Growing up, my little sister and I used to spend our free weekend mornings playing Indiana Jones Lego games on the Xbox. We did not grow up playing video games, but we did spend a lot of our time watching movies, and we loved the Indiana Jones movies.
Like the other Lego games, this one takes you through various Lego versions of the scenes in Indiana Jones, completing tasks to collect artifacts. Once you’ve collected all the artifacts, you’ve won the game. The mechanics are pretty simple: you can run, jump, punch, collect coins, lives, and helpful kits, and build piles of legos into useful items or artifacts. I think this ease of play and simplicity is what we loved about the game; we weren’t gamers and didn’t want to spend all of our time figuring out how to work the game.
As far as the dynamics, the challenge arose from whatever time pressure the bad guys were putting on us or something like trying to get Indiana through a tricky physical obstacle course with a boulder chasing him. It was a great two-player game because at each level, Indy had different sidekicks with him helping him with building or fighting off the bad guys. Finally, the storyline of Indiana Jones is always very dramatic but very humorous at the same time, engaging us between levels.
Overall, these mechanics and dynamics combined to create a great sense of fun for my sister and me. There are a few core aesthetics that kept bringing us back to the game each time: sensation, narrative, challenge, fellowship, and submission. We really enjoyed the sensations of listening to the Lego noises and the iconic soundtrack. The ability to work together to a task and progress through each level to further explore the story made it a stable passtime for us.
