Lego Star Wars PC Game

Rarely do I have time to play any video games that isn’t an online game. But there was one game not too long ago that caught my attention - Lego Star Wars II. Not sure how I missed Lego Star Wars I.

I played the Lego Star Wars II The Original Trilogy PC game last year and it was a blast! It was purchased for my kids only (yeah, right) but it turned out to be a great family game because of some *ahem* modifications. You see, the game was designed for kids and adults 10 and up. My kids are around half the minimum age. As I played it I realized that they won’t enjoy it too much because there were some areas that were downright difficult even for me.

There was this one room where you had to build a huge door and your characters must build it before the stormtroopers kill you. You can respawn after 4 lives but after that, you start the chapter over. There was a way to keep the stormtroopers at bay but only for a short amount of time. When they come back, the stormtroopers just overwhelm you and eventually shoot you, disrupting your Lego brick building work of the giant door. When they shoot your character, all the bricks that had been assembled will go back to the brick pile and you have to start building the door all over again. At the same time, you must keep holding the stormtroopers back.

Since Lego Star Wars II is a two player game, I did have my kid fend off the attackers while I build the door and when that didn’t work we switched places but that didn’t work either. So we stopped playing that chapter of the game and as a result we could not advance to the rest of Episode IV, A New Hope. Fortunately, we could play other chapters in the other two Episodes (V and VI, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi).

I could eventually figure it out like I have done in many games in the past (before kids) but now I had to find other ways of speeding things up and letting my kids finish the game on their own.

(Lego and Lucas Arts reps: Please cover your ears)
So in order to make the game playable for my kids, I needed to find a way to make the characters invincible. The game was relatively new when I purchased it so there weren’t any cheats that I could find. There was a gold brick in the game that would unlock the invincible option. The character would need to find it in the game first. However, even if you did find it, the invincible feature must still be purchased for 1 Million Lego money (or some large amount like that). Since the kids would practically have to finish the game to obtain that many Lego change (called studs in the game) and the kids were stuck on a puzzle at the same time, there was no way they could obtain invincibility right away.

Luckily, I did find hack instructions from someone on the net. The hack allowed the amount of Lego money to be altered. It required editing a binary file, a .com or .exe maybe -I filed the instructions under ‘black hole’. As a result, I had enough Lego money to purchase the invincibility feature, allowing the kids to have their way with the game. So thank you, whoever you are.

With this adjustment, I have allowed a family game even more fun. There are reasons why I think this game became one of the biggest hits last year:

1. Star Wars.
2. Lego.
3. You can have 2 players play side by side on the same keyboard. In most non-networked PC games, you can only have 1 player play at one time.
4. Fun for the whole family 10 and up. (Fun for 4 and up with the modifications).
5. Funny sigh gags in the game and cutscenes.
6. Interesting game play.
7. Ability to use any characters in freeplay once the story mode has been finished.
8. The are a number of interesing "quests" to fulfill even if you finish the story mode. So there is plenty of challenges and gameplay, even if you have to play the same chapters again.
9. Ability to play all kinds of neat characters in freeplay mode. Some of these can be useless, though.
10. Many neat options you can turn on after you find a particular brick and buy the feature with Lego money. For example, some features allow you to use the Force or build bricks faster. Others are silly like giving characters and vehicles glasses, fake nose and mustache disguise.

Not being satisfied with Lego Star Wars II, I tried Lego Star Wars I (Episodes I, II, and III). It isn't as great as II but it was still loads of fun. We've already finished that game too. Wish there was another new Lego Star Wars game available. *Sigh*