Scenes From A Leather Recliner: Star Wars Edition!

May The 4th Be With You!

Today's a fun day. It's the one day where I have an excuse to marathon through everything from my favorite intellectual property. What have I been doing today?

Well, I've been playing Star Wars video games, of course!

Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic.

I started off playing through Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic. This game is pretty damn good, as I've stated before. The learning curve is pretty rough, though. You really need to brute force through the first planet of the game, then it gets a lot easier to actually play the game the way you want.

Currently, I'm playing through Manaan, which honestly was my favorite part of the game. Manaan itself is just so... peaceful. So serene. That is, until you go underwater and have to fight sharks and insane scientists - 20,000 Leagues Under Citadel Station, if you will.

I don't really intend to play KOTOR 2, though. That one wasn't great.

Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.

Ahh, Jedi Academy. GOOD GOD, I played this game like crazy back in the day.

The single player campaign was alright. You played as a padawan who managed to construct a lightsaber without Jedi training, and you went through various missions mowing down Stormtroopers, Reborn Dark Jedi, and eventually you got to use a double-bladed saber or two lightsabers at once. It was pretty fun. The Jedi Knight series is best known for being the one that introduced us to Kyle Katarn, Star Wars' resident Chuck Norris. Sadly, Kyle is reduced to the role of a supporting character in this game, but there is one level where you fight alongside him.

"Don't you mean "'He fights alongside you'?"

No, I don't. He's Kyle Effing Katarn. Even though he's non-canon right now in the new post-Lucas Star Wars continuity, I hope the bring Katarn back for a movie or project. He's too awesome to just leave aside somewhere.

Anyway, the single player for Jedi Academy is alright, but most people really care about the multiplayer, as it's a whole lot better than any other Jedi Knight game's multiplayer. The thing that made it awesome were the tons of clans out there: A lot of groups made their own "Jedi Academies" and trained "padawans" to fight other clans. These guys took things seriously. There was even a Sith group called The Revelation. Any time you saw a player with a {R} tag, you knew they were gonna wreck your shit badly. Hail.

Also, the ::JEDI:: clan was super xenophobic and used (still uses?) their own mods for their server for hardcore roleplay. Not just "Jedi in training stuff, but the other kind of hardcore roleplay, too. I wish I still had the logs of it, because they'd type some pretty disgusting stuff if they even thought you were a woman on their servers. They were kind of awful to be around 'cause the members were fairly arrogant and their policies were fairly Orwellian for a friggin' PC game. They also banned people regularly if they didn't go with the "rules" of the server. So, uh, to hell with the ::JEDI:: clan.

Thanks to tons of mods and the fact that Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy are now open-source, the game still lives on! You can totally play the game today without issue, thanks to Steam. Be advised, you'll need a few mods to make the game a bit more enjoyable. JA+ is a common one, as are custom maps. Some of them are really, really well done.

Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith (GBA).

The Star Wars: Episode III game on the Game Boy Advance was really good. It's pretty amazing that a game directly based on a movie is anything other than garbage, but this one is really good. It's basically an old-school beat 'em up in the style of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, but with a bit of a level-up system. It's awesome. You can play as Obi-Wan or Anakin, and the storyline differs slightly for each.

The Nintendo DS version of this game is actually a little better, because it contains some cool 3D space combat segments. They're fun to mess around in, and they break up the flow of gameplay in a good way. It was really neat to see those N64-esque graphics on the DS back then, and it's still kind of neat now.

Star Wars: Droidworks.

This is a game that a lot of you may have played in elementary or middle school. I know I did.

Star Wars Droid Works was actually based on the Sith engine, which was the game engine used for Star Wars: Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight. This is a game where you must complete puzzles by building different sorts of droids to accomplish certain tasks. One level requires you to build a droid with legs, one may need a droid with treads. You need to follow the guidelines for each level and complete it with the correct sort of droid. Or, you could just go nuts and make something dumb.

We usually did the latter in school.

It's always fun to go back to these old edutainment games, because a lot have held up better than others. Droidworks is probably better left to nostalgia, though. There isn't much to do outside of the base game, and it's not like there's any sort of modding scene for it. That would be really cool if there was, though. It's nice to get an educational game that is more about actual gameplay than, say, blowing up garbage by solving math equations, or listening to a fuzzy blue alien sing a rock song about rhyming words.

10 points to anyone who gets either of those references.

LOOK WHO CAME:

Titannel   

Luna Sy   1