Recap! Last time we talked about Lego Flash games, and we are going to continue here! Reminder: many of the Lego Flash games are available to play via the BioMedia Project in a big multi part zip file download! We talked about Junkbot, World Builder, and the Nightfall Incident last time!

Alpha Team

Alpha Team was a cool (get it?) Lego theme! It is about a group of spy agents fighting against the evil Ogel(, whose name is Lego spelled backwards). The first batch of Alpha Team sets was about deep sea underwater hideouts and submarine vehicles! The game series that I am about to talk about is however from the second coming of the Alpha Team theme. The same colorful cast of characters in a different supervillain setting! This time we are in an arctic setting!

The game consists of multiple parts, and mostly plays in a birds eye perspective. You control a vehicle with tank controls (sometimes on ice physics). The world is filled with enemies and traps that you must deactivate before making contact, or else you die. There are switches and terrain obstacles all around. In the later game parts you get to switch between multiple vehicles and you get to leave the birds eye perspective for short platforming sections.

It's fun! There's some fun lore in the Alpha Team theme, and this game controls nicely. There are some parts that are particularly difficult, like a maze of holes in which you fall to your doom. Given the ice physics these sections get a little bit tricky. But yeah, fun!

Drome Racing Challenge

This one is even on the lost media wiki! But why this one, you ask? Because it was an MMO, silly! A racing themed MMO without actual traditional racing gameplay. As it stands, it is unplayable right now, since the server infrastructure simply isn't there anymore, but some assets of the game have been found, plus the game is documented through screen recordings.

The game was more a game of strategy amd chance than a show of dexterity and reaction time. You would join a racing team, strategically customize your car, and race other players. These races put players through a procedural sequence of scenes and challenges. Sometimes your suspension would be tested, sometimes your turbo, sometimes this would happen, and sometimes that. By winning raced you earned in game money, which you could use to upgrade your car. Players would compete for high scores, then.

The Drome Racers lore also had a few physical Lego sets, some story print releases, and a pretty good Mariokartlike PC CD-ROM racing game with cyberpunk maps and aesthetically creative powerups and a banging soundtrack.

Mars Mission: Crystalien Conflict

Let's nit beat around the bush here: this game makes you play as capitalist colonialists. You land on planet Mars, fight the native inhabitants, steal their resources, and fuck up their buildings. Kid me did not grasp the problemacy of this, and now it is apparent. And it is unthinkable that such a Lego theme and game would be made today.

Gameplay was solid though! This was an aesthetically pleasing scifi real time strategy colony builder, at a time when games like the Anno series were pretty popular. In a way it is very similar to Anno, but in the Anno games you usually don't hunt the native population of the area you colonize. At least it is not framed that way.

So yeah. Politically, this game is not so.... good. Goes to show that Lego also makes mistakes, and we should examine them critically, despite or even because of our love for Lego as a product line.

Anyway that's all for today, but I'll at the VERY least make a part three on this series soon!