It's in our genetic makeup to want to build things. Clicking colored plastic pieces together not only lets a kid construct some tangible plaything, be it the house he wants to live in, the car he wants to own, or the hero he wants to be. It's about play, but it's about dreaming the so-called American dream, too, and not just yelling "USA! USA!" like a lunatic. LEGO lets you proudly shout, "I made this!" as if it were art and life that you are constructing. That's what the LEGO Batman event at the New York Museum of Natural History was about the other day: kids running around with LEGO and Batman, proudly making something.

Don't jump, Batman. The market will recover!

What do you get when you put LEGO and Batman together? Can LEGO Batman: The Videogame be deep, even though it's an E10+ rated game with only "Cartoon Violence"? As in LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Indiana Jones, important things have been excluded. The intimacy of the written word, so essential to comics, is gone from LEGO Batman; there's no narration in blurbs. The characters don't talk in words at all (they grunt and make comic book sounds like "oof," "bam" and "riiing"), so one essential movie-like quality is gone.

The enemy and friendly artificial intelligence aren't so hot, sometimes not even as smart as lower mammals like rats. Even Batman once didn't have the smarts to climb from a wire to the ledge of a building when I was controlling Robin. (And they promised at the Game Developers Conference that this AI stuff would be completely fixed!)

While the DS version is fairly intuitive, and it is great that you're immediately put into gameplay -- after the opening cut scene passes as quickly as a flick of the Batarang, you can go directly to Chapter 1 or to Wayne Manor -- there is no indication that you must play Chapter 1 to get a tutorial that tells you what to do. When you do get hints, they come and go so quickly that you feel like you need to be a speed reader. And once they disappear, you can't get the hints back again.

Haphazard coding! Batman's face will go partially through those walls.

It won't come as a surprise that the graphics in the DS version aren't of console quality, but I did think they would spruce up the backgrounds as they did in the consoles. Sadly, they really have not. When you're battling minor villains, the camera thankfully pulls out for a long shot, but what you see are tiny sprites in battle and backgrounds that aren't detailed enough. And when Batman runs into a wall, about a quarter of his face passes through that wall -- a total coding error.

The substitutions for cut scenes are pretty intense in an old-school way, however. The larger portion of the story is told through comic book panels without words. But after a boss battle, I did wish I could see, say, Clayface die in a brief animation after all the work I did to drown him.

You progress through these comic book panels by using the touch-screen. It's unfortunate that the touch-screen is used for such meager tasks -- since most of the gameplay is done via buttons and movement is accomplished with the d-pad, the use of the touch-screen seems like an afterthought. Alas, the touch-screen isn't used much for navigation or grappling; it's used to set off bombs and other weapons. You can't look around your environment: You might shoot the Batarang at something outside of your field of view, and hear it making damage, but you might not see the damage. There are occasional camera issues, too. Early on, a girder completely blocked my view of the Caped Crusader. (Thankfully, there was no ensuing battle, so I didn't lose a life.) When Robin is at a tightrope, it's difficult to line him up correctly so he doesn't fall off. It's just a tightrope, guys. Don't make it a superheroic effort to get on the damn tightrope. This isn't a Philippe Petit game, right?

Because the gameplay is condensed, it seems that most of what you're doing is picking up things, smashing things, and, more often than in the console versions, making things like switches and ladders. If these tasks were accomplished via the touch-screen, they might be more engaging. But pressing the buttons over and over again becomes monotonous.

So, knowing all this, how can LEGO Batman: The Videogame stay true to both Batman and LEGO and, even more, popular gaming culture as we know it today? It begins with the game box art. There, Batman and Robin are swinging through the demon night, bats behind them and an evil, looming moon behind the winged creatures. The Dynamic Duo have that look of grim determination on their faces. You know this is about Batman's inner turmoil raging to explode. Batman is full of sorrow and vengeance that goes back almost 70 years. Below Batman, on the tar-patched rooftops of Gotham, are the evildoers, The Joker and Catwoman, crazier-looking and sneering, ready to perform every sort of insanity upon the buffed heroes who hover above.

Studly: Pick up as many studs as you can to buy cool new items.

Most every console and handheld game released is about heroism or antiheroism, about saving someone or something. The reason LEGO Batman works on the DS -- even with its coding challenges -- is the same reason that Batman as a character works. There's the heroic aspect of Batman, someone to look up to in times of trouble. We all want to be lauded as heroes; after all we've been through, don't we deserve it, just for a little while? There's also the antihero, the part of Batman that doesn't want to be social, the delinquent who's outside of society. We all want to be bad, don't we, to be wicked and selfish just to get our way, to break all the commandments and jump criminally into that good night? Here, as the tagline says, "Gotham City is falling to pieces." Sure, they mean LEGO pieces as much as they mean that Gotham is going down to the criminally unstable. But still, a hero you are, and a hero you enjoy being.

Some very cool heroism manifests in gameplay in ways that aren't unique if you know the LEGO Star Wars series and LEGO Indiana Jones. You're still hunting down tens of thousands of LEGO pieces and picking up hearts for lives. And you're still making vehicles of LEGO pieces you find, too.

But there are new twists that make your missions more than palatable. Two shorter games are included: As a brief respite from missions, you can play Villain Hunt, in which you'll get a few characters in an effort to hunt down an enemy lurking and hiding within a level. There's also Checkpoint Race, in which you jump into rad vehicles, shoot through levels, and try to come in first. The soundtrack, even in the DS version, uses clips of the great Danny Elfman's music from the Tim Burton movies "Batman" and "Batman Returns," and it definitely keeps the excitement level high when you're bored with picking up the LEGO studs that allow you to purchase accoutrements and new characters via your store (which resides within the Batcomputer).

Smile, Dark Knight, smile wide like the Joker's mouth does.

You'll also become enamored of at least some of the five superhero suits you'll get to use -- three for Batman and two for Robin. After all, with Batman there's the fear of the costume itself, the idea of a monster emerging from the darkest of nights. Is he man or is he bat? Scarier, is he both? And there's the mask. Who is Batman underneath, behind the protective covering, beyond Bruce Wayne's mega-wealth? What do you see when you get right up close to the scarring of his youth? Me, you or the ugly Other we all hide away as our biggest secret?

I liked the Demolition Suit (which allows you to place time bombs all around for fire-filled explosions) until I realized it did nothing against the toxic green goo that oozes throughout Gotham City. So I put Robin into a Bio Suit, which lets him traverse the green crap.

But Traveller's Tales and Warner Bros. must feel that the biggest twist is the ability to become an arch-villain like the Riddler, Harley Quinn or that disgusting blob that once was a B-movie actor, Clayface. They hype this in the opening sequence, where a devilish crew of super-villains attacks Gotham, leaving cops slack-jawed and helpless or laughing hysterically from some Joker-induced gaseous ooze. So if you want to be bad, you can be as bad as you want to be. Just play through a level as Batman and Robin, then return to play as a supreme baddies, and face off against Commissioner Gordon.

LEGO Batman: The Videogame for the DS is not a perfect game, and it's not completely new, either. If you're looking for a game that makes great use of the touch-screen, this isn't it. And while it is fairly different from its console and PC brethren, the development team only included two-player Wireless DS Play. I know why they didn't add online functionality: They think that the kids who will make up the majority of folk who buy the game are tweens who don't care about it playing online. But they do. And since a fair amount of adults will play the game, too, there's no reason not to add it. If the next LEGO game has no greater online functionality, critics generally will not be kind.

But there are more than enough thoughtful additions to excite and occasionally amaze, especially when you don the various costumes of super-villains. If you're looking for a game that lets you take Batman on the road with you, give this one a try.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.