Customer Reviews

Lego Star Wars

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Star Wars is undoubtedly one of the most popular fantasy franchises in the world. Legos are certainly some of the most successful children's toys in the world. So what happens when you put popular fiction together with famous building blocks? Pure enjoyment, that's what!

Lego Star Wars renders the people, places, and events of the Star Wars prequel films in a block-built universe. With an aesthetic that leans heavily on actual Star Wars Lego kits, the game closely follows the epic plot of Episodes I, II, and III.

Everything starts in Dexter's Diner, a locale that received brief attention in Attack of the Clones. There you can or interact with all unlocked characters, select levels to play and replay, or order up extras, codes, hints, and more at the counter.

As you progress through the chapters of each episode, you unlock new characters and collect hidden Lego part canisters and Lego "bits". The parts come together to form mini-kits and collecting sufficient bits in each level gets you parts for a super-kit. When completed, each kit resembles one of Legos real Star Wars offerings. If you head outside the diner you can even examine the kits you've collected in the parking lot.

There are several main character types with different skills. Jedi can deflect blaster bolts and use the force to manipulate Lego blocks and push enemies. Blaster-equipped characters can use their grapple guns to reach out-of-the-way locations. Droids can open special doors and are immune to attack.

Some characters even have unique abilities. Jar Jar Binks can jump higher than most. Astromech droids like R2-D2 can deactivate other droids and fly for a short time. Sith like Darths Maul and Sidious can use the dark side of the force to manipulate some objects that jedi cannot.

The variety is important because progress often requires the combination of different character. What's more, many of the mini kit pieces can't be reached without replaying levels using different characters than originally intended.

Some of those puzzles are challenging, so you'll probably appreciate that you can't really die. When the last of your hearts is taken from you, you'll simply explode non-violently into a pile of Lego components. You'll suffer a penalty in bits lost, but you'll immediately regenerate at the same spot. This keeps the momentum of the game going no matter what.

The ability to have a second player join and drop out at any time helps a lot too. Some parts of the game are easier with just one player but most are more fun with two. The game lends itself to teamwork and demands problem solving which is easier with two heads than one. Though this feature is harder to take advantage of on the Mac than on consoles, it's still an awesome innovation.

Though this Mac port has a lot of advantages over the console versions - such as better graphics and much faster load times - control is not one of them. If you don't already have one, this is a game worth buying a controller for. It's less expensive than most games, so you should have enough left over to pick up a console adapter or a USB game pad.

Other than that, the game is awesome and incredibly addictive. It's a lot of fun for gamers of all ages. It's easy enough for kids to win, yet it poses challenges even to adult players. Here's hoping that the Episode IV teaser at the end is a sign that a sequel covering the original Star Wars films is on the way!

the manufacturer needs to state upfront that the game will not run on the new intel based macs. I too called Aspyr and they said they are trying to come up with a patch, but don't know when that will happen. As of now it is not high on their priority list. We would not have purchased had we known.

My son has played this on PC with his friends and loves it, (and no one had any seizures!) Very disappointing not to be able to play it on his mac, and I am out 30 bucks.

And, no

This is an excellent game. My son delights in playing it whenever he is able. We have a long saga about this game,but the general gist of it is: the hardware requirements need to be much more explicit prior to purchase. My husband literally purchased a new computer, just in order to play this game and found that not even a new computer had the required hardware. We bought hardware and had a friend install it, only to find that it didn't work either. That was with the PC version. We were delighted when the Mac version was released and bought it hoping to play it on my relatively new computer, but to no avail! Finally, we found another person's computer that has more RAM and my son is able to play it finally. Needless to say, it has been difficult for our son to remain patient. He has loved Star Wars since he was six. He loves the game. And, it has been a two year saga of failed attempts until recently. Even now, it is not ideal. And, he is grateful that he CAN play his game (now that we own both versions, though neither work at home!!)

Please do parents who might be considered "technically challenged" a favor---be explicit with the technical requirements in BOLD prior to purchase. Thank you!

Just be aware it does NOT work on the MAC Mini with the dual core chip. Only "OLD" MAC products. I've called the manufacturer of the game to verify this. "Maybe" in the future, but obviously not now. A shame as that's what a lot of kids are getting these days as an inexpensive but quality computer.

My 10-year old hopes that in September, when they release Part 2 of this game it will work.

I had a lot of fun with this game. The charactars are very fun to play with. The blaster people (ex.Jango, Royal Guard) are really good attackers because they are good at aiming but are not so good at defending. They usually have an ability to use their guns as grappleing hooks.The lightsaber charactars (ex.Darth Maul, Mace Windu) are good at both attacking and defending. All of them except Greivous can use the force. BEWARE. Gonk droids may be indestructable but have no purpose what so ever. I really don't like a level called Gunship Cavalry. At some point in it you have a time limit and if time runs out you automaticly blow up in your gunship. If you get all the miniikt pieces in any level you get tons of blue studs. (This is good) If get true jedi status in every single level you get a superkit which unlocks some of Episode Four. Whats cool is that you can have two people playing at one time. You start out in Dexter's Diner where you start out as Qui Gon Jinn. Over time you can collect lego extras and more people. Also, you can enter in a code for a specific charactar and then buy him/her/it. You have to beat Episode 1 Negotiations to unlock Episode II and Episode III. If you are being overwhelmed by an enemy attack press and hold the attack/defend button.

My 5-1/2 year old can't get enough of this game! I have to ration his playing time. Game play gets 5 stars.

Technical/support issues:
1) If you install under "Dad's Account" on your Mac, the game may fail to launch when your Mac is switched into "Junior's Account" because you probably (wisely) made Junior's account a non-admin account, so his account can't write to the application folder. Fix this by logging back into Dad's account, clicking on the outermost application folder (e.g. Applications\Lego Star Wars), pressing cmd-I, and changing the permissions to "everyone: read and write." Aspyr doesn't say anything about this; I had to google to find it.
2) Aspyr and Apple's website don't clearly state the system requirements. It _does_ run on an Intel Mac (we're running it on a 2 GHz Intel iMac) with the available patch.
3) The default keyboard layout for the controls is backwards. Player 2's controls are on the left of the keyboard, even though the player's score and icon are on the right.
4) The default keyboard layout puts the two players' control keys right next to each other, so the players are constantly bumping hands. Makes for some great RSI after a few minutes of playing.
5) It takes about 10 steps to exit the game properly when it's time to quit. Each player has to leave the game, then you have to exit to Dexter's Diner, then you have to exit, then exit again. Each time there are "are you sure?" prompts. It's as bad as trying to leave Ikea!
6) Game saving and level selection are non-intuitive. You have to actually RTFM to figure it out :)
7) It's possible for a kid to get "stuck" in the "Control Options" screen, where you have to hit fn-F1 to restore the default keys and _then_ press Esc to return to the game. Very non-intuitive.
8) As a corollary to #7, Macs default to requiring the "fn" modifier key in order to use the F1 and F2 keys necessary to join the game. Non-intuitive for kids. Aspyr should have chosen different keys.
9) The Display Options screen doesn't display widescreen options. You have to launch the application with the Shift key held down to select widescreen resolution and fullscreen options.

These annoyances almost drag it down to an overall 3-star rating, but the game play really is very good, and keeps it at 4 stars.

[Copied here from a blog post of mine as this will be of interest to any OS X user buying this game]

I really dislike buying desktop computer games. The software quality is poor, and the vendor support is usually lousy.

Unfortunately my 9yo prefers Mac games to Wii games, so when he's earned a big incentive for overcoming a real challenge, we end up with another OS X game.

It's just as well there are so few of them.

The latest problem came with Aspyr's Lego Star Wars (DVD) (Mac) (2005). After I'd installed it my son couldn't play. It started up oddly, with a long video loop. A key press produced a gray screen, then the loop resumed. Finally it crashed.

So what was the problem? There's nothing like this on the Aspyr site and the only update patch is a long delayed and apparently troublesome fix supporting native execution on Intel Macs. I was running the game on my PPC G5 Mac.

I suspected a security/privileges bug. Game vendors, who usually outsource development to very junior engineers in international markets, rarely bother with security models. They build to the usual XP assumption (everyone runs as admin) then port the game to OS X.

Sure enough, from my admin account the game worked. I suspect the game tries to write to the Application folder. That's a no-no. Non-admin users on my system, including my usual account, don't have write privileges in the global Application folder.

I could have reinstalled to the user-specific application folder, but then the other kid accounts on the family machine would need their own installs. Since Leopard gives more control over permissions, I could have installed in a folder that everyone could write to.

In our case though I have an external drive with open space. OS X doesn't enforce permissions on external drives, so after installing there everyone could use it.

PS. On my G5 the game defaulted to lowest resolution. I set it to the penultimate resolution and it worked find and looked MUCH better.

I purchased this for my 6 year old who loves Legos and Star Wars. It has been a huge hit. After he plays the game he then likes to go build all the stuff he saw in the game. So it actually makes him use his brain a bit! I play with him as well and it makes me feel like a kid. Nice work.

If you'd like a game that you can play with your young child at the same time this is a great one. My son is four years old and he absolutely loves this. Characters never die so you can play as long as you like. It also has challenges for the adults. It's cute while also action packed. Clearly, this is not a game for the hardcore gamer but a lot of good fun.

We had problems with this game, which is annoying given that we just bought a G5. Either it didn't load properly or this game harkens back to the way computers were in the mid-80s - where you had to figure out how to do things (which key to push in an utterly counter-intuitive manner) to get it to work; for example,the only way we found to exit was to hold the tab key for a time rather than press it once (yes, some of it works by pushing some buttons longer than others, not that you would guess which button does what anyway). For whatever reason, we do not have a cursor in this. Nonethless, my son is figuring it out and enjoying it greatly, to the extent that he wants to play it first thing in the morning. It is also not too violent - baddies vanish in a puff of smoke when hit - which my wife was worried about.

Recommended, but it isn't easy to use.