Darths & Droids is a webcomic that posits, What if the Star Wars saga were actually the campaign of a long-suffering GM? Then it explores the answer using screen-caps from the movies (starting with The Phantom Menace). If you’re a gaming geek or a Star Wars geek—or, like me, both—then check it out. If you’re my wife, just keep reading.
Lucasfilm has wisely decided to release the original Star Wars trilogy in un-remastered form. The catch is that they’ll only be available from September 12th to December 31st. Anyone who wants to do some early Christmas shopping, you can preorder now. 
I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I don’t own any Star Wars movies on DVD. I guess I was waiting for the all-in-one, 6-movie, 27-disc mega-collection. Surely they have such a thing out now. Can’t hurt to have the original original trilogy, too. I’ll just have to buy it again in about 10 years when the DVD’s successor format is revealed. Progress.
I’m a sucker for Star Wars videogames, so I recently downloaded the demo for Empire at War, which is a real-time strategy (RTS) game set in the Star Wars universe. Last night, I played through the tutorial and the demo. It’s a pretty awesome game, but like I said, I’m a sucker for Star Wars games, so maybe you should take that with a grain of salt.
Empire at War goes beyond the basic harvest-build-conquer model of traditional RTS games. In fact, the resource management aspect of the game has a lot more in common with the classic galactic conquest game Master of Orion than with defining RTS games like Dune 2 or Command and Conquer. There are no resources to harvest in EaW. Instead you earn credits from each planet you control at the end of each galactic day. You can spend the credits on building installations on the planets you control, constructing warships, or recruiting soldiers. This is, for me, one of the most exciting aspects of the game, since I find harvesting to be the most annoying aspect of RTS games.
In the demo, I started off with control of Hoth and was ordered to liberate two neighboring systems from imperial control. First I constructed a large space fleet and attacked a well-defended asteroid system. The space battle was a lot of fun. The space units seem to have a rock-paper-scissors balance system: the capital ships are strong against fighters but vulnerable to bombers, the fighters are strong against bombers and other fighters but easily taken out by ships, and the bombers can make quick work of the capital ships but are easy prey for fighters. When attacking capital ships and space stations, it’s possible to target individual systems, such as the shield generator or a turbo laser battery, in order to weaken your opponent before going in for the kill.
Following the space battle, I amassed ground forces in an attempt to liberate Tatooine. This part of the game was much more frustrating as the control and view system is less intuitive than in the space battle. Also, not all of my forces were immediately available. Instead, I had to take control of reinforcement points, each of which allowed me to bring in a handful of units from my army. It seems like this part of the game could use a little work, but I strongly suspect that the demo I played was from the finalized game.
Empire at War will be released on February 15th. Check out Gamespot for a full, professional review.
I spent a few more hours with KOTOR last night, and I like it more. I’ve figured out the subtleties of the combat system, so it’s no longer annoying. I’ve also stopped transporting back to the hideout every few minutes to heal. It seems like once you clear an area and move on, it remembers that. It just reloads the bad guys if you leave an area prematurely — going back to a previous level or teleporting back to your home base — probably to discourage you from doing that. It worked on me.
There’s also a great sense of satisfaction in completing a quest. I only had to cheat once last — I had to lookup a walk-thru on GameSpot to figure out one section. But it turned out that I just didn’t understand how to do something rather than not knowing exactly what to do.
In summary, a very very fun game.
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. 
