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 can hold that serving tray and beat 'em up one-handed.

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?

There's always some moaning about the Wii version of a multiplatform game, and it's usually about how poor the graphics are. Hey, I disdain the blurries and jaggies as much as you do. But believe me: These graphics are cuts above the usual Wii port of a game. The backgrounds are generally clear and detailed, although the textures on buildings still could use some work. But the shimmering water effects look just about as good to me as they do on the Xbox 360 version.

Now, where's that dang Port-a-Potty when you need it?

A review at one of the larger gaming sites has incorrectly reported that you don't use the Wii remote much in the game. In fact, the Wii remote has plenty of uses: You use it to aim and throw the Batarang, to build your vehicles from blocks (shake it up and down, baby), to shoot out the grappling hook (flick it up), and to punch your enemies (thrust it forward). Yes, I really wish that you could move your vehicles with the Wii remote ? la Excite Truck or Mario Kart Wii, and it's a big mistake not to have this functionality. But it's not as if you're going old-school and pressing buttons (although you can choose that route if you want to).

Clayface, a B-movie actor gone bad and ugly, had better move fast.

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 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.

Too bad you can't pilot this thing like in Mario Kart.

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.

But there are new twists that make your missions more than palatable. First, look at the attention to detail. I don't just mean the backgrounds, which, even on the Wii, are as lush and dark as a description from a Clive Barker novel. At any moment, you feel that something wicked this way may come. Then, if you down a Red Bull, you'll see that the camera looks this way and that -- wary, even paranoid that enemies are nearby. And Robin won't just stand there. He'll look around too, maybe flex his muscles. Rats crawl around. Don't like 'em? Punch 'em out. The soundtrack uses 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).

You'll also become enamored of at least some of the eight superhero suits you'll get to use -- four for Batman and four 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?

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

Yes, each console version should have had some different suits to distinguish itself. But I liked the Demolition Suit (which allows you to place time bombs all around for fire-filled explosions) until I realized it didn't shatter glass. (Behind a lot of glass window panes are items you need to move forward in the game.) So they've made a Sonic Suit that shatters glass and lets you pick up what you need to progress. I love the sound of breaking glass.

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.

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

LEGO Batman: The Videogame is not a perfect game, and it's not completely new, either. I really wish there were online functionality here, too, instead of merely a two-player cooperative mode. Even if they added a fighting Versus mode for consoles, the game would be cooler. Add a few power fighting moves to each character and you'd have something that'd rival Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. I know why they didn't add online functionality: They think that the majority of folk who will 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 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. The background graphics are as detailed as those in the other console iterations, and the game makes you feel privileged to live in this cartoony world that's at once gritty and cute.

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