Anyone remember the Jedi Knight games? I was browsing YouTube and found several of the excellent cutscenes from the first Jedi Knight game (confusingly the second Dark Forces game). These cutscenes made a better film than the Phantom Menace ever did.
Kyle Katarn rocks - he's like some weird Jedi mofo fusion between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. The baddie, Jerec, was especially English and camp, but very, very good. The game was so quotable with great lines like...
"Dark Side? I've been there. Do your worst."
"MMMOOORRRGGAANNN KAAATTTAARRRNNN? This dead man holds the valley's location. Very intriguing."
"Excellent Katarn, you have started your journey to the Dark Side, but that is not enough!"
Here's some of his finest moments...
Like the ever-so cool intro that resembles a New Hope...
... and Kyle's first ever appearance on Nar Shadda, a city in Star Wars that needs to fire its town planning department!
... Kyle is so hard he goes up against a squad of Tie-Fighters on foot. Jan, his sidekick/love interest/first murder victim saves the day.
... and when in true Star Wars tradition Katarn avenges his father's death with the business end of a lightsabre (yes, this time what Jedi told you was true, the baddie really did kill your dad).
Especially cool was that your actions in the game determined the continuation of the above scene. If you became a light side Jedi (with cool defensive powers but no offensive powers) you just stand there. If you become a dark jedi (with offensive powers and no defensive powers leaving you vulnerable to every Dark Jedi's offensive powers) you slaughter the captured love interest for no real reason and then take on every last Dark Jedi in the game.
Here's the "official" version of Kyle's choice...
Sadly they don't have the Dark Side ending where you become Emperor of the Universe, which is how the game ended for me. Also doubly sad was how when the FMV bubble burst Kyle was recast as a bunch of pixels for Jedi Knight 2 and 3 (or Dark Forces 3 and 4).
Real updates soon.
2 comments:
I STILL remember this game fondly, playing it on a 233mhz Pentium1 CPU and A Voodoo Graphics card, the PC had 64mb of RAM!
I remember having just as much fun on the Multiplayer side of the game (where 2 Jedi's fought to the death) using my 28.8kbps Modem to dial a friends machine 2 streets away on our free Telewest phonelines..
The sequel used computer animated characters, that had NO personality whatsoever, which spoiled the atmoshere compared with the "Jedi Knight" outing..
The Original "Dark Forces" game used cartoon-like animation, and was, for its time a very well presented game, I played THAT on a 66mhz 486 PC, with 8mb of RAM.
Although in all fairness lightsabre combat got a lot better in JK2 and 3. In JK it seemed random or down solely to your rhythm.
To be fair the story had a couple of holes...
Post a Comment