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The Justice Files

Sunday, April 13, 2014

LEGO The Hobbit: First Impressions

Let's get this out of the way -- with two exceptions, I'm a total fanboy of Traveler's Tales LEGO games.  The exceptions are Bionicle, which was incredibly boring and repetitive, and LEGO Indiana Jones 2, which tried to introduce a large-scale hub, but failed miserably by making map locations look too similar to each other, hiding many of the story locations and by not providing a map that could be referenced to find the various story locations for free play mode.  (TT fixed the large-scale hub mechanic beautifully in LEGO The Lord of the Rings.)

I've put about ten hours into LEGO The Hobbit, and my impressions are favorable, though they've changed the approach significantly from LOTR.  The biggest thing you will notice is that the hub area does not allow you to change up the members of your party as you can if you choose to replay a level in Free Play mode.  I'm sure this opens up once you've completed the story, but it is a change that's a bit hard to get used to.  I'm sure TT chose to do this in order to keep the story's continuity, and after mentally fighting it for a few hours, I've come to like and even embrace the approach.  I'm about one-third of the way through the story at this point and as a result of this I have none of the red bricks that allow you to turn on the game's Extras.  (Extras are power-ups and cheats, essentially, that allow you to earn the game's stud currency at amazing rates, give you hints regarding upgrade and quest items, and other goodies.)

If you played LEGO LOTR, then many of the locations will be familiar, since this prequel story takes place in the same Middle Earth as LOTR, but decades earlier.  But, as you would expect, there are differences.  For example: one of the puzzle caves in LOTR that was dark and cobweb-filled, is fresh and bright in Hobbit.

Like LOTR, you have a large number of side-quests where people ask you to craft them various mithral items, but there are additional quests where you are asked to bring back assorted treasures found in the story levels.  Each of the game's sixteen levels has four treasures to be found, along with a hidden set of blueprints and the requisite ten MiniKit pieces.  Many of the treasures can be used by your characters to give them abilities they wouldn't normally have, like the mithral items that can be crafted.

Crafting in Hobbit is a much larger game element than it was in LOTR.  All of the mithral items that you can create in the Bree forge now require several other materials in addition to mithral bricks.  These new materials -- there appear to be over a dozen different types of them -- are gathered throughout the game by smashing objects and then walking or jumping to them like you do with studs.  The forge has a new build mechanic where button presses fly into a set of concentric circles and you must time your presses to match when the button icons hit the inside of the circles.  Hitting the outside ring will yield a "good" item, but hitting the innermost ring every time will yield a "perfect" item.  I've only crafted perfect items so far -- it's not hard to do -- so I'm not sure what the difference is.

But wait, there's even more crafting using these new items: scattered throughout the game, both in the hub and in the story levels, are build-it challenges that require a variety of materials including jewels, lumber, rope, stone, fish and other foodstuffs.  These build-it challenges use the same "match the needed item from the build ring" mechanic that was introduced in The LEGO Movie Videogame.

Hobbit is big, residing on the same hub area as LOTR.  So far the stories are engaging, the puzzles interesting and occasionally frustrating, as is typical of TT games.  There are a few puzzles where getting a mithral brick requires that your character be destroyed, dumping a thousand or so of your accumulated studs on a floor full of spikes.  Similarly, there are a few puzzles where, as far as I can tell, you are required to plug in a second controller in order to solve them -- places where one player must stand on a pressure plate while another crosses a spear-encrusted threshold, for example.  Just having a player stand on a pressure plate and then switching characters won't work because you get far enough from the pressure plate to cause the first character to follow you, releasing the deadly spikes.

Overall, this is a fun addition to the LEGO family and Traveler's Tales has introduced a few new gameplay ideas to keep the game fresh.  While I haven't completed it yet, I give it a strong recommendation for anyone that's a fan of the franchise.

Now Twitching!

I'm not a big watcher of Twitch.TV, but there are a lot of folks that are.  So I've bitten the bullet and started a Twitch channel.

I'll try to only broadcast when I think it will be something interesting, like a game that just dropped, a really bad game that I can camp on with commentary or any Kinect game -- because seeing a 325 lb., 51 year-old dude playing Kinect can be pure gold.

I'll add my channel to the links bar, but here it is: http://www.twitch.tv/ColdJusticeXBL/

If you are a reader of this blog, be sure to give me a shout out in Twitch chat.

Thursday, April 03, 2014

The colors of gaming

With the introduction of the Xbox, Microsoft chose alien green for their DVD cases and a green so dark it was almost black for the console and controllers. While the consoles have moved on to whites and blacks, green has been the defining color of an Xbox title.

With the introduction of the PS3, Sony moved from basic black cases to a Mediterranean blue, along with a subtle matching change to the official PlayStation logo.

Nintendo, beginning with the Wii, decided a stark, clean-room white would be the defining color for their titles -- an obvious bid to keep Apple at bay if only for the stylistic chaos it would cause.

What will be the next color of gaming? Will Amazon introduce gold cases -- or will they forego physical distribution entirely. Steam doesn't need a color, since it is a digital distribution model to start with.

And what of Apple? We know they've been brooding about the gaming market for over a decade. With Nintendo stealing their white thunder, where will they go? The original almond (*gak!*) color of the Apple ][? Or perhaps a retro slate in homage to the first Macintosh display scheme?

What new colors are likely to be added to the gaming spectrum in the next few years?