Hello, and welcome to The Back Page Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how was your Easter? Was it good, bad or no comment? It was a diet destroying after all the hard work. I’ve been very careful this year and been kind of chipping away. I’ve basically been on a big chocolate marathon for the last week. Loads of people bought me sweets for my birthday, which was nice, thank you very much. But I figured I just got to get rid of these all at once. Yeah. Because if I drip feed them out, then I’ll be not on my diet again for a long time. So I’ve been eating so much cake and chocolate and eggs. And yeah, so I’ve been stuffing myself. Not a very startling anecdote. Yeah, fair enough. A large man eats chocolate at Easter. Yeah, I got to say, my Easter was pretty uneventful. I went to watch John Wick 4 and nearly fell asleep at all of the bits in between the fights. And then just about, it was partly because the cinema was warm. It was a pretty good film overall, but it was very, very long. It felt like I was being tested in order to get the set pieces. You know what I mean? Right. Like the fucking kinder eggs hidden inside some kind of mace. You know what I mean? Yeah, I can see that. But at the same time, Laurence Fishburne is louder than any of the action in that film. Yeah, that is true. What do you think the sound levels are off or that’s just correct too? I just, I don’t know what he’s doing in that film. It’s a very strange performance. It must be very strange for them to act against it. Yeah. Because obviously it’s quite a, Keanu Reeves is quite a minimalist actor, he said generously. And Laurence Fishburne is so big. I don’t know if he’s doing it to like balance out quiet Keanu, or if like, he’s just entered this like, I don’t give a fuck stage of his career. Like they didn’t bring me back from the matrix. So I’m just gonna be like super loud in everything else. I mean, I guess Morpheus wasn’t that loud, but at the opening of that film where he’s walking down a tunnel, like bellowing, just bullshit. I was like, oh, here we go. Cause I knew it was two hours and whatever long. And you’re like, is it gonna be two hours and 40 minutes of this? Cause, oh boy. See, I find him very enjoyable as a presence, but I do agree that like he stopped doing proper performances and now just sort of like turns up in films to sort of chew the scenery a little bit. Maybe there’s something more recent that proves this, that disproves this, but I think it’s like watching some of his earlier work in the last few pandemic years, just kind of catching up on key highlights of his career. And you’re like, he is like such a capable actor. And then you get to John Wick and he’s just going, somebody, please, in every single scene. And it’s like, is this sustainable? I’m not sure. Four definitely pushes it to the limits. I was also there thinking, I found like Donnie Yen so charismatic that he just blew Keanu Reeves off the screen. Oh, he’s just so much more athletic as well. Yeah, but his character was also kind of annoying because he’s obviously like this sort of blind martial arts guy. And I was just there thinking, someone with a sniper rifle would definitely take this dude out, like 100 percent. So also, like, I know he’s proven himself to be like a very capable fighter in the first two hours of the film. But without spoiling what what plays out in John Wick, he is not in a life or death situation. If I had to choose like a proxy for myself, he is not in a gunfight specifically. He is not the person I would pick for that. Even by John Wick’s ludicrous narrative standards, the idea of the one person you wouldn’t pick is him, but you know, fair play to it. So Matthew, we also went for a pizza last week to talk about what we’re doing on the Patreon this year. Shockingly during that, you called me svelte. What’s the sort of deal there? Because I… What an ego trip you’re going and asking me to tell the listeners how fit you are now. Well, no, the thing is, because I just come back from M&S that day where I buy my jeans, shamefully, and tried to put on some size 36 jeans, which is the size below mine, and it did look like there was molten lava spilling over the top still. But then you called me svelte and I was like, oh, okay, maybe there is a visible difference. But I asked because I’m more worried about the Two Giant Men brand. That’s a big thing for us. Yeah, I am worried about it, but we’re still both tall. And, well, I say still, as if I’ve changed. I mean, you’re losing weight sort of hand over fist, doing your very valiant gym work. I am not. So I’m upholding my part of the volume, but like, you know, it’s like, there will come a point where this routine you have going is going to shame me into also trying to get a little bit slimmer, which is probably good for my life expectancy. So yeah, I saw that after the insurance man put the fear into me. Oh, yeah, that was such a sad story to tell the podcast. Yeah, I know. So yeah, you got your heart tracker popping off. All I’m saying is you have you know, you are you are visibly thinner to my eye than you were before. So congratulations. No worries. I mean, I was chain eating like chocolate eggs over the weekend, and I definitely feel like the sort of those sort of like lower sort of rear back quadrant chunks. Those are like slightly bigger than they were, I think. So you know, it’s coming back despite my best efforts. It’s all about the sugar, man. You’ve got to cut out that sugar and it’s it’s hard because life is really depressing and sugar is good. So I like that when you’re thin, there’s a lot like muscle definition and you can name the individual muscles. But when you get fat, it’s very hard to name the fat bits because they shouldn’t really be there. You like develop new bits. Well, yeah, no, no one cool has ever had those. So they’ve never given them a cool name. Yeah, just sort of that area. The other thing is that like there’s there’s parts of my body I didn’t realize were the result of me being fat until I was like getting in slightly better shape. And I was like, you know how like there’s that bit if you’re sort of like under your armpit and where your man boob begins, where it’s just like a sort of like there’s like a some kind of like fleshy sort of thing there, like a some kind of flap. If you sort of like lift up your arm, and then you’re like, oh, there’s like basically like soft sort of like man flesh in between like the shoulder and where your man boob begins. Just like a it just sort of gets like kind of fatty around there. And that’s now like gone a little bit. And that’s quite like, oh, what was that called? It’s just sort of gone now. The sort of like miniature tent that was part of my body just sort of gone. I’m not explaining this very well. Oh, tent flap. My favorite cut of meat. Okay, that’s enough about that. This podcast then, I will actually go into the details of what is coming up on the Patreon in the next episode. But I’ve already we’ve already talked a load of nonsense in this one. So we’ll just get to the topic at hand. I’m inflicting some Star Wars on Matthew again, seems like about time. So people might remember that back in Episode 77, we did the Star Wars Guilty Pleasure Games in that episode, I kind of went in detail with my secret favorite Star Wars games, which are all like six and seven out of 10s from like the 90s and noughties. But I did always promise to do a counterbalance episode of that where I talked about all of the classic Star Wars games of which there are many as we’ll discuss in this episode. And so this episode combined with episode 77 of The Back Page should combine quite nicely into a definitive overview of like what Star Wars games are and what they’re about. How are you feeling about this, Matthew? And sorry again for inflicting Star Wars on you. No, no, it’s good. Like I like hearing you talk about Star Wars. You’ve got a much better memory for these. I have played a lot of these games, but just not since I played them originally. So my memory is quite hazy. I don’t have many spicy takes like the ones most people think are good. I also think are good. And that’s even without my, you know, without being a big Star Wars guy. As we all know, I am not one. So yeah, I’m excited to excited to hear your deeper thoughts. Yeah, absolutely. It does make me chuckle to see things that I stole off you on the PC draft high up on this though, because I’m like, oh yeah, he really did love those games. So that’s fun. Yeah. Classic good times. They’re good reminders of pods past. So yeah, this was actually like intended to go a little bit later originally. But what happened was that basically, we had other pods that we had to do later this month. So it’s got pushed forward. And then also, it’s tied in quite nicely, because it was just Star Wars Celebration. So weirdly, there is a lot of Star Wars in the conversation right now, because there were like about eight different trailers for Disney plus TV shows, and lots of announcements for films that will never come out. So that’s, you know, that’s good. That’s what happens at Celebration. So it seems like a good time. Jedi Survivor, the sequel to Jedi Fallen Order is also out on April 28th. So yep, good timing in that respect, too. And that game has just had like a whole bunch of previews come out. It means you get a lot of gameplay at once, and there’s tons of it sloshing around for this game. Looking really nice, I think. Matthew, how are you feeling about Jedi Survivor? I can’t remember what your read on Jedi Fallen Order was. I like Jedi Fallen Order enough. I thought it was surprisingly difficult, given that it’s quite a mainstream Star Wars game. It has a little bit of the Dark Souls-y kind of progression in it. Yes, I’m up for this. A lot of the stuff they’ve led with has been story and character, which I must admit is the bit of this game franchise I am least interested in. I thought the story was very bad in the first one, and I thought the character was very bad, but I believe this is not a popular take, and maybe I just was in a bad mood. It’s probably coloured by… I think I covered this for RPS, actually. I think I did a video review for this, and I spent ages on it, and it got absolutely biffed. It didn’t do any business at all, even though the review is pretty solid, I think. So I’ve got a bit of residual bitterness about that. I do love it when you take your professional shortcomings out on computer games that have nothing to do with that. That’s good, Matthew. I think review code came in super late for it, and so we didn’t really have any time. By the time I got the review out, people were already playing it or something, the embargo was bad on it. EA games always struggle to get a good foothold on from a journalist perspective. So, yes, Jedi Survivor then, so it’s interesting because what I really like about how they’ve been promoting it is that you can tell they don’t really have any big new features to lead into. There’s nothing that’s sort of game changing about how they’ve redesigned it or anything like that. It seems like it is trying to just be the bigger and better sequel, like when I saw they had Cameron Monaghan who plays Cal Kestis and Stig Asmussen on stage at Celebration and Stig was talking about how there’s AI companions who are in the game now at some times and then how much you could customise Cal and stuff like that. It felt like, I think it’s okay to just be like we’ve made a bigger and better sequel that we haven’t reinvented the wheel, we haven’t made it a co-op game, we haven’t made it a competitive multiplayer game. It’s kind of underlined by the fact that all of their trailers and stuff just seem to be completely made of gameplay. So it truly feels like a game where they’re selling you what exactly what you’re getting, which I quite like. But what’s interesting is that I do have a much more respect for the narrative side of it than you do. And I think it’s partly because the first one landed as The Rise of Skywalker landed. So you know, what I consider the lowest moment in like modern Star Wars basically, like in my life. So it landed at the same time as Rise of Skywalker and also the first episode of The Mandalorian. And it felt like just the Star Wars was truly shitting its pants on a global scale or like an intergalactic scale, really. Like the there were these two this this brace of good Star Wars things to kind of keep things balanced out and make it feel like the entire enterprise wasn’t about to just like sink basically forever. So yeah, I was I was fond of that game. And yeah, it actually just only really occurred to me this has almost been four years since that first one. That is a long ass time. So excited to just have a new Star Wars thing to play because there still haven’t been that many of them for me. Matthew curious on the non game side, how bored were you by the celebration announcements? Did any of that permeate your pop culture sphere? I was pleased to see Daisy Ridley getting some more work because she seems to have been maligned since Star Wars. And I don’t know if that’s just like the bad taste left by Rise of Skywalker, but not her fault. So I don’t think I watched any of the trailers for anything, the talk of the whatever, the new cinematic offerings. Is one of them a conclusion of the Mandoverse? Yeah it sounded like a basically like a TV movie that they’re going to put in the cinema. Right. Yeah, so some kind of like battle between the New Republic and the Imperial Remnants, which is basically what the old sort of extended expanded universe was about. Yeah. Essentially. Yeah, that sounds bad. Like, whatever you think about the strengths and weaknesses of the individual episodes, there was something quite big about the Star Wars films being like, it is this episode, this is this part, there’s three parts to it and then it’s done and it’s very kind of clean cut. It feels much more like an event filling out that universe on the cinema screen. It just turns to pudding like the Marvel stuff has and it’s just instantly devalued. I sort of thought, I thought some of the other films did sound slightly better actually though, like there’s one that’s basically like the pre The Old Republic Star Wars, like The Creation of the Force by James Mangold. And so it was obviously- Oh, it’s just like The First Jedi. Yeah, basically. Didn’t he describe it as a biblical epic? Yeah, something like that. And I was there thinking, this film’s probably never going to get made. But also, James Mangold is one of the few directors left where it feels like a genuine coup when you get them to make a franchise film, do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Because sometimes, especially because I often see that as someone’s now trapped in that, you know what I mean? Especially when that’s happened on the Marvel side, traditionally. Or actually, most recently with Star Wars, Lee Isaac Chung, the director of Minari, just made the Mandalorian episode that some people despised. And I was like, is that really where that director has to go next? You know? Is there not? I was like, that film was absolutely amazing, that happens sometimes. With Mangold though, it does feel like he’s made the best Wolverine film, he is making an Indiana Jones film that hopefully will be good. There must be a vote of confidence in that film. Yeah, exactly. In some ways, the idea of that film feels like marketing for Indiana Jones. I like Daisy Ridley too, what was damning about that one though is that Damon Lindelof was working on it for quite a while apparently and then just left due to creative differences in the weeks before it was announced. That’s really cursed because that’s another person who could get me excited about Star Wars and he was like, nope, so that’s not so good basically. Is that 10, 11, 12? Is that what that’s going to be? I think the idea, it’s definitely like a sequel is set 15 years later from Rise of Skywalker. I don’t know how they explain that when Daisy Ridley is younger than me and looks younger than me. Me now and Starfighter me, that’s basically like a 30 year difference but actors just don’t age in the same way that Starfighters do. I’m glad that they’re getting out of the cracks between other films because that just limits you to what you can actually do and the potential for the world to get really fucked up. That was what was sort of exciting about 7, 8, 9 because you were like, well, anything can happen, it’s all to kind of play for, which you didn’t really have with the prequels as much. So yeah, that’s okay. I guess I’m on board with that. Yeah. So who knows how that will shake out. The TV shows, they were looking pretty good. There’s the Skeleton Crew Show that’s got basically like an Amblin style adventure that’s got Jude Law in it too. That looked all right, but it looks like it ties into the Mandalorian in some ways, which is annoying. I like these things being standalone. I don’t want to connect it to Star Wars universe in the MCU way because we know where that leads. That leads to basically people taking their frustrations of a genre out on Shazam 2, which is Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantum Mania, which is fine, but just make these things good and standalone I think is a good approach. The Ahsoka Show looks all right. It’s kind of a sequel to an animated series though, which might be a big ask of some people. The one that I actually think is going to be good is The Acolyte, which I definitely discussed on a previous one of these episodes. I can’t remember. It was the XL episode we did on Star Wars or the Star Wars Guilty Pleasure Games, but that one’s basically like a martial arts kind of mystery film that is set years and years earlier, has no connection to the existing films and stuff. So, that might be good, but speaking of all that though, Matthew, have you been watching The Mandalorian this season? I watched the first three episodes, I think, and then I got to one which was suddenly about this scientist or something and I thought, nah. So, no more. That is Lee Isaac Chung’s follow up to Minari, Matthew. Oh, is it? Yeah, I know. Yep, that’s who directed that. Crazy, right? That’s just very strange. He should have set it in a camper van in a field because he’s very good in that setting and I would have liked that more. But probably a different scale to it. Yeah, a bit of a different vibe, yeah. So yeah, it’s been very up and down as a season. I don’t quite hate it, not as much as some people seem to. It at times feels like the same thing, but it does feel like they’re trying to set up other stuff now. I saw some people raging on Twitter or some people retweeting some people raging on Twitter with pictures of Jack Black and Lizzo. And I don’t want to know what that’s about, but I’m really glad that they’re upset. Because it’s just the image of it. It’s just so funny because it just looks so silly. And when someone’s like, you’re not taking it seriously enough, you know, I’m a big fan of that. I’ve got to say, that episode’s not quite as bad as people are saying it is. I thought they were pretty good as guest stars, Jack Black and Lizzo. They were right. They were, you know, they’re not more egregious than fucking Amy Sedaris. Her character is like absolute nails on a chalkboard, which she turns out. I would like the worst hang in Star Wars since Jar Jar. But the idea of them as a couple absolutely works for me. If they are a couple, I don’t know. Like, I imagine that would be a very fun household with the two of them. They both seem like a really good laugh. Yeah. So how can you get cross about that, Barry? Yeah. Whatever, you know, that’s just gold. I liked it. I couldn’t tell you what actually happened in the episode apart from that. But, you know, oh, there was something about battle droids who were programmed to be good, but who were going bad or something, some something like that. But yeah, it was, but it’s kind of part of the course of where the Mandalorian is at. It sort of stopped being must-see TV, I think, and has started being a sort of like a bit of a Star Wars brand extension. It’s weighing it down a bit, but it’s all is not lost. That’s kind of how I feel about it at the moment. Okay, that’s some Star Wars waffle taken care of, Matthew. Yeah. Now we’re getting into the game stuff. So I want to do like a very brief potted history of LucasArts before we get into this, because incredibly important, you know, I’m sure the vast majority of our listeners, based on what I know about their age groups, know what who LucasArts were. But essentially, before Disney bought Lucasfilm, George Lucas had his own video game developer and publisher in LucasArts, who basically made their own stuff for a very long time. They were encouraged not to work in work with Star Wars. They’re encouraged to make new things and, you know, and like experiment and create different types of games that were just not just tie-ins to Star Wars. And then over time, it became more of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones factory, particularly Star Wars in the 90s and noughties. But they did actually, they weren’t always making other stuff. That is true of LucasArts. And they are fascinating because I think they’re a true one-off in the history of games, which is the idea of something that’s not just connected to a major film studio, but connected to a film production company, essentially. It was George Lucas’s own game developer. It’s a very specific thing. A director having a video game company like that is just, there’s no other real equivalent to it. And what’s really interesting about LucasArts is that whether it’s through numerous changes in management that occur over time, or the changes in games that happen around them, they fluctuate massively in quality with their output. There’s a true, like, gulf between the best and worst. There’s an absolute lack of consistency there. But when they’re at their best, Star Wars games led the way, I think, for what a licensed game could be. And, you know, sow the seeds, arguably, for where we’re at now, where I think if you make a licensed game, it basically has to be good. There’s no way to do a licensed game that’s bad, because there was such a stigma attached to games based on movies and TV shows and comic books or whatever that came out of, like, the PS2 era that basically it became, like, it became toxic. And then Arkham Asylum comes along, and then I think that basically flips the perception of you can make these prestigey, high-end licensed games that people properly give a shit about because they’re good games in their own right. I think Star Wars was doing that way before that. It just happened to be that the product was so mixed that there was a load of crap in there as well. It feels like how Lucas was running Lucasfilm has a big impact on LucasArts as well in terms of, you know, they do a lot of tech in-house, they’ve got a lot of their own engines, and they’re quite cutting edge at that time, you know. This is like, you know, the 90s, the sort of birth decade properly of FPS shooters. And actually, they’re kind of competing on a tech level with the other kind of big boys. And I think we talked about this when Ash Day was on the podcast, and we were talking about LucasArts games. You get the impression, the same thinking behind having like ILM to do kind of best in class special effects kind of bleeds through into this, where it’s just everything’s in house, have the best people, have the best everything. You’re not really reliant on anyone outside. I also like that you say like they didn’t want to be too reliant on Star Wars, and then all their 3D engines are like named things like Jedi and Sith, which is just like, well, what else are you going to do with them? Yeah, it’s interesting as well, because I think that what is also quite opaque about them from the outside looking in is that you see a lot of games that just have LucasArts as the developer, but the actual like who’s making it can vary quite a lot. So I think like the kind of like space simulation games that, you know, are synonymous with the PC in the 90s, the X-Wing series, they were basically the brainchild of Larry Holland, who was like, you know, someone who knew how to make that type of game. It almost makes no sense on paper that that developer, you know, like nine years later makes The Force Unleashed. They’re completely different types of games. But that just, I think, it points to like the upheaval that happens there sort of internally. But also, I think just that like over time people leave and over time game types die out. And it’s really, it’s quite, it’s an interesting history. You have to look at who specifically within LucasArts is making this stuff to understand where the DNA comes from, much in the same way that like, you know, everyone knows who made like the Monkey Island games, right? Or the point and click adventures. They’re very strongly synonymous with personalities who were there at LucasArts making this stuff. The same is true with the Star Wars games as well. It’s people with distinct sensibilities and expertise, building things that they were interested in. So, yeah, it’s a super interesting company. Then they obviously get bought, when they get bought by Disney, they get closed down and then the license gets given to EA. They cancel Star Wars 1313, which was a third person shooter, yeah, set at, set, I think like in an earlier point in the Star Wars timeline. I wasn’t like that buzzed about that, to be honest, but it was a shame to see LucasArts die out, because they were real one of a kind. And yeah, it’s sort of, when you see like what they’re doing with Disney Plus and stuff like that, I would be curious to know what a Disney owned in-house video game developer would like make, what that would look like. You know, instead it’s felt very unpredictable, instead just placing it all in the hands of EA for them to, you know, they’ve made a few more games in the last few years, but the first five years was pretty anemic. So it’s been a bit of a strange time. And now, of course, the Star Wars license is in a place where multiple suitors have it, you know, Ubisoft have it and Quantic Dream have it. There are probably some other publishers and developers who have it that we don’t know about yet. So, yeah, it’s, yeah, they’re sort of like, they deserve to be remembered fondly. But yeah, super, super strange story of that company. So, Matthew, I did want to complain about something before we get into this, right? Because I’ve been researching these games, playing a bunch of them. And the worst thing that all Star Wars games do is use the fucking opening crawl for every, literally every single game. It’s like I was playing, I was playing the fucking Star Wars Bounty Hunter where you play as Jango Fett and it had an opening crawl. And I was like, what are you going to tell me about this bad third person shooter starring Jango Fett? Just fucking get on with it. Every single one of these games has an opening crawl and I think it’s outrageous. Wanted to just complain about that upfront. Yeah, because the crawl is meant to be like, these are defining moments in history. Yeah. And wherever Jango Fett, you know, he probably does play an important part in the timeline in some ways. But the idea that the universe pivots on him is, I mean, very unlikely. Yeah, I would never have allowed that to go into all of these games. But it’s in like basically every single one. They’ll make you sit through it, which is unbelievable. Weirdly, I was watching a clip of that today. And there was a bit where he gets his jetpack for the first time. And he literally just, he’s in this, this is like Alien with a jetpack. He’s like, does anyone want this jetpack? And he walks around the corner. He’s like, do you want this jetpack? And he’s like, yes. And it gets the jetpack. And then he has like this iconic piece of like FET kit. Is that it? Like, if you’re going to do like an origin story, that’s the stuff everyone doubles down on. Like, when did you get the iconic equipment? It’s just like, oh, some guy gave it to me. Yeah. It’s like, imagine Superman was like, some guy gave me a cape. And I was like, yeah, why not? Yeah, it was my dad. Yeah. And I guess his mum did give him. But like, she made it for him. And it was like special. Yeah, absolutely. Isn’t it made of some bullshit material as well? So if he gets hit by Luke, he’s like, it’s fine. I don’t know. Wasn’t it the thing he was wrapped in? In Smallville, anyway, I think it was the thing he was like wrapped in as a baby, maybe. That’s good lore, I think. That’s like a decent use of like a blanket to explain what that does. Like, side note, Smallville really got it. Like, it really doled it out in very small portions, like every couple of seasons. But when it did, it always felt quite special, I thought. Having Christopher Reeve to tell him like his true name and everything. I was like, this is pretty good. Side note, Smallville really got it. It’s such a fucking Matthew Castle side on a Star Wars podcast. I don’t want to weigh in on big spoilers for another show this week, but there’s some people on our Discord talking about it, and I was going to go in with a big thing about how it didn’t match the Jonathan Kent episode of Smallville. But I decided that that was shithouseery too far. But didn’t you go in instead and compare it to the Marshall episode of Aliens? Yeah, and that was just me reaching for… I was just trying to think of what Aliens episode is just fondly remembered but daft. Legitimately, the Aliens episode where they finally shut down SD6, that’s up there as one of the great TV episodes. Oh yeah, that episode is why we have JJ Abrams. That episode is like the blueprint for Mission Impossible 3, isn’t it? Anyway, that was so many side notes upon side notes. Fucking, like 40 minutes of recording and like how much of it is usable, like 10 minutes, unbelievable, this podcast. Okay, back on topic. I did want to also talk about what makes a truly great Star Wars game because when we get into this list, I’ve done something that we haven’t done on this podcast before, partly inspired by the Patreon episode, me and Matthew just did a Mario where Matthew starts ranking all of the, like doing power rankings of all the different Mario spinoffs. So Mario Party was obviously at the bottom and then 3D Mario games were at the top, and then everything else was kind of somewhere in between. No one took the bait on the Mario sports games, which is good, I mean they just accepted it. Well, that’s not really what I was going for. Instead, I think we had one listener who was, the running joke about me slamming Jet Force Gemini, he just went, I like Jet Force Gemini with a little sad face, and I was there thinking, that is so funny, that’s the takeaway from this podcast, that’s the most shocking thing. Yeah, sorry, I should stop slamming it. It’s not like it’s wrong to be Jet Force Gemini, it’s just quite funny to dunk on it for some reason. So yeah, I did have a bad time with it. Anyway, so Star Wars games, what makes a truly great Star Wars game? So yeah, I’m going to do a power ranking of all of these, it goes from basically S ranking down to E ranking. I think it comes down to something quite simple, which is it’s very, very hard to try and get your arms around the entirety of the Star Wars universe in a video game. And I think the best games just tend to pick one element of that universe and do it well, match it to a genre perfectly, and also are not afraid to be quite hardcore in how they replicate that genre, I guess, or how they adapt it. I think that’s key. I think a lot of the best Star Wars games are synonymous with PC because PC obviously had mouse and keyboard control. And so in the era where PC games could sell enough by themselves that you never had to depend on console sales, they could really find an audience and thrive. And it meant that the mechanics could be quite adult, really. They’re quite adult games. A lot of the PC games that came out associated with Star Wars are just quite interesting. But I think that’s why a lot of the stuff feels super credible. It’s these games that, yeah, like I say, pick one thing, do it super well. And a lot of the lesser games are games that are trying to speak to a much larger audience unsuccessfully or, you know, feel like a kind of like franchise-y, where we’ve got to have a game about X thing or it’s got to tie into a movie that’s coming out in like nine months. So we’ve got to get this on shelves as quickly as possible. There’s a big part of that with some of these games. Yeah. Just glancing over your list, I think that’s very astute that you have, I think you have to have both sides of the equation, the drilling into Star Wars and drilling into a genre, because all the examples that suck are only one or the other. That’s a good theory. I like it. That’s good. This podcast was worthwhile after all then. So yeah. No, thanks. And I thought about stuff a lot because I think, you know, really, this is really obvious to listeners at this point, but you might be new to the podcast because you saw we’re doing best Star Wars games or something. Like Star Wars games are a huge part of my gaming diet growing up, a massive part of what I was interested in. And I had like exposure to a massive variety of them quite early on. So they were foundational games to me. So while I don’t consider myself like the number one expert, the stuff I know, I feel like I know really well. So, you know, I feel reasonably well qualified to make some of these calls. There’s bound to be a couple of things in here that you might have fun memories of. I end up slamming. If so, apologies for that. But I think it’s going to be a good list, Matthew. So shall we take a quick break and come back with our Star Wars power rankings? Let’s do it! Welcome back to the podcast. So, The Best Star Wars Games, let’s do it. So, like I say, power rankings, we start with the E tier, we’ll work our way up. I’m not gonna go into these games, some of these games are massive detail, because like I say, the Guilty Pleasures episode covers some of these comprehensively. Like, if you wanna hear me talk about Shadows of the Empire, Battle for Naboo, The Force Unleashed, some of this stuff will come up in the podcast, like today, but I have talked about it before and don’t wanna repeat myself too much, so I would recommend listening to that in tandem with this. They should slot together quite nicely. So, I’ll mostly focus on when we get to C tier and above, stuff I’ve not discussed as much before, and certainly like the B tier and above is like where you’ll get, you know, the beef, the beef? That’s where the beef hides, as that famous idiom goes. The meat of the podcast, not the beef, fuck it, L. That’s like, that is pure Tuesday night brain. We gotta go back to recording these on weekends, man. It’s like, it’s tough. Okay, I’ll kick off with it then. So a caveat, I have not got every single game in here. I didn’t want to try and rank things I’ve not played at all because that seems completely disingenuous. Even though I think it’s pretty self-evident where some of these would go in the power rankings. So caveat, I’ve not played X-Men versus TIE Fighter. We did not have like good enough internet to play that at the time when it came out. That was a mostly online competitive game. I’ve not played the original Star Wars Starfighter. Matthew has actually, that’s interesting. But I- Yeah, I like that one. Yeah, I think it’s like, it’s fine. But it’s nothing compared to what Factor 5 we’re doing basically. Oh no, it’s like the simplified, like even more Arcadia version. I played Jedi Starfighter, which will come up in this list. And it is basically a very similar thing, except you can do Force powers in your spaceship. Again, that was discussed in the Guilty Pleasure episode. So the Attack of the Clones game I never played, I think it was made by Pandemic though. And it is on Xbox, Xbox backwards compatibility. So inevitably I will end up owning it and playing it at some point. Star Wars Connect, I wanted nothing to do with that, obviously. Star Wars Obi-Wan on Xbox, a notorious dud. Supremacy on PC, I have not played that, kind of like a spreadsheet game, not particularly interested in that being more of an RTS head at the time. Galaxies I have not played, I have read a lot of good articles about galaxies and their experiences within like a dead MMO basically. And the Old Republic, which is an existing MMO that has lots and lots of Star Wars content in it. But I could never really tell if it’s ever been as successful as EA wanted it to be. I suspect it never has been, but it’s kind of kept going with a big enough audience anyway. So despite that, I wish all those games well. Oh, that’s good of you. Yeah. I also, I have played Super Star Wars and Yoda stories, but I didn’t quite, I couldn’t quite pass where to put them in here. Being truthful, like I know that people have a big Super Star Wars attachment, you know, the side scrolling kind of console games, but I was genuinely living on a parallel track playing the PC games. So they were, they meant nothing to me. So when I came to play them, I just found them super hard, quite abstract as bits of Star Wars, and not totally for me, doll. Do you ever play that one, Matthew? Pretty polished as like 2D platformer, movie license tie-ins go, and I can appreciate that playing, if you’re a super into these films, getting to like experience them with that kind of fidelity would be super exciting. I don’t think they’re like any great Shakespeare’s as like action games or whatever, but probably like, probably C tier. Yeah, that’s probably fair. Yeah. And Yoda Stories, which is also here, was, that was a shit. I think some people have some residual affection for it, but I only played the demo and I was like… Yeah, I had a demo of that from PC Gamer and it was just, you know, it’s like a time waster. Like just play Minesweeper if you want to waste time or play 3D Space Cadet Pinball, you know, or Solitaire. You’ve got loads of classics. You could be playing rather than Yoda stories. Were you more of an Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures head? Oh, all that stuff, it’s just, it’s a no from me, dog. Yeah, that’s fair. I think there was like some Gungan learning game that I feel like I played at some point somehow. It might have been on some… To learn the language. No, it’s just like, it was like very cursed artifacts, sort of like educational game that has Gungans in it, just like the worst thing you can possibly give a child in the late 90s surely. Where in the world is Jar Jar Binks? I will say to you though, as a young boy who liked Star Wars, I very much coveted a game called Super Star Wars that was on a Nintendo platform. That seemed very exciting to me. So when I became an adult and played it hung over at my friend David’s house in 2015, it was not quite for me, but I’d left it too long. And I agree that the sprite art is very nice, so I can see why they have a bit of affection for them. But with that in mind, let’s get into this, Matthew. So we’re starting the E tier, Down in the Drains. So don’t hate me if you like one of these games. It’s bound to be something you like in here, in these lower tiers. But I am basically saying these games are pointless. There’s no reason to play them now. Even out of curiosity, I would say that in all cases for these five games, just go watch them on YouTube if you’re curious. Don’t waste your time buying them. Like I have wasted cash and time on some of these games. In fact, three of these, four of these games, wait, five of these, all of them. I’ve bought and played all of them again in the last five years. So take it from me. You don’t want to make my mistakes again. Star Wars Revenge of the Sith. This was famous from our Star Wars pod for Matthew running out and buying it day one. It’s a pretty bad third-person game that feels very rushed. It has some bad sound-alikes for the different characters in it. I think it’s probably not really any worse than a standard movie tie-in from the time, like in terms of the combat action experience, but it’s so far from a classic, Matthew. You played this one. Yeah, kind of like a bad version of an EA Lord of the Rings type game. Just like slashing, hacking and slashing. Maybe there was a bit of co-op in it. What can I say? We were all in the grip of Sithmania. Absolutely. Next one, Star Wars Episode I, The Phantom Menace. If you fondly recall this, I promise you it’s bad. Like I got paid by Official PlayStation Magazine to play this, to buy this and play this again. And it was, it’s just like Rancid. It’s a really bad third-person game. Like it makes no sense when you play this, that like the same company that makes, that made Jedi Knight, you know, just like two years earlier, would then make this. That was, it just made no sense to me. It looked a lot nicer on PC, but it was just rough. It let you jump between the different characters, but I don’t think it really functioned very well as a good third-person game at the time. So that’s firmly in the turlets, that one. Bounty Hunter. I actually only played this for the first time this past weekend, and the camera in it nearly made me feel fucking sick, honestly. Absolute carnage, that camera. Like you forget sometimes that the biggest enemy of the PS2 era was the third-person camera. Just people not knowing what to do with it. And when you go in tight spaces in this, it would just make you ill. But it’s kind of a game where the cameras are so twitchy, you just lock onto enemies and shoot them. It’s, the one thing that I do like about it is the way he jumps and moves around is quite acrobatic. So it makes it a little bit different from third-person games of the time. But I don’t really think there’s a reason to ever play this and see what the deal is. And I want to warn people off of it, because it is on PS4. You can’t play it right now. Don’t. Do you ever play this on Matthew? No. But I remember reading reviews, previews of it, and being relatively interested. And then it got an absolute shooing from NGC. This was on GameCube too. But dumb that there isn’t a really killer Boba Fett or Fett family game out there. That’s one of the rumoured Star Wars games around. I think that’s actually what people think Ubisoft are making. It’s something that’s kind of like a Mandalorian-style game. Maybe that fantasy has moved on now and it just makes more sense to do a Mandalorian. Because it’s basically the same thing, isn’t it? Like it has all the same stuff, except he has video game structure built into his whole way of life. So he’s such a natural fit. Yeah, absolutely. So who knows when that’ll even come out? Because Ubisoft is still making that Avatar game, right? That’s not even broke cover yet, so it could be a long time. But I agree that there is potential there. Jedi power battles on PlayStation 1. So I used to hang out with this guy called Donald, who lived down my street. I peer pressured him into buying this terrible game. We played it two player for two days, and then we never played it again because it was quite bad. But we should have give it a go. It’s just a very rough third-person side-scrolling game that had a couple of oddball Jedi in the roster, who I was quite curious about playing as. I think Adi Gallia and Plo Koon, I think, are in there. Oh, Plo Koon. I like your big Plo Koon head, Matthew. I think that’s like, quote-unquote famously, Dave Filoni’s favorite Star Wars character or something. He’s just like an alien head, dude. Definitely the, you know, blorko of his day. Straight up Jynrod. It’s my favorite cocktail with the Dark Horse and Barth Matthew. Last in this tier, Masters of Terris Carsey, absolute ass. What if they made Tekken with Star Wars and you had Han Solo fighting Darth Vader? They did that in this game. It’s an absolute pile of crap. Just no redeeming features whatsoever. Not even the fantasy mashups of what it would look like if Han Solo kicked the shit out of Chewbacca. It’s more just like the combat just, it just feels so implausible. I mean, I’m talking about how like the best Star Wars games here are the ones that match a genre to the license very nicely and pull out a different part of the license. And this is like, this is the opposite of that thinking. This is like, this thing is huge, we’ve got to get our version of it and then welding them together in the most like. But there was so much, this is like the same era as like Simpsons Wrestling and things like that. Like any license, if it was big enough, it would definitely get a wrestling game because like the WWF games were massive at the time, so. Was there any good wrestling game that spun out of this, Matthew? Was there like, like one mashup thing that was actually good? Not that I can think of. Xena Warrior Princess on the N64. There it is, perfect. The question has been answered. I mean, God, you know, still to this day, a jock’s all main. Yeah, I suppose you have to like vaguely count, I suppose, Capcom doing their Marvel games and this. They were good, but. I mean, yeah, that’s a different tier. That’s Capcom, you know, just doing their shit though, isn’t it? So, yeah. Okay. Yep. So that was a dud. We move on to the D tier. These are all games that were covered in guilty pleasure, so no need to kind of go with them again. The Force Unleashed 2, the 2010 sequel to The Force Unleashed felt very, very rushed out. A lot shorter, had fewer levels. He plays a clone of the character from the first one, lots of red flags there. Didn’t quite do it for me, but I did play it a whole lot and got most of the achievements on Xbox, which stands as a kind of like, you know, sort of like a sort of history of war crimes when you look on my Xbox Live card, basically. Did you unlock the Guybrush Streetwood skin? I don’t think I did, actually. That’s like shameful, isn’t it? And I definitely like played this at least three times. I must have, like, been too much of a coward to do it on hard mode or something. So, anyway, yeah. But hey, you know, that was a bit of a weird choice considering that they had firmly killed a Monkey Island at that point. But I suppose they’d just done those remasters, hadn’t they, at the time? Yeah. Yeah. So next up is Star Wars Racer Revenge on PlayStation 2. This is like a much more violent and I think more throwaway version of the Star Wars Racer game that came out in 1999, which will be higher on my list here. Perhaps too high. Let’s see. Like I say, it is violent. It is more combat focused when a racer dies out of the game, basically. It’s much more like a kind of, I don’t know, slightly more of a, I guess, micro machine spirit to it or Destruction Derby or something. Destruction Derby is a much better example, actually. I thought you meant they were out of the whole campaign. They were dead now. And at the end, it’s just you and one other person because all the other racers in the fiction have died. Yeah. It’s like a perma-death run. They should do that in all racing games, including Mario Kart. I again don’t think you should buy this. It’s firmly a six out of ten dog. But it was, it’s kind of like an interesting relic. It’s not, I have a slightly soft spot for some of these racing games, so that goes in there. And then Star Wars, Rebel Strike Matthew, which was the Rogue Leader sequel, so Rogue Squadron 3, a dud because even though the spaceship sequences were good, there were numerous on foot sequences that were very, very bad, even though they did package in a co-op version of all of the Rogue Leader levels, Matthew. This is tough, tough hanging this game, right? Yeah, everyone would buy it because of like, you know, at the very least, the co-op version of the previous game was just too good. And it looked so good. It’s just the sections where you’re on foot where famously like the human characters have basically the same controls and physics as an entire spaceship, which is horrible. And there were speeder bike chases through like the Endor forests and all that stuff. Yeah, it’s just really, really rotten. Like you had to play this with proper gritted teeth. Real shame that the series is ends here, I think like it’s, it’s tough. They took it down this cul-de-sac and it feels like it was dead after that, which seems like such a shame. Is this the, is this the beginning at the end for Factor V? Yeah, I think after this they make Lair and that’s it. Like that’s the end of them. I think Julian Egbrick works for Epic Games now because I think like I saw him tweeting about like what his dream remaster of the Rogue Squadron, Rogue Leader games would have been. They used to be like, oh, I’ll do it 4K and all this stuff. So he’s obviously like had it on his mind, but I don’t know, man, you’ve got all those epic megabucks, can you somehow put that onto modern platforms? Come on, someone’s got to do that if they’re just sat there. But yeah, this is obviously the worst one of the three by some distance. We move on to the C tier. Here you’re getting into like more acceptable territory here. Like some of these, you know, these are like games where I don’t think, you know, if I bought these in a Steam sale or an equivalent sale, I wouldn’t be unhappy basically. Like I’d be perfectly acceptable that I own them. Some of them I very much like, and some of them I think are quite competent, so I wanted to spotlight them here. The Force Unleashed is first again discussed in the Guilty Pleasure episode. Don’t need to go into it too much, but the very big bold attempt to tell a new Star Wars story about basically Darth Vader’s secret apprentice and using all of this like wild physics stuff to show the, to depict the Force in this very cinematic way that had never been seen before in video games. Mixed results, very much inspired by the PS2, PS3 era God of War games. But I think like quite, definitely like up there as a piece of narrative paraphernalia related to Star Wars, I think, you know? Yeah, weirdly, like definitely has its hardcore fans, because if you go and look at videos on YouTube about Jedi Survivor, there’s like loads of trolley people in the comments being like won’t be as good as Force Unleashed, Force Unleashed forever. And it’s like, wow, this is like you’re there are Force Unleashed heads out there. That’s a thing apparently. Yeah. Just going around being grumpy under Jedi Survivor videos. Yeah, it was a mega seller for the time. And I think that’s partly because they’d sort of like starved the landscape of Star Wars games for a few years there. But you didn’t have loads and loads of in fact, like I think this was the first Star Wars game that released on the HD consoles apart from the Lego Star Wars Complete trilogy. So you did have a bit of pent up demand there. And even even though that released in like 2008, which is one of the all time best years for video game releases full stop, it was it still managed like really find an audience because obviously like that was it was an underserved crowd at the time. There were no films. It was just yeah, the Clone Wars animated series and then this so I can see why it’s got that following Matthew, even though it’s quite flawed, I would say. Yeah, a question, who who who did who told the origins of the Rebel Alliance better Force Unleashed or Andor? You made this joke on the last podcast, but you did it about Rogue One and and the Force Unleashed. Well, Andor didn’t exist and now that now that joke works better. It’s weird because the Force Unleashed version is a lot more sort of cinematic and sort of like what I mean by that, it’s a bit more fun as an origin, whereas Andor is kind of like it’s a lot of like a sort of like dour looking people who just sort of like who just like get get a bunch of money and then buy some spaceships. Yeah, a lot more believable. Like if enough dour people get fed up, you have a rebellion. That’s Andor where this is like Darth Vader’s secret machinations accidentally create the Rebel Alliance, which is that’s fun. Yeah, yeah. So I think there’s like some it’s very like far fetched as a piece of Star Wars lore goes, but it’s sort of like they did they put so much money into the cut scenes that it felt pretty legit at the time. It was as close as you’re going to get to some live action film or TV show for the longest time there because there was nothing else. So yeah, I think as well as I was there when I was watching Andor, I was there thinking, are there artists at ILM who are like, come on, Tony Gilroy, write a fucking spaceship battle or something. We’ve got nothing to do here because so much of it is just like real sets. And then there’s like one sequence basically where Stellan Skarsgård has a spaceship that has lightsabers stuck to it. And I was there thinking, did VFX artists push for this to be in there? Were they like, dude, you can’t just be people talking in rooms for like 12 episodes. There has to be something else in here. The VFX artists had their own rebellion and then one of the VFX artists appeared at a giant hologram and told everyone to make a space battle and then they did it. I did like that bit, but it was notable as the only real bit of like raw Star Wars action in it. Otherwise it was a lot of like men building shit in prisons and stuff. It’s quite abstract as Star Wars imagery goes. Lots of people looking glum in a tent. Basically. I did like it though, just to be clear. It’s just, yeah, Force Unleashed has its ups and downs, but yeah, it’s an interesting artifact. It’s backwards compatible. Just fling a walkie or two in Season 2 of Andal. That’s all we ask. Yeah, this is easily available. I don’t know about getting this running on PC without it being a faff. Like I feel like it’s some compatibility issues last time I tried to play this, but Xbox owners, you know, fill your boots. You’ve got a backwards compatible version on there. It’s often on sale. Watch out for the sale prices and yeah, buy this for like six quid. It’s perfectly worth your time. Battle for Naboo, a game I’ve not played for 22 years until this weekend. So this was also developed by Factor 5. This was their follow up to Rogue Squadron. I think they maybe made it at the same time they made that Indiana Jones game. You quite like Matthew. I’ll come up which one that is. Is that the Infernal Machine? Yeah. So yeah, classic N64 draft winner there, the Infernal Machine. So Battle for Naboo is like Rogue Squadron, but worse. It is set in the episode one timeline obviously, but it also has like ground combat sections, which I don’t think are quite as terminally bad as some of the Rebel Strike ones, but they’re definitely worse than dogfighting in Rogue Squadron or in this indeed, where you actually get in a spaceship, which happens quite often. You can switch vehicles mid-level sometimes. Those bits are really competent because Factor Five were super good at the dogfighting stuff. They were really good at that, giving you information on your radar, telling you where things are. They were spot on for that. But yeah, when you’re in some hovercar shooting battle droids, it’s not nearly as strong. But it’s still a Factor Five shooter from the time. So C tier, I think, is where it belongs. And I do slightly prefer it to Rebel Strike, even though Rebel Strike looks tons better. So Shadow of the Empire, no need to discuss this. I talked about it so much in that Guilty Pleasures episode. I’m a big fan of this game. The Fog Unleashed. Yeah, N64 weird game. This is a rare example of a game that does try and get its arms around all of Star Wars and basically means you have spaceship bits on foot bits. I think there’s a real kind of like ambition to the set pieces in this, even if it is like has a lot of shortcomings when it comes to the actual playing of the thing and still gets still is still my favorite depiction of the Battle of Hoth for sure. So enough about that because it’s on a previous pod. Galactic Battlegrounds also discussed in a previous pod what if an Age of Empires 2 mod was released as a full game that this ask that question. It means it’s a very confusing, slightly off brand feeling Star Wars thing. I personally think you’re better off just playing Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition for basically the same dynamic speed after try and trick your brain into thinking you’re playing a Star Wars game. Let’s play it and put John Williams soundtrack on in the background. Yeah, exactly. It’s exactly the same. Maybe several of his soundtracks and see what works tonally. So, yeah, put the Faberman soundtrack on, Matthew. Why you’ve got William Wallace attacking Joan of Arc or whatever. Jedi Starfighter, as mentioned, this is a sequel to Star Wars Starfighter. I played this at the time. I wasn’t hugely fond of it. It felt very undercooked compared to what was going on on Gamecube, as mentioned, so not super interesting. Rebel Assault 1 and 2, these are like proper Dawn of the CD-ROM games, like basically FMV games with a tiny amount of interactivity. The first one is so fucking hard. I almost think it’s not. In fact, I would say both of these. If you’re curious about them, it will take you no time at all to just watch them on YouTube. I would do that rather than buy them and play them. But I did want to put them in a seat here because if you were there at the time, they did seem like a big deal because they had live action Star Wars bits in them. They went and filmed some for the second game that are super, super corny, but certainly I think were like a big deal to a certain type of Star Wars fan at the time. So yeah, I wanted to give that a shout out. And that was also, I think Rebel Assault was one of the first times they did mount a kind of major in-house Star Wars game at LucasArts. So quite a key title in that timeline. Last up in seat here, Matthew, games I’m sure you’ve played. Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2, the EA games. I put these here because I thought they were like really gorgeous looking things. But there was something weirdly cold about them. Like the second one has like a campaign I’ve discussed in the Guilty Pleasures episode. It’s kind of fun at times game where it’s basically about some bad guys who turn good. That’s essentially what that campaign is about. And certainly has the very shiny dice looking spaceships and character models and things. Nice depictions of Star Wars worlds. But I just never really clicked with them as multiplayer shooters, Matthew. Did you try and give these a go? No, I played a little bit like as much as I had to for whatever I was working on at the time. Yeah, like weirdly, Dan Dawkins, popular guest on this podcast, absolutely loves Battlefront 2. Like he played it for like hundreds, if not thousands of hours. It was a genuine obsession, and should we ever get him back on the podcast, we must definitely talk about this because I know that he loved it. I don’t know if I’ve ever read him talk about why he loves it. So to me, it was always a little bit like, I think it was the iconic heroes as like power-ups that you trigger and then you’d be like Luke Skywalker for like 20 seconds running around the battlefield like invincible Mario and it was very daft. Yeah, he spent currency to basically become hero characters, which was quite interesting as an idea that was sort of borrowed from the pandemic battlefront games. But yeah, I think that like the problem I had with too, I played a bunch of my brother and I was like amazed by the amount of stuff in it, like the amount of assets and you know, they also they gave us so much free content after launch because obviously had a notoriously like tough launch. Back when people cared about loot boxes, I feel like people stopped talking about that now Matthew. That’s because it’s all fine, it’s all fixed and we don’t have to talk about it. So yes. Well done, everyone involved. All fixed. All fixed. This truly proves if you talk about something on Twitter a lot, that will fix it. Well done everyone. So yeah, basically, it was packed with stuff, but there was a supremacy mode in it, which is kind of like you basically push against the enemy when you control a certain amount of when you basically win the game. You go off of off the planet and into their spaceship, where you have to win there too. But if they win inside the spaceship, it pushes you back to the battlefield. And I swear, me and my brother has some like pandemic era goes on in this mode that lasted for about 10 years, like just like fucking like a single match going on and on and on and absolute fucking nightmare that I didn’t love spent so much time in their base. Quite a fun Starfighter combat to it. I quite liked it. It’s basically just Star Fox with with Star Wars spaceships. It worked pretty well for a long time. The A-Wing was too small in terms of hit boxes so you can absolutely fuck people up and listen to yourself man. The hit box on the A-Wing was too small. What I’m saying that was a good thing because it meant you couldn’t be hit while you were in it. So you’re just fucking up everyone’s good time. You need to wedgie yourself. Yeah, it’s shameful isn’t it? I’m making a fucking best Star Wars Games podcast. This is wedgie myself. You know what I mean? I’m doing it right now. So yeah, that’s the last of the C tier. The Battlefront games were definitely competent but hard games to love I think for whatever reason. And it also just feels like at some point the servers will go off and there will just be no more game in these and they feel just quite ephemeral. You know what I mean? They’re just going to disappear. But now we come to what I consider the true good games, I would say. Everything from here onwards I like in some form. So this is the promised best Star Wars games of the episode. We got there. Yeah, we got there in 10 minutes. First up then, Empire War. Amid noughties, Petroglyph, the former Command and Conquer developers, finally took on the Star Wars RTS. For a long time, LucasArts had never cracked the genre. The RTS was absolutely enormous in the nineties. They had a go with Force Commander and Notorious Dud from the time. Just absolutely terrible, slow, boring game. I think I again actually managed to bully my friend Donald into buying at the time. Were you actually doing Jedi mind tricks on that? You will buy this five out of ten. It’s like Dad was a doctor or something. So I thought, what’s it to you? You know what I mean? You got fucking money coming out of your ass. Yeah, my kind of like weird brand of socialism, I guess. So they did that. They did Galactic Battlegrounds, as I mentioned, which is basically just like an asset flip for Age of Empires 2 with some nice sound effects. This though was basically, let’s get the people who are enormously influential on this genre to essentially create the Star Wars version of it. The result is something that is pretty, pretty compelling, pretty cool, even now has like a massive audience, even now, and a lot of mod support. Basically what happens is you control battles in both space and on planets. So it’s kind of a bit like doing like an XCOM sort of thing where the management stuff of the actual of the battles happens in the space layer. And then like the actual combat stuff, it doesn’t all happen on the ground because there are space battles in this too. But you have to be conscious of both layers basically and how you play the game. Quite interesting, I think. And it means it’s like slightly more complex than, you know, the Command and Conquer games were which were all very much what’s happening on the battlefield. I think it’s pretty cool. Yeah, it’s even now I think it holds up and there are loads of graphics mods and such you can get to basically expand the game. There’s an expansion. It’s sold in a kind of gold edition on Steam so you can always get it for reasonably cheap. It’s on GOG as well. I rate it. Here’s the important thing, so if it’s a C&C alike, does it have a Tanya equivalent? No, but if you want to hear like bad sound of like Wedge Antilles, this game’s got your back. I feel like they never settled on whether Wedge Antilles was like English or American. In this he’s American, but he’s like clearly English when he turns up in or Scottish, I guess because he’s Dennis Lawson, right? That’s the actor who is Scottish. But, you know, the accent is kind of English. I think when he turns up in Squadrons, he is English and then in this he’s American. They need to like put that in a fucking style guide and be like, this guy is one of these two languages, but you know, or two accents. In the offices where I work, there are these like audio booths. Like those, those like one person’s phone call booths you can go into, they’re like soundproofed and they’re named after Star Wars characters. And there’s one called Wedge, and there’s one called Wedge and Biggs. Is that Star Wars or is that Final Fantasy? Yeah, that’s Star Wars and also Final Fantasy. Oh, okay. I think it’s a Star Wars thing because one of the company founders is like a big Star Wars head. Actually, one of them is a big Final Fantasy head. I have no fucking idea what’s going on in their offices. That could be just a bit of both where they’re like, this covers both topics, so let’s just go with it, you know. Are those the only characters they got? No, there’s definitely this wedge in bigs, the big meeting room is called Rapture. Which is like, I don’t know if it’s that good. Is that meant to be something we’re meant to aspire to? Yeah, there’s like Columbia, that’s where you go when you have a meeting where everyone’s racist, you know what I mean? That’s like the racist meeting room. I will say actually, the first company I worked at, all their meeting rooms were named after Star Wars planets and it was really fucking cringe because it was like, we’ve got to go have a meeting in Endor, which is like the board room or something and I was just like, oh, really? We really got to do this? Can you just call it room one, room two, like they do in the future? That’s at least handy, you know which rooms you’re going to. Yeah, I quite like it, except it must be odd for, you know, there are like serious people at the company who aren’t like up to their elbows in pop culture. Dweeb shit, yeah. And to them, it must just be like, oh, I’ve got to have a meeting in Rapture or Cloud City, or what’s that one called? Best Bin, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe they named, maybe one of the meeting rooms is named after the good upstairs bit in Midgar in Final Fantasy 7. Oh, right. Do you mean, you don’t mean the Gold Saucer, right? No, I mean, like, who are the people who get to live on top of the disk? Do they have a, does that area have a name? Gosh, I don’t, it’s called like the plate or something. I don’t think it’s, I don’t necessarily think it’s in the way. Maybe it’s not that. I obviously, I don’t know the law of our own offices well enough, but, like, there was definitely a set, yeah, it’s not the slums, it’s the, it’s the upper bit, but. Yeah, it’s probably got a name that I’ve just forgotten, but, yeah, it doesn’t come to mind. They were like Sector 1, Sector 2, etc. Oh, yeah, I wouldn’t name them meeting rooms after that. That’s a bit industrial inside. It wasn’t called Seventh Heaven, was it? Which is Tifa’s Bar? No, it’s not that, it’s not that. That’d be quite a good name for like a sort of rec area or something. I don’t know. Do more research on your office and come back. Yeah, I’ll come back. See what you learn. That will get everyone back for another episode at least. So in conclusion, Empire at War, very good. Again, this feels like the last vestiges of when you could make a PC-only kind of Star Wars game and get a bit of money behind it. It feels like the last of its kind in some ways, I think. So Princess Leia is Tanya, though, and we’re off to the races. She’s just flying around doing all weird full shit from the later films. That would be great. There was a good Jeremy Peel interview with Petroglyph doing the rounds connected to a game that my employer published, where I think they talked about how they basically did the cut scenes in Red Alert seriously, but then people saw them as kind of jokey and it kind of that’s how they sort of grew and became quite daft and then obviously eventually leads to Spice, Tim Curry. So yes, that’s Empire at War, very good, always about four quid on Steam. Next up, Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2, the Pandemic Games. So these are a lot jankier by any standards compared to the EA ones and yet there is something so lovable about them. They were games that basically took the battlefield formula from the time and translated them for both console and PC crowds. You have basically big Star Wars battlegrounds, you can fly around, you can sort of do like your Hoth set piece and sort of like air speeders versus the AT-ATs and you’ve got the scale basically of an on-foot Star Wars battle with all the vehicles in one game and that was a cool promise to sort of pull off and even though I think it lacks polish, certainly is a kind of FPS experience by modern standards, I really, really love them and I’ve played the shit out of them over the years just taking on AI but last time I checked there were some PC servers still going for two. But I was just really fond of them, the second one out of Space Battles as well and had more of the prequel stuff as you might expect because it was tying into Revenge of the Sith which released that year. Yeah, super cool games and I can’t believe it took them like genuinely eight years, no wait ten years to make a follow up to these. Just crazy town. But there was for a long time like a rumored and then eventually you know turned out to be it was like leaked massively Free Radical version of this and like the troubled development on that killed Free Radical basically. Do you ever play these Matthew? Maybe like demo versions at some point. Like I know how they look and move but I don’t have like real familiarity with them. That era of like early console online, I was so far off being online like I found online quite befuddling even in this era you know like it really took like Xbox Live probably like the 360 era to kind of bundle it up in such a sort of idiot proof way that I was finally online gaming. Yeah, I don’t even mean like 360 crack that open for me a little bit as well. So I played a bunch on PC at my friend’s house using GameSpy or whatever to again poor Donald just getting roped into buying all my Star Wars games for me because his dad was a doctor and he could afford it. This one finally paid off. This is good. Yeah, this was good. I actually you know I did buy this and play this myself anyway like I had this on Xbox and it was it was the Xbox version was always best. You can buy both of these backwards compatible again on Xbox super super good versions of these games load really fast they were just really they’re just really good really entertaining and the second one really let into the silliness I think it added like a hunt mode where you could basically just go murder some Ewoks or or whatever or like that’s the dream. I think you could even like play as a Whomper Ice creature at Hoth and one of them. I feel like that happened and then can you drop kick a Grogu? That’s my current dream. Not a big Grogu head, Matthew. Have you had enough of Grogu now? I’ve seen everything that that puppet can do. It’s doing a lot of leaping these days, a lot of jumping. Oh, that looks really naff the second it jumps. It’s like an amazing animatronic thing. The second it starts like flying around, it’s just very silly. Yeah, the tone of these games is best summed up by there is like a mode, like a hero assault mode, I think it’s called in the second one, where it’s basically just Star Wars heroes and villains in Mos Eisley battering the shit out of each other. So you’ll see like four Anakin Skywalker’s and like five Boba Fett’s fucking each other up. And the Emperor just runs into the fray, starts like zapping everyone. And then like Chewbacca will just start firing bolts into people. And it’s like absolute carnage. It’s the most un-Star Wars off-brand thing, but it’s so fun and silly. And I think it sums up what the ethos of these games were. Like this is what Pandemic made. They didn’t make super polished games, but they made really fun sandboxy things. And yeah, they were simply not allowed to survive in an era that valued incredibly precise mechanics on the 360 and PS3. So EA had to close them, I guess. Next up, all Star Wars Lego games go here. Lego Star Wars games, rather. They are all in the B-tier. Matthew, do you have something? I think the best of them are A-tier. That’s probably… Is that fair? The thing is, is there not a ceiling on what you can achieve with these games mechanically that means they have to go in the B-tier? Oh yeah, definitely, but they almost started the best possible match for what they were trying to achieve in that it’s so iconic that the challenge of recreating it in Lego, it’s really obvious if they failed or succeeded. You’re like, yes, that is a thing I recognise made out of Lego. And also the story telling and the parody element of it. The films, A, because the films are all made for children, they have that simplicity so they’re quite easy to parody, but they’re also visually full of so much iconic stuff that there’s so much material to riff off. The Lego games, the Lego Marvel games, when they do try and do bits from the film, there’s nothing to get your teeth into because there’s nothing memorable in any of that action, nothing really happens in any of those. But this, the joke about him trying to explain I am your father with the two pictures of the family photos of him with his mum and things like that, you’re like, that’s so great. They’re almost the best the Lego games have ever been. If that means that that series has only ever peaked at B tier, I don’t know. The problem is that I’m not using B tier as derogatory here. I would make the case, maybe the original game or maybe the sequel, which I think had the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy together. No, what happened was they did the prequel trilogy first, then they did the sequel trilogy. Sorry, no, then they did the original trilogy and then they did the complete edition that bundled them all together. Right, but I think the original trilogy is pretty kind of gold standard in terms of like Star Wars fan service, but like it is also like a step removed. It’s kind of looking at it from the outside, you know. You don’t feel like you’re in Star Wars, but as one of the few games on this list that I have played, you know, I thought, oh, I can offer my two cents here. No, that’s fair. I think like they’ve had ups and downs. Like I have no familiarity with the Clone Wars one they did, like Lego Star Wars 3. It’s tough to be like we’re going to make adaptors based on TV shows. I also didn’t play The Force Awakens one they did. It was like 2016 or something. They’ve been quite downhill since there. I didn’t like the new one. I think that’s harsh. It’s like it’s the thing is it’s, you know, at this point, it’s such an old formula. The formula hasn’t changed that much and they really did increase the scope of it. If that was your first Lego Star Wars experience and you really like Star Wars and you’re like 10 or something, that’s a fucking generous game. It’s trying to be like too legit as an action game. It’s not as throw away and just like smash everything up as the original Lego Star Wars games were. It isn’t a good action game, but it makes you deal with more of an action game. It’s probably my problem with it, like this, you know, cover based shooting. You’re like, oh, fucking really. There is also the funny thing of like you’re in like wherever the fuck the Gungans live. I can’t remember what it’s called now, but that place in on Naboo, you’ll and it’s like there’s so there’s like the real estate of a fucking GTA 3 island in there. Like it’s just it’s so much like land to kind of export. That’s just like one point. Maybe calling it bad is wrong. That’s not but that’s not I’m not praising it for that. I’m saying that’s like it’s almost like it’s almost content overload. It’s like there’s so much to see and do and like I found that that is slightly overwhelming. I think compared to the original like the I played the complete saga they did at the time when it came to HD consoles. That was great a great experience. I had some great like slightly hungover Sundays just blasting through that doing all six films in a row and you know the little hub area like it’s it’s like a perfect little Encapsulation of Star Wars the canvas is just so large this new one. It’s just it’s quite a it’s a different proposition. But yeah hard to appreciate fresh when you’re as old as we are. I guess you know anyway some love for Lego Star Wars. That’s fair. That’s fair Next up then in in beta Star Wars squadrons I wouldn’t say this was like a boat be careful what you wish for situation but I do feel like it this game didn’t really make as big of a splash as I thought it might and I think that’s maybe Because it is pretty mechanically sophisticated for a modern Star Wars game it is like a flight simulator very much in the mold of them X-Wing the X-Wing series and they were not ashamed about that and I think that’s really cool They built that and certainly, you know, it’s a go absolutely gorgeous looking game made by EA motive I think it’s where this left me slightly cold was the campaign the story was did nothing for me for whatever reason and I think it’s because it feels quite tailored to VR play so a lot of the story is delivered from people talking to you in first person, which means that I think that, cinematically, it doesn’t entirely work when you’re playing it just with a pad on a monitor or a TV or whatever. But I did think that the combat was really nicely done. Some of the missions I really liked, I found it tricky at times. That was mostly because I wasn’t used to the mechanics and what they ask of you compared to contemporary action games. I’m really pleased they made it. Just for whatever reason, I just couldn’t quite love it. But you know what? I’ve never played this in VR, and people say it’s fucking amazing in VR. And I’ve got my Quest 2 hooked up to my PC. I should just play this at some point because I probably really enjoy it. But certainly the effort made to create an authentic Star Wars space experience in the modern age and sell it for a pretty reasonable price, pretty good. You can always get this for about five quid these days. Do you want to play this one, Matthew? This is tapping into a big part of Star Wars I had no connection to. So, like, I just didn’t feel like I could like judge it or I’d be the right person to judge it. Yeah. I just, I didn’t even give it a, have I even played it? I don’t know. I don’t think so. It was like a pandemic year release, right? Like 2020 or something. Like it was snow. Just fell into that strange portal of time. So yeah, it was, but it is good. So nonetheless, it goes in this tier. And the various VR games are last up in the B tier. So the ones I’ve played are the Vader, Vader Immortal Trilogy on Quest 2 and then Tales from Galaxies Edge. They’re all fairly slight as a lot of like VR games tend to be, but they’re very nicely made. They’re made by ILMX Labs. So I guess like that’s the closest thing to a modern LucasArts that exists, really made in house. And yeah, I think if you want a, you know, like some really nice Star Wars presentation, you know, in VR, then this is here for you. I guess I’m not saying that these, this is like, you know, buying this will be feel as valuable a purchase as, you know, playing like the battlefront games or Empire at War. I don’t think it is. But experientially, I think Star Wars fans, you know, if you can get this for cheap, you should probably check it out and tell some Galaxies Edge, I believe, just re-released Matthew on PSVR2. Yeah, I’ve been playing a bit of that on PSVR2. And you get to be in like the canteen and there’s lots of little like weird gadgets. You can play like the dumb instruments that they play in like the various space bands. There’s like some silly keyboard sort of drum kit thing and you can chuck stuff around the blasters kind of handle like, you know, you can do all cool little tricks. What I like about the blasters in this game is they overheat and then you have to pull a little steam vent on top to spray out the steam. That’s quite good. That’s cool. I like that. Yeah, that’s decent. Yeah, so that’s, you know, that it looks super nice as well. The sort of like, you know, the overhaul they gave it visually just looks super, super good. So yeah, that’s I’m glad you check that out, Matthew. That’s it’s cool. Like I say, like these games are all VR games. These VR games tend to be quite slight, so keep your expectations in check. But you know, they are they are cool ways to experience this universe in video game form. Form. Okay, we come to the A tier. I think these are all great purchases, no matter what, basically. So these are, you know, I don’t think you regret owning these, essentially, although one of them is an arcade cabinet. So maybe don’t go and spend 20 grand on behalf of this podcast, but with that obvious caveat of the way, Matthew, I’ll jump into it. If I had 20 grand and I was a big fan of this podcast, I’d give it to the podcast. patreon.com/backpagepod. You just own us for the rest of your life, but we’d make whatever you want, it’d be great. We’ll make 10 episodes in your honour if you do that. 10? 20 grand? 2 grand an episode? Well, yeah, you know, I take… You’ve got to think of the rest of the listeners. Oh, they’d probably ask us to do. Actually, I don’t know if I’d want to give anyone that kind of power over us. Best 32X games, Matthew. That’s the thing, you just know it would be like, oh, I do the Tiger Electronic Handheld. It would be like, all right, well, we don’t know about that, but sure. It’s funny how anytime we’ve done something Sega related on this podcast, it’s been begrudging. It’s like, yeah, Andy Kelly’s on and he’ll talk about Dreamcast. Leave us alone now. We’ll talk about Mega Drive games, but I’m going to make jokes about Michael Jackson. Okay, fine. Good stuff. Actually, speaking of 32X, I have weirdly played Star Wars trilogy arcade. I think it’s called On There. That’s probably a D tier game. Or is that a Mega CD game, actually? I’m out of my depth here, as I always am with Sega games. Let’s get the fuck out of Sega Land and straight into the A tier. Absolutely. Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order 2019, PS4 and Xbox One and PC, just the best modern Star Wars game that you’d give to most people, I suppose, with no caveats. You can pretty much hand this to anyone and I think they’ll have a good time with it. Although, like you say, Matthew, it is surprisingly tricky because it is a third-person action game built in the old Dark Souls mold. So it has some of those elements to it in terms of how you die, your relationship with respawning and your relationship with the world as well as these kind of like not open world, but dungeon-y things to unpick, basically, where you explore the space, you understand the space, you pick up the shortcuts, you return to the space, maybe, and you can do something a little bit different. So, you know, lift some inspiration from that, which is really interesting. And it has super competent Star Wars combat. I don’t think this is quite best-in-class combat for the genre. It’s pretty good, but I think, like, having played Sekiro that year, Sekiro was just, like, miles ahead. Tough break for this, going up against Sekiro. Indeed, but rock solid. Way better than I thought it was going to be. Because people were so fucking down on that, like, that actor in this. When they saw the character, they were like, fuck this shit. Do you remember what people are like on Twitter when that happened? That was like, people annihilated that kid. They had, they did not care about that guy at all. Yeah, there was, there was that. And also, I don’t think it had the best demo showing at E3. Because at the time, there was a lot of buzz about, you know, someone is making a new third person action adventure game. Like, that’s really exciting. There’s not a lot of that sort of happening as much. And you see it and you’re like, yeah, I mean, it looks kind of fine. You know, it’s not like the best looking game ever. It looks solid enough, but it definitely comes alive in the hands. Like, the combat makes, you know, a lot more sense and has way more tension to play than to look at in that initial demo, I’d say. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also shows that, you know, you’ve got to put your faith in, you know, one of the brains behind God of War 3. Like, he just knows his shit, you know what I mean? He always comes across super, super well in interviews and very modest, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Plain speaking, but yeah, he doesn’t bring himself up. And he’s focused on the game, not like him or his ego or anything like that. Yeah, he’s quite interesting as a presence. Yeah, really, really good. And then I, like I say, I like the story a lot more than Matthew, because I think that it’s basically about someone who has just had to like flee and then live in exile essentially and be on the run his whole life. And so the idea that he kind of finds a little bit of something to click onto, but is also in the most danger he’s ever been means he’s like he’s I think he’s just I think he’s a good hang. Like he’s not it’s not the thing is like I got people’s criticism of this character is like is a white guy the most interesting character you can do as a lead in a Star Wars game. That’s completely fair criticism, I think. But the character they did create is Ginger. Most heroes aren’t like that’s that’s that’s that’s a bit different. That is different, but it’s not like as representation. Oh no, I’m not saying it’s like a big diversity, but I am saying like like I play it I’m like, oh yeah, this guy’s like really ginger in this game. Something tells me this is going to be remembered as a key bit of our podcast. It’s just the time that Matthew argued for ginger diversity. I don’t I don’t I’m not saying I’m not I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m not making the case that it’s especially good. I’m just saying it’s something I noticed like when you’re doing the customization on him. He’s got a big orange beard in this new game and I’m like, wow, that’s like I can’t remember the last time I saw a canonically ginger character. Wow, just wild stuff here coming up on the pod as we record a 807. Oh no, that doesn’t feel that wild, I’m going to get cold with this. Oh, I hope you keep some of it. So yeah, I think it wins you round and I think the point they made at the time was our supporting cast is slightly more diverse than just this guy. And you know, that’s maybe comes across as a medium out of the little bit of an interview, but it is true. It’s like you do have a really well-developed mentor character in this who has close ties to one of the villains who’s a super interesting villain. There is absolutely all-timer set piece in the chamber that they say for the very end of this game that I love. I won’t spoil on here in case you haven’t played it, but fucking amazing bit of Star Wars there. That’s like a proper God of War mentality coming through when that sort of thing happens, I think. That is like fighting, beating the shit out of Zeus, basically. It’s that equivalent in this game. Yeah, super good. And I’m really glad they got to make a sequel. And it’s led to them. I think it’s led to Respawn basically being entrusted with the EA license, sorry, the Star Wars license at EA. Because they have a first-person shooter coming that all their job, I’d say, is inspired by Jedi Knight. Fuck yeah, I’m all in on that stuff. And then there’s an XCOM style game too coming from some X for Access people. So, you know, I sort of like, I think they’ve really earned that trust. And I’m glad someone’s taken an interest in making some fucking Star Wars games. Because, you know, we’re definitely not sort of overloaded with them these days. So next up, Rogue Squadron, the N64 and PC game, 98 and 99 this was released. The first Factor V third person, I guess, like arcade dogfighting game. Quite different as a proposition to the simulation games on PC. Really fucking good. All the levels take place on planets. Essentially, it’s, you know, you’re going across planetary surfaces, fulfilling objectives, sometimes very unreasonable, tricky objectives. It starts on the super familiar Star Wars planet with Tatooine. You’re just defending Mos Eisley from being bombed by Thai bombers. Really straightforward, but a great little slice of what the game can do with some cool secrets to be found when you fly around the environment, like Jabba’s Palace and the Silek Pit and stuff. Loved all that shit. And then it goes into some slightly more, a bit more sort of poetic license, like extended universe stuff, I guess, takes place between episodes four and five. Really, really works well, Matthew. I replayed this last year. I fucking love Rogue Squadron after all this time. And it is a little bit different as a proposition to Rogue Leader for a few different reasons. You don’t have the, you can’t control your companionships and that sort of stuff. It’s like to, it doesn’t seem quite as hard. The aesthetic is very, very different being from the N64 era. So I still got a lot of affection for it. But how about you? Yeah, you know, I just, you know, remember seeing this in screenshots in N64 and thinking, oh yeah, that’s, that’s like a fantasy. I want to kind of tap into, those are scenes I want to, I want to experience. Remember thinking it was quite difficult and being very bad at it, especially like the Hoth stuff in this. I think at the time I didn’t necessarily like noticed how good it looked compared to other N64 games. Though obviously in hindsight, you’re like, it does look pretty amazing. And that’s what they, you know, go on to like really excel at. I think, I think I prefer the GameCube one more though. I think that’s still got more like wow factor and I prefer the kind of mix of levels and the set pieces and that more. Yeah, let’s move on to that then. So yeah, Star Wars, Rogue Squadron 2, Rogue Leader on the GameCube. We discussed a few times this podcast released in 2001. But if someone told you this game released like five years ago, you’d believe them because it looks absolutely phenomenal. Whatever the fuck they’re doing with a ship engine lighting in this is just out of control. The textures still look incredible after all this time, a proper achievement. And I think that Factor 5 seemed like they were quite closely involved with the development of the GameCube, Matthew, and we’re integrated into that process. And I actually only learned this week reading about it that apparently the existence of this game was quite creating a bit of tension internally at LucasArts because they were making Starfighter and they were wary of them being compared. And apparently Microsoft tried to convince LucasArts to put Rogue Leader on Xbox because they were aware that this was the hotness. And it is tough to compare to basically what Rogue Squadron was, but also a bunch of space levels, a much grander scale, tons more ships going on on screen, actually as close to the Star Wars films spaceship set pieces as you could possibly get in a video game. And this may still be as close as any game has ever gotten, Matthew. Thoughts? I find it very, very hard to untangle from just the excitement of the GameCube launch and this thing looking so good. If you were sniffy at all about Nintendo or the GameCube’s prospects, you could not look at this game and say like, oh yeah, that looks shit in any way, shape or way. It looked so good. You know, from the time I first saw it on like a free video that came with a magazine and just seeing it and going, well, it can’t possibly look like that, you know, that’s way too good. And then seeing it on the TV and you’re right. It where they invest visually and the specific visual effects they do have like textures and particularly like lighting, like all the lighting coming off the laser fire and the fact that you’re doing the kind of Death Star as the opening level and the laser fire is just kind of like lighting up the Death Star. It’s a really magic thing and, you know, made me think, you know, everything on GameCube is going to be like this. Obviously it wasn’t. And just really good fun, I mean, iconic opening set piece, like you say, it’s like playing the movie. Has the Death Star ever been done better in a video game? I don’t know. No, it’s yeah, absolutely unbelievable. I think just like the way it kind of splices in movie audio works really nicely. And yeah, it’s great. And like the Battle of Hoth is really good too. And I think like when you get to the Battle of Endor at the very end as well, which I think they split into two levels, there’s one where you kind of go across the surface of the Death Star, then go into the Death Star. And there’s one before that where you do the whole thing where it’s like a trap. All of that stuff happens basically. And it’s like a fucking gigantic space battle. So yeah, they really did like this was the one where if you know, Rogue Squadron only really teased at like the movie set pieces, they were basically they were all unlockable secret levels in the first one. And I think that’s maybe that they maybe thought they couldn’t quite take it on. But then this comes along and they’re like, oh, no. So now we’ve got the power to make this happen. And it’s absolutely unbelievable. I think what adds to this game is kind of like allure now as well is the fact that it is so hard to just play on a you can’t play on a modern platform. An older boy told me it used to work on Steam Deck until something happened recently that made it not work on Steam Deck with Dolphin, which is frustrating. But this has been a long like a long term project by that emulation community to get this game working basically because it’s so they were so hacking bits of the GameCube to get it working basically that it’s a real one off. So yeah, definitely deserves to be in the A tier. I did consider putting in the S tier but it’s got it’s got S tier levels for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Not all of the levels are the same standard as some of those, but it’s you know, but also extremely replayable as well in the way that the Rose Squadron was like letting you play in different ships and yeah and certainly like getting the kind of most out of it in that very sort of early noughties and PS2 GameCube era way. Next up then Dark Forces. This game was sort of like the Star Wars version of Doom, I suppose. It was a bit different though. You could you could sort of like look up and down, which doesn’t sound very exciting by today’s standards, but that was revolutionary. There was like a some more verticality to the level than there was in Doom. So that seemed like a huge deal. I also think it was like much more than just a Doom reskin. It looked and sounded fantastic. It created its own Star Wars character, you know, in Kyle Katarn, this sort of like smuggler guy. The mission objectives were pretty cool. The levels were like these really fucking complicated mazes and this in that very like Doom era FPS way. And I got stuck in the sewer level of this, as mentioned on a previous podcast for no kidding 20 years. Eventually used a walkthrough in the modern age to get through it. Did you like what was on the other side of that sewer? Well, yeah, because it was a level that wasn’t that sewer. Seriously, man, that level is just like, like white panels and then like brown water and then those Dianoga like squid things attacking you nonstop in the dark. That’s all this level is, while you go through like drains in this like, absolutely absurd looping motion to try and solve the puzzle to get through the absolutely absurd and like, it did feel like breaking the matrix open slightly when I did actually see that the dude you’re meant to like find and rescue in this like, that was like, I never thought I would see this in my like human existence, but here I am. I like the idea of this sewer that’s just full of like loads of aging carcassans because they can’t work the fuck, had to get out of it. They’re just all stuck there endlessly. Yeah, I think like this, truthfully, if you weren’t there when this kind of FPS was around, I wouldn’t recommend this to you now. It’s maybe like, it’s not very set PC in the way that you probably expect from a modern first-person shooter, it’s very much like a bunch of enemies in a maze, like I say, and like, you know, repeated sort of tiles and levels. The thing about that repeated tile look of the era is it suits Star Wars so well, because like a lot of the ship design is like that. It’s like long repetitive corridors. So it’s actually, it just looks like authenticity rather than limitations of the time. Yeah, it really does, actually. I think that’s a good way of putting it. And yeah, certainly as well, like it’s, if you just as well remember that no one had seen anything like this before using Star Wars. Just think how exciting this must have been. Even if it was, even if you were cynical enough to see this as a Doom reskin, it was like seeing Stormtroopers and them sounding like Stormtroopers and you having all of this weaponry that was like, was Star Wars. Like getting thermal detonators, you’d seen those in the movies, right? You saw the bit where Princess Leia presses one in Jabba’s palace, you’re like, ooh. And then suddenly you’re playing a first person shooter game where I think you press the three key on your keyboard and you could just lob them at enemies. That fucking ruled. It was a great, great armory that they basically established here that built on in the subsequent games, which I’ll talk about very, very soon, Matthew. So in fact, I’ll talk about it next. Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight, a follow up. I suppose like this was probably the Quake era equivalent to the sort of Doom era Dark Forces. Kyle Katarn yet again, much more story in this one. And the key thing is that it goes from being essentially like a first person shooter like Dark Forces to becoming a Jedi game, where over time you get a lightsaber, you accumulate force powers and yet you go down the light or dark side and the game changes based on that, on a way you align essentially. There’s like a bar that shows in the menu throughout like where you are so you know, you know what your actions are, what the consequences of them are. And then it was all stitched together with these very cheesy, but for the time very impressive live action cutscenes featuring a dude who today owns some kind of like vineyard in California. When I was on PC Gamer, like where’s her work with us? Like, did you know that Kyle Katarn just has a vineyard now? And I was like that fucking rules. We should either go to that vineyard and do a feature on it or just like interview him or something because that’d be pretty cool. This game though, I think like the reason it’s in the A tier and not higher is the Jedi stuff in this is like is a little bit ropey by modern standards. The armory still is still really, really good, but I think it’s like it’s naturally aged as a kind of like combat experience, but it was bold of them to basically do the first person shooter thing as well as they did in Dark Forces, but then to also do all this Jedi stuff on top of it. Super ambitious late 90s game design. I’m guessing you never played this, Matthew. No, I played the sequel, which I guess we’ll get to. This particular one passed me by. Fair enough. But it was super cool to see some live action Star Wars something in the late 90s when I was just massively getting into this stuff. Absolutely all-timer box art as well for this, for the complete edition of the game that came with the expansion Mysteries of the Sith, which is also really good. It’s basically first person and someone’s having a lightsaber fight with Darth Vader, which never happens in this game. Don’t know how they got away with that box art, but there we go. If you own a vineyard and you made your fortune from Star Wars and you have to make a Star Wars branded wine, what do you call it? Oh, gosh. I wish I had like two weeks to come up with the answer to this, and I might be able to. No, it’s fine. I’d call mine Vin Erso. That’s a character, right? Yeah, that’s really good. Yeah, damn. I’ve got to say something now. Pino Grogu? Han Merlo. That’s all right, isn’t it? I’ll do. Yeah. Han Merlo. Let’s carry on. Yeah, that’s good. No, you keep interrupting me with those asides, because they are like a good like sort of, you know, little pause in the action for people who are sick of my voice. So keep doing it, Matthew. So yeah, next up, Episode One Racer. Some might say this is a little too high. I played through this on the pretty good Switch port they did of this very recently, like in the last couple of years. I think it’s super good. So the one set piece that everyone seemed to agree was decent in The Phantom Menace. They took and turned into a whole racing game at a time where the likes of Wipeout and stuff were pretty big and obviously F-Zero and things like that. A super competent version of that type of game to me and like feels really fast, feels really exciting. The Alien Planet tracks to go to a pretty decent. I think it holds up. I’m fond of it, Matthew, and it has a little bit of customizable parts to your vehicle. That system is quite confusing, actually. But the game overall is pretty decent. Were you a fan of this one? Yeah, I mean, it’s not like an F-Zero killer or anything on N64, but it was like prettier and had its own vibe and like the engine, like heat management is kind of interesting. Had the unlockable mode where you could control each engine with a different analog stick on the N64, which was cool. So like you could sort of simulate a proper kind of pod racing. If anything truly iconic came out of the prequel trilogy, it is probably those vehicles. So I can see why it still holds up. We played shit loads of this. Yeah, it was super good. It was really replayable as well. And I like that it sort of began and ended with Tatooine. Like he had the shorter version of the Tatooine race and the much longer version that was basically the film version. Really super cool. I think it was quite hard to unlock Sobolba in this. Yeah, because I think Sobolba actually has a combat mechanic to him as well. Like I think he can actually damage other pod racers, which is markedly different. Did it have voice samples from Greg Proops? Yes, I think it did. Yeah. Like not loads of it, but a little bit of actually, is that true? Maybe? Yeah, I think it does actually. It’s like in the cutscenes and stuff. So yeah, a bit of Greg Proops in there, a little Greg Proops chaser. Yeah. Hopefully no Watto though. No, Watto is in here. Oh, Watto is front and centre. Loads of absolutely batshit Watto voice samples in this. There’s like bits where he just shouts, NUBIANS for no reason. And it’s really confusing, obviously a very problematic character. Read some great writing on Watto last year and he is like best slash worst in this. I do. Yeah, absolutely. As we all know in this podcast, it’s not a crime if it’s funny. No, it is a crime, but it is funny in this case. It’s called the Watto rule. You know? Yeah, that’s yeah. So, Racer, that goes in here. The funniest thing on that podcast we did on Guilty Pleasures, Matthew, is you asked me can you name another pod racer who’s not Anakin or Sub-Albert and I couldn’t do it. It was a great question. Can you name one now? No, I wanted to just make someone up and see if it would like wash with you. Like if I just went like Deeb’s. I’m already in. I’ve already put into whatever you say next. This is already sounds legit. Guy that’s like a blee blap. As the creator of Gin Rob Don Max, you are like the expert. Blie blap is not a thing. That doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t. Okay, let’s move on. So Star Wars Trilogy Arcade. This is a Sega game that came out in the late 90s. I was extremely fond of this. I’ve tracked this down at several arcades. It’s like, basically just tells, it goes through all three films in miniature, essentially boils them down to set pieces. Really straightforward but looked amazing for the time obviously as an arcade machine. It looked a lot better than anything I was playing on PC or was on console so it seemed incredibly exciting. Having discovered it in like later years, I still find a lot of appeal to it. It’s unfair in the way that all arcade games are a little bit unfair. But it’s a great use of five quid to just fire through this. I just absolutely adore it. Did you ever play this, Matthew? Did this machine ever end up at places near you? The number of arcade machines I’ve played is very low. They were just things that were expensive and I didn’t consider a good use of my pocket money because I was so bad at games. You know, I was like, what a racket. Like I’d just go home and play my game cartridges. Also, there’s something about being in an arcade when you’re a kid, putting your money in the machine. They’re so loud and they really draw attention to yourself. And if you are a bit shy, the idea of like, hey, look at me, I’m playing the game because people are going to gather around because they want to see. And it’s just too, it’s too much pressure for me. Arcades. That’s, that’s, that’s the truth of me in arcade machines. That’s fair. I’m surprised though, because I mean, I lived in, you know, you lived in what, Basingstoke, something like that. So I was South Coast and there were a lot of like, you go to like a laser quest or something, there’ll be this machine, you know, like it was. I’ve seen it. I’ve just never played it. I just, I wouldn’t want people being like, you know, this guy can’t fucking pilot a shit to save his life or whatever. Yeah, fair enough. You know, my forming ego would have turned out even more fucked up than it already is. Well, I already told that story about this game before, right, where there was like, it was like a year seven French trip, and I was trying to impress a girl. And then there was like a dude who played this game with one credit. And I mean the entire game with one credit. And then it was like, I’ve been hanging out with this girl who was like, you know, let’s just like assume that all people are vain and like everything is based on looks because it is, right? That’s like the reality we live in. And like this girl was like, if you saw me and her now, you’d be like, what she, they’d ask her, why are you with this jacket potato? By comparison, why are you with this felt jacket potato? Yeah. Yeah. More of a like a sort of like, you know, a chip these days, really. So like, you know, she was, even though we’re in year seven, I was trying to impress her. This dude gets like completes the game with one credit, goes off. I play it and I fucking die on the battle of Yavin just straight away. I’m just dead and I’m out and I’m like the pathetic. And it was, it was like the first moment I can remember being emasculated. A very like, you know, one of those, one of those coming of age moments, you know, but in a bad way, sort of like, sort of like that. Not sure how much that has to be redacted, Matthew. I’ll leave it to your discretion. Oh, no, I should leave that one in. That’s great. I can imagine like, you know, almost like a big row afterwards, like in a very intense stage play where it’s kind of like, you’re going to choke like you’re choked on Yavin. Just you being incredibly bitter and angry about it. If I was like, well, this is raw. Yes, basically Mad Men you’ve written there. It’s great shit. Okay, good. Okay, so next up then, Republic Commando. This is a really cool game. So this is one of the few sort of non-episode one games, actually prequel era games actually worked. So it’s a first-person shooter, but you have some control over the other members of your clone squad essentially. It’s not quite, I guess, like is it comparable to something like Rainbow Six? I don’t know, but it’s pretty short, pretty straightforward, but it’s just really competent and like a fun first-person shooter game that actually makes good use of the setting. I’m really fond of it. I played it for the first time a few years ago for a PC Gamer feature, and it’s super strong. I can’t vouch for the HD version as I’ve not given that a try, but certainly you can play as some PC and it works absolutely fine. It’s like a cinematic set PC, cool Star Wars first-person shooter game that was not released so long ago. You couldn’t play it and enjoy it now, Matthew. Do you play this one? I haven’t played it, but I remember it coming up a lot because the guy who directed it, Tim Longo, was like Mr. Halo 5. Right, right. Obviously, Halo 5 had a sort of squad element to it in that you had three AI-controlled companions with you. And I think people were, for a brief moment in time, excited about the potential of Halo 5 because of his involvement and because he’d come from what felt like quite a good match. Whatever the qualities are of Republic Commando, I don’t know if they manifested in Halo 5 because whatever happened with your squad in that game, I can’t remember it. No, they’re sort of there, but I don’t think they’re hugely important. I think you could give instructions though, right? Yeah, I think they could revive you when you went down. I think you could point at a rocket launcher and go, Nathan Fillion, go and pick up that rocket launcher. Yeah, yeah, it’s a great version of Nathan Fillion as well. The best one captured in games, it’s just him, it’s actually the guy. Yeah, I can see the sort of DNA there actually, that kind of makes sense. It’s kind of like a light sort of control thing. It works pretty well. Yeah, I need to play this one. I don’t know why I haven’t. Well, it got pretty good reviews. I don’t know, it might be, I don’t know if you’re not a Master Star Wars fan, how much the pre-crediting stuff would put you off, but- Yeah, that’s part of it. The name as well doesn’t fill you with hope, Republic Commando. No, I can see why it was a bit of a flop, to be honest. But it has lived on a little bit. I believe that Dave Filoni is a big fan of this, and one of the clone characters in it appeared in a Star Wars TV show as soon as two years ago. So there is a legacy here. I think he was quite inspired by it in terms of how the different clones were depicted in them, the Clone Wars animated series and such. So yeah, it doesn’t have no legacy, but it might actually add a little bit of depth to your perception of the prequel trilogy. And that’s a pretty hard thing to do, I think. Yeah. So I do rate it and it won’t take you too long to complete. I think it’s about six hours or something. Perfect. The dream. Okay, last up in the A tier then. Maybe this is controversial. I’ve got X-Wing and X-Wing Alliance here. I mean, I have no fucking idea. So you could tell me these were E tier and I’d believe you. Well, no, there’s an argument for them being S tier, but I think there is like one game in this series. It does stand above the rest in terms of reputation and what it does with the Star Wars license. So that’s a true golden draft pick. So, I mean, I really love these games. The formula is the same. It is like, you know, basically flight simulator level granular mechanics but applied to the Star Wars universe and you’re controlling all these different chips. And then, you know, you decide when to go into hyperspace to end the mission. You use targeting computers. You decide where the shield goes, like forward or backwards. You decide how much power you put into your lasers, that sort of stuff. Really like quite in-depth, you know, kind of need a joystick to get the most out of this sort of game. But the first X-Wing is like the first game I ever owned. The first like full stop. My parents got me for Christmas, like the white label version of this big white box. And I thought it was absolutely incredible to experience at the time. And X-Wing Alliance, which was the last in the series, came in along the late 90s, has lived on because it’s like the nicest looking of these games. It’s like a fully 3D game. I think it’s got quite an active mod scene as well. And it did let you play as the Millennium Falcon for the first time, which was super rad. I did like this. I have slightly less of a relationship with this one. So maybe my placement here is slightly bogus and people would argue it should just be an S tier. I don’t know what I’m talking about. X-Wing, I played a whole bunch of though. And I think that Tie Fighter, to spoil it a little bit, is just has that little extra spice that I think takes it to the S tier. It’s a bit sexy, isn’t it? It is a little bit. Yeah. But super rad games. I’m pleased that they made Squadrons to honor this. So now we come to the S tier, Matthew. I think these are all pretty self-evident as picks, but curious to know what our listeners think and if this is fair. Because again, I’m not saying like the A or B tier games are bad. I’m saying they’re very, very good. But the S tier, I did want to reserve for like the super, like the seminal games, essentially, of which I limited to five for a specific reason. I suppose what unites these yet again is like they are either the best at adapting a certain genre for Star Wars, their take on the Star Wars universe is just spot on what it needs. Or they just do something spectacular that means they kind of rise above a little bit. And so I’ll bundle these together, it’s super obvious Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic 2, The Sith Lord. So basically, buy aware of these RPG specialists who cut their teeth with Baldur’s Gate and MDK 2. I think they made that as well, Matthew, or maybe it’s just MDK, I don’t remember. Basically they come along and they take Star Wars away from the prequel era that everyone hated to go back thousands of years and tell a story in their timeline, that timeline where they can basically set the parameters of what’s going on at the time between the Sith and the Jedi, tell a super interesting story of, well, I guess I don’t want to spoil it too much but there is essentially a war going on between the Sith and the Jedi and then a Sith character of Note has recently disappeared and yet the apprentice of that character still lives and yeah, it’s essentially about the Star Wars era at that time. This has dated a lot, I think, in some ways. The animation of the characters and cutscenes, obviously there’s a lot of dialogue in this. That’s where it looks super dated. Kind of puppet level animation, you don’t expect something super high end from a game this old. This is a 2003 game. Where it’s held up is the writing is still great. The companions in this game are super distinctive. You want to talk to them and spend time with them. This is what they were really good at with Baldur’s Gate. This is what they would be great at with Mass Effect as well and Dragon Age. The companions would be the lifeblood of these games. Here they were in this original Star Wars setting, essentially, creating all these new characters you never heard of before and then making you fall in love with them. I think it’s a real feat. Where it’s dated the most is a few mini games in this that are quite jank, a bit of a strange choice but I guess they were trying to do as much as possible like racing and spaceship-y stuff, that sort of thing. The combat, I don’t really like the combat in this where it’s not really real, it’s happening in real time but you’re sort of programming in actions to play out in a row. It’s not very exciting to look at but again I can’t hold it against this Matthew because it just seemed like such a huge deal at the time that this game came along and gave people a bit of Star Wars they could actually love and I think its reputation is deserved all these years later. Thoughts? Weirdly what attracted me to it was the idea of building a character and being able to tap into both sides of the force. I think a common theme across some of these S tier games was the Jedi fantasy was a really big deal and a tangible thing and to be a kid in the 80s and 90s you probably shared that fantasy and so any game which let you A have a lightsaber that particularly let you dabble with the light side or the dark side and have the Sith powers as well. The promise of that was always really appealing to me but actually, yeah, when I played it I think I don’t have particularly fond memories of the combat like you but yeah, that’s the story and the characters and this being a game where I was, you know, one of the earlier games I can remember where I was really invested in those characters, you know, I think the fact that it was sort of 3D and you had like the more traditional Bioware camera angles on the conversations made those characters feel a lot more alive than say like the Baldur’s Gate characters which equally well written, you know, are just a little bit more abstract and you’re further removed from the action due to the perspective but this one you could kind of see them and the work they do in bringing this world to life in this game to life haven’t gone much beyond it. Like they haven’t really had to. Like it is just the template that works for them. And even like some of the tropes, you know, the murderer robot in this, the kind of psychotic, lovable, evil robot is a character they really like, you know, of like the sort of funny, evil person in your party who you kind of like to hang out with just because they make you laugh even though they kind of hate you and are actively evil. You know, it’s very similar to the, you know, the mad scientist in Mass Effect 2 and things like that. Maybe I prefer the games, it spawns afterwards, but it’s like, you know, sort of a sacred text in terms of its importance. Yeah, I think so. Like it’s even like, it asks, it occasionally asks, like quite a lot of you in terms of the how will I un-Star Wars it can occasionally be. So there’s a whole bit where you’re going underground in this near the start, like clearing out all these like monsters where it feels like a fallout side quest rather than a Star Wars side quest. And that is like a little bit off, I think. But those moments are few of our between really, I think that the dialogue is really well written. It’s like it’s well judged Star Wars dialogue. Like it’s, it’s that thing of like 60% drama to 40% comedy that I think Bioware kind of get, you know what I mean? Like it’s, it’s fun. A lot of the time, you’re not just sat there through dry discussions about shit and boring lore stuff. It keeps it light on its feet. The second one’s interesting because they obviously this went to Obsidian instead of Bioware who had at that point moved on to making Mass Effect, I suppose. I haven’t finished this one, I will confess, but I think it’s a super interesting game in terms of like how they rewrite the rules. So, the Jedi are almost extinct in this one, I think it’s set five years later. Basically like they’re in even more dire straits than ever, which is a really interesting, I think, backdrop for this sort of like Star Wars story. It is largely credited with adding sort of like gray areas to the Jedi and the Sith dynamic, which it may be, you know, certainly maybe set it apart from how binary the morality is of Star Wars more generally. It was a famously incomplete feeling game that has been patched to feel a little bit more complete in recent years. Otherwise, it’s like essentially identical in terms of how it looks and feels, the combat and stuff like that. But certainly, I think that, again, like maybe even more so than the original KOTOR, some of the characters in this one have had an extended life and people still worship this game years later. It’s on my to-do list to finish this one, Matthew, but the first one I have much more of a relationship with. Next one, really obvious, TIE Fighter. That was what I was alluding to earlier with the X-Wing discussion. I think like you just have to give this one the credit for being the game where you play as the bad guys and actually going through with it because Star Wars games so rarely do this. They like the flip of you going from bad to good, essentially. This game is all bad all the time. It’s just, you know, you are in this machine, this unflinching, awful machine, and the game makes you feel that way when you play it. Yeah, I mean, I played this a whole bunch for the Draft episode we did. And I think it also represents quite a big step up in, obviously I didn’t get it. It represents quite a big step up in types of, in like the level design from X-Wing. Like it’s a lot faster and more exciting missions. Just really kind of like really, really exciting. I can see why this one has the reputation years later. And it’s interesting to fly ships that feel much more like just a piece of metal going through the stars than these clunkier, rougher things in X-Wing that had a lot more shields or weapons to them. This feels like you are almost like a kamikaze pilot or something. It’s got that feeling to it. Just the quiet confidence of the elitist dark side. Exactly, yeah. And it just carries through with that really well. What a great flip to do with your sequel, not to do X-Wing 2, to do, we’re going to do you play as the bad guys. And then I think fulfilling a secret Star Wars fantasy a lot of people have. So, yep, still rate this one. Like I say, played this as recently as whenever we did that 90s PC draft. Really enjoyed it still. And I think it belongs in the S tier for the simple reason of you play as the bad guys and they did it super well. So yeah, well done. It sets it apart in an otherwise great series. Okay, last two here, bundling them together. Star Wars Jedi Outcast and Star Wars Jedi Academy. Now, why have I bundled these together and why are they not bundled in with Dark Forces and Dark Force II in A tier? There’s a simple reason for this. These are the games that perfected lightsaber combat in a game. They did it. Like they and that was something as much as like seeing the Death Star Trench run recreated in Rogue Leader was really compelling to me when that game came out. This was just as compelling on the on the flip side of like, I’ve always wanted to see lightsaber combat done well in a game. And this game, first of all Jedi Outcast did it incredibly well, Jedi Academy built on it a bit mechanically. Really, really fucking good. And then just like every detail from when you scrape a lightsaber against the wall and you see the mark that you left in the wall, down to like the stances you could do, what it felt like to throw a lightsaber in this. Just like my first my first encounter with this game was a demo where you played against one of the sort of like, basically the villain in this game can turn regular dudes into sith essentially it’s quite dark, but it means you get it means that you never short of people to fight with your lightsaber in the game, which is obviously really exciting. You have to be the reason this game works better on mouse and keyboard than anything else is you have to be super precise with how you land each blow. And like, just like hitting, throwing your lightsaber at the right angle just as they move at the right time can just be like life and death. And that’s exactly what a lightsaber fight should feel like. And so all of that was just incredibly exciting to me, Matthew. But not only did they do a slow starter, but eventually like fantastic campaign in Jedi Outcast. Like it starts very much as like a first person shooter, then Kyle Katarn literally has to become a Jedi again because he had dabbled with the Sith in Mysteries of the Sith expansion, Matthew. He was the secret villain of that expansion and so had to come back to the light side in this one, having been rehabilitated. So it’s a bit of a slow start, but when you eventually get your lightsaber and your force powers, they’re so much better done than they were in Jedi Knight, I think. And Raven Software made this, did a super great job with it. You played this at the time too, right? Yeah, yeah, I absolutely loved it. I mean, I think what you’re saying about the lightsabers bang on, that was the thing, kind of this game will make you think you’ve got a lightsaber. And I don’t think I ever really mastered the combat. I definitely remember kind of walking into rooms where it would just be you and another person with a lightsaber and you’d be like, oh shit, this is going to kick off. And in my head, it was the kind of closest thing I’d had to like a proper sword fight and trying to kind of capture the weird behavior of a sword fight. And no other game has done it in quite the same way. Like it’s still still like a super interesting example of this. I am really intrigued about the sequel though, because I never played it despite really loving this. I mean, I cannot for the life of me think why… Well, in my head, I always thought the follow up was bad and that’s why I didn’t play it. But it’s not bad. It’s equally well reviewed, right? So it’s a weird one. It’s a really weird sequel because, okay, Jedi Outcast who plays Carl Katana, it continues that story. Jedi Academy, you play as a character called Jaden Korr, who you just you basically designed the character. That’s what’s different about it. You build your own Jedi. That’s kind of the fantasy of Jedi Academy. And then I think you play the missions out of order, if I recall. You can decide which order to play a bunch of the missions in, which was a bit different. So I think like story wise, it was not as well liked as Jedi Outcast, which was considered quite a legit bit of Star Wars storytelling. This was a bit more, I guess, not quite fan service-y, but just a fan fiction-y, but a little bit, I guess, because you were creating the character just didn’t quite convinced in the same way. But combat wise, it was even better. That’s the thing, like it’s, I personally thought that the level design in this was top notch. There was some really some levels that use the Force incredibly well, massive scale to some of it. And when you get like your Force jump going, you can really just like ascend and descend in some quite exciting ways. It feels dramatic and cool. Yeah, so it just, I think it just, it set that bar a little bit higher when it came to what can you do with these different sort of combat and force mechanics. Also, a key distinction is, I believe that unlike Jedi Outcasts, which gives you a few first person shooter levels to sort of like not slog through, but they’re not that entertaining compared to the stuff that follows. You are a Jedi from the start in this one. So that’s another way it’s set apart. But yeah, you’re right, though, it doesn’t have quite the same people don’t really I think it’s like when people try and remember it, maybe they remember the combat, but not the actual game content quite as much, Matthew. But I understand this was like a pretty important game in terms of the online multiplayer scene, like it had an extended life for sure. And that was the other thing I was going to say actually about Jedi Outcast. That was one of my first key multiplayer experiences was playing this game where it was like an FPS and like a Jedi dueling game at once you could you could challenge someone to a duel in the middle of a giant multiplayer map or firefights happening around you fucking amazing stuff like Raven software just absolute killer in the early noughties. They’re really up there. Do you think they’ll ever return to this? I don’t think so. Like it’s it’s weird if you look at like how the combat in Jedi Fallen Order differs compared to this. Like it’s a skill based game. But what is what is specific to this game is that one to one control of your lightsaber. It just feels like because you can change your stance and you pick the angle of attack. It feels like you’re in control of your weapon in a way that you just you just aren’t in like even in most modern action games. It’s just it’s such a different proposition. I personally think like you can play this on Xbox and, you know, it’s like a HD version. I don’t recommend the HD version actually, because I think the aiming is way too twitchy when you’re using it on like a switch or something. I think like your mouse and keyboard is still the way to go. But that’s why I don’t think they do it, Matthew. It’s just that precision factor, you know. It’s, yeah. It’s better getting Revengeance, the spiritual successor to that. But that game’s like not sophisticated enough in its… Yeah. Like the only sophisticated thing about it is how you use the weapon in relation to objects rather than like, or treating enemies as objects, rather than like the what are the enemies also doing to you to make that combat exciting. That’s why I don’t think it works that well, Revengeance. But yeah, I guess it only simulates the one to one in the very specific slow-mo chop mode, so. Indeed. But, you know, certainly more games where you slice up melons or you leave a mark in the wall with your sword. That’d be cool. This is also reminded me of like, there was a time where you would get a game that was a shooter and a melee combat game in the same game. And now you don’t see that as much. That sort of like jack of all trades approach to game design, I think. You know, this is super good at both of them, because obviously Raven had just made Star Trek Elite Force, which is quite a well-reviewed game, and then they went straight into this. And so, yeah, they knew their FPS onions and then obviously just built the lightsaber combat because they’re incredibly passionate about Star Wars. So, yeah, it’s not the same thing. But I know that Jedi Survivor introduces a combat stance that is you have a blaster in one hand and a lightsaber in the other. That’s cool. Which is kind of an interesting, like long range thing. Though, again, I saw some people under the videos going a Jedi would never lower themselves to use a blaster, you know, downward thumb emoji. But they’re probably the same people who don’t want to hang out with Jack Black and Lizzo. So fuck them. And on that note, that’s a great place to wrap up The Best Star Wars Games. A lot of me monologuing this. If you find that boring, I do apologize. But oh, no, this is this is this is what people want. They, you know, I think people who listen to this podcast, they like to hear us occasionally go off on one about the thing that we know about and like. And we’ve spent many years accruing specialist knowledge in certain areas. And if we can’t tap into that on our own podcast, where else can we tap into that? Yeah, exactly. The thing is that a great Star Wars game will still get me in the way that a great Star Wars movie does. Like they still have the power to do that. And that’s why I think it’s a different licensed ball game to anything else to me. It’s just there is there is a next level a Star Wars game can reach that I just yeah, that’s absolutely tied to my sort of personal history with these games, but also just I don’t know. The license is uniquely suited to games, I think. It’s just it’s it’s a real one of a kind. So yeah, good stuff, Matthew. OK, the podcast is done. Thank you very much for indulging me listeners. I hope that was informative in some way. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? At MrBuzzle, underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W Roberts on Twitter. Backpage pod, if you want to follow us, follow the podcast account on there, where we retweet memes and such. There is also backpagegames.gmail.com if you’d like to email us. patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like to support us financially. What is the other thing I was going to say? Oh, yes, next week is the best games of 2015, Matthew. So big episode for us. Oh, it’d be a big one. Absolutely. They’re always very, very popular. So look forward to that. I will do that next week. Goodbye. I’m going to confess, I haven’t played a lot of these games. So apologies if you have to do what you are going to have to do, a lot more heavy lifting. That’s fine. You’ll see how I do it. It will be good, I promise. Are you going to do the whole thing as Yoda? After one, I’m like, oh, that was pretty funny, but I hope he doesn’t do it for the next 17. Oh, he is doing it, okay. Jedi power battle is very mediocre, yes. We should have saved this episode.