Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

Buy It Now: on Amazon.com

Strangeness Review:

Strangeness Abound’s Review: I’ll preface this review by stating that I’m a casual gamer, but I’m a hardcore casual gamer. I may not touch a video game for several months, but when I find a game I love, I will play it TO THE END at the risk of getting bad grades in school and letting the food on the dishes in the sink dry to tough crusts.

But moving onto the review: you’d think it would be a great combination – Indiana Jones meets Legos© meets the Nintendo DS and several other gaming consoles. Despite the fact that it’s a game aimed more at older children, I find it to be fun most of the time. Lego Indiana Jones – The Original Adventures was released in 2008, but thanks to a friend of mine, I’m able to play it for free and on my DSi.

As you play through the adventures you see in the movies, you have the chance to play through a variety of key scenes from the movies (i.e. the rolling rock from the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the runaway mine trains in Temple of Doom and the Nazi castle in Last Crusade). If a character dies, you do not see blood or them dissolving into a puff of smoke – they fall apart per the Lego© style.

RUN AWAY! Image courtesy of IGN.com

Several times I exclaimed, “Aww, how cute!” And indeed, there were several instances, especially in the beginning of the game play where it was quite endearing. Seeing Marion Ravenwood gain the ability to turn into a monkey when she stands upon her special pad was particularly darling to me (Marion has always been my favorite character in the Indiana Jones film series). Getting to “build” structures to help Indy and his assistants along their merry way with enormous Legos was a blast as well. I never got tired to listening to the cute clicking noises as things were built – I’m easily amused, LOL. The theatrical sequences were quite a bit of fun to watch as they contained a bit of slapstick and a lot of situational comedy. Much of the tension that would be found in the original three movies was gone from these sequences. I wondered how the programmers would handle the violence found in Temple of Doom in developing Lego Indiana Jones, but I felt they handled it very well, especially considering that this is a game aimed at kids.

However, as I continued to play the game, I noticed that in order to move Indy through the side-scrolling format, I had to mash the D-pad in a variety of directions all at once to aim Indy exactly where I needed him to go. Aiming Indy’s whip was not an issue – the game did that for me automatically. However, I got the feeling that this game would be better suited for a console that utilized a joystick instead of a D-pad.

For the DS version, you do not need to use the stylus at any point – your “A,” “B,” “X” and “Y” buttons are all you need. “A” lets you crack the whip if you are Indy, “B” lets you jump, “X” lets you punch or attack and “Y” lets you switch between Indy and his partners for gameplay flexibility. I will admit to becoming easily confused between the functions of the “A” and “B” buttons in the heat of battle. The “A” button is traditionally used to jump or roll and the “B” button is traditionally used for attack (at least, this is the case with the Nintendo Entertainment System, however the DS is modeled after the Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller).

I also discovered several small glitches/programming oversights as I played through the story. More than once, I tried to use Indy’s whip to smash something and it wouldn’t smash. I had to come at it from a certain angle or else it wouldn’t come apart. There are also two occasions (in the Raiders arc and the Last Crusade arc) in which you must jump across the tops of moving vehicles. Several times, I unwittingly moved my partner down and under the wheels of the moving buses simply because I was trying to prepare for a jump to the next vehicle and they were in the way. The partners (with the exception of Marion – she rained bottles upon enemies without pause) were practically useless in battle. They often just stood around and got shot.

Frustration! Image courtesy of the Angry Video Game Nerd (http://www.cinemassacre.com)

Also, it would have been nice to hear something besides the music from the Raiders of the Lost Ark film recycled over and over for all three adventures. I often listened to my iPod instead of the game, but I would argue that the developers at LucasArts just got lazy and didn’t bother creating any more mp3 loops.

This is not the first game from LucasArts I have played. When I played Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine back in the day when it first came out for the Nintendo 64 (I’m a Nintendo baby all the way, can’t you tell? ;)), I noticed that it had several programming errors similar to those found in Lego Indiana Jones, so this may not be an isolated incident found just in Lego Indiana Jones, but rather something faulty in the way LucasArts programs their video games.

All in all, I give this game three and a half stars. It was fun when it first began, but the programming oversights were a bit of an irritant. The theatrical sequences and character introductions (see Dr. Elsa Schneider’s entrance in the Last Crusade game) were funny and worth playing the game. Clearly, I’d recommend this game to Indiana Jones fans simply because it was fun – when I was winning. ;)

I'd make out with that.