I played KOTOR for about 3 hours last night. I like it, for the most part. It does degenerate into a hack-n-slash adventure at times, which is really annoying when you’re trying to get thru a section and you keep getting killed in the same spot. What’s the fun of that? It’s very frustrating. Also, you can only walk forward, so if you want to retreat in a combat situation, you have to expose your back. WTF?!?! It also has this weird feature where you can basically teleport back to your base, and then return to your starting position. This is nice because it allows you to change your party make up as you please, and also heal completely. However, when you return to your starting position, all the creatures you killed are reincarnated (actually this happens whenever you leave the area and then re-enter — it doesn’t remember which beasts you’ve defeated — which makes you wonder why the Xbox has a hard drive). The teleport feature also allows you to bypass any security checkpoints in the way — you have to sneak past the first time, but after that, you just magically whoosh by them.
So in summary, the role-playing part is very cool, but the combat is kinda sucky. And the graphics could be better. Oh well. I’m not a Jedi yet, so I’m sure everything will be much cooler then. 
Official Website
GameSpot Review
I first noticed this phenomenon with the rise of shows like Battle Bots. The combatants on that program are sophisticated remote controlled vehicles, not robots. A robot is an automaton. The word itself, with all of the sci-fi implications behind it, is sexy, and that’s why they use it.
I was watching a program — Science Times, I think — yesterday on The National Geographic channel, and they had a segment on “rat bots.” These are rats that have had three electrodes inserted into their brains that allow them to be lead around remotely, sort of the high-tech equivalent of dangling a piece of cheese. The idea is that you can get them easily into a building that has collapsed or been taken over by terrorists. The segment also featured competing technology in the form of remote controlled vehicles, referred to on the program as robots.
Netiher the rats nor the “robots” are autonomous. Both require a remote operator to guide them to their destination. Roomba, the robot vaccuum cleaner, is a real robot because you turn it on and without any further input from you, it will clean your room. It is autonomous. Imagine what a crappy product it would be if you had to sit at your computer and guide it around the room.
Eventually we will have real robots that can search for survivors in the aftermath of an earthquake wihtout direct control by a person out of harms way. The current crop of search-and-rescue robots are a good place to start. They’re just not actually robots.
