I must be in my second childhood. Either that or I’m still in my first one. I love Lego games. Lego Video Games, to be specific.  I have dozens of them on several different platforms, with PC recently becoming my platform of choice for playing them–primarily because I can play most of them in three-screen “surround” mode.  This gives me the closest I’ll probably ever be able to get, personally, to a VR Lego experience.  With my one bad eye, I just don’t get the whole VR experience with real VR when I’ve used it.  I just get a headache after and hour inside that world and things get really blurry.  But with three regular screens providing one very very wide game screen, I think I get close enough to that experience and I can enjoy it for many hours at a time with no blurriness or headaches.

My favorite Lego game is still Lego Worlds.  I’ve been playing it for years.  Other players complain that it’s very limited and just the same old stuff over and over and just a grind to reach the 100 gold bricks required to unlock all of the tools to play the game, and I guess they think that’s the goal – 100 gold bricks and you’re done.  I disagree.  That’s what I would consider the FIRST goal.  Unlocking all of the tools is essential, yes, but that just enables the ability to do everything in the game.  There are still hundreds and hundreds of other items to acquire in the game–minifigs, brick builds, brick types, etc., and all of those enable even more things you can do in the game, including building entire worlds of your own if you want to.  It’s truly unlimited, with an almost infinite amount of procedurally-generated worlds containing any amount of mix between many different biome-types (old west, Christmasland, Candyland, the moon and many more–or even just start with a completely flat, empty landscape and go nuts!).  It allows you to bring any of the minifigs you discover to life, dropping them into any world or your own worlds and interacting with them all you want.  Give them an army of vehicles and weapons and see what they do… Spawn a hundred zombies and watch them swarm… I love it.  I’ve played Minecraft and I know how awesomely huge that game has gotten, and that’s great.  I’ve playing in there for hours on end as well, but I lack a lot of the creativity that it demands.  You only have simple square blocks to build your worlds with in Minecraft.  Sure, there are tons of different types of those blocks to work with, and even many more you can craft by mixing them together, but in the end you still have to build things one block at a time and to me it’s just too tedious and I can’t seem to create anything worthwhile without spending way more time than I have trying and re-trying until I get a result I like.  Sure, Lego Worlds allows you to build brick-by-brick, just like you can in Minecraft, but that’s just the beginning.  You can instantly place complete “brick builds” anywhere you want, which are previously-built structures of Legos, making it simple to create a world to your liking in a very short time–or take you time to get everything perfect.  You can even build a nice structure or area (for example a park) and save it as a brick build to use in another world or in the same world as many times as you like.

Anyway, that’s the gist of Lego Worlds.  I have many (most) of the other Lego video games as well, but none are as free-playing and open as Lego Worlds is.  Most of them offer their own unique worlds that you can eventually free-play in, once you reach their main game goals, and the stories and voice acting is great and much different, but I always come back to Lego Worlds.  I seem to be in the minority though, and I just can’t figure out why.  Here’s my Lego Worlds stats on each platform I play it on:

I’m currently working hard on the PC version, always trying to inch closer and closer to obtaining 100% of everything. I’ve never been there, but maybe some day I’ll have 100% of something at least. On all of the console versions my game save has gotten corrupted at one point or another, forcing me to start over completely from the beginning.  The console versions also have limited number of worlds you can have saved at once, then you have to start cleaning up and deleting old worlds before you can save any more.  The PC version has never corrupted my save though, it has always worked and I haven’t ever had an issue with running out of save space for new worlds.  I think I have hundreds of worlds created in it now, and I’m always creating more.  They form a sort of spiral galaxy, endlessly building out and around in an oval shape as you create more and more worlds, so it’s pretty neat. The PC version was also the very first to be released, if my memory serves me. There was a beta version for quite awhile and it was pretty undone back then, as I recall, but I started playing it anyway–without a controller. That was even before I started playing “real” PC games.