E3 09: LEGO Indiana Jones 2

My encounter yesterday with LEGO Indiana Jones was as exciting as I've come to expect from the Telltale Games Traveler's Tales folks, and - also as we've come to expect - featured incremental improvements to design and gameplay.

For starters, while you'll revisit the first three chapters in the Indian Jones tetrology, you won't be playing through any recycled levels: the movies' plots have been completely re-re-imagined, more vehicle missions or mini-missions have been added, and there's now a disco ball where the spirit of God's vengeance once resided - in the Ark of the Covenant.

That's right, a disco ball. Rather than try to recreate a scary scene of plastic face-melting, Telltale Traveler's Tales has opted for what is quite possibly the most gay-friendly alternative imaginable: instead of dying horribly when the Ark is opened, Indy and the Nazis begin disco dancing. The divine disco ball rises into the air and sends out the same ghostly rays as you remember from the film, but with less gruesome results. Fun.

Each movie gets five levels, and the new Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls segment has three hubs. Indy's whip has also been improved - he can now tie up whipped baddies who'll remain immobilized for a brief time.

Building your own levels looks like a mountain of fun - crystal skull aliens raise and lower terrain and water levels, and you can smack down interactables, LEGO buildables, and create your own LEGO adventure which you'll be able to share, although at the moment sharing is only possible with physical portable media such as a memory card.

One of the best improvements to the LEGO concept is the addition of split-screen coop. Nothing's more frustrating than running toward opposite ends of the screen, with you and your buddy equally intent on reaching the studs/objects/buildables just out of reach. Enter one of the most innovative splitscreen techniques I've ever seen: rather than a static horizontal or vertical divide, the line separating the two players changed its angle fluidly depending on where - and how far apart - your LEGO avatars are. Far away, you'll end up with a horizontal divide, which angles up toward vertical as your LEGO guys approach each other, and then melts away when you're within one screen of each other. It looks fun.

And you can expect to enjoy that fun sometime this Fall!