Games – The Conspiracy Theories Issue

Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Publisher: LucasArts
Developer: Raven Software
Platform: PC
Genre: First person/action
Rating: Teen

They might as well have called this game Crack Knight II: Jedi Crack Addict because that’s how addictive it is. I found myself getting up two hours early before work to play this game. Hell, let’s be honest here. I called in sick two days last week to play this monster. Even if you hate Star Wars you still have to play this game just for the action. A solid single-player experience pits you as a rogue Jedi off to settle a score with a Sith monkey-lizard dude. Along the way you get to train as a Jedi with that punk Luke, you get to bust Lando (voiced over by none other than THE Billy Dee “Colt 45” Williams) out of jail, and you even get to pull off the Jedi mind-trick. Since LucasArts likes to promote a kid-safe environment, you won’t get to slice people up with your lightsaber unless you enter a hidden code. Go into devmap mode and enter the following in the console: g_SaberRealisticCombat 1, and voilà! Nothing’s more satisfying than slicing Greedo’s arm off. This game uses the Quake 3 engine so you can expect top graphics depending on your card. The character models and textures are slick as shit but I found the level design to be the one “off” element of the game. The multi-player aspect of the game is pure genius. You have the choice of dueling one-on-one, lightsabers only, where the winner plays on as challengers wait to play. There are also all your standard free-for-all, team- deathmatch, and capture-the-flag matches. Along with being able to use a lightsaber and various blasters, you can also use the Force. So go ahead and do the Vader-style choke hold on someone, then throw them to their death off the Bespin catwalk. Or maybe electrocute the bastards like in Return of the Jedi. There are no limits to the amount of shit you can fuck up with your lightsaber.

Virtua Fighter 4
Publisher: SEGA
Developer: SEGA
Platform: PS2
Genre: Fighter
Rating: Teen

Unlike a lot of games out these days, Virtua Fighter actually requires skill. Sure, you can mash the buttons like crazy and probably get to the end that way in the one- player game. Sure, the original-style three-button control scheme from VF and VF2 (no evade buttons from VF3) make it pretty easy to start playing this game right out of the box. But take a closer look — the tastiest plum is often the most difficult to obtain. If you really want to kick your friends’ collective asses all over town, you’ll need to learn how to string together and time your moves with ninja precision. This is tricky, as the game seems deceptively simple at first and it’s tempting to go down the button-mashing road. Don’t do it. Practice, practice, practice and you will prosper. It’s nice to play a fighting game that keeps the button count on the low end. Less is more and some well-thought-out restraint will turn you into a slick precision instrument that will elegantly break some heads and take some names. Many hardcore fighting-game aficionados may be dismayed at the lack of crazy-mystical-fireball-dragon-punch kind of moves, but those concerns should easily be offset by the quantity and depth of each character’s moves. Speaking of characters, most of the classic VF characters are back, plus a few new ones, but where’s that sumo wrestler dude from VF3? Is it even legal to make a martial arts game with no sumo character? Another mild beef I have with this game is the graphics. The PS2 certainly has one of the best libraries of games out there, but the graphics are already falling behind everyone else. VF4 may not even look as nice as the arcade version of VF3, but it’s still a great way to beat the shit out of people.