Forget Mario and Sonic (for now anyway) – one of the most popular gaming franchises in recent video game history is Lego. The reason is simple – the games are easy to pick up, great fun to play, and accessible for all ages. And with Lego Jurassic World set to be released in June, it’s high time we built a list of the top ten brick-based video games. A tough challenge indeed. MORE: Lego Jurassic World trailer looks bricking awesome Released on Windows in 1997, Lego Island was the very first Lego game ever made. With no plot as such, players could free roam the colourful island taking on a variety of missions, from delivering pizzas to jet-ski racing. While it’s not dated particularly well, it remains a classic and a springboard for some truly great games. As a child there was something unsatisfying about building an awesome car out of Lego bricks, then not being able to watch it speed around a track, which is why Lego Racers is so brilliant. Essentially the Lego version of Mario Kart, with one key difference – you can build your own car (which has it’s pros and cons).
It’s an old game now, but certainly deserves its place in this list. 8. The Lego Movie video game A Lego video game tie-in of a Lego film – you can’t get more Lego than that! The game closely follows the plot of The Lego Movie, using a colourful world made entirely of Lego bricks, a huge variety of playable characters and a generous smattering of good fun. 7. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga This is a superb offering that combines both the brilliant LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Star Wars II in a neat package. Released in 2007, the Complete Saga offers higher quality graphics than the originals, as well as a classic soundtrack and a hilarious dose of unique Lego humour. 6. Lego Pirates of the Caribbean After such success with other film-to-bricks-to-videogame adaptations, the franchise moved on to Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, merging the first four blockbuster films into one convenient game. The complex story may be a little hard to follow as – like others in the franchise – there’s no dialogue, but they capture the pirate world perfectly and the game play is great fun.
5. Lego Harry Potter: Years 1–4 As the name suggests, this title focuses on key moments from the first four Harry Potter years, resulting in a magical game that brings Hogwarts to life. Game developer Traveller’s Tales paid close attention to both the films and books in looks and story, so genuine Potter fans will feel right at home. 4. Lego Lord of the Rings An fun adaptation of Peter Jackson’s iconic trilogy that used genuine dialogue and music from the original films, which took the franchise to a new level. While it condensed the story somewhat, the atmospheric title offered plenty of replay value with a vast world to explore and endless secrets to discover. Released in 2013, the franchise ventured away from the movie adaptations and brought a huge open-world game with an original story to the Wii U. The result was a family-friendly, action-filled sandbox game, which is the closest Lego will come to Grand Theft Auto series (without all the prostitutes, drugs and swearing).
2. Lego Marvel Super Heroes An exciting and varied open-world game with its own original storyline, using around 150 characters from the Marvel universe to tell it. With excellent gameplay, endless collectable, witty storytelling and oodles of replay value, this is one of the best Lego games out there. 1. Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes In a tough-to-call list, my number one Lego game is DC Super Heroes, released in June 2012. The first in the Lego series to have original voice acting (up until this point the stories were mainly told via primitive grunting), which added a new dimension. Even though it’s slightly older than Marvel Super Heroes it’s an excellent sandbox offering, in which players could plays as both Batman and Superman and unlock an array of classic DC heroes and villains. With a fine balance of drama and humour, excellent narrative and gorgeous graphics, this is surely the best Lego game to date. Best Lego Sets For Men 10 Awesome Lego Sets Every Grown Man Should Have
This article was originally published by AskMen UK. Everyone knows it’s acceptable for us grown-ups to get stuck into some Lego. It's the reason your parents bought it for you as a child and it's also the reason you'll buy it for your own offspring. With increasingly sophisticated models and the kind of geek-tastic products that have adult men salivating in toy shop windows (see just about every bit of Star Wars kit ever produced), Lego has come to combine two of the greatest pleasures known to man – taking on a project and wallowing in nostalgia. With this in mind, we’ve enlisted the help of top AFOL (adult fan of Lego) and editor of Bricks magazine, Mark Guest, to run down some of greatest sets known to mankind. Some will test the limits of your construction skills, others will simply appeal to your inner nerd – all are worthy of serious man-points. Time to start bricking it.It is a brand name familiar to children around the world, but a decade ago Lego was in crisis.
Sales were collapsing at a rate of 26% a year, it lost 1.4bn Danish kroner (£150m) in 2003 and private equity firms were circling the 82-year-old family-owned Danish company. Now, after a series of job cuts and the ending of the family's management of the company, the plastic brick business has rebuilt itself into the world's most profitable toy maker ahead of Barbie's Mattel. The company, which has been headquartered in the small Danish town of Billund (population 6,155) since 1932, has reported "another record breaking year" of sales and profits growth – for the ninth consecutive year. Its high profitability comes from its ability to turn each kilogram of raw material plastic – which costs less than $1 – into sets that sell for more than $75 per kg. Annual profits increased by almost 10% to 8.2bn kroner (£900m) – about the same as the profit Facebook turned in last year. Sales jumped 10% to 25.3bn kroner (£2.8bn). "That is an incredible quadrupling of our revenues in less than 10 years," Joergen Vig Knudstorp, Lego chief executive, said.
"We think we are changing children's lives forever when they play with Lego. We think this was another year where we got great affirmation of that." Knudstorp is credited with driving Lego's resurgence since he took over as CEO from Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, grandson of the company's carpenter founder, during the 2003-4 crisis. He said Lego's success was due to constant innovation and the creation of 60-70 new products every year, including Harry Potter, Star Wars and SpongeBob SquarePants ranges. But he admitted it is still a "major innovation challenge" to "stay on the top of children's wish lists" against competition from iPads and computer games. "We need to constantly become better, or otherwise there will be someone out there who will catch up to us," he said. Jane Westgarth, a toy analyst at market research firm Mintel, said Lego's recovery had been fuelled by its investment in quality and design. "They are doing things that are taking Lego into a slightly different position, from the boxes of bricks where you had to use your imagination to sets you use in specific ways with characters you already know," she said.
"If it's good quality, people are prepared to pay that little bit extra." Westgarth said Lego was also benefiting considerably from parents' nostalgia for their own childhood – parents including David Beckham, who admitted earlier this month that he builds Lego with his children to stay calm and had just completed the 4,287-piece Tower Bridge kit. "For a parent aged 30 there's no doubt about it that they would have Lego in their homes. Parents like to introduce their children to things that they loved as children." The company, which sold its Legoland theme parks to Madame Tussauds owner Merlin Entertainments in 2005, is building on its "red core business" by boosting its digital presence, but Knudstorp said his customers have done most of the work for him. More than 99% of Lego videos on Youtube – featuring Lego recreations of everything from the London 2012 Olympics to the New Testament – are made by users. "We're not leaving the brick, but we will leverage digital technology to stay relevant over the next 20 years," he said.
Lego, which is derived from the Danish "leg godt" meaning "play well", is also benefiting from "a considerable amount of excitement" prompted by the Lego Movie. The film, which features the hit Tegan and Sara song Everything is Awesome, is taking £2m a day in UK cinema box offices, and has topped the US and Canadian charts for three consecutive weekends. Next up is Knudstorp's "pretty simple ambition" to "take the bricks all over the world". Lego is sold in more than 130 countries round the world, but Knudstorp admits that "we're not really there" in many of the world's less well off nations. "We see a huge opportunity to bring Lego further out into the world in the next 20 years," he said. Sales in China, where Lego will open a new $300m factory in 2016, grew by more than 50% last year - although from asmall base. Knudstorp believes Lego could be expanded to 600m Chinese customers within in the next decade."But we need a set up that is much more diverse, much more international, than we are today.
"It would be arrogant to think that just because you're Danish you're equally knowledgeable about what it takes to succeed in countries all over the world," he said. "We want to remain very much a Danish company rooted here in Billund, a place where we were born and we have our heritage and we will never leave. "But we want to be a Danish company that's welcoming to all sorts of cultures." To do so the company is diversifying senior management into four global offices in London, Singapore, Shanghai and Connecticut. The company is still owned by the descendents of Ole Kirk Kristiansen, a master carpenter and joiner who founded the company in Billund in 1932, when it was a small village. Ole's son Godtfred joined the firm when he was 12 years old, and the company's first toy was a wooden duck called Lego. The first plastic bricks were produced in 1949. Godtfred's son Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen was chief executive from 1979-2004. Forbes magazine named Kjeld as Denmark's richest man with a net worth of $7.3bn in March 2013.