Pittsburgh Penguins goalie Marc-André Fleury deserves a chance to start somewhere else Art Reviews + Features Artists rallying to resist Trump Scott Smith, of East End Brewing Company, lets his baby bird fly with can distribution Hardcore band Power Trip plans on staying political even as it gains more notoriety among metal fans Movie Reviews + Features Addiction treatment can save lives, but getting patients in the door is still an issueWin McNamee / Getty The State of Trump's State Department Anxiety and listless days as a foreign-policy bureaucracy confronts the possibility of radical change The flags in the lobby of the State Department stood bathed in sunlight and silence on a recent afternoon. “It’s normally so busy here,” marveled a State Department staffer as we stood watching the emptiness. “People are usually coming in for meetings, there’s lots of people, and now it’s so quiet.” The action at Foggy Bottom has instead moved to the State Department cafeteria where, in the absence of work, people linger over countless coffees with colleagues.
(“The cafeteria is so crowded all day,” a mid-level State Department officer said, adding that it was a very unusual sight. “No one’s doing anything.”) As the staffer and I walked among the tables and chairs, people with badges chatted over coffee; one was reading his Kindle. The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids Today’s young children are working more, but they’re learning less. Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few of which a 4-year-old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading. Because so few adults can remember the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades.
The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines. Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn. Joshua Roberts / Reuters Why California Is Environmentalists' Trump Card Unique authority granted to the golden state allows it to have a profound impact on emissions regulations. With Scott Pruitt, a close ally of the oil and gas industry, now confirmed as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, environmentalists are bracing for a broad assault on former President Obama’s green legacy, particularly his efforts to reduce the carbon emissions linked to global climate change.
In most of those fights, the only viable recourse for environmentalists is to contest Pruitt in court. (They can’t expect much help from the Republican Congress.) But on the critical issue of requiring auto manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency, green forces have another line of defense: unique authority that Congress granted to California under the Clean Air Act decades ago. Across the many confrontations looming between President Trump and Democratic-leaning local governments on issues from immigration to health care, the impending struggle between the EPA and California over fuel economy may be the one where Democrats most clearly hold a trump card. Nicole Xu / Spectrum The Hidden Link Between Autism and Addiction It’s believed that people on the spectrum don’t get hooked on alcohol or other drugs. New evidence suggests they do. Shane Stoner’s addiction began in 2008. He lost a factory job, his parents divorced, his father died—and then a relative introduced him to heroin.
“I felt like heroin gave me confidence,” Stoner says. “I could get out of bed in the morning and do the day. No matter what happened, it made me feel like it was going to be all right.” It erased his constant anxiety. Stoner, now 44, eventually entered detox in 2013 after he was arrested for stealing copper from an abandoned house. It was obvious at that point that he was addicted to heroin. But it would take several more years for him to get the diagnosis that truly helped him understand himself: autism.11 acts to look out for at Hamtramck Music Festival 2017 Nexus wants to use eminent domain to ram a pipeline through Michigan and Ohio — and you to help pay for it First look: Gather owners talk about ‘campfire’ concept ahead of the restaurant’s March opening in Eastern MarketMovie review: ‘Lego Batman Movie’ is awesome enough Lego Batman is the hero everyone wanted, even if he isn’t the hero they need. By logging in, you agree to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.
Looking for movie tickets? Enter your location to see which movie theaters are playing National Bird near you.The Lego Movie Videogame Platform: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, Windows PC, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Release: February 7, 2014 The Lego Movie Videogame sticks to many of the series’ tried-and-true tropes. You’re going to spend a lot of time running around contained levels brimming with interesting objects that you need to bash order to free their constituent pieces, all the while keeping an eye out for key items that will help you solve clever contextual puzzles that usually involve building something new. But in a manner similar to last year’s surprisingly bold Lego City Undercover for Wii U, it doesn’t rely as heavily on pop culture licenses as it does on the appeal of Lego itself, on millions of people’s unabashed adoration of the colourful, 55-year-old plastic building blocks that have – remarkably – become the top selling toy in the world and one of Denmark’s largest exports.
More importantly, much like the film upon which it is based – a story about a Lego minifigure construction worker discovering his imagination and using it to defeat a mastermind bent on imposing a sort of fascist order on the entire Lego universe – The Lego Movie Videogame acts as both an explanation and a strong justification for our love of a toy that embodies childlike imagination. The first thing franchise fans will likely notice upon jumping into the game is that everything is made of Lego. Previous Lego games cheated a bit. Just about everything had a plastic sheen, and many objects were clearly architected with a variety of authentic Lego elements, but most things – trees, buildings, the ground – clearly weren’t constructed with the Danish building blocks. That’s not the case in this game, which does its best to stay true to the film’s stop-motion style and these-are-real-toys-and-proud-of-it vibe. Every building looks like one of those complex $200 modular Lego city sets kids covet at the Lego Store.
Lamp posts, couches, vehicles – all are constructed with authentic Lego elements. Music coming out of boom boxes takes on the form of 1×1 flat tiles with pictures of musical notes adhered to them. The illusions of running water, fiery explosions, and smoke are all achieved with rapidly moving bricks. The closest the game comes to fudging anything is the ground in some areas. TT Games puts down Lego base plates – those big flat studded plates that serve as the foundation for most Lego sets – but the studs sometimes appear flattened, an illusion of depth created by shadows drawn away from two-dimensional painted studs. Aside from that, the Lego world crafted here is pretty much 100 per cent legit. Which means you can build anything you see in the game (assuming you have the proper bricks). And that, as The Lego Movie’s catchy theme song merrily insists, is awesome. Level design feels a little different than in previous Lego games, too. Sure, you’ll break things apart and build new stuff out of the smashed pieces, and solve little contextual puzzles through a mix of exploration and trial and error play.
And it’s still a great couch co-op experience, with sequences in which a pair of players can play off each other’s unique abilities, taking turns clearing paths that let the other progress. However, the levels tend to be a fair bit shorter and more dynamic. Instead of the marathon levels of Lego games past that could balloon to 90-minutes or more, these levels are shorter and punchier, set in some wonderfully fantastical locales from them film (the cloud realm is a feast for the eyes), and often include more cinematic, action-oriented scenarios that involve things like driving vehicles and sliding along hills. Better yet, there are new activities designed to play off Lego as a toy. Master builder characters like Wyldstyle (the girl with the purple streaks in her hair) can pull bricks from the environment and build ad-hoc structures — like catapults and clown cars — from their imagination. Others, like construction worker Emmet, require the sort of instructions that come with Lego sets, and a big part of the game revolves around finding these pages — they’re printed on flat tile bricks — and using them to create necessary objects.
When you have enough, you get to play a little timed mini-game that involves picking out proper Lego elements scattered around a wheel. These are nice additions to the game. More importantly, they highlight the narrative theme of contrasting free thinkers and those who insist on thoughtlessly doing everything by the book, and in doing so tie some of the clever messages found within the static film to the interactive world of the game. Rules, according to both the game and movie, are like Lego creations: They’re made to be broken. It’s a safe bet that kids are going to come away from the game thinking about how they play with their real-world Lego, re-examining what they see in their sets’ instruction booklets and wondering what they might be able to do with their imaginations instead. Adults, meanwhile, can just sit back enjoy the game’s lightly subversive vibe and terrific sense of humour, which, like the movie, mixes low-brow jokes with biting commentary. Few games have such potential to make kids and grown-ups giggle in equal measure.
One word of caution: If you decide to play the game before watching the critically acclaimed film from which it takes its name, you do so at your own peril. TT Games’ adventure follows the movie’s plot pretty closely and pulls more than a dozen lengthy narrative cut scenes straight from the big screen (not to mention the A-list Hollywood talents who lent their voices to the film). It’s a terrific treat for anyone who’s seen and enjoyed the movie, but it serves as a giant spoiler for anyone who hasn’t. And you should know, too, that the series’ notorious glitches are in full force once again. The game crashed three times while I played, and there were several areas in which characters became stuck, forcing a restart from the last save point. (The Lego series has single-handedly taught my daughter the meaning and proper use of the word “glitch,” and she had ample opportunity to employ it through this adventure.) These warnings aside, The Lego Movie Videogame earns an easy and enthusiastic recommendation.