LEGO Batman: The Videogame (PSP)

Who is Bruce Wayne behind that hard, plastic exterior?
10/3/2008 6:24 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 onomatopoeic sounds), 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!)

The back of the box on the PlayStation Portable version contains a surprise: There's not one, but two UMDs. I contemplated the possibilities: What extra things did they have in store for me. Was there a Batman movie on that extra UMD? In fact, I can't recall another PSP game that's ever put two UMDs in a single box (Can you?). It's even more of a surprise when you open the box to find just one UMD. What happened here? Did the Joker steal it? I'd been gaslit.

While the box says it's a single-player game, the dang manual states "Press the Start button on a second controller and take control of the second player character." So there is cooperative play after all? Do they mean that a second PSP is your so-called second controller? If they do, I certainly couldn't get it to work. So confusing for a game based on a comic book that's generally prided itself on being straightforward. And if you haven't updated your software to version 4.05, you'll have to install it before you can play the game.

It won't come as a surprise that the graphics here aren't of current-generation console quality. But they are pretty dang impressive, especially in scenes in the snow with the water flowing below. The backgrounds here are nearly as spruced-up as they are in the console versions. The problem is that the LEGO characters, while cute and detailed, sometimes look like they only have two dimensions, not three as in the console games. This is a condensed port of the console game, and that's sometimes a problem. Batman can be such a small sprite that you can barely see his fists punch. And with the general darkness of some of the background, I occasionally got a bit lost in the shadows.