Star Wars: Republic Commando (2005)

Genre: Tactical FPS | Players: 1, Multi | Developer: Lucasarts

Players take control of Boss, the leader of Delta Squad's clone commandos, as they fight through campaigns of the Clone Wars against various Separatist enemies from droids to Geonosioans and beyond using various Republic and enemy weapons, but most importantly using the squadmates.

The main draw is the squad-based gameplay that allows players to direct the 3 other commandos, Scorch, Fixer and Sev, to perform various actions like take attack positions, set charges and hack computers. It is actually essential to learn it as many battles would probably be impossible otherwise because of difficulty and that ammo is limited and drains very fast if players try to do everything themselves. It works very well most of the time. Several times the commandos got stuck on the geometry and it took some creative uses of the pull back and attack commands to cure them of their retardation, but it was still a minor problem and sometimes funny.

The weapons are decently varied and players are encouraged to use them all as different ones will be more effective than others against certain enemies. Too bad no one will tell you what does what. Grenades in particular can be effective, but there are multiple kinds and no instruction on how to use them effectively. This trial and error will cause players to waste ammo and force them to use the weaksauce pistol with recharging ammo almost as a punishment when they run out. If players manage to figure things out though, combining enemy weaknesses with effective squad commands will give the satisfying feeling of being an elite squad. Protip: regular droids by themselves should just be punched in the face for an instant kill. Saves the ammo which is liberally scattered around, but Boss can only carry so much. Healing bacta stations are also pretty much everywhere which doesn't make battles any easier since shields and health disappear quickly under fire without taking cover and trying to use one in a firefight is a dumb idea.

The game still looks pretty good for it's age and minus the occasional stupid AI, Boss's lumbering movement speed and pretty short campaign ( I finished it in just 7 hours), it is a good example of solid squad-based game-play. There is multi-player, but there was no one playing to test it. Oh well.

Buyer's Guide:
Available for the original Xbox and on PC and Steam.

3½ Wookie life debts for everybody out of 5

Star Wars Episode 1 Racer (1999)

Genre: Racing  |  Players: 1 - 2  |  Developer: LucasArts

SW Ep1 Racer, at its heart, is a basic racer (with NO STORY) that anyone can pick up and get good at with a little practice. The control is steady and easy to adapt to. It doesn’t send you into a wall with the lightest stroke of the joystick. Hitting walls causes damage but you can try to repair it while driving. If you hit a wall hard enough you’ll blow up but don’t worry, you respawn. If you want a more authentic controlling experience, in the list of cheat codes there is one that you can enter to utilize 2 controllers at the same time.

Tournament, free play, and time attack are the 3 play modes. You get 4 save profiles that will carry into any mode. There are 25 courses, several of them are the same place just with variations in the tracks. You can choose any course in free play and time attack along with the option to mirror them, although that is a locked feature in tournament mode. Tournament mode allows you to earn money and modify your podracer. Before races, there is a trick that lets you see the drivers taunting each other. Sadly, they all only have one line to say for themselves. If you pick Anakin, all you will ever hear is “I can run faster than your podracer.”

The tracks go from ‘easily learned’ to ‘may cause motion sickness’. The swamps, mines, and underwater tracks all have dark backgrounds contrasting with the sky, snow, and desert tracks which are bright. The speed makes things different in this game. Podracers are fast and the scenery goes by even faster. It takes many runs to memorize a track.

And you better get used to Duel of the Fates… It’s the only music in the game.

If you wish to play this game in all its glory then you’ll need an expansion pack. The expansion pack is basically an extra bit of ram allowing for higher resolution. Not many games took advantage of using the expansion pack but the ones that do look great. Without one for this game, the graphics are muddy and the cinematics are cut short, but with one it looks wonderfully crisp for an N64 game.

4½ Jake Lloyd’s bad racing taunts out of 5

Nutted by Little Perturbed Blue Ducky!

Armed and Dangerous (2003)

Genre: 3rd Person Shooter | Players: 1 | Developer: Planet Moon Studios

Armed and Dangerous follows the exploits of a band of rebels called the Lionhearts as they attempt to steal the Book of Rule from the villainous King Forge and end his reign of tyranny. That sounds a bit epic, but it is really a tongue-in-cheek parody of those grand fantasy quests along with jabs at shooter cliches and references to Star Wars (probably because of publisher Lucasarts) and Monty Python with one character lamenting at one point that "this is turning into a bad fantasy novel."

Players control main character Roman and fight enemies with weapons that range from the conventional rifles and machine guns to the more fantastic Topsy Turvy bomb that reverses gravity and the Land Shark gun that true to its name fires whole sharks at the enemy. You can also give basic squad commands to your companions Jones, an anthropomorphic mole with a love for explosives, and Q, an obsessively tea drinking robot. With the squad and weapons, players complete missions like saving peasants, destroying towers and holding off invasion forces all with great humor and solid gameplay in levels that can be both linear and open world style particularly those with the jetpack. Bonus points for the great Tony Jay voicing King Forge.

Negative points are a weird difficulty curve with enemies that do almost no damage standing next to ones that will end you in 3 seconds, the weird and fun weapons have very limited ammo meaning players will rely on the boring but effective machine gun 90% of the time, almost every level has a hold off invasion portion at the end which isn't as fun as actual bosses and almost all NPC characters use the same ugly character model.

Buyer's Guide:
Can be found used for around 5 bucks for both Xbox and PC or you can buy it off Steam for $4.99.

4 Gardening robot soldiers wearing pigtails and sundresses out of 5