It leaps out when the one actor to reprise his role from the movies - Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian - pops up, with all the same, slightly slurred, charm he displayed on screen. Also, the bloke playing Luke Skywalker really sounds nothing like Mark Hamill (even if he did improve in many subsequent Star Wars games he also was the voice of Porky Pig in numerous Warner Bros. The cutscenes look the part - particularly the pre-rendered shots of ships and the like - even if the dialogue Is sometimes a trifle hammy and expositional. Set 8 years after Return of the Jedi, in a slightly weird way Outcast feels far more Star Wars-y now than it did back then. However, now that the definition of what Star Wars is has evolved, I found that this decade's expansion of the galaxy - and how it has been delivered into the care of those who grew up with Star Wars - has left me far more receptive to Kyle Katarn's adventures. I had to switch off my nerdy irritation with the story and characters, and quibbles when something felt a bit off, and just embrace the gameplay. That was an era long before we got Star Wars TV shows, and expanded universe movies, and the sequel trilogy - all made by people who were Star Wars fans before they were filmmakers.īack in the day, I generally eschewed the expanded universe novels, as they always felt a bit fan fiction-y, and such as it was with the games. What really stuck me playing Jedi Outcast is how its story feels even more embedded into the Star Wars mythos than it did back in the early-00s. It's a bit weird that they've chosen to re-release the Katarn story beginning with what's essentially the third game in the series, and it would've been nice to have had them in chronological order, but beggars canyons cannot be choosers canyons (do you see?). In fact, it has been recorded that DePalma danced up and down in front of Lucas, singing "You might as well face it, it's a pageant of stink!" to the tune of Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love.Īlthough that last bit never happened, as far as any of us know, the real good-sounding Kyle Katarn series continued with Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, an expansion pack called Mysteries of the Sith, before ending up here with Jedi Outcast (and one more later entry in the series, Jedi Academy). There's a famous anecdote about how George Lucas showed an early cut of Star Wars, pre-John Williams score, to some of his friends, such as Steven Spielberg, Brian DePalma, John Milius and the Time magazine film critic Jay Cocks (ha ha), and they mostly all thought it was a pageant of stink. Those aren't sound effects they're Star Wars characters!!!!!!!?!!!!! Just check out these iconic sound effects: Sound is vital to Star Wars - and we take for granted how iconic its sound design, and music, has become. It got two things very right: a sense of scale, and the sounds. Honestly, who dresses like that? He looked like he was wearing a padded cell.ĭark Forces has aged badly, of course - so very indebted to the Doom template, as it was - but at the time it felt the closest I'd ever come to being in Star Wars. Much more so than that smug, shoulder-padded, strutter Dash Render from Shadows of the Empire. I loved Dark Forces in a way that was extreme and unseemly, and the relatively bland mercenary Kyle Katarn was a solid addition to the Star Wars pantheon. I was hooked on first-person shooters - or "Doom clones" as your grandmother used to call them - and a Doom clone that cosplayed as Star Wars was irresistible. In 1995 I bought my first PC purely to play Star Wars: Dark Forces, and it was the best money I ever spent. you'll look back upon this time, nod to yourself, scurry to 'n' fro across the dirty tunnel where you live like a pig, and mutter: "Yes. Perhaps in the days, weeks, months, and decades to come. Hey - who remembers when I did a big, self-indulgent, blog post about being bored of writing about video games, and then the very next day I wrote about video games? No-one - you don't remember, because it's happening now.
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