Day 9 !
What is that dragon getting up to ? Next thing you know, he’ll bring his friends in. Now there’s a thought.
It’s Rey making an appearance today. I liked Rey. She had a great entrance leading us into The Force Awakens as a scrapper junker kid with attitude and an instinctive (from taking ships apart to loot the best bits) head for starship workings.
There could only be a couple of games to feature today for Rey. Well, perhaps the Jedi Knight games and Jedi Academy too but I don’t think I owned those. (I tried the Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight demo but I don’t think I got the game).
So … Knights of the Old Republic (aka Kotor). There were two of these games … They were set 4,000 years before the movies in a similar but different universe. Instead, the galaxy is balanced between the hordes of the Sith and the legions of the Jedi. They really don’t like each other.
Like Rey, you don’t start as a Jedi though. There’s no lightsabre as you wake from a coma with no memory, escape an exploding starship and find yourself marooned on the city planet of Taris.
And the adventure launches off from there as you find your ship, the Ebon Hawk, before heading off around the galaxy in search of answers to your mysterious past.
Along the way, you pick up Bastila (the lady on the cover of the game), with the incredible voice of Jennifer Hale who was later to become the only Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect games.
There we go. Jedi and fella with apparently no jaw.
HK-47 is there as well, as the assassin droid with the best lines in the two games.
I played through Kotor once, enjoying the way they turned d20 mechanics from the Dungeons and Dragons system into something that played really well as a faux-real time system on the computer. The game had decent writing, good characters and was probably when the publishers Bioware were at the peak of their powers, producing an excellent game that didn’t outstay its welcome too much. Modern games can be a bit too long.
Kotor spawned a sequel, Kotor 2. I do actually own this game after coming to it a bit late but it’s a digital copy so no box to take a picture of. One reason for not getting it back then was because it had picked up a reputation for being a bit broken. It’s since had the fans having a go at it, patching it up and restoring some cut content.
I’m not sure why but I didn’t really take to Kotor 2 and only got perhaps halfway through. I might have to try again at some point. Maybe because it felt like it was following a similar line to the one before. Not sure. Perhaps like some of the others here, it’s tough to go back to the old games again. New games have come out and do everything so much better. There was also a game that should have been Kotor 3 … but it got overtaken by the trend towards turning everything into Massive Multiplayer Online games and became The Old Republic. I did try that … but it kinda sent me back into Warcraft.
One thing for that is the expectations around How To Play.
The old games would have manuals and keyboard reference charts in their boxes along with the cds. My Mass Effect Andromeda box didn’t even have a disc in it !
Nowadays, the games have their tutorials built in. Games still steadily build up the mechanics that you play in, rarely throwing you in at the deep end. But instead of it being in a book, you’re led by on screen prompts.
I’m not complaining there, this is progress that is good :-D.
Now wondering what’s behind Door Number 10. That’s one for tomorrow. Maggie K’s just updated her discord and twitch emotes and said nice things about the animated and edited versions of those that I do, so I know what I’m doing after hitting the Publish buttons 😀
Be well everyone, stay safe.