Leaderboard

Before we start; I don't like to insult or say harsh things about Game Developers. They work hard, long hours with minimal pay, and usually to little payoff. I'm sure with this game they worked their absolute hardest. However, I don't think it's right to ever let a game just slide away with cardinal sins, and so I will be brutal if need be. Not because I hate the devs, but because I hope that, if I can't teach them what's wrong, I can help prevent future devs from making the same mistakes. Furthermore, this is my first TT Game since LEGO Star Wars The Complete Saga. I'm ashamed right now. I'm ashamed of the fact I'm a Game Designer. I'm ashamed of the fact I'm a LEGO fan. I'm ashamed of the fact I wasted 10 hours on a game that may just be the very antithesis of my existence. The LEGO Movie was incredible, to say the least. In my own opinion, a film that can start right in the ranks of Disney and Pixar classics, and my own personal favourite animated movie of all time. It was a film that went beyond simple product-placement and actually gave us significant, strong messages and a story filled with laughs, tears and heaps of heart-warming moments. The LEGO Movie Video Game has none of these. You're getting no images with this review. If I had to slog through this thing in its entirety, you can slog through my raving and ranting as payback. I went into this game hoping for the best. I ignored the comments and reviews, and I simply hoped that TT would do this game justice. A perfect trifecta between Movie, Game and Toys is virtually unknown in modern times. The LEGO Movie is an incredible movie as discussed before, and the LEGO sets for the movie are equally as magnificent, and some of the most fun sets to build to date. This game doesn't belong. My journey started with the immediate discovery of incompetence on the UI team. "The ability to change the graphics settings? Why would anybody ever need to change those *before* you start the first level? That's crazy talk! Why, what a coincidence that EA did the exact same thing with a few of their games! It's not like we're both going to make an evil, soulless, money-sucking game, correct?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV6akps-b1k So, you finally decide to start a new game. 4 save slots is pretty standard for console ports, so I can't really fault it, especially since you'd be insane enough to even considering using one save slot and play the game. What happens next is absolutely incredible. Traveler's Tales decided the smartest thing to do was to take clips from The LEGO Movie, cut them up, compress them and play them onscreen at about 1/3 the size of the actually screen with massive black bars. And so help you if you dare want to use subtitles, those suckers will go right in the middle of the video. The definition of laze in the dictionary can probably be changed from whatever it is now to "Traveler's Tales' Business Plan". Unfortunately, what comes next explains where their entire development time was spent. TT Games assume that you're a moron. And, I don't mean a kid. Kids, unlike what many developers seem to think, are actually intelligent and can actually dissect and learn game patterns very quickly, sometimes faster than adults. Just look at the "Zelda" generation. No, TT Games assumes you're a complete nitwit who needs to be dragged along on their one-way amusement park. In fact, that's the exact feeling I got from playing this game. It's Disneyland Simulator mixed with Pants Simulator (we'll talk about that a little later). See, you've got these "Hub" worlds, and they act like the different sections of the Disneyland park. There's little mini-attractions here and there, and people begging you to spend your "hard" earned money on them, and they link up to some big rides which aren't worth the ticket price you paid to enter. Not only do they insult you with simple help messages, and not only do they use a trail of uncollectable green studs to show you the "correct" path, but the characters will go out of their way, good or bad, to tell you EXACTLY WHAT TO DO. And it's not like the challenges are incredibly difficult either. In many cases, they're telling you to do the most obvious thing you've already done multiple times in the same level. Apparently, this is linked to the "Dynamic" level of hints, which apparently makes it more annoying than "On". I decided though, in order to give you guys the best review possible, I'd stick with Dynamic, and see what'd happen. When the hints are telling you to do things that either; A) you've already done, B) are not an objective on this level or you lack the character to do something, or C) refuse to show up when they actually are required (for some new gameplay element that was not introduced properly), you know you have a very broken hint system. The saddest thing is that, the only point at which I had *some* enjoyment with the game was when the hints simply disappeared into the void. Frankly, I wish they stayed that way. Did I say that the options menu is hilariously broken yet? When an option (specifically Refresh Rate) appears twice, and you put most of your important configuration settings into an entirely different menu, you've got a big problem. And, what about those massive frame-drops during the hacking mini-game, or when you're fighting a Micro-Manager? There's just so many awful moments in this game, and one of them made the lack of attention to QA apparent. I was in Cloud Cuckooland, and I had already been introduced to characters sliding whenever they touched uneven terrain. It was an animation bug, but not major. It didn't become a problem until I was supposed to face off with a robot goon with a rocket launcher. I had just gotten Unikitty and Wildstyle stuck in separate parts of the geometry (don't ask me how), and Benny lacked a gun at this point, so I couldn't kill them to reset them. The robot goon needed to shoot these three silver objects, and to do that, you need to move your character behind each object and let him fire upon it "by accident". Simple enough, right? Apparently TT Games felt it in the best interest to send any competent programmers on holidays early before they decided to code the robot goon's AI. The Goon looks for the character in the shortest distance to itself, and fires upon that. Of course, both Unikitty and Wildstyle, who were stuck in geometry, happened to be closer to the Goon than Benny. Eventually I got Wildstyle unstuck, only to encounter the same problem, but not because of Unikitty. Because either Wildstyle or Benny would sometimes, when controlled by the AI, stray to the side of the silver objects a little bit, apparently that counted as them being closer to the Goon, who would then shoot promptly to the side of the silver object. Everything is tedious with TT. Hell, this same AI problem occurred with a code section later in the game. The game has two of those annoying, badly designed jumping puzzles, where you need to jump onto the correct buttons in sequence, with the camera in a locked position at an awkward angle while you still have platforming physics. Unikitty felt she needed to be the star of the show while I was trying to complete the nine digit code however, and so it took a LOT of attempts of trying to move Unikitty, who would quickly move back onto the keypad. I could go on about the AI, but there's far more problems. We don't even need to continue discussing the repetitive gameplay; TT tried to mix it up by adding platforming sections (with wall-kicks and climbing), turret sections, falling-through-space sections and more, but everyone of these new mechanics is both one-dimensional and wasted. Nothing is coherent or consistent. It feels as though TT tried to build this game out of a LEGO Duplo, a LEGO Friends and a LEGO Junior set, and couldn't quite figure out why the parts didn't stick together right. Anyone who plays Ratchet & Clank would remember the huge amounts of inflation between R&C and R&C3. What happened was that instead of making a single bolt worth a single bolt, Insomniac gave the engine leeway to come up with appropriate, random number values, so that the player wasn't constantly having to collect single bolt after single bolt. This was to avoid repetitiveness and make people feel more powerful due to the larger numbers. I can't quite figure out why TT Games have attempted the same thing, but they did, and it's jarring to say the least. The stud values remain the same; silver for 10, gold for 100, blue for 1000 and purple for 10,000. For some reason, though, in 10 minutes of play, I was already pushing 200,000 studs. The massive increase in inflation has naturally caused character prices to explode, with the most expensive costing a million a piece, and the lowest ones between 50,000 and 200,000. Let's just talk about the characters in this game. TT Games proudly boasts how they have so many characters. Something like 90? Less than the amount they have in Star Wars: The Complete Saga though. The process of purchasing new characters is a real pain the rear. After collecting the "appropriate" amount of studs, you must either find the character in the world, or open the character selection screen (which seems to be available when it feels like, rather than when it should), scroll over to them, press the button twice, and then watch a long and pointless animation as it purchases your character. So help you if you want to buy more than one character, because you'll be waiting at that menu for a long time. The increase in potential party characters is nice, if only wasted. You're only allowed extra party members in certain locations based on the story (and how much memory TT managed to waste on background effects). They can sometimes help, but usually you only need two people, and for most of the game you'll find yourself playing with two characters. The weirdest thing is they've modified the AI; firstly, the AI makes little to no attempt to follow you when you need it to, and vice-verse. It could be because this new system is supposed to allow you to have two characters doing actions at the same time and allow for seamless transitions, but it really doesn't work as advertised. Secondly, the AI is now capable of killing everything except the last enemy in the room. And, when I say it can't kill the last enemy, what I mean is that it stubbornly refuses to take any action at all. It just stands there like an garish rapscallion, watching you try to do the menial task of the hour and getting interrupt by the enemy. There really is just so much narm I want to talk about, but for size I'll need to cut down; the hacking minigame is the one mechanic I actually had FUN with, but it was less a "I'm so excited to be doing this!" fun and more like a "At least this is better than the crap I was doing before..." fun. The Pants mechanic, which allows you to have permanent special abilities for characters that wear pants (think the Star Wars hats if they were combined with powerups). The very lowest aspect of the game, and the one that highlights my argument the best is both the Master Builds and the Construction Builds. Master Builds simply require you to swing the camera around three times and then let go of a button. How that even constitutes as gameplay is beyond me. The Construction Builds, on the other hand, require you to look at a model, then look at a bunch of parts and select the one that should fit. Easy, right? Oh wait, there's a timelimit that's counting down your stud reward for both taking your time and getting the answer wrong. Oh wait, the controls are both hyper-sensetive and super-sluggish, so your chance of selecting the correct button quickly is very low. Oh wait, it regularly makes the bricks flip over and distorts them in some way to make selection harder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07So_lJQyqw The worst part, however, is the story. I'm going to be very blunt. It's bad. It's terrible. What Traveler's Tales do probably isn't Game Development. I think they may actually be butchers who just discovered how to use a computer. The amount of story they chopped up, jokes they ruined and the clearest and saddest irony of how The LEGO Movie Videogame goes completely against the morals and messages of The LEGO Movie, to the point they actually cut out the sequences in the movie that talk about those morals and messages is just pure disgusting. I'm going to wrap up here without even mentioning the other plethora of problems, because the longer I stay here to write the sicker I get. This game is a success. It's on a level of success far higher than Bioshock or Spec Ops: The Line. What it deconstructs is the art of lazy game making. It shows us, up front and center the grim reality of what the industry has become, and gives the player a chance to come to their senses and realise their mistake. Except, that was all unintentional. This is clearly the worst game I've played. Unlike Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing or WarZ, this wasn't made by people who were technically and theoretically incompetent. TT Games are responsible for my favourite Crash Bandicoot game of all time. This isn't due to a lack of good source material or assets, since The LEGO Group would have given them everything they needed, and the core message and ideas of the Movie were some of the strongest I've seen in a long while. What we have here is a game that blindly lies to your face; it shows you an experience that looks fun, but lacks any kind of subtance, and yet assumes it can stand amongst the greats. It abuses the LEGO logo, using that to ride the waves of success, without realising the deadly whirlpool of boredom that it's surfing over. The recent trend for big developers is to stop being creative and be safe, and do things as fast possible, over trying to do things to the credit of the idea (i.e. giving the original idea the respect it deserves). This game encapsulates everything wrong with that trend. The saddest thing is that you can tell people tried, but for whatever reason, the management of this game was lacking, and every fault in this product can be squarely blamed on the Creative Director. This game, and all TT Games as of recent seem to be stuck in the same trend as many, MANY developments. Instead of studying why a mechanic works, they look at how it works, and try to copy it without realising what made the mechanic fun in the first place. That's become extremely evident here. Do not buy this game. If you really must, watch videos on YouTube. Watch the Movie and then move on with your lives, because this is one experience you do not need to have.

how are you

jamesster : (12 April 2014 - 02:19 PM) Even if somebody's a tad harsh they might have a good point, no need to moan in statuses and the chat about how you're sad and reporting them Car CrazeXVI : (12 April 2014 - 02:27 PM) And that's why the kangaroo-loving douche-bag with purple hair is still here.

ARE YOU READY TO LE717

I've gotten better as I did this, and some of my earlier ones looked worse by comparison. So, I went back and edited Ace and Xiron to be closer in quality to the more recent ones ^_^

"I want Bruce Willis to die of a Viagra Overdose just so I can see the headline 'Bruce Willis Dies Hard'" -Will Kirkby (Origamiguy, I think) "Wikiwiki sounds like a euphemism for sex"

There are too many interesting articles on EBSCOhost to list. Unfortunately, I can't give out a link as it is only possible to access the articles through a library card, and I've just realized that this means any link I could give would be connected to the library card I used. I've copied two articles below, the first on the development of Rock Raiders and the second on the development of LEGO Island. Of course, there is plenty more to be found.

leWho

Built to replace the ageing fleet of LL-918 one-man spacecrafts, the LL-947 has 6 side mounted lasers on the wings to defend itself from the forces of Blacktron, which was a key problem with the old 918 class spacecrafts, who couldn't defend themselves if they ran into trouble. There are numerous reports that some of these have been modified by Blacktron to use against our forces, but so far there is no photographic evidence of these occurrences. Check out my photostream for more images! https://www.flickr.com/photos/ayliffemakit/

I think I did prefer QP's voice acting for him, sorry. Also, please try to improve the sound quality if you can, see the conversation I had with QP one page ago. I am afraid that only Warrior talks, the others never appear in cutscenes. This. Sorry for confusion, I pulled the list from another topic, and I haven't thoroughly gone through the list yet, but I am slowly making my way through. I removed the rest of the Xalax guys from the list. Here is one line for Warrior vitawrap; post a sample of your voice acting for it here; and please, make sure your quality is decent, as is it a requirement. ------------------ @Adding more animations; while the scrapped animation files still exist (like shake fist, or looking to the side or behind), I don't think it would be possible to add them in, I think adding them for new events may be hardcoded, unless that mysterious .BSB file (same folder as animations) has something to do with it. It is a shame to have to let them go to waste. The only reason I can think of for so much unused animation and sound files, is that they ran out of development time.

This kinda strays from the original mod but... Remember in lego racers one, racers would shout stuff when they would get boosts or pass you and stuff. I think adding this in, along with maybe a short animation for the racer could add some more life into the racers. It would also give you things to voice for the other aliens. I'm not sure how possible any of this would be however, I've seen Xiron edit animations for running before .('?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>>) but i dont know how possible it is for specific events that would happen. You might not know, but in the game files there actually are these sfx, but for some reason they didn't make it into the final version of the game. For example, I found a sfx of a rama saying "waaaaaaaay!". I have no idea why they didn't use it, it would have made the game much more interactive.

I couldn't have built a better

Awesome drawing, Fushi! Thank you so much Lovin' the hairdo and laser gun.

PeabodySam won. We can go home now.

Mine is wonderfully plain in comparison to everyone else's, but I came in second after Xiron so wasn't expecting the hype that this l'il event received. The mystery has been solved!

Mr, Le717, but RECTANGLED. The big problem is that I am LATE

Oh no, a Le-slide has occured. May I add a few more le's, please ? Levatar version 1: Chief Levatar version 2: hmm, looks like an album cover ^^ P.S.: And that shows us, how powerful one le can be (to inspire all the other users). One ring le to rule ready them all! P.P.S.: Okay, I will try to stop making puns (but I will probably fail ).

Where did the original image even come from?

The LEGO Maniacs have smiled upon me, granting me five more issues of LEGO Club Innovations. There is more on the way. The eBay lot I won these in also included the first two issues of the Canadian MANIA Magazine, plus several catalog booklets that don't appear to be on the internet yet. They have a few new things of interest.

Is micspamming your opponent with this as a means of distraction frowned upon?

Review: #4569 Warrior Review by jamesster Photo Review So I read Review: #4569 Warrior online. It comes with an empty-looking review. I'd like the photo a lot, but I have to say, why is there no photo!The review is good for kids who are young, as it is only 3 lines! Also, the writing of the review isn't that good, as it doesn't read that good. But, reading these reviews goes pretty fast! Rating Design: 10 / 10Quality: 100 / 10 Fun: 1000 / 10 Price: 10000 / 10 Is it a read it, or a skip it? I would go with read it for forum users, forum moderators, and forum administrators, but if you are not a person who likes to read stuff, then it would be a skip it! Total rating: 9.5 (out of goldfish)