LEGO Batman: The Videogame (PC)

Who is Bruce Wayne behind that hard, plastic exterior?
9/30/2008 7:28 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

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.

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!) Batman sticks too easily to a wall, going into Stealth mode like in the debacle that was The Getaway: Black Monday from Sony. And why can Batman punch Robin and vice versa: Is that some sort of "Fight Club"-esque man love?

So, Holy Game Nerd, Robin, why is LEGO Batman The Videogame so darn 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.

Most every console game released is about heroism or anti-heroism, about saving someone or something. The reason LEGO Batman works 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.