New Ways to Cheat

I was stuck in a Hoth battle. Most of the time Legos Star Wars is easy to play. Death is forgiven with instant reincarnation, usually in the same spot where you died so you don't have to keep doing parts of a level over. When there's no obvious ways to exit a level, you start looking for all possibilities and the solutions are seldom too mentally taxing, or as in some games, something you would have never thought to do in a million years.

But the Hoth battle was proving perplexing. I had circled those walking mechanical things with tow ropes and brought them down and then shot them up, and they just kept coming. I dragged bombs out of a bomb house and dragged them on tow ropes, hurling them against various walls and enemies, and nothing changed. I did notice the big red wall had a flashing emblem of a tiefighter on it. I was not flying a tiefighter, so I had a suspicion this wall was not going to yield. I had also noticed a slit in a cave that had bars across it, but my efforts to shoot through the bars had produced nothing. I paused the game and went to the Internet to research "Legos Hoth battle."

As usual, I found message boards full of other frustrated people and obscenely cursing kids, various suggestions offered and complaints that the suggestions didn't work. Then I saw a link to a YouTube video. I clicked it and there was a video of the whole level played out, nearly perfectly. Yes, you must tow a bomb to that cave and hurl it at the bars. Within minutes, I was through the cave and combating bigger mechanical walkers on other levels and finally reaching a save point so I could quit for the night.

YouTube is saving my butt on video game after game. We pushed through the mind-twisting puzzles of Nintendo DS' "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" by watching videos kids had made of puzzle solutions. It's the new way to cheat. Or maybe it's just working as a team, which is always a good thing. I'll put it on my resume. "Excels at team work."