literature, and now there’s almost nothing in them. All the instructions are in the games themselves, which means that not only are we incapable of figuring out puzzles, we are also incapable of putting meaning to words on a page. I think this might be the simplest solution to overlong tutorials and in game “hints”.

        Also, not to keep harping on about Demon’s / Dark Souls, but they put the instructions on the ground in game, for you read or ignore. A nice system. And after that, you figure out by exploring. There’s a couple games that actually need someone to play them.

        • BarbleBapkins

          I used to do the exact same thing with manuals. I don’t know what exactly it was about manuals for old games, but I would pour over them for hours. I think part of it was the combination of artwork that could only be hinted at in game due to technical limitations, and the way they were often written to actually feel like a part of the gameworld itself (not just a list of controls with a couple of screenshots like later manuals were). They were part of the experience of getting a new game, now you are lucky if you find a card with how the buttons are mapped.

        • http://www.avclub.com/users/merve,96925/ Merve

          I fondly remember that when I got the special edition of SimCity 2000, it came with a manual that included a section just devoted to artwork and poetry. The manual was about 100 pages thick.

          I can understand the lack of physical instruction manuals as both a cost-cutting and environmentally-friendly measure. But there’s no reason to do away with manual entirely. It shouldn’t be too hard to include a .pdf manual for the game, or even to put the manual directly in the game, as Fallout: New Vegas did.

        • Effigy_Power

           The best manual I can remember is that of the original “Syndicate”, which was made in the style of the inhumane uber-companies and had some ads inside for a designer eye-replacement that makes you see beautiful verdant fields when actually stomping through puddles of acid rain.

        • http://www.backloggery.com/colliewest Colliewest

          One of the first games I got totally into was Elite on the BBC Micro. I remember the manual addressed you as a novice space pilot starting out. It also had a sketch of the inside of your ship, with the Micro and a joystick as the controls.  
          Pretty simple but it went so far in giving that feeling of immersion.

      • hastapura

        One more thing, sir.

      • caspiancomic

        Fine points, all. And to think that all of this could have been avoided so simply and so elegantly by allowing players to turn hints off.

        But more to the point: regarding the idea that frustration is what causes players to quit. I believe it was Jenova Chen, of thatgamecompany, who came up with the “Flow” theory of game difficulty. Basically it states that for every game, and every individual task within a game, there is a difficulty “sweet spot” of sorts. If a game is too difficult for the player, they become frustrated, and are likely to give up. This is the problem being addressed by this game, and so many others, by implementing hand-holding (mandatory hand-holding!) tutorials and hint systems. But it totally ignores the other half of the theory, which is that if a game is not difficult enough, the player becomes bored, and is just as likely to stop playing. You know who gets bored easily? Kiddies.

        It’s a pretty interesting read if you’re into that sort of thing. Incidentally, this theory was the foundation of the game with the same title. The cornerstone of that game was the idea that the player can adjust the difficulty of the game mid-play to suit their needs, without having to choose between static “difficulty levels” or whatever. All interesting stuff.

        • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

          That reminds me a bit of the “scaffolding” theory of Lev Vygotsky, one of my favorite child development dudes (Hey! @Effigy_Power:disqus also brought up child psychology. I guess it’s a pretty relevant field since we’re talking about how games teach, and since these functions are often ostensibly for the benefit of younger players.)

          Essentially, each child has a (constantly moving) “proximal zone of development”, which is that “sweet spot” beyond the child’s level of mastery, into which they are able to expand (and build a new level of mastery from which to expand, etc. etc.). Essentially the teacher’s (or teaching tool’s) job is to build the “scaffolding” in the proximal zone of development to facilitate the child’s independent construction of new knowledge. You wouldn’t construct a scaffold around an already completed building, nor would you construct one in an area (or at a height) where no construction can yet take place – you construct it right in that ‘sweet spot.’

      • Effigy_Power

         Child psychologists say that children learn composition, problem solving and generally spatial logic by playing with and initially failing at simple educational toys. That is why they should receive positive reinforcement for success, but not be told what to do.
        Putting the star-shaped peg into the star-shaped hole is only an achievement if the child wasn’t told to put it there, but instead figured out that it doesn’t fit into the other holes. That aspect of learning and a sense of achievement doesn’t change throughout our adult life.

        The problem is that certain areas of society have come to fear frustration and failure as something that is to be avoided at all costs in order to stop people from giving up. That has lead to teachers not allowed to fail students for bad grades or missed tests anymore, for example. People who grow up with everything designed to be easily achievable will never know the pride and feeling of self-worth that comes from succeeding against the odds, which is not only harmful but also sad.

        My oldest niece is 12 and she played Assassin’s Creed for a good 2 hours
        (we didn’t let her murder anyone by telling her she had to run away
        from guards) and became so fluent in the certainly complex controls after falling off roofs for a while that she actually beat some of my times at roof-races. Every time she fell off a roof, she was convinced that she now knew what was wrong and tried again. After a fairly short time she executed complex skips from walls and was proud of herself for figuring it out. I think the greatest aspect for her was that the way she was playing had stopped the conversation in the room and more or less enthralled 5 grown-ups enough to just stare at the screen and watch her play, encouraging her with the odd command. I would argue that this did wonders for her self-esteem and her beaming smile every time she got a bit of positive feedback after an especially complex sequence is something that made her parents quite happy. No game holding your hand would garner the same response, because a 12-year old pressing a button when told to isn’t a budding creative, but a potential sweatshop-worker.

        Games may have become more complex and therefore sometimes require a quick hint on how to do something. But maybe having a fictional character pointing at things and saying “Do that” isn’t really teaching at all. Trial and error is still the main process our brain uses, especially at an early age, to solve problems. Without trial, there are no errors and no learning. The game basically teaches you how to follow commands, not how to think creatively. “Asteroids” may be a vastly simpler game, but I would argue that its utterly unassisted gameplay teaches you a lot more about spatial awareness than a complex modern game does.

        One could also argue that any game developer who thinks you need to constantly be reminded of how to play the game isn’t terribly convinced that their game is all that well designed. Any game that has its shit together, so to speak, will become fluent very quickly.

  • Staggering Stew Bum

    The important issue which I think you guys missed discussing in your video is this… Does this game objectify Lego Batman as a hypersexualised plaything OR is it really a study* of lego superhero empowerment? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

    *pun only sort of intended

    • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

       I’m more concerned with the increasingly sexualized portrayal of John Teti: Stud Fiend.

      • HobbesMkii

         Right? No jacket. We’re slowly seeing more of him. How long can it be before the Digest is done in nothing but Speedos?

        • X_the_Anonymous_Man_or_Woman

           Entirely too long.

        • Effigy_Power

           I would argue that this is what the internet was ultimately created for and at the same time thank my stars that the thin line holding my heterosexuality in reach snapped many years ago.

        • HobbesMkii

          For some reason, it occurs to me that even if it gets to this point, @JohnTeti:disqus will still wear a tie.

        • http://www.backloggery.com/colliewest Colliewest

          That would be because he is The World’s Most Tie-Wearing Games Writer.  
          http://johnteti.com/

  • Raging Bear

    I did the quick-turnaround-maximum-resale-value trade-in on Lego Batman 2 already, mainly because going for all the unlocks was a pain in the ass without being able to switch among the suits in free play. It’s deeply annoying to have to backtrack over the entire area because the combined talents of Superman, Green Lantern, Cyborg, Clayface, et al. are still not equal to the task of using an electrical device or a ball switch (as if Clayface can’t turn into a ball. Get with the program, people).

    Tiny & Big is the first thing I’ve ever put on my Steam wishlist.

  • HobbesMkii

    I don’t mean to get all “Games Historian” on you here, John, but I’m pretty sure the first LEGO videogame was 1997′s LEGO Island, and not LEGO Star Wars. Island featured a free-roaming environment that also included a plot wherein you, as a pizza delivery boy, “accidentally” free the antagonist “The Brickster” from jail, using a pizza.

    • Mookalakai

       I hated that part so much. I thought the world was over when I let him out of jail, so I just hit the power switch on my dad’s computer so it wouldn’t save. I was probably 7 when that happened.

    • Mooy

      Ahh Lego Island – you’re getting my nostalgia all worked up. And for those who wish they had a more customizable building experience, Lego Creator came out not long after island IIRC. It had a pretty godawful UI even to my childhood self, but it gives you full access to unlimited pieces (and dynamite to blow up your buildings with!)

    • hastapura

      True – but I believe Teti meant the first Lego: Franchise game.

      • HobbesMkii

        Oh, you mean, LEGO: We Don’t Have Original Ideas Anymore.

        • http://www.avclub.com/users/merve,96925/ Merve

          But when they have the potential to make sets as cute and awesome as this one, I couldn’t care less how unoriginal their ideas are.

        • HobbesMkii

           @Merve2:disqus Well, call me crazy, but I miss the old sets. Pirates, Western, Arctic, Aquazone, Castles, Time Cruisers, Egyptian, U.F.O., those were my friends.

        • http://www.avclub.com/users/merve,96925/ Merve

          That’s fair. I don’t have much Lego nostalgia, since most of the “Lego” I owned was part of a generic Mega Bloks set.

    • Effigy_Power

       I could have sworn it was Lego Racer, but Lego Island may be older, you are right.

  • Brainstrain91

    Irrelevant: I feel like you should spell your last name Taeti. Because the way you pronounce it kind of deserve an equally awesome spelling.

  • doyourealize

    Heisler mentions that the key to video game voice acting is knowing when to shut up, which fits nicely with Wolpaw’s discussion about how most of GLaDOS’s final speech was cut to be much shorter than the original script. Maybe if the writers knew when to have Alfred shut up…

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kevin-Johnson/501651 Kevin Johnson

      Another thing is tied to the complains of Lara’s grunts and groans in her new game. Tara Strong (AMAZING VO) once tweeted how you have to be careful while doing “efforts” (basically, the SFX of heavy breathing, hitting, being hit, jumping, running, etc.) and how it can indeed sound sexual. So Lara’s noises are really just a product of an inexperienced voice artist, voice director, and sound editor.

      • RidleyFGJ

        I think that we’re going to see a lot more of this happening as traditional mo-cap in games moves more towards performance capture, and since publishers are always so eager to cut costs, they’ll likely rely more on inexperienced actors than costly established ones.

        This post may or may not have been influenced by my continued rage over Ubisoft dropping Michael Ironside from portraying Sam Fisher in the next Splinter Cell in lieu of a younger actor who is more up to the task of the physical demands of performance capture, and sounds vaguely enough like Ironside to satisfy the suits and yet piss everyone else off.

      • http://www.avclub.com/users/merve,96925/ Merve

        To be fair, all that VO in the Tomb Raider trailers was done by a stand-in. They’ve brought on an actress by the name of Camilla Luddington (who was apparently on Californication) for the actual game. I imagine that the VO will be higher-quality – and less sexual – in the final product.

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kevin-Johnson/501651 Kevin Johnson

          That’s good to hear. It would be very, very nice if the game had better PR. Everything we’ve seen implies the worst but everything that’s going on behind the scenes implies the best. Really frustrating.

        • http://www.avclub.com/users/merve,96925/ Merve

          It’s a shame how much pre-release flak this game has been getting, and I hope it doesn’t negatively impact the game’s creative direction. I’ve been itching for an Uncharted-like experience to come to PC, and this seems to fit the bill. Plus, everyone who has seen behind-closed-doors demos of the game has had nothing but positive things to say.

          That being said, you’re right to imply that the game has had awful PR. In a way, I’m a lot less angry about producer Ron Rosenberg’s interview with Kotaku than I am about the backpedalling from developer Crystal Dynamics. Rosenberg may have made some sexist assumptions about the game’s potential audience, but at least he didn’t trivialize sexual assault or try to pass it off as “close physical intimidation.” What the hell is that even supposed to mean?

  • STOP_RIGHT_THERE_CRIMINAL_SCUM

    these Lego games are for little kids, that’s why there’s so much hand holding

    of course a lot of games these days have too much hand holding 

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