Games that Ruin Friendships: Lego Star Wars

The title of this article says it all.

Simply put, Lego Star Wars destroys friendships. Pure and simple.

I've been told that this video game is preferably played single-player. I've even been told that it's good with two players. However, MY personal experience playing this video with a friend has showed me that it is the devil. It has no redeeming value as a teamwork builder nor does it lend it self to cooperative efforts.

It is, without a doubt, designed to tear apart two buddies. I'll explain...

There I am, at my local game store, Tower of Games.

At the Tower, they allow free play of any video games they happen to have on sale within the boundaries of their well-equipped cyber cafe (I might have mentioned this during my Lost: Via Domus review). One day, I had some time to kill before one of my weekly roleplaying games and decided to thoroughly kill this time by playing a video game. Now, I didn't want a video game that required me to think too much, so I figured some light frivolous fun of one of the many Lego games would suffice. Being a fan of Star Wars (who isn't?), I settled on that one.

My intent was to sit down by myself and play this game alone for an hour or two until all the other players had arrived. One of the players who happened to already be there, James, decided this wasn't going to happen as he sat his obnoxious Marine butt down in the seat next to me, X-Box controller in hand and a goofy grin on his face.

Me - "What are you doing?"
James - "This game has two-player!"
Me - "....and?"
James - "Let's play together! C'mon man, it'll be fun!"
Me - *groan*

So I relented and the game began. Right off the bat, I discovered two of the biggest cooperative flaws in this hellhole of a game:

First, the camera DOESN'T switch to splitscreen when the players get a certain distance from each other.
Second, friendly fire is on. Always.

Normally, this wouldn't be so difficult, except the terrible camera, combined WITH the friendly fire AND normally small spaces in which the characters navigate, equaled countless unnecessary character deaths. And it isn't so bad that each player has only a limited number of lives, but the stupid macguffins that we had to collect got lost every time we fucking died so....add in the frustration of resource loss. The worst part was that it got to the point where James and I were flat-out assuming that we were damaging each other on purpose.

It essentially went something like this:

Me - "Yes! The Stormtroopers are dead!"
James - "Dude, you shot me."
Me - "...it was an accident."
James - "Fuck you, accident!" *proceeds to shoot back*
Me - "Hey! Asshole!" *retaliates*

I'll let this picture of two marmots visualize our feelings toward each other.

Aaaand you can pretty much accurately assume the rest.

 And friendly fire aside, we found other ways of causing each others deaths. The poor camera and lack of split screen specifically caused poor James to be stuck on a ledge that he continually fell off of until I finally got my character back to where he was so the camera wouldn't push him off.

Suffice it to say, he blamed me for that too.

I won't bog you readers down with further examples (especially since I believe those I have provided to be sufficient to understand my point), but instead leave you with these parting words...

Don't let silly games break up a friendship. 

James and I are still friends and never really were angry at each other over Lego Star Wars. However, I have heard stories of friendships being torn asunder over such frivolous reasons. And the point of this article is to serve as a warning to all of you out there...don't let that happen. There are more important things in life than stupid games.