Lego Indiana Jones

I'm surprised I've gone so long without yet writing about Lego Indiana Jones. ES got it for his birthday from Grammy. It came in the mail just before we left on our vacation to the Big Island, so we got to check it out before we left.

Now that we're back home and the kids are on summer vacation, that's almost all the boys have wanted to do all day everyday is play Lego Indiana Jones. LW has had to ration them and kick them out of the house to play and make a disaster area of our yard building forts and whatnot.

Lego Indiana Jones (LIJ) is AWESOME. Much like Lego Star Wars (LSW), it does a similarly hilarious job of telling the story of the movie without any dialog - just grunts and gestures and physical comedy. Through exploring LIJ, it dawned on me one of the reasons I liked LSW so much was the puzzle aspect of it. You have to figure out which pieces go where to unlock or remove the obstacles and progress through the game. LIJ has continued that puzzle-solving aspect and even improved on it a bit more. For example, there are more tools that you have to find and use in LIJ. Sometimes, a monkey will be sitting up on a wall holding the tool you need, so first you have to find a banana. If you throw the banana to the monkey, then he'll grab the banana and drop the tool.

Like LSW though, LIJ is very forgiving and playable by small children. You may not unlock all the bonuses or get the highest score, but you can still progress through the storyline just fine.

You can check out the trailer for the video game on my previous post here.

The new secret codeword: JUNIOR

Both boys had been outside playing with the neighborhood kids. ES and our neighbor J decided they wanted to come inside to play LIJ. They didn't want to say it out loud so YB would hear, because then he would want to come in and play, too, and unfortunately it's only a two-player game. So instead, they made up their new secret codeword for LIJ. They came in the house and declared they wanted to play "Lego Junior."

LW and I were perplexed by this and didn't know what the heck they were talking about. (The secret code worked then, right?) Can any of you figure out how they came up with that name?

In The Last Crusade, Indy's father (Sean Connery) calls Indy, "Junior." So instead of saying Lego Indiana Jones, they replaced "Indiana Jones" with "Junior" and called it "Lego Junior." I thought that was pretty clever.