Lego Star Wars

games: lego star wars II: the original trilogy

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The Force is strong.

When Lego Star Wars was released in 2005, it won over critics and punters alike with its blend of brick-based plastic construction toy and epic space opera. Even Traveller's Tales, the developer, was “as surprised as anyone by the success of the original Lego Star Wars”, according to development director Jonathan Smith. “We knew we had a game which we loved ourselves, but we had no idea at all how it would be received by our potential audience. We were doing something new for Lego and new for Star Wars, at the same time as the official Star Wars Episode III movie game was launching. It was certainly a gamble.”



In many ways the game was a lot more fun than the cluttered prequel trilogy movies it was based on. In fact, if it had one criticism, it was that it wasn't based around the original Star Wars trilogy. Well that's been rectified now with the sequel. So what's changed? “Oh, I could answer this one all day,” says Smith. “We were all really proud of the original game, and we knew that the only way to feel that proud again would be to produce much more than a straightforward continuation of the Lego Star Wars story.”

What this amounted to was “a bigger and deeper game all round - more Lego, and more that you can do with it; the ability to get in and out of vehicles like the AT-ST and landspeeder, or to ride creatures; new combat moves and special abilities, including the ability for characters to build with Lego...” Which is an obvious, but simultaneously inspired, development. Smith's list of additions culminates with the similarly logical inclusion of “the ability now to mix-and-match Lego body parts to create and customize your own playable characters.”

The sequel presumably threw them under the critical glare of the often rabid older fans of the original films, though. “We’re all Star Wars fans ourselves, so we’ve never found it hard to deal with the expectations of the vibrant Star Wars community,” explains Smith. “We ask the same questions, with the same eye for detail, as any other fans.”



The games overall have a good eye for detail, from the miraculous way in which Lego Star Wars figures are animated (“we were blessed with a genius character animator, and it only took one pass before everyone could see, immediately, that he’d nailed exactly the right way to bring these characters to life as cool videogame characters”), to the humour (such as stumbling across storm troopers in the bath), to creating a game that has a broad appeal. On this latter point, Smith says, “We were really focused, in both the original game and the new sequel, on the younger audience. I also still very much believe that, where we can please younger players, we inevitably make a game that’s better for older players too.”

Over the years since the release of the first film, the Star Wars phenomenon has grown to a point where a hit-and-miss record is perhaps inevitable in its multiple media output. However, it's fair to say that Traveller's Tales struck gold with the formula for the Lego Star Wars games, which are as charming as they are unique.

Daniel Etherington 21 September 06

Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy is out now on all formats.

Okami Game Review

Game Theory

Rejecting the Usual to Ignite the Imagination

Okami from Clover Studios is a complex quest that features a wolf who is actually a goddess.

By CHARLES HEROLD

Published: September 21, 2006

Last year I went to the video game trade show in Los Angeles called E3, a noisy event with games displayed on gigantic video screens and wandering models, skimpily dressed as video game characters, who looked as uncomfortable as you might expect of people standing in a crowded convention hall in their underwear.

OKAMI
Developed by Clover Studio and published by Capcom for PlayStation 2; for ages 13 and up; $40.

AL EMMO AND THE LOST DUTCHMAN’S MINE
Developed and published by Himalaya Studios for Windows 95 Release 2 and later; not rated, but recommended for teenagers and older; $30 ($60 for Collector’s Edition).

Al Emmo, from Himalaya Studios, is set in a Wild West locale.

I saw hundreds of games in development at E3, and they all looked pretty much alike. There were a bunch of first-person shooters I couldn’t tell apart, strategy games that looked the way strategy games always look and cartoony action adventures that looked like the previous year’s crop. Public relations people were praising the improved graphics of the brand-new Xbox 360, boasting that you could see the players’ sweat in a sports game, but to me the 360 games were just slightly sweatier versions of the games that had come out the year before.

Then I saw a Japanese game for PlayStation 2 that looked like a living watercolor painting. And as I watched a white wolf running across a field, flowers sprouting in its wake, I fell in love.

A year and a half later, that game, Okami, is on sale in the United States. The game, from Clover Studios, is everything I was hoping for, a visually dazzling, imaginative action-adventure game that stands apart from the crowd.

That white wolf is the goddess Amaterasu, who has manifested a mortal form to battle an eight-headed dragon terrorizing the land. She is joined by Wandering Artist Issun, a flea-size creature who functions as the player’s guide and irreverently refers to Amaterasu as “furball.”

Okami’s locales have been blighted by demons, and Amaterasu must bring these lands to life by finding magical trees and making them bloom, causing a desolate valley to erupt in flowers and take on the look of an ancient elegant Japanese woodprint.

To perform this magic, Amaterasu uses the Celestial Brush. At any point the player can freeze time and draw a circle to make flowers bloom, two lines to call forth a breeze, or a zigzag line to create a climbing rope.

The brush can also be used when battling demons. A painted line hits them like a sword, drawing a circle with a line through it creates a bomb, and swishing the ink on their faces temporarily blinds them.

There is a lot to do in Okami. Besides the main story, there are side quests that generally involve helping people. Every time Amaterasu does a good deed — restoring a withered tree, finding medicine for a sick man, feeding a mewing cat — she is bombarded with affection that translates into points used to increase her health or the number of symbols she can draw before her ink runs out.

There are also various treasures throughout the land, many of which you won’t be able to retrieve until you’ve learned a particular symbol. The game is very reminiscent of the Legend of Zelda series, and is at least as good as those games.

There are also interesting mini-games that turn up occasionally. At times Amaterasu will have to dig quickly through a series of stone blocks or catch fish. You must also help out Susano, a samurai of dubious talent, by quickly slashing with your brush the monsters he attacks.

Okami is tantalizingly close to perfection, but is not without flaws. Dialogue is in written text that scrolls out much more slowly than anyone over the age of 10 reads. While you can speed that up in some scenes, in others you can’t, forcing the player to do a lot of thumb-twiddling. And feeding an animal, which should take a couple of seconds, prompts a little scene that just wastes the player’s time.

But over all, this game is so visually striking, so original and so well done that most other game designers should look at it and then hang their heads in shame. It is proof that the important thing in game design is not the graphical processing power of the game console but the power of the designer’s imagination.

While Okami aims to create something fresh and new, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine, from Himalaya Studios, is equally eager to do something really old. The game is a sincere and loving effort to recreate the style of the humorous adventure games published by Sierra in the late 1980’s and early 90’s, like Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest.

Taking place in the Wild West, the game follows the adventures of Al Emmo, a short, dweeby character with a bad comb-over who comes to the town of Anozira to meet his mail-order bride. Upon learning that Al is closer to good looking than he is to prosperous, she calls the wedding off.

Stuck in Anozira until the next train arrives, Al promptly falls for the town chanteuse, Rita, and determines to win her love, a task made more difficult by the suave Antonio Bandana.

Al soon learns what it takes to win a beautiful woman’s heart: steal a flag, make a fishing rod and dress up as a woman. This at least is how it works in adventure games, where everything, including love, is a puzzle that can be solved through the proper use of hammers, flasks and inflatable dolls.

The game uses the point-and-click interface of those old games, and clicking on any item elicits some witticism. Click on a dartboard and the game’s narrator will say, “Your eyes dart to the board.”

While sometimes clever, the humor often falls flat. It’s commendable to try to put a laugh in every bit of scenery, but it’s disappointing when not a single tombstone epitaph in the town graveyard is actually funny.

The humor isn’t helped by the voice acting, which has the rather hammy, artificial quality of community theater.

Still, the game can be quite amusing. I liked a Greek chorus of ditzy ladies and was surprised by the pointed wit in a scene involving an extremist pest exterminator determined to wipe out “termites of mass destruction” at any cost.

Like the acting, the game’s puzzles are competent but unexceptional. Good puzzles force the player to think outside the box, but Al Emmo rarely challenges the player’s ingenuity.

Al Emmo finally kicks into gear in its last third, when the humor becomes sharper and the puzzles become smarter. If the whole game were as good as the last part, it might have matched the games that inspired it, but instead Al Emmo is just a decent game for fans nostalgic for old-style adventures.

Still, like Okami, Al Emmo doesn’t want to look like every other game on the market. Both games reject the cookie-cutter approach that permeates the video game industry and teach us a valuable lesson: the best games are not necessarily the sweatiest.

herold@nytimes.com

Eric Linden's Top 10 Machinima Tips

Eric Linden gives 10 tips for creating machinima in Second Life.

2006-03-10

Get Second Life at http://www.secondlife.com.

1) Set up your screen capture software. I recommend downloading FRAPS (http://www.fraps.com/) to capture your footage. FRAPS captures very clean footage while maintaining the best possible frame rates.

2) For dolly shots, contact Alt-Zoom Studios (http://alt-zoom.com/) to get their free, scripted camera object. This is currently the best scripted camera in Second Life, and will give you the ability to capture smooth camera moves.

3) Try to isolate your action in a way that prevents extraneous background objects and scripts from coming into view. This will help you maintain a more consistent frame rate � especially if there is a lot of action in the scene.

4) Try capturing in mouse-look mode. You can get smoother camera movements this way.

5) Try to capture footage in a larger format than what you plan to deliver it in. For example, I always capture at 640x480 when I know my output is going to be 320x240. You�ll maintain higher quality throughout the editing process this way.

6) Try to limit the number of actors in any given scene. Having a lot of avatars within a scene � especially if they are all using unique animations or have a lot of attachments � will reduce your frame rate.

7) Always capture several frames in front of- and at the end of your action. This helps greatly when you�re editing scenes together.

8) Try not to move the camera too fast; this can be confusing for the audience and disrupts continuity.

9) Try several views of the same action sequence. Capture more than you think you�ll need. You can always delete. This will allow you to make more creative decisions when you�re editing.

Related Articles Making a One Minute Machinima Making a One Minute Machinima in Second Life.

10) Hide the Second Life UI (ctrl+alt+1) when capturing.

Resources: machinima.com

What Is Machinima?

Welcome to the revolution.

2001-01-20

At some time or another everyone's had an idea for a movie – probably an epic inspired by something like Star Wars or The Matrix. But, unless you happen to be a Hollywood mogul in your spare time, it's unlikely you'll have had the spare $20 million or so to make your dream into reality.

But now there's a new kid on the block of independent filmmaking, and it's offering everyone who wants to try the chance to make their own Matrix: a thing called 'Machinima'.

Machinima's a new form of filmmaking that uses computer games technology to shoot films in the virtual reality of a game engine. Rather than picking up expensive camera equipment, or spending months painstakingly tweaking even more expensive 3D packages, Machinima creators act out their movies within a computer game. We treat the viewpoint the game gives them as a camera - “Shooting Film in a Virtual Reality”, as we've been known to put it in their more slogan-high moments – and record and edit that viewpoint into any film we can imagine.

You don't need any special equipment to make Machinima movies. In fact, if you've got a computer capable of playing Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2004 or even Quake, you've already got virtually everything you need to set up your own movie studio inside your PC. You can produce films on your own, or you can hook up with a bunch of friends to act our your scripts live over a network. And once you're done, you can upload the films to this site and a potential audience of millions.

But surely, you might say, these films will look amateurish, made inside games? Not at all. Machinima movies like “Hardly Workin'”and “Red vs Blue” have already won awards at film festivals across the world. Machinima has been shown on television. And several Machinima films have clocked up well over a million viewers.

You're not going to be taking Pixar or Final Fantasy on just yet, but you're not going to have to spend $100 million on your lead character's hair, either – and like any artform, what will make your movie shine is the story. What you get out of it is what you put in – and if you put enough in, you can indeed make your own cinema-worthy feature film in your bedroom.

Sounds cool? Ok, let's get started - read on to find out how you can get into Machinima.