If you've been longing to kill LEGO Nazis in a video game, your dreams will continue to go unrequited (at least for now). Last week, Edge magazine had a chance to sit down with LucasArts and Traveller's Tales, the publishers and developers of June's Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. To be fair, the article did have some great information about the game. Like the Star Wars games, Lego Indiana Jones will be split into 3 chapters (for a total of 18 levels). There will be humorous recreations of moments from the films, including an awesome-sounding retelling of the opening of the Ark in which the paint is wiped off the face of Major Toht. There is also a new promised “phobia” mechanic, introduced to address Indy's near-crippling fear of snakes. When facing a snake, the player loses control of a terrified Indy, forcing the second player (or AI) to save him. Other than that, the game looks like another parody-filled, block-collecting ride.

The news from the title of this post comes from about three-quarters of the way through the article, when Edge asks about the game's enemies.

Traveller's Tales has chosen to remove Nazis ... from the game, 'Lego [has] already replaced them with an anonymous genocidal, occultist, trenchcoat-wearing master-race'. The studio explains it has left it down to the strength of the Indy characters to show they are bad guys - but 'that said, we like to reinforce the fact that these really are terrible, terrible people.'

While TT promises that they don't want to stray from the Indy formula too much, it does throw me for a loop there will be no Nazis (or any reference to them). The Reich is such a huge part of the Indiana Jones lore, and it just seems odd to be facing some anonymous enemy. Especially when the villains are a “ genocidal, occultist, trenchcoat-wearing master-race.” Is just stripping the name of the group a suitable solution? Don't get me wrong – I'm no fan of the Nazis. I'm just surprised by the decision, and suppose I'll have to load up one of the hundreds of World War II FPS games from the last half-decade to get in some German-killing fun.

[from computerandvideogames.com]