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.

Alfred's not merely there to bring you spicy Buffalo wings. Butler Boy punches just as hard as Batman.

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!)

Pee-yew. Does it stink in here or what?

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.

Because the gameplay is also somewhat 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. Pressing the buttons over and over again becomes monotonous. And when it came to vehicles like the Batmobile, I had a bit of trouble driving them with that nubby left analog stick. (I've never really liked using that stick for anything, though.)

They have made it a bit easier to hit enemies and to walk tightropes in this version. When Robin is at a tightrope, it's not a challenge to line him up correctly to jump on so he doesn't fall off. Still, during battle, you sometimes feel as if you're punching a minion from a distance and not actually hitting him.

Them there backgrounds are detailed and scary. That's one big, gaping maw, ma.

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.

Most every console and handheld game released is about heroism or antiheroism, 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.

Some very cool heroism manifests in gameplay in ways that aren't unique if you know the LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Indiana Jones series. 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.

Fly over hill and dale with Batman's Glide Suit.

But there are new twists that make your missions more than palatable. You'll become enamored of at least some of the six superhero suits you'll get to use -- four for Batman and two for Robin. I liked the Demolition Suit (which allows you to place time bombs all around for fire-filled explosions) and Robin's Water Suit, which lets you dive underwater to search for goodies.

The soundtrack, even in the PSP 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).

That crazy Mad Hatter is one of the villains in LEGO Batman.

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 PSP is not a perfect game, and it's not completely new, either. The character sprites are too small, and if you're looking for a game that lets you play with a pal, this isn't it. While it is fairly different from the Nintendo DS version, the development team decided against co-op 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. But 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.