Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Holy fucking crap. You will never hear me admit to ANYONE that I’m a Star Wars geek. Fuck, who listens to a two foot high broccoli anyway? Someone with an ax wound in his shin, that’s who! Anyway, yeah I think most of these overanalyzing Star Wars fans are fucking losers. I think the new movies are, well….garbage (except for Darth Maul, he’s fucking cool). In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that this new Star Wars game for Xbox,
Knights of the Old Republic, is BETTER than the last 2 movies.
Follow your created character on his or her journey through a time period that is placed roughly 4000 years before the events of Episode I. As you progress through the story, you are able to controle ALL of the major plot developments and the growth of your character’s umm….character. See kids, the hook here is that you can either be a fine, upstanding follower of the light side, a plain ol’ Jedi…..OR a badass take-no-prisoners Dark Jedi who murders innocents, starts wars, kills for money, all that good stuff. That’s the magic of
KOTOR. It’s all pretty much up to you. As you progress on your path to the light or dark side, your character will begin to take on physical traits reflective of the path you’ve chosen. If you’re a fine upstanding Jedi, you’ll be bathed in light and have pretty good posture, of all things. Dark side leaves you looking like a zombie pretty much, with pale skin and eyes that look like you have the worst case of glaucoma known to man or vegetable. Not only is this some extremely innovative gameplay, this also gives you an incentive to play through the game twice since your path not only determines the ending, but various quests open up or don’t at all depending on your conversations, who you kill/let live, etc. Needless to say, in my personal game the streets are paved with the corpses of my victims. Streets, flow, blood of nonbelievers, yadda yadda. You know the drill.
KOTOR is an expansive, epic RPG that is, in all honesty, accessible to hardcore Star Wars/gaming geeks AND casual fans at the same time. BioWare has done an exceptional job of balancing geeked-out stat tweaking with several options that allow you to forgo all that “I need +2 defense, +4 charisma” shit and pretty much just kick ass. I’m going on record as saying this game WILL be a system seller for Microsoft. If you don’t have Xbox, you should at the very least rent the system and game for the weekend. Then buy them both when you can’t put it down when it’s due back.
See you next week, fuckers.
