Oof. This is a good thread. Lots of good games listed in here:
The Dark Forces series is top notch. I finally played through it all on the hardest difficulty and beat it (I stopped at Jedi Academy, mostly because I couldn't get my mods to work due to JA's singleplayer not being able to support the amount of custom stuff I was trying to use), but I'd beaten that before, and JA is more of a spiritual sequel anyway, as it doesn't really follow Kyle's adventures. I really hope we see some new Katarn stuff in the Disney future. I wish they'd kepy Kyle seperate from the Jedi, but it turned out okay.
Republic Commando was also fantastic, and a departure from the general Star Wars fare in that it was a window into the gritty, dirty, wetwork side of Star Wars as opposed to the flashy pretty Jedi glowsticks and magic side. I think 38 sums it up perfectly when you find the lightsaber Easter Egg: "A more elegant weapon for a more civilized time, hm? Well, guess what. Times have changed. Everything felt big and bad, too. The Trandos and Wookiees were all huge, the Geonosians were mean as hell, the droids weren't stupid cartoon characters, but serious things to be afraid of, especially Grievous' Magnaguards.The environments were pretty, too. I always forget Grievous was part of the game because I'm pretty sure it was one of his first appearances.
KOTOR was another huge game for me. I remember being intensely excited while playing it, and being just as shocked at the big reveal as I was with ESB. KOTOR also gave me my Star Wars-related name for a long time, as well. It was definitely a Star Wars game, despite being very distant from the OT. KOTOR II was also fantastic, but, obviously and correctly, you get the feeling that you're playing an early indev version of the game, and you pretty much are, especially in the second half of the game. I can't convey how stark the contrast between the first level and the last level is in terms of feeling like a completed game. I feel really bad for the crap reputation Obsidian got on the game, even though I heard they lobbied to make a "completion" patch for the game after it was released, which LucasArts vetoed. Luckily there's the community-made mod that gives us a much more complete game, because KOTOR II deserves it, because it would have likely surpassed KOTOR had it been completed.
The original Rogue Squadron on the N64 took hours of my time. I always meant to try out the hugely-improved Rogue Squadrons II and III, but never owned the Nintendo hardware in order to do so. I did get Battle for Naboo, which was the Episode I tie-in Rogue Squardon-esque fighter game on the N64, and it had some ground combat elements and a pretty wide variety of ships to play with, and I remember it being quite a lot of fun. I remember getting the Naboo Starfighter through cheats and loving it.
I also sank quite a lot of time into Episode I Racer when I was a lad. I cheated so much in that game, though, back when I was into not having a challenge. I picked it up again a couple years back during my "break-out-the-N64-and-beat-all-my-games-again" streak and got stuck on Racer. Those duo-level races in the Cloud City levels always kicked my ass, but it was still a blast with a huge variety of racers.
Shadows of the Empire was also a big one. Many hours in that. I also remember WAMPASTOMPA allowing you to play as enemies and whatnot. Such a fun game, even though Dash was just yet another lame Han clone. I remember liking Rogue Squadron's version of Hoth better, but it was so much easier to use the tow cable in SOTE. I remember playing through Jedi Knight and hearing a lot of SOTE sound effects, that's how ingrained it was in my pysche.
There was also the lovely Force Commander. I remember standing in the local Software Etc (now EB Games) trying to convince my brother to buy that over the original Age of Empires and finally winning him over with promises of AT-ATs and TIE fighters stomping over Rebel scum. Whoops. To be fair, it wasn't all THAT terrible (but it was bad), and I actually beat it a few years ago (I had a kick where I went back and legitimately beat all the games I gave up/cheated on years before). The soundtrack for FoCom was, however, exceptional, providing heavy metal and other remixes of John Williams' scores, and they were amazing. So good. Go check out some of them if you have the time, they're worth it. The story itself wasn't terrible, either.
After that, of course, came Galactic Battlegrounds and The Clone Campaigns expansion pack. As said before, generally a forgettable Age of Empires II (which I play to this day, thanks to the HD remake) clone, but, because the gameplay was basically 100% lifted from AoEII, still a ton of fun. Lots of good campaigns and such, and one of the first games I remember playing online a ton (through the MSN Gaming Zone, remember that?). I remember the Jedi Knights when sent to move would sometimes say, "I'll use the Force, Commander" and I always took that as a homage to the (in my opinion, because it was far more original) superior Star Wars RTS predecessor.
After THAT was Empire at War and Forces of Corruption. I played these pretty well. I remember they were a lot of fun, but then you just ended up with a fleet so big (I always ran with the Executor and like two other SDs plus an Interdictor to keep the Rebels from escaping, and just used the free TIEs I got with them) that you just stomped everything no problem in space, and then with a few AT-ATs (which could drop free stormies) and AT-STs and AT-AAs (one of many FoCom units that stayed around for a long time) you stomped everything on the ground. Fun to do for awhile, but then it got pretty old. Still a pretty neat game, though I much preferred the Homeworld II Warlords mod for Star Wars space combat. Amazing mod.
I also played Obi-Wan. An interesting but somewhat-clunky game based on the adventures of Obi-Wan through his perspective leading up to and during the events of TPM. Felt like the opposite to Bounty Hunter, and was a crummy Xbox port and had crummy graphics, but was still pretty fun and had cool and diverse level design. Naboo has always been really amazingly pretty to me, but there was also a jungle planet, Coruscant, the Jedi Temple, Trade Federation ships, Tatooine, and so on. It has has a great reference to Trainspotting at the end that I did not get for many years. I still quote this game to this day, mostly because the voice actor for Obi-Wan sounded like he had a bad headcold and it was funny in a very memorable way.
Bounty Hunter was another game I liked a lot, but never could finish because I didn't own a PS2 at the time. I fully intend to go back and play the hell out of this game, but I'm not sure when. I really enjoyed the tie-in to one of my favourite comic series, Open Seasons, which was made as a tie-in to the game, and the cinematics were great.
The Clone Wars (not either cartoon series, but the original game) also saw some playtime. It was neat, and made by Pandemic, so it had lots of pre-Battlefront stuff in it, and it was even pretty fun. The single-player was neat and had an okay story, but the multiplayer was even better. I remember playing the survival mode in the Geonosis arena with my brother for hours, or going head-to-head in vehicles. Not a great game, but still a lot of fun.
Then there was Star Wars: Galaxies, which still gives me chills to think about. I put about seven years into that game, all told. I've talked about it a lot here, but this game really was my life for a long time. So many good and bad memories in there. It was kind of ahead of its time, one of the last of the sandbox, experimental MMOs (for awhile) and it was definitely a victim of the Curse of WoW that standardized MMOs for a long time, but boy was it a lot of fun in the early days. I'm not sure I'll ever feel that kind of excitement and wonder as I did when I stepped off the shuttle onto Naboo and started exploring. It had a ton of faults and unrealized potential, but man. What a game.
I also got into Battlefront and Battlefront II. Forgettable singleplayer stuff (though Temuera Morrison put in a good performance as a grizzled clone vet narrating the Battlefront II storyline). The multiplayer was where it was at, though, especially in BFII, which I felt was much improved, especially with space combat, the all-heroes mode, upgrades, and whatnot. I was disappointed to see the loss of Battlefront III, but, as an avid and long time Battlefield player, knowing that DICE has the new reboot, Battlefront, I could not be more excited, especially considering Battlefront was a Battlefield knockoff in the first place. The future was dark, and is now very bright for Battlefront.
LEGO Star Wars I played a bit. Lots of fun, and still pretty true to the story. I love games where you can explore and solve puzzles for secrets. Writing about it is really making me want to check out the Complete Saga version. LEGO and Star Wars, what could go wrong?
The Force Unleashed I played a lot of, as well as the Ultimate Sith Edition. It was fun. I like to think of Starkiller as less of a real character and more like a metaphor for the spirit of the Rebellion. Less a true story and more of a tale old Rebels tell new recruits to make them feel like they can win against unbeatable odds. I honestly really enjoyed playing it. You really did feel incredibly powerful, especially compared to a game like Obi-Wan, or even Jedi Outcast, and I, at least, felt awesome challenging the Emperor and Vader, and ripping a Star Destroyer out of the sky, even if it was over-the-top. It was a pretty game, it had a lot of the grit that RepCom had, the customization options were great (even though I mostly wore the Mandalorian armoured outfit Galen gets on Bespin), the extra characters were awesome (crazy powerful Force C-3PO? Yes please), and the Sith What-If stuff was so much fun. Even though you kill Boba. I'm also glad because it brought Sam Witwer into Star Wars, and he's been an incredible asset. I want TFUII, just to see where the story goes, but I'll wait for it to be really, really cheap on Steam first, because it's definitely not a whole new game. Plus I'll also have to rebuy TFU:USE on Steam as well to keep the collection intact.
I also played the F2P Clone Wars Adventures. It was okay. They had a great selection of character customizations (as long as you didn't mind buying them) and some fun minigames. Definitely not really a real game, though, just a virtual chatroom with avatars and minigames, much like many kiddie-MMOs.
Finally, we had The Old Republic. I dunno. It didn't live up to the hype that it generated. I think a lot of people, myself included, went in somewhat expecting to be as fulfilled as we were when we played SWG, and it just wasn't gonna happen. They were two very different games, and it just wasn't going to be the same, no matter what. That said, it was still a lot of fun, and it brought a lot of my old SWG-era buddies out of the darkness. I think their greatest asset (being fully voiced and very complex, story-wise) was also their greatest downfall, because it meant that once content ran out, it was gonna be some time before new content arrived; they've been quick to bring it up, but it's still slow, and I was never a big raider, and the top-tier Bounty Hunter gear never really appealed to me at the time, so that part of the game wasn't huge for me, which meant that, well, there just wasn't much to do after a certain point, on top of that, the story was incredibly restricting, which meant the game was not only very linear, but it also meant that your story was the exact same as the story for every other player of your class (minus a few Dark Side or Light Side choices), and so it was basically a single-player game with multiplayer bits, and once your class story ended and you got past the awkward "oh so we're BOTH the best bounty hunters in the galaxy?" stage, you were in a very empty sandbox, expecting you to be fed content with a defined story and thus unable to create your own. But, who knows, I may even still be playing it if I wasn't having insane internet problems at the time that kept me from enjoying anything and running any endgame content. Since it went F2P, I've been considering checking it out again, but the restrictions they put on F2Pers are really, incredibly harsh, even for people like me who beta tested the damn thing. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but it still calls to me now and then...
As a small aside, I also remember exclusively playing Darth Maul and Jango Fett in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4, respectively.
I really want to try to get into some of the other retro games mentioned in here, X Wing and TIE Fighter and Rebel Assault and all the arcade games and other things I missed. Maybe I'll do a marathon at some point...
Anyway, that's my novel/retrospective on my Star Wars gaming career. Sorry it's long and rambly, and has terrible grammar, but it's late and I'm tired.
