The last time I visited Warner Bros. at E3 was in 2007, when they were showing Duck Amuck for the DS. I remember being surprised by how ingeniously creative the game was. Too bad it ended up being not that fun, but even so the creative design was mostly what had me interested anyway. This year I was given the chance to visit Warner Bros. again and I was shocked once more by the level of creativity they presented. The most prominent title Warner Bros. was showcasing for a Nintendo system was LEGO Rock Band. If you want to read about that, check out the Music Games impressions article by The Sound Defense already published.
After that, I had the chance to check out LEGO Battles, which is easily among the most expansive games ever to be released on the DS. It started out as three separate, complimentary titles that each featured two campaigns in one of LEGO’s famous universes. The settings were LEGO Space, LEGO Castle and LEGO Pirate. Fortunately for us, Warner Bros. decided that they didn’t want to push three games on the market all at once, and didn’t see them selling equally or in enough quantities to benefit each other. Instead, all three full games were squeezed onto the largest game cartridge Nintendo makes. Now in this one game there are six full campaigns, six playable armies with an ally army for each, 90 levels of single player action, dozens and dozens of unlockable units, 24 fully rendered cutscenes and something like 30 multiplayer maps. Now even if the gameplay is just passable, that’s a pretty outstanding value.
But even better than passable, the game actually looks like a lot of fun. Christopher Mair, the CEO of Hellbent Games who developed LEGO Battles, was present at E3 to give the demonstration. He described the game to me as a sort of Age of Empires for kids, but since I didn’t see any elements of progressing from one level of technology to another, it may be more accurate to describe it as a Red Alert 2 for kids. Now when I say it’s for kids, I don’t mean that the game has been dumbed down. The campaigns are bound to be much easier, but certainly the complexity is still mostly there and in the multiplayer, battles are just as intense as they ever were in Red Alert. Mair told me that often he would start up the game to look for a specific bug and lose hours in a campaign, and the multiplayer was so enjoyable that he and the other employees at Hellbent Games would often compete with each other while on breaks or even when they should have been doing work.
I am actually really looking forward to this. I have a friend whose kids are into the DS, and though they can’t compete with me in Mario Kart, we might be able to play together with this.
Scribblenauts, the other incredible game in the Warner Bros. booth, was most impressive for its dictionary of tens of thousands of items. The simple goal of the game is to find and collect the starite in each level. The level I played through was simply to get to the other side of a wall. You could reach it by going under it, over it or through it. I went over with a ladder and a rope, but another reporter that was with me at the time went through with a shovel. Another article online demonstrated the use of a dolphin to swim underwater to reach the other side. Any of these items can be obtained simply by typing them into the game’s interface. Anything you type is guaranteed to appear. The closest I got to stumping the dictionary was telehandler which instead gave me an excavator. At least the game recognized the word, though, and that is pretty impressive.
Also impressive is the way each of these objects can interact with nearly every other object. I also summoned a welder and a falafel, which I fed to the welder. I saw another journalist summon a long list of expensive medical equipment and then give a cat an MRI. In a video of the game, one set of journalists summoned a kraken and watched it devour a stegosaurus. The possibilities with this game are almost endless, and with a built-in level creation tool, it may be like a cuter Little Big Planet for the DS. This is sure to be a huge hit when it comes out this fall.
