Lego Island 2: The Brickster's Revenge

"A successful satisfying synthesis of two things that wowed me in my childhood."

Before running into an inane high school teacher who showed us that you needed to learn various asinine data structures in order to be a good programmer or at least do well on the AP exam so she'd look good for the school and that textbook company she signed a contract with, I had this crazy belief you could make all sorts of games if you put your mind to it, and perhaps I could one day. Apparently there were games about cartoon characters and so forth, although you had to work with the computers for the ones with worse resolution. This all faded through high school computer courses as my Apple and Atari 2600 fell to the bottom of the barrel and the local Babbage's and Egghead Software went belly up.

Legos were one of the things I'd imagined transferred to a computer game, and even though their meager color scheme clashed with that of the Apple I figured that just might rebound to new Lego colors in the near future. But then I stopped playing with Legos too as it took time away from brooding over, among other things, how much time it was really healthy to spend daydreaming about girls my age and what proportion of whom would be optimal--I blame my strong performance in Calculus for this, which obviously beat out the summer days of having half the garage to myself to create a Lego town from all the pieces I had.

Through my relatively broke college years I heard tales of the sorts of games that other people were rich enough to play--more up-to-date than the free fare at the computer lab or the junk that once worked on my family's broken Apple. It also helped that these technophiles set foot in a computer game store, to which I had no easy access. Then when I finally got enough money to achieve my dream of spending far too much on computer games, I felt a yearning to re-open imaginative pathways lost on the road from youth(read: too lazy to crack open that Windows Game Programming book I got from Amazon)it became obvious that it would be far too easy with the selections having grown so, and I wouldn't have any spare change left for the other part of my fantasy--eating something very bad for me while playing, with no-one to yell about the crumbs going all over the keyboard. At the late hour of 11 PM no less.

So, to restrain and focus my acquisitions, I'd often focus on something that reminded me of my lost childhood and Legos were one area. They kept recurring because suddenly there were too darned many of them. Sports, racing, and undefined genres, probably even RPG's. For a fellow who found Space and Medievel Legos groundbreaking and manages a conservative head-shake at the specialized Legos you find these days in kids' toy stores, the selection seemed like overkill.

Fortunately I'd took up and thoroughly refined my own brand of skinflintism over my broke college years and took the first game that dropped shamefully low--Lego Island 2 for the GBA. With the occasional imaginative jump, name, or hip modernization(I dunno about Lego characters cabbage-patching at the intro) too senseless for your average ten-year-old to stomach, it's still a pleasant game with little risk of bruising your ego and only occasional bland stretches.

You start out controlling Pepper Roni, a kid of indeterminate age(a couple of years past the age one stops playing with Legos, i.e. the age most kids who play with Legos wish they were) with the sort of job you imagine must be glamorous when you're young: pizza delivery boy. And it's up to you to stop a scuzzy Lego character, the Brickster, from ruining the town area again. He's managed to take the Constructopedia pages for various buildings such as the police station and pizzeria. Your job is to run across Lego Island and find items, eventually building up to Constructopedia pages that will rebuild the structure that were torn down until eventually you can rebuild the jail--a small one, but necessary to hold the Brickster. Along the way you'll meet some well-meaning folks, none of whom has a name quite as devastatingly corny as yourself(Bill Ding, Nick Brick, Papa Brickolini and Snap Lockitt,) but despite being your average smiley Lego figures they all seem to demand a favor before helping you help save the town. Oh well, my Lego playing sessions were probably even less realistic.

The introductory scene pretty much sets the tone for the entire game. 'Pepper! You might want to check out X!' Several people suggest what to do, and if you're not sure what is where at the start, you can tap the big left button for a handy map replete with 'you are here' arrows and then maneuver through it with the controller pad. It's in three screens although you can't physically access the top or bottom until you find two basic early items, the jackhammer to rebuild the bridge and a hard hat to pass through the tunnel. Despite being on the GBA the map does a good job of showing how the streets twist, and aside from some blocked off areas that require items to get to, all you really have to guess at is where to go in from the sidewalk, if the structure isn't right on the street. Sometimes it's tricky to tell where the mazy paths inside the sidewalk lead, and using your sense of perspective here makes up most of the challenge.

Because there's not much else pressing to do than pick up items and return Constructopedia pages to the right location, and if you ever forget, you can go to a phone booth to remind you where you should go next. Sometimes the game will drop a surprisingly appropriate mini-game on you, which you have to stink up totally in order not to be commended and rewarded.

With the general plot, added to the barely menacing villains, the whole deal never seems to annoy you actively. Occasionally you'll run across a Brickbot, and you nail it by throwing a pizza at it. Ehh? This is not as confusing as the Brickster himself, though, who at least makes himself a distinctive villain. I remember back in the days when Lego men didn't have any facial hair...things were more orderly then. This fellow seems intent on crossing up everything including his own plans. In a fit of badly dialogued hubris, he hands you a skateboard early on which helps you zip twice as fast around town. Frequently when you talk to him he seems to be drunk or laughing maniacally. It gets a bit old scrolling through what he has to say as he frequently approaches you after an important site is rebuilt to discourage you, ending with a flourish of two or three screens of 'Ha ha ha ha ha [hic] ho ho ho' with a heh, huh or [burp] for variety's sake. I remember I made a few of my seedier Lego characters drunks back in the day(it seemed more glamorous and funny then) but I'm assuming grown-ups made this odd decision.

And this sort of thing shows a loopy trend in the tone of the game. The above example is quite funny to an adult who's watched enough paeans to sarcasm and bad art in general, but I think a kid might see through it and roll his eyes. Then a few too many of the Lego characters you meet seem itching to give you the best snappy comeback they can think of to a simple greeting--I never considered doing that. I suppose it livens the game up, and on the whole it seems to work for me. But it does not feel totally honest.

The build-up to the end is one part that definitely works, though. There are a few puzzles where you have to find four of a certain item spread around town, eventually leading to four pieces of a space shuttle. Then once you've visited the jail you'll find the Brickster has fled to Ogel Island where you have a few hoops to jump through before the final confrontation with the Brickster--throwing pizzas at a band of bricks before you get to him. Which is weird since he kidnapped the Brickolinis and forced them to make him pizza.

The mini-games are definitely not small-time as happens all too often in nonviolent games. There may even be a few you want to master. The actual game incorporates them well into the plot, although you can go to your house and replay them any time. Some are part of a trip to Castle or Adventurer Island needed to get through the game, others are the standard fare that seem to get thrown in games with tons of mini-games(concentration, whack-a-mole, Lunar Lander) and near the end there's even a big maze that forces you to be slightly patient and even rely slightly on luck to make the game feel tougher than it was. Once finished you can replay all these until you achieve gold-medal scores, but there are two original concepts near the end that show you the versatility of Legos and creativity on the authors' part: a G-rated pizza-based version of Tapper, where you have to throw empty plates in the garbage, and a platforming sequence with Legos bouncing from the goal above, which could probably be stretched to a whole game.

Of course just about the entire scene is made out of Legos. The deconstructed houses show the floor plan, and roofs and sidewalks have Lego nubs aplenty. The trees reminded me of the ones I used to covet in childhood--perfect circles on top of each other in different widths. I suppose the beach wasn't quite doable, and they had to cheat with the railway car you can commandeer as it turns the corner in tunnels where you can't see, and the vehicles you drive flip when you change directions, but most of the buildings and people and vehicles that pass by follow the conventions except when Pepper bends his leg backwards on a skateboard. There are also plenty of relaxed pleasant tunes as even the breaking news pulses seem on the mellow side. If there were anything I'd like to see more of it would be the space and medieval characters, for which they had too-sparse scenes. But maybe that will be in another game.

Lego Island II at times seems directly ripped from the childhood imaginations of a soul brave enough to reveal the more embarrassing parts to the outside world. Most of the other time it seems too easy. But with the map feature and a full town in a play area that doesn't spill out too far, it is certainly well-executed, and there's a lot to do even if it's easy to figure out. Enough in fact that you don't care whether the corny parts were deliberate(I suspect the part where I turned the police car into a hovercraft after it ran through a forest preserve was a bug,) as the game has built enough playing capital that you can laugh at the bloopers even if you have no Lego-filled past for this game to help you recall.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/29/02, Updated 12/29/02