The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

between bouts of book shopping. it was 15 bucks new (pc).

did i make a mistake? it seems pretty interesting on its face.
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[Mr. Apol]

I found it to be dreadfully boring.
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LJ -- Profile

[SuperWes]

It's not a bad game. It does a few thing things really well and it's much, much better than Jade Empire, but it's a bit too long for my tastes and it has that X-boxification thing that will probably make it feel a little sparse on PC. I've also heard that it's not really that optimised for PC and might end up looking like shit and/or having mucho bugs.

There are some neat ideas there though, and if you're into the Star Trek geekiness side of the Star Wars universe it uses the license well.

-Wes
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[Mr. Apol]

the last star wars game i enjoyed was jedi power battles. and that was only like, 3 minutes into it before you had to start jumping.

i used to hate the fact you couldn't jump in the legend of zelda.

now i realize why you shouldn't be able to.
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LJ -- Profile

[Wilkes]

I really liked it.

I finished it twice,
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[Scratchmonkey]

Please post more about it as you play, this would be a good one to discuss.

(I liked it up until the last bit and then hated myself for liking it.)

[simplicio]

I played a lot of it, but at that time I'd been hanging around a bunch of people online who were drooling all over its shiny, waxed body* and I grew to resent it when it didn't live up to the hype. It's a Western JRPG, and it's a pretty good use of the license, but I never came to love it. Or finish it.


*I was just going to say "nuts," but I thought that a little uncreative, and in searching for a more interesting body part I realized KotOR is totally hairless. Head, pits, chest, legs, and yes, nuts too. The whole tamale. From what I gather the sequel may be hairier, but not in a good way.

[dark steve]

It bored the hell out of me. Most of if felt pretty listless and perfunctory. The best part of the game is recruiting the "evil" aligned robot who's gone mad and wants to kill everything (he's fun). And it has the Bioware Morality System For Ultimately Selecting an Ending, which just plain makes me nuts.

Also finishing it made me hate star wars. I hate star wars now.

[simplicio]

Oh, see I hated Star Wars before I started it. That may have helped it, really.

[dark steve]

Well. I didn't especially like it, before, exactly.

[purplechair]

I just played through this for the first time last month.

It's a bit predictable, but still enjoyable. There's a good sense of being in a living world, you know? I mean, most of what happens all ties together really well and makes sense... for the first time ever, perhaps, I was attacked by NPCs for rifling through their boxes and stealing their things.

I find it's a bit like Lost, at times, in the sense that you'll know that there's a plot twist coming, but you're not sure what exactly.

[dhex]

initial impressions - it's optimized pretty poorly for nvidia cards. not being able to force it into a widescreen mode kinda sucks too. (there are hacks, but they are imperfect) created a character and played through the intro.

i'm a little confused as to how a sword can hold up to a lightsaber but not being invested in star wars at all i'm sure there's some sort of explanation that's probable enough.
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[purplechair]

The combat is just D&D in Star Wars clothes. Otherwise, a high-level Jedi would be able to just walk along and kill everything instantly until they reached a boss.

Which would be a good way to test players' light side/dark side rating. As it is, there's usually an obvious set of paths that all lead to the same result - there was no strong temptation to turn to the dark side because I could just choose the "good" solutions. It'd be a lot different if the dark side led to really easy combat... and then, when you fight someone more powerful than you, you'd have much less experience at using your brain to overcome enemies, which would also reflect the whole "arrogant evil" thing.

It's the same kind of problem I have with things like Fable or Black & White. Except then there's the issue of overzealousness... like how, in Black & White, failure to protect your villagers from being killed by enemy gods is classed as an evil act, when it's really just "neutral".

[Tablesaw]

[dessgeega]

isn't a lightsaber more of the chop-off-your-limbs variety of weaponry?
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[Shapermc]

Yea, for some reason I bought this on the Xbox a long time ago when I was trying to remember what I liked about starwars as a kid. In an attempt to find that thing I thought that I would immerse myself in the games. After about 5 hours of Jedi Outcast on the PC I decided enough of that and never even made it to the RPG.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dhex]

jedi outcast is so broken but dark forces 2 was so perfect. what happened?

how bad is jedi academy, btw?
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[purplechair]

[Lackey]

[dhex]

i must disagree. as fun as that setting was, two was the first real let's stab some people with candy-colored sabers of light and did a good job while it was there. also, all those interiors are boring, because it was an fps from 1998 or whatever.
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[dark steve]

[dhex]

are you coming on to me?
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[dark steve]

Well, I never played Dark Forces 2, and the level design ain't quite top shelf, but three-on-one vs. fodder jedis is pretty much everything you could hope for.

[Dracko]

The most striking memory I have of Dark Forces II is simply how huge the levels could be. Towering buildings and AT-ATs or fights above massive precipices were common, brilliant stuff. I also have fond memories of the Space Fort maps in Mysteries of the Sith.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Nana Komatsu]

I have KOTOR but haven't played it yet, but watching a friend play it I thought the neatest thing was the display where you could see exactly what dice rolls were used in combat behind the scenes.

[dhex]

well, it may be too early to say but i may have to consider a ban on my buying any game that features any kind of card collecting minigame in it starting now and lasting until the sun burns out.

WHY DO THEY DO THAT? WHY! WHAT THE FUCK?
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[Shapermc]

I would agree with you were it not for Card Fighters Clash... which is really excellent.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dark steve]

I gotta say, if there was one redeeming part of Xenosaga, it was that the card game was awesome.

[Lockeownzj00]

I donno. I liked KOTOR a lot. Most of it wasn't that difficult, but if just for Kashyyk or that...water planet alone, I thought it was nice. The environment was just very aesthetically pleasing. Even if it was D&D in Star Wars clothing...it was a fun romp.

[Nana Komatsu]

I started playing this tonight and I'm enjoying it quite a bit! I'm four hours in and until I rescued the jedi and she started saying "the force" every other sentence, I honestly forgot that this was a Star Wars game at all. I mean sure there's plenty of familiar elements and stuff (wookie) but every other star wars game I remember playing seemed hellbent on recreating the movies and this seemed extremely refreshing.

But yeah, I like it a lot so far.

[Lackey]

The worst Star Wars games are the ones which try to imitate the movies. The best are the ones which use the movies for setting and theme and then go in their own direction. I'd cite Dark Forces, X-Wing and TIE-Fighter as the best examples. Haven't played KotOR yet.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[kirkjerk]

[Lackey]

Funny you mention Rogue Squadron, I was trying to find a way to make my generalization work around it. These things are imprecise of course.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[GSL]

Let Rogue Squadrons 1 and 2 be shining exceptions to the normal rule of Star Wars movie-based sucktitude.

[kirkjerk]

[dhex]

whomever earlier described kotor as a western jrpg was pretty on the nose, story-wise.

the lightsaber noise is going to get annoying eventually, i think. but melee combat is fun.
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[GSL]

[TOLLMASTER]

Star Wars is the game that made me remember why I thought Star Wars was cool in the first place.

The original trilogy was certainly good, but things can only stay impressive for so long. And being born after the movies had been released, them existing was more of a mere fact that something impressive. But KotOR, despite having horrible gameplay problems, kept me coming back and playing marathon sessions (something I rarely do). While most sci-fi these days has the one or two MacGuffins the plot focuses on, and then makes up a bunch of useless fluff to make the fantasy seem real in an imitation of the Star Wars style, KotOR understood that its the bizarreness, the unreality, of the setting that makes it so great. We need a good history for the world, but just as much is explained as is kept secret, creating a mysterious atmosphere.

Landing on that forest world, venturing into a Wookie village and hunting an ancient Jedi-eating monster in the deep jungle, surrounded by a lightsaber-wielding cantakerous old man and a beeping robot--that's what science fiction used to be about.

[dhex]

ok so two questions:

1) what's the diff if you play as the dark side?
2) how was the sequel?

the end was ok. it's more or less completely unfair without destroy droid.
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[Scratchmonkey]

1) In terms of how the game progresses/changes, not a whole hell of a lot. It mainly deviates on the axis of "Instead of saving somebody, you get to kill them", which is kind of frustrating because the Sith are really just Objectivists and instead they get turned into generic evil types. You get to kill your party members/have them kill each other though, which is kind of satisfying, mainly because Carth is a total wiener.

2) I hear mixed things about the sequel. Some people like it better than the original and then there are people like my wife and friend who just yesterday described the game as "a whirlpool of suck".

And as for the destroy droid thing, are you talking about the ultimate battle or the penultimate battle? Because it's useful for both; only with the ultimate battle you can substitute various other powers to have the same effect.

[simplicio]

The second game is supposed to be better, up until the end where they ran out of time and didn't finish making the game and LucasArts pushed it out the door for a Christmaseason launch anyway. So not better at all.

[dhex]

well, the corridor of droids is what i was thinking of. without destroy droid i imagine it would suck real hard.

i may peep the second one if i can find it cheap on half.com.
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[dhex]

hey guess what
it don't work
seems to be
a common problem
with kotor two
bad batch maybe
disc is fotzed
no one knows
sucks a lot

i am sad
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[Shapermc]

Oh god, star wars has m. talking in poems.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dhex]

well, i'll find out more about the game tonight when my torrent finishes up. dunno whether this is a securom error or a machine issue with the disc; the actual .cab file seems to be damaged. i could send everything back to lucasarts for 5 bucks and have a new copy in 4 to 6 weeks, but bleh fuck that.
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[dhex]

so the story goes something like:

obsidian is no bioware.

the title was clearly rushed. technically, it's a glitchy mess.

on the positive side the dialogue is a bit snappier and slightly more nuanced.
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[Shapermc]

So I take it this version worked then?
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dhex]

yes, sort of. there's a bunch of possible game-stopping glitches that the patch only half-solves (mostly dialogue branches that fail to trigger events) but the whole game feels like star wars: invisible war.

i guess at some point i use the term "xboxification" to describe things which are just plain poorly implemented. they clearly ran out of time on this title because the QA on both platforms seems to have been severely lacking.
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[dhex]

so some final observations:

1) boy did they need 3 more months.

2) it's a lot of squandered potential and ideas that could have been really great.

3) hk47 is the most compelling star wars character ever.

4) kotor as a series could easily be adapted into a far more interesting set of films or short stories than the prequels were (from what i've seen of 1 and the little bit of two i caught on channel 5 the other day)

unless i get a fatal bug, i'll finish it out.
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[Toto]

This thread has reached its cilmax:
How good is HK47?