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Cruising the racks of my local independent reseller, I look for a cheap way to bridge the gap between my last game (Dante’s Inferno) and my next (God of War III). The selection is pretty grim. Sports, sports, sports. Bionic Commando. Sports. Killzone. Resistance. Sports, sports, sports.
The selection is better at the EB Games in the mall – but the prices aren’t, and the ethics aren’t. EB wants to turn new into used as soon as possible. Their entire business is built on a conflict of interest, which they exploit at every turn. I may buy used games, but I try to buy morally, which is kind of like having standards.
At this little entertainment orphanage, there is no new; only rows and rows of the abandoned, looking for love. Or, in the case of PS3 games, a one-third row, and most of it sports.
The pleasure of finding a decent title in the hock shop jumble is like finding a good pair of jeans with both the crotch and knees intact at the thrift store – rare, but awesome. You sometimes wonder at the story behind it. I try to wonder very briefly, because in the case of jeans you don’t want to think of who died in them, and in the case of games you really want to believe that’s just Cheetos grease making the manual pages stick together.
Nestled between Sport and Sport, I spot Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
I sense a disturbance in the Force. It sounds like “SQUEE!”
$18. Not great – not a steal, especially for a game I bought new two years ago and brought to the orphanarium less than a month later, to the tune of $40. Averaged out, I still make out okay on the deal, but it’s hard not to feel stupid about it. If real life had the decency to be more poetic this might even be the same copy I once owned, having traded hands and crossed county lines, and maybe even traveled in the back of a truck with chickens and migrant workers; an epic adventure on its way back to me.
Stupid or not, even with Ackbar’s Realization looping in my head, the squee persists, and in minutes I am the mildly ashamed re-owner of what, at best, can be called a broken physics engine with a franchise sheen.
Every four-to-six months I become a Star Wars fan.
It is like lycanthropy. Most of the time I am a normal human being. But when the nerd is full and the geekbane blooms, I change. It strikes without warning, like force lightning. It consumes me, like the Dark Side. It can make a pleasant social exchange suddenly awkward, like sister-kissing.
True fans are nothing if not consistent. Star Wars isn’t a universe I live in. I just visit. But what makes it different from anything else I dig on is the volume of my obsession. I won’t just watch one of the films or take a spin through a game, soak in the sights for a bit and move on. No, I’ll go to the Wookipedia. I will scour the internet for a good deal on Addias AT-AT kicks. I will watch The Clone Wars – and like it. I go from passive enjoyment to superfan in the span of a hyperspace jump. Then the impulse passes and I wake up next to a pile of Expanded Universe fiction and feel dirty.
The Force Unleashed is a mess, but it’s kind of an awesome mess. For everything it does right it compensates with three or four horrible, lazy things. Still, at the end of the day and against my better judgment, I had a good time with it. Again.
The narrative is pretty great – a story that not only connects the two trilogies but manages to capture some of the cavalier magic of the original films. This is complimented with gameplay objectives than never change from the first level to the last. Kill stuff, move stuff, QTE.
Fortunately, Force powers are awesome – when they work, when the auto-targeting system doesn’t chose that inoffensive piece of destructible environment instead of one of the ten Storm Troopers in front of you, when the sluggish camera doesn’t decide the best perspective is the wall behind you.
Starkiller is a total badass that can pluck Tie Fighters from the sky, but sometimes has a hard time walking over inch-high bumps in the terrain.
On this playthrough, I had one boss glitch out hard. Maris Brood, Shaak Ti’s Dark-inclined apprentice, can go so invisible she leaves the game entirely.
What should have been the game’s defining moment, something so awesome it would make your unborn great grand children wet their pants, very quickly becomes an example of everythingthat game got wrong – bad targeting, janky aim, poor pacing, repetition; pulling a Star Destroyer out of the sky turns unleashing the Force into an exercise in tedium and tolerance.
That The Force Unleashed has sold 7 million copies across all SKUs to date is baffling, given all it’s problems – except here I am playing it for a second time with a shit-eating grin. When I am in this Star Wars fugue every terrible, unpolished design choice acts as a “What if?” scenario, instead of a game-breaking, inexcusable mistake. I forgive it, and enjoy it, because on some level it succeeds in being indisputably Star Wars, and that’s sadly good enough.
I gave money to the developers of this game, which is like telling them they did a good job. Fortunately, they were all fired (author’s note: I do not actually think this is fortunate). The sequel, presumably starring Zombie Starkiller, is set to drop this year. Development is split between in-house and “outside” departments. I’d love to believe the next game will leave me more satisfied than tolerant. But 7 million on franchise fever doesn’t do the series any favours. They don’t have to make it great. It will sell just the same. And I will buy it, because sometimes, when it comes to Star Wars, I leave my standards in a galaxy far, far away.