Does It Make Me a Bad Person If I Repeatedly Punch Marcus Brody In The Face?

Because I’m a little worried about that.

As I may have mentioned before, I am obsessed right now with Lego Indiana Jones for the Nintendo DS.

Only in my leisure hours, mind.

But obsessed.

It’s enormous fun, especially now I’ve finished it in Story Mode and can play all the episodes in Free Play, which is vastly more fun (and more productive: generally, most of the maps and artifacts you need to collect can only be accessed in Free Play, when you can switch between characters. So you have a small character to climb through hatches, a Knight of the Cruciform Sword to open certain doorways, creepy priests who pull people’s hearts out to allow you into different areas, and so on.)

But what’s bothering me is that there are two characters on each level: one you control and one controlled by the computer.

(When we played Lego Star Wars, it was two player, and both characters were controlled by us. Which led to its own problems, since Nick isn’t used to co-operative play, and kept running off while I was trying to build things.)

But when one character is computer controlled, it gets quite frustrating.

Sometimes they become stuck behind things, and you have to run back half a level to guide them out.

Sometimes they’re unusually dull: I was driven to despair a few nights ago trying to navigate a dinghy. You can only navigate these if there are two people in them. But I got stuck. My computer character—Willie, the irritating night-club singer in Temple of Doom—leapt out of the boat. I couldn’t leap out without falling in the water and dying: trust me, I tried every possible angle. But she, daft cow, wouldn’t get back in the boat! (I always did dislike her.) So there I was, unable to move, all because this silly Lego figurine was posing, in my tuxedo, on the banks of the river with an umbrella!

Hmmm.

Sometimes, the computer characters actually kill you, by blocking the point of access when you’re jumping, so you fall in, say, a pit of lava.

And sometimes the computer characters get in your way. This is unusually annoying when you’re leaping from train carriage to train carriage (Last Crusade) or from truck to truck while having exploding barrels thrown at you by a Nazi (also, oddly, Last Crusade.)

And then there’s nothing for it but to repeatedly punch them in the face until they either move or, as a secondary effect, die and re-materialise somewhere else, somewhere less annoying.

But often my sidekick is Marcus Brody.

And I really liked Marcus. I was devastated when we watched the most recent film (this was a devastation that came on before the fridge was nuked and before the events of the last fifteen minutes) and I realised he was dead.

I really don’t want to punch Marcus in the face.

I want to punch Nazis in the face. Little Lego figurine Nazis. That’s the point of the game. (Although Lego apparently doesn’t call them Nazis. They’re generic villainous Germans. But I call them Nazis, and so does Indy.)

But if Marcus won’t move out of my way, what choice to I have?

None, really.

I just have to punch him in the face and then feel like a cad for the rest of the evening.