The next Lego Batman recreates a memorable scene from the 1989 movie, complete with Prince soundtrack

LEGO® Batman™: Legacy of the Dark Knight - “The Joker, Clown Prince of the Museum” Cinematic - YouTube LEGO® Batman™: Legacy of the Dark Knight - “The Joker, Clown Prince of the Museum” Cinematic - YouTube
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The superhero-themed Lego games are unusual in that they're rarely homages to specific movies—unlike Lego Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Indiana Jones, the Lego Batman games tell original stories, with a few nods to the comics and movies that inspired them, rather than recreating whole scenes in slapstick-brick form.

It's not all parodies of the gritty Nolanverse, though. As the cinematic above shows, Tim Burton's 1989 Batman is on the menu too, with the scene where Jack Nicholson and gang vandalize the Gotham Museum of Art redone in Lego form, complete with the original soundtrack of Partyman by Prince. It's more kid-friendly than the original though, which began with the Joker gas-murdering a bunch of Gothamites and ended with him menacing Vicki Vale.

As well as the Joker and Bane, the full game will include Poison Ivy, the Penguin, Two-Face, Ra's Al Ghul, the Riddler, Firefly, and a real Arnie-sounding Mr. Freeze. It's enough villains for an Arkham game, and given how blatantly the combat in Legacy of the Dark Knight draws from Rocksteady's blocky-bashy, I'm crossing my fingers this will fill the gap the Arkham games left.

Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight will be out on May 29, and is coming to Steam and the Epic Games Store.

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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