Well actually, Lego Creator was quite like you'd expect. You would build towns out of bricks in creator mode, and they go into play mode and interact with what you'd just built. The last time I played it was probably around 10 years ago, so I dont remember it very well, but it was definitely the most like what you'd expect when you hear "lego computer game".
Lego rock raiders was probably my favorite lego game though, it was my first introduction to real-time-strategy game mechanics.
If you're looking for a good "lego style" game, I HIGHLY recommend you check out Blockland. It's a multi-player game where you create whatever you want, and it has a powerful engine for adding functionality to what you create. Back in the beta, the blocks were actually lego-themed, but when it was commercially released the lego-style was changed to generic blocks to avoid copyright issues. It's very hard to describe what playing it is like because of its very user-modifiable nature, anything is possible.
It's built upon a heavily modified version of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_(gam...ne)]Torque game engine[/url] which is both a blessing and a curse. It is awesome because of Torque's reasonably advanced scripting language, which allows players to modify almost any aspect of the game using TorqueScript, an interpreted, weakly-typed, pseudo-object-oriented programming language. You can write code for everything from basic player interaction and new in-game items, to irc clients and web servers, all in the game engine's scripting language! I even wrote a cryptanalysis toolkit in TorqueScript for a final project in a cryptography class (also as an excuse to create an example of where video games have a legitimate purpose in schools, and then brought that to the administration). The down side of the game engine, is that it is unable to support things like lego technic. The scripting engine does have its limits though, for example it's very difficult to write files with arbitrary non-text data, and it's handling of arrays is rather unconventional.
I also wrote a Blockland to POV-Ray converter, just to get some better-looking renders of some of the awesome stuff I've built in Blockland, if I can find the source on some old backup drive somewhere, I'll release it.
I've spent many thousand hours playing and scripting that game, and I've throughly enjoyed it from the day my best friend told me about it back in elementary school 'til today. I had done some programming (mostly in C) before blockland came out, but scripting blockland was what what made me really interested in programming because of its immediate feedback in a medium I've loved since birth, legos! (and now I'm a CS major). It was by far the best $20 I've ever spent in my entire life, not exaggerating at all.
It's fun for all ages, and I highly recommend everyone give it a try.
[/salespitch]
But seriously... it's awesome!
Lego rock raiders was probably my favorite lego game though, it was my first introduction to real-time-strategy game mechanics.
If you're looking for a good "lego style" game, I HIGHLY recommend you check out Blockland. It's a multi-player game where you create whatever you want, and it has a powerful engine for adding functionality to what you create. Back in the beta, the blocks were actually lego-themed, but when it was commercially released the lego-style was changed to generic blocks to avoid copyright issues. It's very hard to describe what playing it is like because of its very user-modifiable nature, anything is possible.
It's built upon a heavily modified version of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_(gam...ne)]Torque game engine[/url] which is both a blessing and a curse. It is awesome because of Torque's reasonably advanced scripting language, which allows players to modify almost any aspect of the game using TorqueScript, an interpreted, weakly-typed, pseudo-object-oriented programming language. You can write code for everything from basic player interaction and new in-game items, to irc clients and web servers, all in the game engine's scripting language! I even wrote a cryptanalysis toolkit in TorqueScript for a final project in a cryptography class (also as an excuse to create an example of where video games have a legitimate purpose in schools, and then brought that to the administration). The down side of the game engine, is that it is unable to support things like lego technic. The scripting engine does have its limits though, for example it's very difficult to write files with arbitrary non-text data, and it's handling of arrays is rather unconventional.
I also wrote a Blockland to POV-Ray converter, just to get some better-looking renders of some of the awesome stuff I've built in Blockland, if I can find the source on some old backup drive somewhere, I'll release it.
I've spent many thousand hours playing and scripting that game, and I've throughly enjoyed it from the day my best friend told me about it back in elementary school 'til today. I had done some programming (mostly in C) before blockland came out, but scripting blockland was what what made me really interested in programming because of its immediate feedback in a medium I've loved since birth, legos! (and now I'm a CS major). It was by far the best $20 I've ever spent in my entire life, not exaggerating at all.
It's fun for all ages, and I highly recommend everyone give it a try.
[/salespitch]
But seriously... it's awesome!