Reader Reviews
Rock 'n' Roll Racing, the Game Boy Player, Star Wars: KOTOR, James Bond 007: EON and something called Samorost all caught your eye this week.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC/Xbox)
by marilena
The problem with us, humans, is that we keep forgetting.
No, scratch that. One of the essential survival skills for a human is the ability to forget. Without it, sooner or later, most of us would cease to function. We need to leave behind the incredibly embarrassing moments inherent to the teen age, the inevitable deaths of people we love, the world-shaking heartache associated with the end of love stories we thought were going to last forever. We simply need to.
But me, I'm not like that. My heart is still full of feelings I should have left behind many years ago. I still cringe in almost physical pain as I remember the one and only true betrayal I have suffered in my life, wandering how someone I cared so much about could dismiss a lifelong friendship so easily. I still remember my best gaming moments, and the sadness that followed them, when I realized I may never find such beauty again.
It's true, I'm demanding. For a game to score high in my book, being the year's best is not enough. It has to have the magic that makes me remember games like Planescape Torment or System Shock such a long time after their release. It has to make me want to finish it, and then make me feel like I'm losing something precious when it actually ends.
But now, I don't feel anything. I'm watching the ending credits of Knights of the Old Republic, and I am completely, absolutely empty. I'm not even angry with it, I don't hate or despise the people that made it, as I usually do when I don't like a game. I simply feel nothing. Names roll by in front of me, and I don't care to read them. I guess I should have given up in one of the few moments I was enjoying it and held on to that moment, like those people that claim they can hang on to orgasms for hours upon hours. But there's not much in KOTOR I can hold on to. It's a soulless, by-the-numbers RPG, and, if there's one genre were soulnessness is unforgivable, that genre is RPG.
It wasn't supposed to be like that. I started with high hopes, as gamers and gaming magazines all over the world were claiming this is indeed the second coming of JC (no, not Denton), and I wasn't immediately disappointed. It is quite fresh in terms of interface and overall style, which is something I always appreciate. Learning how to play it is one of the things I enjoy in a game, so I always love it when I find something different, instead of tried and true formulas. The interface doesn't work as well as it should, being ridden with several small but annoying problems (sorting things in the inventory takes an unnecessarily high number of clicks, party members don't keep up, missing the first few rounds of a battle if you meet enemies after a corner etc.), but in the end it does the job. The scenery is mostly beautiful and very colourful, with hand-drawn (I guess) backgrounds compensating for the rather small size of the actual levels, and special effects that make the game look sometimes more like Star Wars than the real thing.
But, besides that, there's nothing. Scratch beneath KOTOR's shiny surface and all you will find there is the big emptiness I was talking about earlier. The quests seem to be taken from a quest textbook, with the usual assortment of "bring me that", "kill that guy" and "talk this guys to death", sometimes interrupted by more unusual stuff that, with enough game culture, you can remember from older Bioware or Black Isle titles. The fighting is more of an annoyance than actual fun. Even though you can pause and issue orders at will, the party members still manage to do silly things, requiring more micromanagement than the rather simple system would suggest. The system in itself is quite clever, making good use of both the AD&D rules and the Star Wars setting, but it's underused, as the light versus dark part just isn't what it could have been.
Ah, yes, the light versus dark thing. It's bad. The lameness of the writing, the mostly clichéd characters (can you believe the most interesting of them is a rehash of Baldur's Gate Imoen?) and the simplicity of the design, all conspire to make it pointless. You can't really be evil. Just bad. Twelve-years-old-school's-bully bad. You can tell people you don't like their faces, you can get into fights, use the force to change their minds (somewhat fun, that, but it gets old fast) and that's pretty much it. You can't conspire, you can't betray, and anyway, there's hardly any reason to do so, as the baddies can't make a decent case for the power of the dark side, and there aren't any moral judgement situations that could make the goodies look inflexible or plain wrong.
There is a part, near the end of the game, that perfectly illustrates what's bad about KOTOR. If you haven't played it but intend to, you might want to skip this paragraph, though it doesn't spoil any major plot twists. As a male character, there is only one female you can fall in love with. And she's the most boring of the lot, so I continuously avoided all the replies that led to romantic implications. Yet, in a crucial moment very near the end, she asked me if I love her. As simple as that. And if I said "yes", it was all right. No need for preparation, no need for romance, she just needed one word to be happy. How boring is that?