Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You know how Minecraft is a bit like the world’s biggest and most elaborate Lego set? Except here you start with more green and brown blocks than even Simon Lego himself owns. Well, monolithic megacorp, Mojang, are discussing a deal with the Danish blockmasters to release official Minecraft Lego. They are only next door to the Swedish devs, after all. The news comes via Mojang bod Daniel Kaplan’s Twitter feed, who reports that they’ve gotten past the first stage of Lego’s peculiar means of developing specific themed packs. Via LEGO CUUSOO, someone’s idea for a Lego set appears in a Kickstarter-style site, except here all people are pledging is their support for the idea. Get to 10,000 votes and the idea gets looked at by Lego. And now Kaplan reports they are now chatting with Mojang about the prospect.

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Hooray! A Batman game that won’t use the word ‘bitch’ every five seconds, though God only knows what all the cutsey, wordless Lego-dude chuntering really means. “Oh great Satan, dark lord of my heart, let me worship you, let me consume the souls of the innocent and strangle kittens in your honour” – that’s what Lego Commissioner Gordon’s really saying, I bet.

So, Lego Batman 2: DC Superheroes has maybe been outed, at least if this oddly stark image on Bricktuts.com is to believed. (Uncropped full version of the above pic with more stuff here). If it is accurate, it also means Batman’s bringing all his special friends to the build’n'smash party – which no doubt would mean even more open, joyful silliness than the first game. Lego Superman – i.e. invincible flying man who can destroy any object – must be be a conceptual nightmare, mind.

An increasing number of massively multiplayer games are offering free entry into their worlds but it stands to reason that, more often or not, gangs of salesman will be roaming inside, or at the very least there will be equivalent of concession stands littered about the place, stocked with pricey but powerful socks and the like. Lego Universe began offering a free trial back in June and these short months later, the announcement reaches us that the game is shutting down.

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Whenever another MMO announces that it’s changing to a free to play subscription model, the sound of rapid intakes of breath can be heard throughout corridors of Castle Shotgun like some panicked zephyr. We just can’t believe it. There’s an alternate reality out there where all MMORPGs are free to play and it’s trying to break into ours.

Hot on the heels of the City of Heroes announcement, we’ve heard that child-friendly MMO Lego Universe is doing something similar, but a bit stingier. Where City of Heroes is letting anybody play for free up to level 50, this August Lego Universe will allow anybody to go romping through the game’s first two adventures zones for as long as they like.
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Things that are good + LEGO = Happiness. It’s a sum we were all taught in school, and it’s as true today as it ever was. So when a clever person, Catsy [CSF], builds a customised GLaDOS and Chell out of LEGO, I’m so sold. Have a look at a couple of the splendid results below.

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Despite feeling a little lukewarm towards the release-month accomplishments of Lego Universe, we’re still keen to keep an eye on it. And the game – which was fairly small on release – is expanding. The latest reveal shows off Crux Prime, which shows skeleton minfigs mining on asteroids, and which reportedly contains some kind of martial arts monastery where players can learn “Spinjitzu”. This is, apparently, related to the real-world toys’ new Ninjago line, which features ninjas and the undead in conflict. The new zone will contain 100 new missions and will appear in the game in a few weeks time.

There’s a lovely trailer for Crux Prime just here.

From now on, RPS will be exclusively dedicated to revealing hitherto unsuspected man-crushes on celebrities and tracking their every movement, Perez Hilton-style. You’re okay with that, right? Here we go: “Cube-faced, pencil-armed pin-up Johnny Depp took a break from being automatically cast in any and all Tim Burton films today to stroll down the Champs-Élysées whilst wearing a fetching distressed double-denim combo…”

Ahahah. Just my little joke. RPS doesn’t fancy men. Or women. RPS is, in fact, entirely incapable of sexual attraction to anyone or anything. Though we do get a little emotional about toffee cheescake sometimes. In fact, this post is about LEGO Pirates Of The Caribbean. You may be able to see what I did there.
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Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars looks pretty incredible. Really, go take a look, below.
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I’ve spent rather a lot of time of late in the lands of Lego Universe, the kid-friendly MMO from Auto Assault creators, NetDevil. It’s been out for a couple of weeks now, so how does the brick-built world fare? Read on to find out Wot I Think.

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Whoa, the backstory for the Lego Universe MMO is the same as the plot for Roadside Picnic. It’s (roughly) true! Check out the new trailer, below.

John is on this one, by the way, so we should have a review coming up later in the month. Healing notwithstanding. I had a play too and, despite some generic MMO elements, it’s got a lot of intriguing ideas.
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There’s a new video up over on the main Lego Universe site which shows a bit more of the building procedures in the game. For me it’s this stuff – rather than the standard “hit bads for XP” MMO material – that is really interesting. This is kind of a CG mock up, rather than in-game footage, but it’s worth browsing over this and the other videos there to get a broader picture. I get the feeling that the quest stuff is largely going to be secondary, and that – if we’re lucky – it’ll be the user-created content aspect of LU that will really shine. I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed for this one, not because of LEGO so much, because developers NetDevil have much to prove.