Last Sunday night - well, very early Monday morning - I finished playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. That only took six years and a $10 release on Steam to make time for. Gotta say, I continue to be amazed how so many other people seem to get Star Wars so much better than George Lucas gets his own creation. Seriously, look at this Old Republic trailer from Bioware and tell me you wouldn't want the people who put this together to make an actual Star Wars movie. Whether it's Bioware, or the Zahn books, or the original two volume animated Clone Wars series from Genndy Tartovsky is there really anybody at this point (including Brandon's left nut, as he so elegantly phrased it on Twitter) that doesn't get what makes a Star Wars story Star Wars better than George Lucas?
Ah well. Back to KOTOR. The game certainly isn't without flaw, especially compared to more modern games, but Bioware continues to impress me with their ability to create characters I get attached to and weave a narrative that keeps me playing when I shouldn't be, not unlike being hooked on a good book. I don't want to say I ignored my kids this past weekend to play the game, but I certainly spent more time on KOTOR than I should have, especially on Sunday when I had to know the character of Bastilla's fate. In the face of that, negative stuff, like the fact that talking someone down from the darkside is the equivalent of saying, “Carol-anne, come back to the light"!” and having them respond, “Okay!” just doesn’t matter much to me. (Also, to be fair, convincing NPCs to see things your way is done far more convincingly in KOTOR than it’s done in, say, Fallout 3.)
A second perk of the game is that it kept me busy while I await review code for Dragon Age, something I still don’t have. Sigh. I so wanted to get an early start on that game and throw it in the face of all you shlubs, but no, I’m down slumming it with the rest of you. (I kid, I kid.) Actually, it’s worse, because I’m also buying the game despite (supposedly) getting review code and I’m unlikely to have that until the end of next week. What can I say? It’s a game I want to support, so I ordered the CE from the EA Store. (I must have the cloth map. Being an Ultima whore, I’ve a bit of fetish for cloth maps in RPGs.)
