04/02/2002 Archived Entry: "Feel the force!"

I've been playing Dark Forces III: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast for most of the weekend, though I understand that they've finally dropped the "Dark Forces" monicker. It's a decent game, though the game design is bland and repetitive, and the first two levels, until you get the lightsaber, are absolute torture to play through. Once you get the lightsaber and you get to start whupping butt with the Force, it gets a bit more interesting before it becomes stale again. As with most FPP-shooter games, I can only play it in small, hour-long doses before I get bored. No matter how much you try, and no matter what creative license you apply to a game, it's impossible to make "run into the room, kill all the guys, hunt for the switch or door, run into the room, kill all the guys, hunt for the switch or door..." very interesting. And the disgusting fascination level designers seem to have with "make the switch or door hard to find, leading to an hour of boring wandering around" is a terrible, terrible thing.

Right now, I'm in the swamp outside the Jedi Academy, having just blown up Lizard Man's entirely-too-large and stupifyingly-boring-to-run-around-in starship. I'm glad that I blew it up, too, because it was filled with pointless rooms and needlessly stupid structurs, as well as absurdly complicated systems. After going through what I went through to set the communications array--and I ended up just turning on the "no clipping" cheat rather than spend a half-hour running and jumping like a reject from a Super Mario Brothers video game--I have to question the logic of the ship's architect. If I had to crew a ship that was laid out like that, I'd throw myself into one of the seemingly endless array of trillion-mile deep chasms that litter the ship's open spaces.

"Right, lieutenant, we need to raise the base on the communicator. Go set the red, green, and blue switches to correspond with the following meaningless symbols."

"But, sir--does this mean that I'm going to have to spend an hour running and jumping around amid the floating cubes, trying to find which cube houses the proper symbol for the communications array?"

"Indeed, lieutenant." [force grip] "And I find your lack of faith disturbing."

Why am I still playing this game? Because, let's face it--even with all the shittiness, it's still hella-fun to whack people with a lightsaber. I do so love those "woob-woob" noises.

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