Ah, Adobe Flash. Once found just about everywhere you looked on the internet, now defunct in any ‘official’ capacity. When it disappeared, so did the multitude of internet games that were built with it. And one of the most prolific websites for these games was LEGO.com.
However, thanks to the efforts of dedicated fans (especially those contributing to Flashpoint), many of these games have been saved from the dustbin of history. And seeing as flash games made up a good part of my youth, I thought I’d take a trip down memory lane and share 5 of my favorite LEGO flash games with you.
Just one thing to note. These aren’t in order from least to most favorite. They’re just some of my favorites.
5. Worldbuilder & Worldbuilder 2
Now we’re really getting into the good stuff. Based on the Designer theme, the Worldbuilder games are a sort of psuedo-puzzle. In each stage you need to get a specific construction to a specified point. You can build a variety of animals, vehicles and structures from the brick lying around, so long as you have the right blueprints. You’ll need to use their special abilities, such as going over different terrain or moving obstacles, to complete each level’s objective.
But it’s not so easy as that. Most constructions require an energy brick to function, and these loose power as you move around or perform actions. If all of your energy bricks loose power or you run out of blueprints, you’ll have to restart the stage. And the enemies that sometime prowl the levels will attack any of your constructions they find, taking them apart and draining their energy bricks completely.
All in all, the Worldbuilder games are very unique. Things can get frustrating at times due to the enemies’ pathing being random, but they’re still fun nonetheless.
4. Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident
It figures that a Strategy RPG would find its way in here. Like Inventor, Spybotics was a short-lived theme with only four sets. Using an included CD-ROM, you could program a series of actions into your Spybot in order to complete a few missions. Never having owned any of the sets, I’m not quite sure how it works.
Anyway, about The Nightfall Incident. You take the role of a rookie agent of S.M.A.R.T., an agency that deals with hackers and viruses. Lately a lot of prominent companies have been seeing their security programs getting compromised. They’re turning hostile and locking the companies out of their own systems. It’s your job to hack into those systems, delete the infected security programs, and find out whos behind this whole mess.
You have a wide variety of programs that you can purchase or earn from side quests. Some are focused purely on attack, some on support, some on de-buffing, etc.. But what makes this game unique is the health system. As the programs move across the field, they increase in size up to predetermined maximum. The attack power of a program determines how many segments are deleted from an enemy program. Once a program’s size is reduced to zero, it’s deleted.
This aspect acts a a de facto defense stat. Maybe you’ve got a program with a high attack power but a max size of one, meaning it will get deleted by any attack. Maybe you’ve got one with a large max size but low movement, forcing you to plan carefully when to move that program to attack your foes. So while it doesn’t have the depth of other SRPGs, it’s solid enough in it’s own right.
One final note is that every stage or “node” you enter begins with a warning against hacking. Depending on what kind of node you’ve entered, the language will be different. And the Lucky Monkey Media nodes’ warning is in Japanese. Just thought I’d point that out to any fellow SRW fans.
3. Junkbot & Junkbot Undercover
When LEGO redesigned their website in the early 2000s, they added a section which was meant to more convey the ideas behind building with LEGO, rather than focused on any current products. To help drive in traffic, they contracted the developer GameLab to make a flash game for that part of the website. The result was Junkbot, a game about a little LEGO robot who loves to eat trash. One day finding himself low on food, he finds his dream job cleaning up trash at a factory.
Players would need to move the various LEGO brick around to create staircases, bridges and other structures to help guide the auto-moving Junkbot through each level, collecting any trash cans along the way. You also had specialty bricks that could launch Junkbot into the air or give him protection against the various hazards in the factory.
Junkbot Undercover adds in further elements like laser hazards and teleportation pads. It also switches out the factory theme for scientific facilities, as Junkbot explores the basements of the factory to uncover the mysterious Project X. And if you’re in the mood for a challenge, you can try and complete each level in as few moves as possible to go for the gold ranks. There were even leaderboards back in the day.
And on a personal note, I’d like to thank my mom for spending time with me playing these games. Junkbot was one of the few video games that she was able to get the hang of, and she got pretty good at it too, often coming to my aid whenever a puzzle stumped me. Thanks for a lot of fun memories with two really fun games, Mom.
2. Mata Nui Online Game 1 & 2 (MNOG & MNOGII)
Bionicle. Honestly, there isn’t enough space in this article for me to do it justice. It’s my absolute favorite LEGO theme, and it eclipses almost all other pieces of media that I enjoy.
Mata Nui Online Game and its sequel are point-and-click adventure games. The first one takes place during the first storyline of Bionicle, with the six Toa Mata search for the Masks of Power to face the evil Makuta. You play as the Ta-Matoran Takua, journeying across the island of Mata Nui to lend your aid to the six Matoran villages as they face attacks from Rahi under the control of Makuta’s infected masks.
The gameplay is just what you’d expect from a P&C Adventure. You navigate the island by clicking on hotspots, you can store items in your inventory, and there are a few puzzles and minigames sprinkled in as well. A good time, especially for Bionicle fans, but it doesn’t do anything outstanding. Plus I found it hard at times to know where to go next.
Mata Nui Online Game II takes place just after the Bohrok-Kal saga, following the Ga-Matoran Hahli as she travels across Mata Nui to train for the upcoming Kohlii championship in Ta-Koro, leading up to the Mask of Light arc. The P&C gameplay is back, but in a third-person perspective, and the inventory system has been enhanced with the ability to trade gathered materials for either money, tools or other materials.
In addition to traveling across the island and aiding its inhabitants, your other goal is to defeat the Kohlii teams in the other villages. The minigames this time will raise one of six Kohlii stats, such as strength, accuracy and stamina. All in all, MNOGII is an overall upgrade to the original and is a lot more fun as a result. But there still remains one game that tops all the others…
1. Voya Nui Online Game (VNOG)
Voya Nui Online Game. In my opinion, the magnum opus not only for Bionicle flash games, or even LEGO flash games, but ALL flash games. It’s nothing short of a fully-fleshed RPG based on the 2006 Bionicle storyline. As one of the six Toa Inika, you travel the titular island searching for the Mask of Life, while helping the Matoran Resistance against the evil Piraka.
You have the usual RPG trappings of equipment, levels & stats, and six elemental affinities that are determined by which Toa you chose and can be altered by your equipment. Battles take place in a grid-based format similar to Live A Live. You have a basic elemental attack and can equip two weapons and a support item, and you can move around the field and attack based on how many Movement and Action points that you have, respectively. And you can trade in elemental shards for weapons and armor, besides digging them up from rock piles and winning them from enemies.
In addition to all of this, VNOG is the same length as, say, an SNES RPG. All the effort for a game like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest into a game that you could play for free! All of that is why Voya Nui Online Game is my favorite LEGO.com flash game.
And that, as they say, is that.
Originally I had intended to make this a Top 10 list. I decided to cut entries 6-10 at the last minute. The main reason is that I just felt that most of them were there just to fill out the list. Maybe some day I’ll do a follow-up to this article and show them off then. Who knows?