Lego Island is one of the games I can still nostalgically hold onto from my childhood. While it is, by today's standards, a little outdated, it was pretty great for the time and due to it's charm and laid-back nature can hold up anyway despite that setback. Plus, when diehard fans of no speech Lego games get mad that modern Lego games involve talking and defeat the purpose of LEGO (vs the older but still 2000s games such as Lego Star Wars that do not violate this mantra), I can point to the very first LEGO game and say it's not a new thing.
So, what with the success of The Lego Movie, let's discuss one of the earliest endeavors that set LEGO on this anthropomorphic trend: Is Lego Island scary? The thing is I was never scared of it when I was a kid, but it did feel kind of creepy at the time nonetheless.
Graphical limitations of the time led to all sorts of weird looking things or just bad looking things compared to other parts of the game world. This goes from something as simple as patchy, blurry sort of looking textures to resolution issues to lack of good color contrast or brightness to the way they can depict the LEGO pieces compared to modern LEGO games, film, and TV. Sometimes the world could be just kind of barren, a monotonous color spewed across a single area or part of area (think blue screen/green screen kind of effect) that we now take for amateur computer graphics student work. The LEGO bricks and characters themselves looked just fine, they still do, and I'm not sure how accurate a few of those criticisms are. I haven't played the game in a long time and just took common problems of the time to fill in some of the blanks. Regardless of the gaps in my memory, in many ways, the game still looks fine, but that's not all that contributed to the scary factor anyway.
So, let's move on to things I am 100% sure on. It included LOTS of close ups of characters, they'd often just get right in your face during an encounter in which movement or gameplay was restricted to some degree. There aren't a lot of first person LEGO games, even the sequel didn't follow through on the perspective, and that might be why. Let's also not forget that while plenty of LEGO games make fun of the structure of LEGO with the building mechanics and breaking apart slapstick Lego Island involved a lot more, sometimes kind of random, flipping and changing characters and pieces. They'd roll, they'd break, they'd disappear, they'd transform, sometimes with funny or bizarre sound effects and banter, and it was all intentional rather than glitch issues. I'm sure part of this was to mimic how we often played with them and also, their unrealistic nature. Then again, they'd do it to an extent no real LEGO parts would; I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a character's pant's rectangular connector piece split and the legs made independent or something. Essentially, that piece should remain forever broken. And who can forget the dark looking and scaryish, feeling environments you'd find in the racing minigame [http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/BM_63emd_UQ/maxresdefault.jpg] (which was by far, the biggest offender of the barren, monotonous environment I said earlier just for the ratio between that effect and how big the area for the minigame was), hidden places, the cave [http://www.lugnet.com/pause/techzone/games/legoisland/treasurecave.jpg], and the bad ending [https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/fNSDo__LPQU/mqdefault.jpg]. And the more you explored places like that one cave and that part of the Information Center that the game never particularly encouraged you to go to (I think you had to go take an elevator up), you'd run into this pirate, deep voiced guy telling you all about the hidden things on Lego Island, like his secret treasure. It's not him that could scare some, though he is intended to be an intimidating sort of guy, so much as it is often the music that is meant to accompany him.
If this gem of a game is not scary in general, then is it, at least, a bit frightening for younger kids?
So, what with the success of The Lego Movie, let's discuss one of the earliest endeavors that set LEGO on this anthropomorphic trend: Is Lego Island scary? The thing is I was never scared of it when I was a kid, but it did feel kind of creepy at the time nonetheless.
Graphical limitations of the time led to all sorts of weird looking things or just bad looking things compared to other parts of the game world. This goes from something as simple as patchy, blurry sort of looking textures to resolution issues to lack of good color contrast or brightness to the way they can depict the LEGO pieces compared to modern LEGO games, film, and TV. Sometimes the world could be just kind of barren, a monotonous color spewed across a single area or part of area (think blue screen/green screen kind of effect) that we now take for amateur computer graphics student work. The LEGO bricks and characters themselves looked just fine, they still do, and I'm not sure how accurate a few of those criticisms are. I haven't played the game in a long time and just took common problems of the time to fill in some of the blanks. Regardless of the gaps in my memory, in many ways, the game still looks fine, but that's not all that contributed to the scary factor anyway.
So, let's move on to things I am 100% sure on. It included LOTS of close ups of characters, they'd often just get right in your face during an encounter in which movement or gameplay was restricted to some degree. There aren't a lot of first person LEGO games, even the sequel didn't follow through on the perspective, and that might be why. Let's also not forget that while plenty of LEGO games make fun of the structure of LEGO with the building mechanics and breaking apart slapstick Lego Island involved a lot more, sometimes kind of random, flipping and changing characters and pieces. They'd roll, they'd break, they'd disappear, they'd transform, sometimes with funny or bizarre sound effects and banter, and it was all intentional rather than glitch issues. I'm sure part of this was to mimic how we often played with them and also, their unrealistic nature. Then again, they'd do it to an extent no real LEGO parts would; I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a character's pant's rectangular connector piece split and the legs made independent or something. Essentially, that piece should remain forever broken. And who can forget the dark looking and scaryish, feeling environments you'd find in the racing minigame [http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/BM_63emd_UQ/maxresdefault.jpg] (which was by far, the biggest offender of the barren, monotonous environment I said earlier just for the ratio between that effect and how big the area for the minigame was), hidden places, the cave [http://www.lugnet.com/pause/techzone/games/legoisland/treasurecave.jpg], and the bad ending [https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/fNSDo__LPQU/mqdefault.jpg]. And the more you explored places like that one cave and that part of the Information Center that the game never particularly encouraged you to go to (I think you had to go take an elevator up), you'd run into this pirate, deep voiced guy telling you all about the hidden things on Lego Island, like his secret treasure. It's not him that could scare some, though he is intended to be an intimidating sort of guy, so much as it is often the music that is meant to accompany him.
If this gem of a game is not scary in general, then is it, at least, a bit frightening for younger kids?
