How Vader Got His Groove Back
THE FORCE UNLEASHED PROMISES THAT RAREST OF STAR WARS EXPERIENCES: A SATISFYING ONE
Few intellectual properties are as perfectly suited for the video game experience as Star Wars. George Lucas’ universe is teeming not only with spaceships, ray guns, and laser swords, but also epic clashes between good and evil, father and son, teacher and student, Wookiee and Ewok. Filtering influences from Joseph Campbell to Akira Kurosawa through stop-motion animation and then bleeding-edge 3-D computer graphics, it may be the quintessential mix of high and low culture.
Yet, confoundingly, there has never been a major pop-culture franchise so poorly served by the video game medium. Many of the 80-plus Star Wars games are decidedly average, and to some fanboys, it never got any better than the original 1983 Star Wars arcade game, where a stick-figure X-Wing fighter takes down endless waves of blocky Death Stars.
Sensing that its self-published games were too closely tethered to the movies’ mythology and morality, LucasArts set out to create a multilayered Star Wars experience for gamers raised on Halo and Grand Theft Auto—dense, action-packed extravaganzas with Michael Bay–style explosions and plenty of wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if? moments.
The Force Unleashed (★★★★; DS, PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox 360) offers up all these by simply delivering on the title’s rich promise—indulging the power of mind control over people and things for maxi-
mum mayhem. The story of Darth Vader’s career as an enforcer for the Empire in the years between the two movie trilogies would be a footnote in the Star Wars Wikipedia entry, but the game’s aggressive attitude feels fresher than anything to come out of the Lucas think tank in years.
After playing an opening level as Vader himself, you take on the role of his secret apprentice, a Jedi orphan raised by the former Anakin Skywalker. Armed with a lightsaber and an ever-growing array of Force powers (levitating people, shooting lightning bolts), you can view each level largely as an excuse to destroy stuff,
whether you’re slicing up enemies or tossing around spaceships with your mind.
Wanton violence alone isn’t enough to capture the attention of jaded gamers, so the game’s secret weapon is a new software tool called Digital Molecular Matter that re-creates the physical properties of real-world objects. Rip a metal door off its hinges and it crumples like you imagine a metal door would. It’s an uncanny effect and grounds a sci-fi universe that is, by definition, consumed with fantastical elements, in a recognizable reality. (The Wii doesn’t have the processing power to handle the advanced software
engine, but manipulating a lightsaber via Wiimote isn’t merely the ne plus ultra of that device’s functionality—it’s something you’ve been waiting to do all your life.)
Instead of trying to bend the well-tested memes of video game design to fit the confines of the Star Wars canon, it seems LucasArts has learned to build an engaging game first, then add the branding later. By deconstructing the conventional wisdom regarding what a Star Wars game should be, The Force Unleashed may prove that the franchise can survive its greatest threat—the end of the movie series that inspired it. DAN ACKERMAN
How Star Wars fans have become part of the act
That deep-breathing voice under Darth Lucas has been known to embrace (and Vader’s helmet in The Force Unleashed even hire) creative fans rather than serve may sound familiar, but it’s not the them with cease-and-desist orders (hello, movies’ James Earl Jones. LucasArts Disney!). The 1977 spoof Hardware hired enterprising Madison, Wisconsin Wars, which featured Fluke Starbucker superfan Matt Sloan, who played the and Chewchilla the Wookiee Monster, lead in a series of Web videos about may seem like a relic now, but Lucas has Darth’s wildly unpopular supermarket- called it his favorite Star Wars parody, manager brother, Chad. “I was pretty and director Ernie Fosselius went on to excited—who wouldn’t be?” says the 35- do sound-effects work and voices on year-old filmmaker. “They cast in London, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, New York, and L.A., and they couldn’t Return of the Jedi, and Attack of the find anyone who could do the voice.” Clones. Director Kevin Rubio parlayed his
For Sloan, who will also lend his voice to the fighting game Soul Caliber, the best perk is working at Skywalker Ranch. “They certainly have all the technology,” he says. “For Chad Vader, I talked through a long PVC tube to get the echo.” D.A.
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