Genre: Role-playing game

Format: DVD

Developer: Bioware

Mac Publisher: Aspyr Media

Minimum System Requirements: MacOS X v10.3.4, 1GHz PowerPC G4/G5, 256MB of Memory (512 MB recommended), 4.3GB free disk space, DVD
drive, Video card with 32MB VRAM and hardware support for fragment
shaders (ATI Radeon 8500, nVidia GeForce 2MX or better)

Review Computers: 1GHz iMac, 256MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 video card with 64MB of DDR RAM, Mac OS X v10.3.5; and 1.5GHz 17" PowerBook, 512MB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (AGP 4X) graphics processor with 64MB of DDR SDRAM

Network Feature: No

Price: $49.99

ESRB Rating: Teen (Violence, Jawas)

Availability: Now

Official Website: [url=http://www.lucasarts.com/products/swkotor/index2.html]http://www.lucasarts.com/products/swkotor/index2.html[/url]

The weird thing about Star Wars is that as the movies get worse, the games get better. Now here's Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR! Raaargh!), a game with such an interesting story, with such well-developed characters, that it's actually a better cinematic experience than either of the Episodes.

KotOR is set 4,000 years before the rise of the Galactic Empire, during the great war between the Republic and the Sith. You take on the role of a Republic operative who gets swept up in events, destined to save the galaxy, or betray it.

Okay, so that part's not so innovative. This is a role-playing game after all. Who would you rather be? Porkins?

Beyond the normal trappings of an RPG, however, KotOR introduces compelling NPCs and unusual game play that can have even jaded cynics like me up until 2 a.m. trying to complete just...one...more...side...quest.

The story: After creating a character, you wake up to find your starship being shot out from under you. You escape to the planet Taris, where you and your companion have to locate a missing Jedi named Bastila before the Sith do. You'll sneak around a city that covers an entire planet (talk about urban sprawl), descending to the crime world of the Lower City, and then to the wastelands of the Undercity, before finding Bastila. Then all you have to do is several highly dangerous side quests, sneak into a Sith military base, find a way to join an interstellar criminal cartel, and steal the prized spaceship of the most dangerous hood on the planet.

And once that introductory section is out of the way, the game can really begin.

KotOR is huge. I haven't seen a game that's impressed me so much with its size and depth since Neverwinter Nights, and before that, Deus Ex. But anyone can throw a bunch of locations together; what KotOR has is an epic feel, the sense that you're part of a huge story about saving the galaxy.

The different planets you travel to aren't the same rooms with different textures (Halo, I'm looking at you); each one has its own personality and style of play. The desert planet of Tatooine is a gigantic desert wasteland, waiting to swallow you up. You have to use a mixture of cunning and viciousness to survive the attacks of the Sand People and sneak into their base. The Wookiee home world of Kashykk must be freed from a corporation of slavers, but not before you travel to the treacherous jungle floor, where you must kill or be killed by the native wildlife, and worse. Meanwhile, intrigue is the order of the day on Manaan, a planet struggling to stay neutral in the conflict between the Republic and the Sith, where any violation of the peace is punished harshly.

And that's not even all the planets you have to visit in your quest to discover the location of the Star Forge, a powerful artifact being sought after, and possibly already taken, by Darth Malak, the Sith Lord who would destroy an entire planet just to kill one Jedi, and has decided to make you his next target.

But a world must be populated with interesting characters to make a good game. Here again, KotOR excels. For one thing, your character has a wide variety of responses available to the situation she encounters. You can be a fine, upstanding hero, make flippant remarks, or be a self-serving jerk. Each response will affect how other characters see you, and will end up determining whether you follow the Light or the Dark Side of the Force. There are benefits to both: good Jedi Knights are highly thought of, and have the satisfaction of actually being a hero. Dark Jedi, on the other hand, have to put up with a lot less crap, and get to do cool things like choke people with their mind.

And unlike Star Wars: Jedi Academy, which side of the Force you walk on actually seems to matter in this game. While I enjoyed Jedi Academy, I was a bit put off my its lackadaisical attitude towards good and evil. The struggle against the Dark Side in KotOR, however, is a major part of the game, as the various Jedi struggle to maintain a sense of harmony while the world is (in some cases, literally) falling down around them. Will you succumb to your emotions, and use your hate to destroy your enemy, knowing that you may become even worse?

But back to the characters. In addition to the depths your own character can have, you're surrounded by the most detailed NPCs I think I've ever seen in a game. You gradually acquire a crew of nine, of which two can accompany your main character on her missions at any one time. Each companion has his or her own backstory, which is gradually revealed as you talk to them and encounter their personal trigger points as you follow the main quest. Traveling with the Wookiee Zaladar to his home world, for example, will reveal his shameful secret for leaving the planet decades ago, while the Twi'lek girl tries to track down her long-lost brother.

The companions will also initiate conversations with you, and depending on who you have on your team, with each other. Bastila and Carth, a pilot for the Republic, have a history together, and will often challenge each other's perceptions of the situation at hand. Once, in a completely random moment, Mission teased Bastila about being too uptight, so Bastila used the Force for a prank...which she then denied doing.

As these NPCs struggle with their own stories, your character can help them find peace, or encourage them to give into their anger and follow you to the Dark Side. You choose.

And that's the real beauty of KotOR, is that as you're being driven from one location to another, you are given the illusion of choice. Sure, you have to visit all the planets listed to find out more about the Star Forge, but you feel like you have a choice in how you go about it (even choosing what order to visit the planets, leaving and returning to planets whenever you like).

KotOR also offers a variety of types of missions, from the kind you'd expect—flashing lightsaber combat to "please find my missing child"searches to the unexpected: two different murder investigations with unusual conclusions, or a computer sentry that can only be bypassed if you learn to think like a Sith (and risk the Dark Side). There's even one short mission where your main character is out of commission, and you must select one alternate to try to save everyone else.

In terms of game mechanics, KotOR owes more to strategy gaming that to "twitch" fighting games. While combat takes place in "real time," you can pause it at any moment to set up a queue of actions for your character and her companions to take. Beyond that, you have no control over what happens in the fight: you can't control their moves (like say, in Jedi Academy, which was like an arcade fighting game), and, in fact, altering a character's position wipes their queue clean. Also, since you don't have to worry about controlling the character's combat movement, KotOR has the advantage of being a great game for laptops. You don't even need a two-button mouse to play the game: you can use the second button to direct your character's movement, or just use the WASD keys as normal.

You can switch between the characters in your party easily, and they level up to keep on par with you. All your characters share a common inventory, eliminating the pain of making sure that everyone's carrying a health pack, or making one strong character the "mule" to haul gear for everyone else. You have complete access to the powers and abilities of all your companions, allowing you to set up devastating combined attacks. If a character falls in combat, he's revived at the end provided at least one person in the party survived.

KotOR has also eliminated some of the drudgery of questing by allowing you to teleport back to your base from safe locations. Once there you can change your party (something you can also do in the field from most locales), be instantly healed, and transit back to the location you left.

And, of course, if you're playing in Star Wars, the main attraction is going to be the Jedi. Once you get your Jedi powers, you choose which ones you'll focus on. Those who follow the Light can have Dark Side powers (and vice versa), but they're harder to use. You will, of course, construct your own lightsaber, and can even modify it (and a few other items in the game) by hunting down rare components, giving it bonuses to hit and damage.

KotOR also features a few "mini-games," all of which I found to be annoying distractions. One is the "Pazaak" card game, where players try to reach a score of twenty by playing cards from a hand against those drawn blind from a deck. You can also buy rare cards throughout the game (gotta catch 'em all!), and will find people to play the game with on every planet. Uh, thanks, Yu-Gi-Oh, but I think I'll skip it. I hated the game, and as far as I could tell, it had nothing to do with the plot.

Another mini-game is "swoop racing," where you try to make your best time in a high-velocity hovercraft. You needed to do it once as part of the plot, but when offered the chance to repeat this simple game of moving left and right while shifting gears, I decided I'd rather deal with the Sand People (they're the worst).

The third mini-game brings us to the only design flaw in the game I've yet to encounter. Sometimes while traveling from planet to planet, your ship, the Millennium Fal – oops, I'm sorry, I meant the Ebon Hawk will be beset by Sith fighters. You will be instantly transported to a cannon turret, where you have to blast the suckers before they destroy your ship.

The gunning mini-game is annoying on several levels. First of all, the controls are completely altered: what was once the pause button (the space bar) is now the fire button. The pause is, in fact, the Escape button, which before took you to the menu screen. You can't get to the menu screen from this mini-game—the only point in the game you can't save in, I'd add.

This is doubly annoying if you forgot to save right before you left the planet you were on. KotOR features an auto-save function that will save every time you enter a new area. But, if you get killed during the gunning mini-game, the autosave disappears, and you have to go back to your last hard save. Always save right before you leave a planet.

My only other quibble is that a few of the side quests are downright silly. Helping a dancer audition for the cantina show? Locating a lost droid that its owner has fallen in love with? Hoo boy, the things I do for experience points.

But these are minor points; flyspecks in the face of a game that will overwhelm you with its depth of character and level design. I'm not sure that it brings anything new to the role-playing game genre, but it takes what was already there, and brings out totally new dimensions in it.

For capturing the spirit of the original trilogy, this is the Star Wars game.

Which makes me very afraid of how bad the next film has to be.

Next Article: New Apple Hot Deals Update

Previous Article: Aspyr ships Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

	Print this page is sponsored by www.MyMacStore.com For all your iPod, iPhone and Mac Gear