So, when we examine my personal gaming life and see druids getting squashed under dragon’s asses, sonic defenders completely financed by sugar daddies, and one questionable marital incident when I thought it well worth my time to download Hitler into my wife’s ongoing Sims game, I think it will come as no surprise that, despite my love for video games, I have actually finished so very few. Sure, the geek in me wants to build a digital tanker that plays as if he runs on geothermal power or crack and construct a high def’ master mage that could spit a full-bodied Hermione Granger out of my computer exhaust fans. But alas, much of my geekdom instead gets ladled into hand correcting my Klingon dictionary, writing a macro that pays all my bills at once, and repeatedly turning the Atari 2600 ‘Yar’s Revenge’ score over the 999999 mark back to zero. “Hmm, I am starting to like that Kenny G. song.”
Thusly, when I do finish a game, no less finish one in just a couple of weeks, it is nothing short of an unsurpassable personal triumph. This was the case with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for Wii and I’d love to share my thoughts on the subject so as to pretend that it is at all important or that anybody cares. Can we give Michelle Obama access to the blog?
First, a moment of silence for some of the digital characters into whom I’ve poured the pure essence of life only to leave them stranded, mid-plot, possibly for all eternity.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider 3
(Playstation shit when I finally bought my first PC.)
Plavic Myrtleberry: Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition
(Perpetually stuck in a poor game-save scenario that only loads him, empty-handed, into an enclosed cave with two fully grown and pissed off white dragons.)
Grenoble: Ultima Online
(Victim of the emotional response to an ugly 3D client.)
Grigg Rathskeller: Star Wars Galaxies
(Shot in a dark alley by the president of Sony.)
Gordon Whitefang: The Sims 2
(Potato chip addicted loser whose digital, bread-winning wife was lured over to a permanent lesbian relationship with my wife’s college sorority Sim.)
…and the list goes on.
The Force Unleashed, like most games creamed upon by LucasArts, attempts to successfully add to the epic plot lexicon that the franchise has become. The question is whether they get there as they had with an awesome Darth Maul lightsaber/quarterstaff fight or whether they copped to the business model of Dulocks (evil Ewoks) from the 1980s cartoon. The answer is a little of each, all the excitement of Darth Maul’s counter-insurgent entrance, all the lexicon value of Alien Resurrection. Similar to Knights of the Old Republic II and what seems as if it will be an option in the forthcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, TFU allows you to play a Sith, their vehicle to conveying you, justifiably, to the best parts in this game, the completely freakin’ chaotic parts! While accessing the dark side is a relative newcomer to LucasArts player characters, its branded releases seem to parallel the rate at which most of my friends have grown cynical. So, kudos on the emerging market, George!
First, if you are going to take food out of your children’s mouths to buy new and kill civilians in wars over oil to power your childhood dream of wielding a lightsaber that’s not a mop or a stick, at least get it on Wii. I’m a fan of Wii for the motion technology, but its native bobblehead graphics, while clean, make me long for the blocky veneer of Tron Deadly Discs on Intellivision. For me to opt for a game on Wii over PC or PS would normally be like Rachel Maddow opting to give Glenn Beck a rim job, but for TFU, there can be no better technology. I’ve got lots of broken living room furniture to prove it! “Honey, those cats are going senile.”
Second, if you want them, research your lightsaber-like Wii controller attachments thoroughly. Part of my Christmas gift was a set of stunted falsies with plastic hilts and illuminating, packing-foam blades. The Wii controller fits into each nicely, both the red and the blue, locking into place and allowing open access to everything but the signal panel. The result, a decent feeling child’s replica for swordplay containing a controller that cannot communicate with game system. The signal gets blocked, badly. Fresh batteries correct momentarily, but are we gamers or are we my mother, a woman who once thought that yelling into her 2600 joystick like a microphone could better get Pac-Man to do as she dictated? The game plays fine, even preferably, without any controller attachments, a good thing considering that I play 12 inches from a china cabinet and never more than a pinky toe from a growling Yorkie who seems to sense the dark side in me as I play.
Like Wii Boxing, TFU uses both the Wii controller and the Wii nun-chuck, one in each hand simultaneously. This has a few logistical ramifications for TFU. To begin, it means that almost no matter what Wii package you’ve bought, if you want to take turns playing with your neighbor, the Pulp Fiction gimp enthusiast, you’ll likely need to buy a second controller or second nun-chuck, lest you catch him salivating over all the many complicated safety straps that dangle as you hand off system accessories. The game has a duel mode in which two players can pound on each other, lightsaber to lightsaber, but I have not yet played that. Nobody loves me. Well, not since I got this game anyway. I imagine duel mode needs both the controller and the nun-chuck for each player as well, especially if the mode permits force powers as in the scripted game.
Also, the nun-chuck plugging into the Wii controller means no space to use a Wii MotionPlus chip, the great chip, obviously invented by an old man with potency issues, that keeps your landlord’s kids from effortlessly carving your avatar up like a Christmas turkey by disallowing a number of the standard motion “cheats.”
Finally, while I’ve never been able to quite figure out why such a markedly wireless game connects controller to nun-chuck with a cable, TFU has further puzzled me with a new wired mystery. Somehow, when playing TFU, that cable is so short that my arm span is a definite issue, one hand threatening to yank the opposite shoulder out of its socket when I feel Rancor-infused excitement. At the same time, that cable is somehow so long that when the theatre nerd in me flourishes my weapon as would an extra gay Mercutio mid-battle, I then have to pause the thing to unwrap the massive tangle I create about my wrist. “There was no pause on the Death Star!”
Okay, so, bottom line, closest I have come yet to feeling like I’m using a light-saber! It’s money! The controller is a little less than the weight I imagine Luke’s hilt to have been, the saber part obviously only appearing on the screen and therefore as light as light (without attachments). Yes, I allot exactly 14 seconds per year to imagine lightsaber weights. While I long for the day when my hapless tinkering will create a real lightsaber that I’ll pull for the first time at night in a NYC alley to the shit-pants surprise of some retreating gang-banger, this game will hold me over for a long while. Sure, you can manipulate the toon’s melee style with simpler flicks of the wrist, sometimes even quite accurately, but if you came up as I did pretending the carpet was lava and sacrificing your virgin sister with a push from the sofa to save yourself, you’ll be sore from the full-on broadsword swings and thrusts that you know you want to incorporate into TFU.
The great news is this. While playing a Sith/Jedi in other LucasArts game designs had sort of spiraled into the classic D&D broken balance issue (how much magic is too much versus weapons damage), each aging game title either letting you focus on lightsaber battles or instead the force, this title seems a perfect mix of the two. There is an awesome bad-ass feel to taking out four guys with your lightsaber and then force pushing a huge conduit down the hallway to flatten three more.
And that’s where the Sith motif comes in. In my opinion, the hardest part about getting a game to FEEL like the films is representing the force as the silver screen had. You come away from the films with the childlike inkling that the force can be used to do practically anything. It is expansive, even expansive beyond what you come to realize are the very few particular ways in which the Jedi and the Sith actually exercised it in the plot. You leave the theatre a wide eyed kid somehow believing in UNLIMITED POWER and trying to make your Dad’s car float in the air using only your mind, especially if your new belief system led you to first push it into a swamp. (Ah, memories of time well spent.)
Game design rarely picks that up. It has limits. Frequently the devs relegate themselves to necessary programming and parameters that allow the force to be used on one object, but not the twenty objects immediately surrounding it. “No honey. I’m not pissed at you. I just want to propel that TaunTaun at this griefer’s head and Sony isn’t letting me.” The TFU solution? Fill every square inch of the set with objects not nailed down. Sure, you can’t pluck just anything off the wall with a wave of your hand. This game has the same limitations of any other. But who cares when you are levitating a giant rack to take cover from blaster fire or force pushing your own stormtroopers over a cliff just because they are in your way! Foreground guy gets smashed into an assortment of metal boxes. Midground guy gets squashed by a mammoth cylinder you sent rolling UP a ramp. Background stooges find out what happens when you hurl a three ton bomb their way using only your mind. Glass breaks. Droids blow up when they are slammed into walls. About three minutes into play the game map looks like my apartment after a week of ignoring chores. And that’s only the beginning.
When I went through the tutorial I was astounded. Not by graphics or script teasers, complicated moves or visions of gold bikinis. I was distinctly amused, almost to the point of being appalled, at how far the devs took the force powers. I said aloud to my wife, “Wow, even for a Sith, that’s just plain mean!” TFU seems to address every question a youthful you ever asked about Darth Vader that started with “Why didn’t he just…” Sure, the classics are there (Vader choking people without touching them; pushing a person by shoving your hand out in their direction; ripping things off of the wall and sending them flying.) And yes, the moves appealing to the video game world are there too (force sprint; force jump; blocking incoming blaster fire with your lightsaber). But why stop there? Hey, let’s pick that guy up using the force, and slam his ass into the ground, hard! Let’s plunge our lightsabers into the floor and cause a little local earthquake, just because we can. Here’s a great one, let’s pick that schmuck up, hold him in mid-air with the force, and while he’s up there, whack him in the head with a huge metal crate from the side. Heck, let’s slam two guys together in mid-air just because we can. Take that NPCs! AI is no match for the force. That electricity thing that the emperor can do? Yeah, we got that. We also have a version of it that can hit multiple targets at once! Youch! That move’s got some lexicon compliant name, but I like to call it FRY THOSE BASTARDS! Throw your light saber at a guy? No problem. The force will boomerang the sucker back to you with a really cool noise in your controller. Hey, why not dump all your force “mana” into just buffing you for the lightsaber fight? Devs? Ding ding! It’s in! Want to curl into a half fetal position, concentrate a moment, and just explode the force out into every direction? No problem. In fact, if you buy ranks in improving that power and concentrate long enough, you’ll first suck in everything loose object around you, causing all the junk to swirl like you are a gravity well, thereafter creating enormous projectiles that fly out in every direction when you release. It’s monster. Here’s one, use the force to pick up a heavy blaster cannon and let it float alongside you, shooting, picking off enemies while you train your lightsaber on them. All these moves are value-added keepers, horrendous in their implications, but soooooooooooo f’ing sweet.
Style-wise, though, I have to say, it’s hard to beat the move that makes me the giddiest. Designed around a Yoda move from Revenge of the Sith, TFU lets you hold an NPC up in the air using the force, throw your lightsaber at him, and impale the guy with it! Cruel, cruel, cruel. Just watching it makes you groan aloud…and then think of all the RL people you’d like to see that done to.
That’s what I mean about the chaos. The moves take a few scenes to unlock, in full, your first time out, and once unlocked it takes a little getting used to. Old guys like me really have to take the initiative in refraining from just picking one or two moves that we perform well and letting them carry us through the story. Get a handful of these under your belt and it’s like creating your own scene out of Star Wars. Blow the 20 inch thick door of its hinges, enter deflecting blaster fire, zap the ten guys stupid enough to stand in a cone in front of you with electricity from your fingers, quick parry the one of them smart enough to carry melee weapon, push his buddy into oblivion through the ship’s force field into space, send crates and chairs and barrels careening into the NPC formation to your left. Throw your blade at the protocol droid and blow him up. Smash Ike and Mike together mid-air, force double jump getting in one swipe on the airborne Mandelorian and one blaster deflection before ramming your lightsaber into the ground and knocking all the reinforcements on their asses. Hey, if that’s not incentive enough to be a Sith, break a few things in the process and reveal hidden collectible objects. Yes, greed helps! It’s a COV bank mish on steroids.
The lightsaber technique, by contrast, has less expansive design to it, but is equally as satisfying. For those of us a) aware that lightsabers in Star Wars are stylistically treated like broadswords, not foils, and b) aware that actual or staged broadsword combat works best on a five or eight point system, we might initially be a tad disappointed. (Unless you faked it in your college theatre troupe and spent years after lying about your staged combat certifications.)
Lightsaber combat in TFU basically works on a four point system, up, down, left, and right, with a thrust thrown in there for higher damage and visual variety, plus one parry to account for all parries. However, those four points plus extras, obviously simplified for general audiences, are layered over a very Hollywood-like automatic camera pan throughout play that well makes up for that dip in swordplay expectation. It is also true that there are multiple animations for each point on the broadsword system. So, camera pan layered over varied animations makes for a relatively complex set of possible moves in multiple directions. At least that’s how it feels. I turned down sex!
A word about the camera pan…I’ve been spoiled with innovative camera options in other games. TFU only allows the user to speed or slow the rate at which the camera pans. The player maintains no camera control apart from choosing where s/he moves the main character, the view panning after a few moments to arrive at everyone’s favorite view of their PCs ass. I recommend the fastest pan. Default is medium.
Still not enticed? How about a planet covered completely in junk and the “interesting” things that live in it. How about one where ignitable, poison gases burst out of giant plants? Want to fight an AT-ST? Jedi Temple in ruins? Cloud City? Oh, saliva on my keyboard just thinking about it.
Also falling on the plus side in TFU’s design is great music and what seems like authentic character voices (Jimmy Smits as Senator Organa) if not reasonable facsimiles of expected voices (like Vader and the Emperor). Keep an eye open for a near cop-out guest appearance by a very young Princess Leia and many NPC combatants belonging to species you’d expect to see only in a cantina on Tattooine or roaming the streets of Queens.
The story itself picks up between episodes 3 and 4, and deals with your PC as Darth Vader’s Sith padawan during a time when The Old Republic is being “reorganized” into the first Galactic Empire. (Your PC, btw, is played by an acting compatriot of mine. Yay! Should I tell him he sucks?) The writing is typical Lucas slush which weirdly aids your escapism while playing. The drawback to the chosen timeframe and the loosely strung together in-game movies are as they would be with any prequel. You know that Vader and the Emperor cannot die. You know you are not going to get decision making ability with regard to iconic characters. And, as is almost the requisite mantra of LucasArts by now, your Sith has a change of heart mid-plot. (Gag me with Bantha poodoo.) Altogether this makes for a flip-floppy feel to the plot in which the chaotic moves you can execute no longer fit with the Jedi way. Other characters follow suit as Lucas tries fruitlessly to create some mystery or suspense to which side they are on. No real mystery, George. When your first movies came out, the guys sticking my head in the elementary school toilet were the bad guys and offered little suspense apart from when they would strike, and flush, next.
Still, TFU does take a few plot liberties that are interestingly unexpected. For instance, big spoiler, it is Vader who actually starts the famed rebellion. He entreats your PC to the idea of overthrowing the emperor, as Anakin mentioned at the conclusion of Revenge of the Sith, sending you out “under cover” to make it happen. In a timeframe when you would also be hunting down the “last” of the Jedi, that makes for a good mix of notions. It is also the device through which you go over to the light side, feeling for those you’ve befriended and tricked.
Another novel implementation of the writing and time frame is the hefty number of just plain cool bosses you will face. With ever escalating difficulty, you square off Sith to Jedi, Jedi to Sith, PC to AT-ST, padawan to bull rancor, sane player to nutcase NPC who’s built himself a junk golem, and the list goes on. My favorite bosses are 1) the dark side girl who fights with two dagger-like lightsabers, holding each hilt with the blades pointed out like a knife expert and 2) the Mandelorian who shows up in this giant, flying, crab-like machine that’s immune to almost anything you throw at it. At the very end, you are even going to take on Vader and the Emperor. Despite the fact that you know they cannot be destroyed without changing the timeline, those will be the two toughest battles you face, AS THEY SHOULD BE. Watch for Vader’s helmet coming off when you’ve done enough damage!
Which brings us to the parts of the game that are neither great nor horrible, but just weird enough that they take some serious getting used to. The manners in which the bosses function are among the weirdness. First, there is a health bar for the boss at the bottom of the screen as you enter each boss battle. That would seem standard enough, but for the fact that they are somewhat meaningless. Almost none of the bosses are defeated as you’d expect, when the health bar reaches a true zero. Each instead has a different point on that health bar, a point prior to zero, that his/her defeat becomes possible. Don’t get me wrong, all the sets points seem placed well beyond the three-quarter mark on the health bar. Yet, why then have the health bar at all? It is not an accurate representation of how much longer you need to fight and therefore a difficult mechanism to strategize around, instead forcing you to go all out at every second of the battle, like marriage.
If the health bar trope seems bizarre to you, consider now your own PC’s death and how TFU handles player failure. As it happens, one of only two drawbacks to dying does not start out in an obvious way. Every NPC you kill gives you “force points,” a departure scoring system that is represented by blue light popping out of dead bodies and being absorbed into your own. Cult anyone? Force points are the points you spend to buy ranks in force powers and lightsaber powers between movies, customizing and improving your character as the story moves along. Different NPC types and different situational scenarios yield differing multiples of force points won, like bonuses. The main drawback to dying, even when fighting a boss, is a loss of some force points. However, there is nothing visual to establish that the loss has happened on a boss screen when it does happen.
The second drawback to PC death, (apart from the weeks it will take to unteach your daughter the four letter words that fly from your mouth), specifically in a boss fight, is that a boss will gain back some or near all of his/her hit points. That makes sense, but for the fact that different bosses gain back different amounts. It’s not like healing in COH where a conned NPC might regain life gradually and observably. TFU boss health bars simply jump to the new heath total just before the battle restarts. Earlier bosses tend to gain back fewer hit points, latter bosses gaining back almost full health, with a mix throughout the game between big gainers and small gainers. The result is that, dying during a boss battle early in the game, tricks a new player into believing that there is no drawback to PC death at all. It suddenly feels like T-Ball with no winners and no losers and garners immediate, uninformed, disappointment in the game. With no on-screen indicator that your force points have dropped, no knowledge yet as to how those force points will be used, and a boss’ health bar that so minutely jumps to a total very near his/her prior total that 40 year old eyes cannot see it, dying feels like nothing more than a minor annoyance. You find yourself fruitlessly trying to power through boss battles in hopes of taking down enemies in a single swoop, when a more strategic approach would still prove superior. As prevalent as this uninformed annoyance is when new to TFU, it’s amazing how much one’s strategic approach and muscle memory stay with the player. A boss battle that squashes you again and again your first time out, if replayed later, becomes one of the challenges that you can, in fact, topple with a single, satisfyingly complex effort. You become ready to take on the Sith Lords at Chase.
And now for the jeers. Wii, you were almost there, almost my first sensation of total Star Wars lightsaber immersion. Here’s where you went wrong.
“Force lock” and “saber lock” are the terms the TFU game tutorial uses to describe those moments in the film when combatants reach a corps-à-corps. In game, that basically means when your light saber catches at the same time the boss’ does, creating a temporary stalemate. In TFU this also applies when players attempt to use the same force power at the same time the boss uses it (for those bosses who wield the force). Deadlocked moments like these are handled with a sort of puzzle race. In the event of a lock, a 2D image of your controller appears on the screen and prompts you to twist the controller to different angles to match said image. If successful, a mid-battle animation begins with your PC getting the upper hand after breaking the lock. If you fail at the puzzle or are too slow, the animation and consequences are the opposite. The puzzles get more difficult and have shorter time spans as the game moves on. The “saber/force lock” mechanism is an interesting use of the controller in the game that forces a player to change up movement, but the on-screen, Wii puzzles completely remove a player from the fantastic Star Wars immersion we so crave.
Similarly, when a player reaches the mystery point on a health bar at which a boss can be defeated, direct control is lost, animations begin, and an on-screen, 2D representations of your controllers pop up and shut down to either side of the main view. In this case, Wii needs you to move the controller or the nun-chuck, whichever matches the image, in any direction, but in a left-hand/right-hand sequence that changes for each boss. The images will pop up several times over increasingly lengthy sequences. Match the sequence exactly, and the animation continues on until you win the battle. Miss even one move in the sequence, and the animation briefly shows you taking lumps before diverting again to direct battle control over your PC. Because of this diversion, many boss battles may run the sequence several times if you don’t die in the process of reaching it again. The novel part about this interface, again, is that it changes up controller play, and, in this case, that it really allows you to see the great animation pursuant to setting the Wii images on either side the main view. Using only peripheral vision, you can accomplish the task and watch your animated triumphs.
Other game shortcomings…short length, “narrow” maps, a tutorial that trains you on powers not yet unlocked in the game, no vehicles, no Jedi mind trick, in-games movies that immediately follow other movies, only three save game slots, and a save function that holds your last save point so long as you keep the game running or paused, but reverts you to the distant beginning of any unfinished scene if you shut the game down (in effect, not a save at all).
Other game pluses…findable Jedi and Sith avatars that can be Unlocked for duel mode, unlockable concept art, unlockable costume changes for your PC, Easter egg-like additions to your hit points and “mana” bar, various collectable lightsaber hilts, the ability to begin a second game with all your force powers unlocked once you’ve completed the game a first time, voiced bosses, and increasing numbers of NPCs.
Other plot sinkholes
- The game re-establishes very well that lightsabers are more “civilized” than blasters. So, it feels correct when NPCs holding blasters are taken out easily. The flip side to that is that you will face NPCs who wield all kinds of melee weapons, funky swords, sticks, electric quarterstaffs and such among them. These are tougher foes, able to better parry you and better drop your life a few pegs. However, that means the lightsaber aesthetically loses something in the construct. Here your lightsaber can go through metal floors, burn through walls in the films, slice open metal crates, break glass, cut droids in half, sever limbs, but it can’t parry a wooden cudgel? Ah, the feeling of impotence. That’s what I look for in a game!
- As you get higher in the game, NPCs become harder to kill. That’s normal in gaming. Tougher PCs have more hit points. Period. Yet, this die hard structure holds true for all the many forms of death in the game INCLUDING lightsaber victims. That means that bigger, non-boss NPCs can take multiple lightsaber hits. I have to admit that I have no working gamer solution to this. The alternative would be a far too overpowered PC, perhaps so much so that the game would be uninteresting. Still, there’s something about watching a non-boss who needs to be impaled with a lightsaber more than once to kill him that really nerfs my mental impression of a lightsaber, a mental impression I would have preferred to remain intact.
- While never expressly explained, the early films leave a viewer with the impression that only the Jedi owning a lightsaber can wield it. The later films show saber wielding friendlies interchanging weapons. Later games start to change up lightsaber colors. TFU goes whole hog to break any such impression. Find lightsaber crystals of all different colors and change your lightsaber to whatever you want within those finds with no regard to the dark side or the light side. It’s a tad jolting to the geek mind. But, so was marrying a cheerleader!
- 4) No matter how enthralled a player is with the dark side for gaming, nobody, just nobody, wants to kill Wookies.
Overall best lightsaber and force powers game I have ever seen, played, or even heard of, if played on Wii. I cannot imagine that the other platforms would be nearly as satisfying, and for me, that’s saying a lot. Geek rank order, starting with the least, Lego robotics, Ren. Faire fan pages, rebuses, LARPing, Stephen Hawking, holograms, leetspeak, Gary Gygax, chaos math, internet porn, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Locutus of Borg, pinging free wireless internet access, Amanda Tapping, and Lord of The Rings.
More >>
