GDC: Lego Batman and Speed Racer

The slog through all the previews I did in and around GDC is almost over. Today, the two games that Warner Bros. Interactive showed off...

Lego Batman (Fall)

First things first: This game is a lot like "Lego Star Wars." And I mean a lot. Imagine "Lego Star Wars" with Batman characters and, well, that's exactly what this game looks like.

And the gameplay? It's mostly the same. Simple fighting. Build bridges, steps, tools, etc. out of Lego pieces lying around.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? "Lego Star Wars" was eminently fun and the whole point of "Lego Batman" is to bring that fun to the world of the caped crusader. So along with Batman and Robin (the only playable heroes I saw, though I'd bet we'll see Batgirl in the final version as well), we get the entire "rogues gallery" -- villains like Joker, Penguin, Scarecrow, Harley Quinn, Catwoman, Killer Croc, etc. In a nice twist, and one that makes sense since there are so many cool villains in the Batman world than heroes, the entire game can be played through in either hero or villain mode, with concomitant heroic or dastardly goals.

There are also some tweaks to the action. The developer from Traveler's Tales (now owned by Warner Bros.) who as there noted that they put a lot of work into the hand-to-hand combat in "Lego Batman," since it's not all about light sabers and blasters as it was in "Lego Star Wars." In addition, Batman has a batarang that can be thrown at different targets in an arc, kind of like Link's boomerang in "Zelda."

The temp music was from the score written by Danny Elfman for the 1989 "Batman" movie. A Warner rep said they haven't decided yet if that will be the final music in the game. If it is, I can only hope it won't repeat so often because I got sick of it in about 20 minutes of playing.

Speed Racer (May)

Kotaku said the game looks a lot like "Wipeout," and it's hard to disagree. Though it also plays kind of like "Burnout," with slo-mo takeout moves, called "car fu," when you slam into an enemy from behind.

It's a pretty basic Wii and DS game that's being made fairly quickly to hit the film's release date (with a PS2 version coming with the DVD in the fall). But it has 15 different tracks (three tracks in five stadiums), each of which can be played three ways and 20 different "Speed Racer" characters. Leads Emile Hirsch, Christine Ricci and Matthew Fox provide their likeness and voice, though since there's not really a story, the v/o work seems limited to pretty standard taunts during the race.

It's the first third party game, and I believe the second game besides "Mario Kart," to use the Wii Wheel -- basically a round piece of plastic that turns the Wii-mote into a steering wheel.

One cool feature: The developers at Sidhe Interactive got the Wachowski Brother's f/x team to provide fully built out drawings of the tracks that we only see portions of in the movie for the game. Some of those had to be significantly scaled back to fit in the game so it didn't take 20 minutes to drive one lap, but it's still a really smart tie-in to the film world.

I also played a DS version, which allows up to 6 person multi-player (as opposed to two-person split screen in the Wii version) and, oddly, has even more tracks than are on the Wii. Though it would seem like you'd use the touch screen for "car fu" take downs, in the same way that you use the Wii Wheel, developers found that was really hard to make work in a simple way and stuck with a button-based mini-game instead.