Lego managed to successfully follow up its highly entertaining and replayable Lego Star Wars games with Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. It plays with the same format as the Lego Star Wars games, looking almost like another sequel than a brand new game, but including new elements that make sense for Indiana Jones, like searching for tools to unlock various parts of levels and repair broken machines, and stealing the bad guys’ weapons and throwing various objects. The two player drop in/drop out co-op is still these games’ strongest element. It’s a format that lends itself to any number of other games with liscenced characters Lego might think to use.

Up until now, Lego has been working with film trilogies. Each game gets a total of eighteen levels, six for each film, which plays through the entire trilogy. Many of the levels are quite extensive and with all of the extra things you can’t get to in story mode, which you have to go back to find in free play, these games are very long and the levels are worth coming back to more than once. Lego Batman: The Video Game comes out in September, and it’ll be the first one not to use this trilogy format. It’s also the first not to be based on films, and it contains its own original story, one in which all of Gotham’s villains escape from Arkam and Batman has to round them all up. I’m interested to see how well the story holds up in comparison to the other games, especially since they already had a road map laid out for them by the film trilogies.

As popular as these games have been (and I imagine Batman will prove to be Lego’s most successful) I doubt Lego will stop with Batman. I’d eventually like to see a return to the film trilogy format, and I have some ideas for candidates that would make very good Lego games.

Lego Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park has a lot of potential for a Lego game because A) It’s a trilogy, B) there are plenty of built in action scenes, C) watching Lego characters get eaten and trampled on by dinosaurs is nothing short of hillarious, and D) it’s another Spielberg property. Both Star Wars and Indiana Jones are Lucasfilm movies, but since Spielberg also partially owns Indiana Jones, it’s possible that might make it easier for Lego to get permission for this game. In fact, they might not even need it– there have been Jurassic Park legos in the past, with their Jurassic Park III line. Keep in mind that Lego only makes video games that it has also made Lego sets for.

The only real problem with a game for the Jurassic Park trilogy is that the films get progressively worse. The most fun in my mind, at least to design, would be the sets from the first film, because we would get to see the whole theme park in Lego. The Lost World was a decent movie and still has Lego potential, but most of it is in the jungle without many structures to work with. Most of what could be built with Legos would be vehicles. And Jurassic Park III… was boring and far too short. They’d be hard pressed to come up with six good levels for that movie, and they’d have even fewer man-made structures to work with. Then again, some of Lego Star Wars’ best levels were from the unforgivable Attack of the Clones, so maybe they could work a miracle.

Some other folks have built some Jurassic Park sets and vehicles out of their own Legos, and they look pretty good. If Lego ever thought to make this game, perhaps some of it would look similar to this.

Lego Harry Potter

I would bet money this game really is coming. Lego already has the rights to Harry Potter, and there are a good number of sets already out from the film series. The problem with making it into one of these games, though, is that it’s much longer than a trilogy. I suppose they could go ahead and release the first three in a game, wait for the last two films, and then make the last four into a game… but that’s lopsided and a little strange. More likely, they’ll wait for the last two movies and then release one very large game. Seven films broken into six levels apiece would have been too much for the PS2 and XBox, but the nextgen systems could handle it, as evidenced by the fact that both Lego Star Wars have been released as one big game on those systems just recently.

A lot of new concepts would probably need to be introduced– I wonder how magic wands would work in a Lego version? Probably a lot like the Force. Something glows, you point your wand at it, it explodes and studs pop out, or you move it to build something. But wands do all kinds of other things in Harry Potter, so it would be interesting to see how it was handled. The Quidditch scenes would probably be a lot like the ship battle scenes in Star Wars. Every film has a lot of potential for interesting levels, and unlike with Jurassic Park III, these movies would be hard to break down into only six levels apiece. 

The Lego Matrix

A lot of fans have envisioned this one too, and there are several Lego Matrix fan videos (most of them not especially impressive) on YouTube. Whether you like the last two movies are not, this is a trilogy where every film lends itself to a game like this. The first film has the big hellicopter sequence, the second has the fight with a bazillion Agent Smiths and the fight on the freeway, and the last film has the epic battle for Zion. Getting to see Legos in bullet time is reason enough to make this game, and I imagine, if it could ever get off the ground, it would be one of Lego’s biggest sellers and maybe even the best Matrix video game, considering some of those that have come before it. One thing that could hurt this as a possibility though, is that it would promote a Rated R franchise.

Lego Back to the Future

As far as action scenes go, this would be more in the vein of Lego Indiana Jones, where goons would run into a room and you’d punch them all to pieces. And the problem there is that really all the bad guys would be either Biff or Biff’s thugs. Other than figuring out who Marty and the Doc would fight though, a lot of really neat Lego sets could be built and as classic as these movies are, all three with plenty to offer a Lego game, the best part would be the animated film sequences in between levels. This one would be great for the co-op because you could be Marty and the Doc most of the time. The Lego games have also used their films’ music throughout the levels, and Back to the Future would be great for that, as well. Maybe it would even give Huey Lewis a comeback. Like The Matrix, there haven’t been Back to the Future Legos before, but I think it could happen, especially with the mass nostalgia around today.

Lego Spider-Man and Lego X-Men

Both have three movies. Both have a lot of characters, especially X-Men, which would work in their favor, as it’s good to have a lot of people to unlock and choose between in free play mode. One of them already has Legos, and that’s Spider-Man. If I had to guess, I’d say Lego Spider-Man is probably the next game that really will come out. The X-Men films would lend themselves better to a game, I think, again because of all the characters, but also because of the sets. The Lego X mansion, Lego Cerebro, Lady Liberty from the first movie, Stryker’s base from the second… and although X-Men: The Last Stand was pretty awful, I think it would still make for some cool levels, especially Magneto moving the bridge and some of the stuff with the Phoenix. We haven’t seen Legos have to push against wind yet… for that matter, we haven’t seen a Lego with a healing factor yet! But Spider-Man could be fun, too. Lego web-slinging sounds hillarious.

Regardless of what gets made, the sky is really the limit. We’ve all imagined our favorite films, comics, and tv shows as Legos. Virtually every property has its own Mini-Mate set (or some equvialent) now, and although those lines are really funny, you have to assume we have our nostalgia for Legos to thank for a desire to see cute, plastic, disproportionate versions of our favorite charcters.

Mini-Mates Back to the Future

Mini-Mates 24

Mini-Mates Star Trek

Mini-Mates Rocky

I don’t know if a Lego Rocky game would work or not… but it seems to me that if Mini-Mates could get the rights to so many liscenced characters, Lego shouldn’t have a problem.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

We can’t completely blame– I mean credit– John Romita Jr. for this. After all, he’s the artist and Dan Slott is writing the thing. Who knows what exactly their creative process is for inventing new characters. But even if Slott invented the guy all by himself… Romita’s visual design isn’t helping matters much.

It’s Venom. But it’s not. Well, it’s a symbiote. But it’s different. Whatever.

Anti-Venom will make his comic book debut this summer in Amazing Spider-Man #568, as just reported a few hours ago on ew.com. Yep, this isn’t a joke– he’s really called Anti-Venom. Why do they call him Anti-Venom, you ask?? Um… because they’ve completely run out of ideas? Honestly, I don’t know. You’ll have to read it to find out. But even after you get past all the fan arguments (who seem mostly to be in agreement) that this is rehashing and just milking an old character (and yes, I too would agree) you have to wonder about practical application. What exactly is anti about him? He’s another alien symbiote with a spider on his chest and a giant, monster mouth. Maybe he’s anti in the sense that he’s nowhere near as cool-looking as Venom. He’s the opposite because he’s ugly and pathetic, rather than actually being Venom’s true opposite. Venom’s real opposite is Spider-Man… or maybe even Carnage. I guess the name works if the point is to have a really crappy looking Venom… not sure it’ll sell comics, but I’m not entirely convinced that’s Marvel’s biggest goal these days. In Civil War, Spider-Man revealed his identity, Iron Man got completely out of character rounding up anti-registry superheroes , and they killed Captain America… seems like Marvel’s made a lot of bad moves. Maybe after all of that we should be expecting silly things like an Anti-Venom.

I would probably have to read the book to be sure of this, but it doesn’t even look clever in a campy, comic kind of way. Anybody remember Anti-Spawn? In the early Spawn comics, there was a character sent by Heaven to eradicate spawn called the Anti-Spawn (he was actually Jason Wynn if I remember correctly). He had an awesome blue, armored costume that was completely different from Spawn’s, but what I loved about it was his belt. He actually had a logo of Spawn’s head with a slash through it. He was literally Anti-Spawn. Later they changed his name to Redeemer, which I admit sounds less-hokey. Maybe I just liked seeing a little camp in the middle of this very dark, graphic and brooding comic. Also the reason I loved psycho-plasm, which they later also changed to necro-plasm. But again, this guy doesn’t look like an anti-Venom… he just looks like a badly drawn Venom with  a different logo. I guess his costume is white and that’s the opposite of black… but that’s about it.

Carnage was an off-shoot of Venom and though you could argue they were just milking the symbiote idea, he was an entirely new and interesting character. Carnage was the one person Venom hated more than Spider-Man and he was fascinating because he was a serial killer who killed entirely for sport. He was a psycho almost in the vein of a Batman villain. He also had a MUCH different look and a his symbiote behaved differently. So I’m not saying you can’t get new, fresh ideas from old sources. I am saying that the Venom source is pretty well spent. If anything, Anti-Venom needs to be a new villain for VENOM, not Spider-Man, and unfortunately there’s no longer a monthly Venom series. If there were, I don’t think any of us would complain so much.

Oh, and to answer Peter’s thought at slashfilm.com… Anti-Venom in the new Spidey film? No chance. Anti-Venom won’t sell comics, much less a movie. He’ll be forgotten about long before it goes into production.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan