Our community, 1124 want it The LEGO Movie Videogame Sign In or Join to save for later Platforms: Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Wii U, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Windows, Xbox 360, Xbox One What parents need to know Parents Need to Know About our ratings and privacy evaluation Top advice and articles What parents and kids say Lego Fusion lets you build virtual playgrounds with real-world bricks If your child is constantly glued to a tablet swiping away at birds or fruit, you're probably wistfully wishing for the days when kids liked playing with actual toys. Well, Lego just might have the perfect solution for you and your offspring. Today, the maker of the beloved construction bricks announced Lego Fusion, a system that combines the flexibility and fun of app-based games with the good ol' fashioned activity of creative Lego building. Gallery: Lego Fusion | Developed by Lego's Future Lab, Fusion was invented as a way to marry digital and analog play.
Ditte Bruun Pedersen, a senior design manager of the Lab, tells us that during its research, the Lego team discovered that children don't really differentiate physical play from digital. "To them, it's not two separate worlds. It's one world that blends together. It's all just play." However, games on tablets and phones remain popular with kids because of how immersive they are, so the trick is to put the two worlds together.The Lego folks identified three sorts of games that kids typically like: Tycooning, which involves building and managing, tower defense style games and racing. And so they've come up with four different Lego Fusion games to fit those categories. Lego Fusion Town Master lets you create a miniature Lego city, Lego Fusion Battle Towers puts you in a medieval battle where you'll need the best castle and fighters, and Lego Fusion Create & Race has you creating a customized car for either a time-based race or a demolition derby. The fourth game, Lego Fusion Resort Designer, is very similar to Town Master except that it lets you decorate the interior of buildings as well.
Each Lego Fusion set consists of 200 bricks along with a special "capture" brick building plate that's meant to be paired with a corresponding app. To play the Town Master game, for example, you would build a two-dimensional facade on the base plate, say the front of a house with a door, two windows and a roof (buildings can be up to 16 bricks high and 16 bricks wide). You'd then launch the app's camera function to focus on the printed pattern, which is used as an identification tag. This essentially lets the app figure out exactly the size and colors of the Lego bricks you've built on the plate, enabling it to import and translate that physical creation into the digital realm. The app is then intelligent enough to transform the two-dimensional front of a house into a three-dimensional virtual building to be placed in the game. Lego tells us it uses Qualcomm's Vuforia mobile vision platform for this process."For most kids, if you simply give them a pile of bricks and tell them to build something, they go blank," says Pedersen.
By pairing a game objective with the bricks, it gives them a prompt to actually get something started. "The games are used to facilitate creativity," she says.All the apps are free to download and experience for free so kids (and their parents, of course) can familiarize themselves with the game's mechanics and requirements before committing to it. However, all of these apps do actually require the physical Lego set to progress. You can't build a building in the game without those physical bricks.Additionally, the Lego Fusion games are designed to encourage kids to keep on building beyond the initial steps. With Town Master, you're constantly given missions to appease the townspeople and run the city. In Battle Towers, you'll have to upgrade your castle with defenses depending on the kinds of enemies the game pits against you. As for the racing game, well, you can't beat your last time or destroy your competition without making your car sleeker and meaner. "It drives kids back and forth from the tablet to brick building," explains Pedersen.Further, since all the creations are stored digitally in the Lego world -- you can save them to the cloud with a Lego ID -- children are able to carry on with the game even after they've put their bricks away for the day.
If the parents allow it, kids can connect with their friends using their Lego credentials too. They can visit each other's towns, see how the other person's tower looks like and even race those cars against each other. It also presents the opportunity for the child to learn from what their friends have made, and perhaps improve upon their creations.Each of the Lego Fusion sets cost $34.99 and will be available at Toys R Us, Lego stores and Legoland locations in the US and online. The Town Master, Battle Towers and Create & Race kits will be ready in August, while the Resort Designer game will be in stores in September. The age range for these Lego Fusion games are 7 and up. Though the system doesn't look quite as cool as Mindstorms, at least it encourages kids to build something real rather than poking at pixels all day. From around the web ear iconeye icontext fileThe New Lego Star Wars Game Gives Us an Official Parody of the First Force Awakens Trailer2/02/16 9:20amWay back in the old days of Thanksgiving 2014, when we got our first ever look at Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it was inevitably followed up by tons of amazing parody remakes—including the customary Lego versions.
But now we have what is essentially an official parody of that first teaser trailer, and it’s amazing. The teaser is for the newly announced Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the latest entry in the lego video game franchise that adapts popular franchises like Marvel, DC, Lord of the Rings, and more into the brick-built world of Lego. Our sister site Kotaku has more details on the game—which adapts the movie and features content bridging Return of the Jedi to The Force Awakens—but honestly, the best part is this delightfully goofy take on that first ever teaser. And weird as hell that we’ve now got an “official” parody of it.So when exactly did the brightly colored building blocks we played with as kids transform into a wildly successful multimedia entertainment platform? On February 7, the Lego Movie stormed theaters and notched one of the top opening weekends ever for a non-sequel animated film. Outside the cinema, Lego-themed video games and building sets featuring licensed properties have become incredibly popular with both children and adults.
The most obvious indicator of the company’s recent success is its new position as the most valuable toymaker in the world. So how did they do it? Some of the success can be attributed to a forward-thinking business model that managed evolve the brand while honoring tradition. But mostly the new Lego is the product of lucrative licensing. Lego’s breakthrough with licensed intellectual property began in 1999 with an agreement to license Star Wars characters and vehicles. Since the closing of that deal, Lego has sold over 200 million Star Wars Lego boxes and negotiated a new deal in 2012 that will allow the company to produce Star Wars themed products until 2022. On the heels of the Star Wars success, Lego smartly committed itself to obtaining licensing arrangements with established brand universes, including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, DC Comics, Marvel and Disney. The move paid off. In 2012, royalty expenses amounted to $263 million while profits reached $4 billion. Licensing intellectual property has been a backbone of the toy business for decades, so why is Lego’s model making such a huge difference to its bottom line?
For starters, the screening process for determining which properties Lego licenses is incredibly detailed, and its managers turn down far more licensing opportunities than they accept. By partnering exclusively with brands of wide global appeal, Lego has been able to ensure that the quality of its own brand isn’t diluted via association. Smart property selection helps, but what really sets Lego apart from other toymakers is the way it blends licensed properties with its own style to create what are essentially new properties. As a result, Lego’s Star Wars platform is more than mere reproductions of iconic Star Wars characters and vehicles in Lego form. It has become its own brand, Lego Star Wars. Additionally, many Lego interpretations of classic characters have assumed their own personality, and are often far different than their film or comic book counterparts. For example, the original Batman is dark and brooding, but Lego Batman is comedic and suitable for children. Lego has also been able to secure separate licensing deals from brands that are themselves fierce competitors.