The Star Wars universe has been a personal favorite since I was a boy of about seven or eight and watched A New Hope for the first time. This was the FIRST Star Wars, purchased on VHS tape from the corner video store that doesn't exist anymore, complete with muppets, cutout lines around the spaceships, and Han Solo shooting Greedo in the junk just for looking like he was about to start something. It was magnificent.
I grant that it's fallen off a bit in recent years. The new trilogy was pretty bad... MR. PLINKETT explains why better than I ever could... and while making a series of shitty sequels doesn't really ruin a series, intentionally editing in cgi graffiti and having a toymaker rewrite scenes that were once written by writers while working to make the original product unavailable kind of does.
Still, despite George Lucas' best efforts to destroy what he created, it grew beyond him and what he could directly shit on. There were hundreds of books, of which several were actually pretty good. There were endless comic series, of which a fair number were pretty good. And there were video games, which have actually been pretty solid in my experience so far. As shitty as the movie franchise has become, the video games keep taking me back to a world I enjoy being a part of. Thousands of diverse alien species, hundreds of worlds accessible via faster-than-light spaceships, swords made out of frickin' laser beams. While the movies now exist primarily to sell toys and show off how dated computer effects can look within one decade, the Star Wars universe has been kept alive for me personally by some skilled and dedicated craftsmen in the video game field.
I'm unapologetic about my love of Star Wars games. There's a lot of them, and they're not all good, but the ones that are are awesome. Starting with DARK FORCES way back in 1996, the entire Jedi Knight series has been solid, peaking (personal opinion) with JEDI ACADEMY in 2003. Any game where you got to fly an X-Wing or a TIE Fighter was going to be good almost no matter what. STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT, an entirely different kind of game, was one of my favorite third-person shooters of the decade; a friend of mine even did A VIDEO LET'S PLAY of that one, in which I participate. But Bioware's KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC took the cake; not only was it the most involved rpg I'd played since the JRPG glory days of the mid-90's, not only did it STAY the most involved rpg I'd played until Bioware's MASS EFFECT in 2007, but most importantly, you got to be a Jedi and have lightsabers and a droid and stuff.
A few years later, that same company, Bioware, announced that it was making a Star Wars MMORPG. Now the last one, STAR WARS GALAXIES, was kind of terrible... I tried it for free several years after it's peak, and I still couldn't be arsed to play for more than a few days. But this looked different. This was Bioware, first of all, the company that brought us Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect and Dragon Age and probably a host of other games that I don't want to look up at the moment, and more importantly, they were making up their own storyline again. No whiny Anakins or midichlorians or flipping Yodas, no convoluted continuity that new stories have to contort themselves to fit into, and no creative input by George Lucas. It could be great! ... But, it was subscription based, and I don't play those, so I had to wait.
But now the quasi-famous STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC has introduced a free trial option up to level 15 and has announced that it's going free to play sometime this fall. Probably this is a good move for everybody involved; I've yet to see an MMO hurt by going free to play, and this one I've actually been wanting to try but am perpetually unwilling to pay money to play a game I already bought.
So I started downloading it about two weeks ago, because it's a whopping twenty some odd gigabytes and I don't live in a space station or wherever these guys who can skype effectively live, but finally I've got it, and I'mma play it. Wanna see?
