Star Wars: Episode I - Jedi Power Battles (2000)

I'm so happy that my friend picked Plo Koon and not one of the more conventional picks. He's half-baked with seemingly only one force power that sucks, but he has a really good combo that ends with him upper cutting the enemy into the air (which can knock them off cliffs). This half-bakedness is hilariously conveyed in the intro cinematic where you see each Jedi doing impressive acrobatics, then there's Plo Koon. He just kind of waddles around killing a few droids. It's very utilitarian but he gets the same results while having the face of a crab. What a legend.

I picked Mace Windu, who really highlights just how half baked (san upper cut) Plo Koon was. He has 3 force powers. But honestly only one. His light saber toss is absurdly good and fun to use. The only unfortunate aspect of our character choices is you need to beat the game as Qui-Gon Jinn to unlock Darth Maul. O well. Now we can't escort Annie on Tatooine to the air ship as Darth Maul.

This feels like an old school arcade game. You have credits. You have multiplayer. The levels are all self-contained. There is a scoring mechanic. There are respawn points. And gameplay is effectively a beat em up. If you've played any of the classic Capcom arcade games you will feel at home. Well except the controls are certainly a bit janky. Most the time, you're best off just mashing the light attack button. Particularly against Darth Maul. You can effectively stun lock him. What's a little silly about this is he has set damage thresholds where he runs away to a new location for the next phase. But you can endlessly beat him, preventing him from running away and locking you in that phase of the game. Once you break the combo for a moment, he will finally shuffle off to initiate the next phase. So yeah, combat is janky and borderline broken. But I would argue it's in a "so bad it's good" sort of way. My friend and I found ourselves laughing at the shoddiness more often than getting frustrated. There certainly are big exceptions.

Platforming is abundant and abundantly terrible. Honestly it is among the most challenging aspects of the game, but not in a good way. Fortunately with the Dreamcast version, you can use the D-pad to walk which helps significantly with the platforming (you can in the PS version too I believe, but you can turn around quickly in the dreamcast version but cannot turn around, without spinning in a 180 degree angle, on the PS version. Thus the Dreamcast version is unequivocally the better version in terms of game play and graphics). Growing up I only played the PS version. I remember playing it everytime I went over to my friend's house for a month or two. We were obsessed and this game was absurdly hard and punishing.

Even with the Dreamcasts improved controls, there are plenty of times where the camera angle will make the platforming actively more difficulty because it obscures where you need to jump... making it feel at times trial and error rather than a satisfying challenge. In addition, in Naboo you need to rescue these maidens. If you miss one and reach the level boss, you fail and need to start all over... pretty unforgiving. Most maidens are easy to find, but it's easy to miss a few of them. The tank driving sequence is also pretty tedious and silly. As far as I could tell, the tank was invincible. On one hand, I'm glad I couldn't fail on the other not being able to fail made it boring... what really sucked was not rescuing all the maidens and having to do the tank sequence again...

The level above also highlights just how thrown together this game was. Textures don't properly line up. You will have a corner of a window over layered on top of the upper window. Making it look like they quickly copy and pasted textures without giving it any thought or play testing. The game also does a poor job of creating a sense of realism within the game world. There are tons of hallways and paths that have invisible walls blocking them. Which just feels lazy. Why not paste a few more wall textures to at least communicate you can't go that way? There isn't much of an artistic direction anyways, so you really wouldn't lose anything and only gain clarity for the player.

The later levels certainly become more of a tedious slog as the game shifts to an increased focus on platforming. The pen Ultimate mission in particular is brutal. You are told to "save pilots" and you have a time limit. You start on a cliff and have no idea where you need to go. My friend and I frantically rushed ahead. Avoiding as many enemies as possible. Which was hard because the cliffs are lined with droids, flyers and rocket launchers. You have to scale down a large cliff face, then back up and then you finally can start entering doors (a mechanic the game never uses beforehand which made this confusing. We got lucky by accidentally stumbling into the door). We failed this multiple times. Even with rushing buck wild, you still barely have enough time to do this. In addition, the level is just so bland and repetitive. The first time we failed the mission, we even questioned if we started near the pilots and wasted a bunch of time because it all just looked the same. Turns out no. You just need to rush forward constantly or fail.

Then the last mission is a series of narrow platforms and difficult and janky platforming. That's the real last boss. Darth Maul you can just stun-lock by pincering him and smashing the light attack button. Remembering to stop beating his ass so he can activate the next phase. Fortunately in the final phase, he will awkwardly teleport to the pit and fall into it. Even if you are in the middle of beating his ass in a pincer maneuver.

Still, it's about the journey. We laughed a lot while playing this game. Sure it's janky AF and lazily cobbled together but it still manages to be a good time with a friend. Truth be told, single player I would rate lower. This game is bad, but with a friend I had a blast.

The other night, a couple of friends and I fired up Disney+ and watched just the lightsaber battles from all nine mainline Star Wars movies. It was a terrific experience that I would highly recommend, just to focus on one aspect of these films and observe the pacing, choreography, special effects and music all working in symphony to create these sequences that are some of the most exciting and memorable in the history of film.

One big takeaway (and I'm not the first to observe this) is that the 2-on-1 matchup in The Phantom Menace absolutely RIPS. Yeah, it's intercut with a bunch of way less cool planes of action which include a 100% CG Gungan battle that looks like absolute trash by today's standards and some other bullshit with an annoying kid flying a starfighter, but the lightsaber fight, man! It's just got the desperate dramatic pacing and intensity that really sells you on how awesome these Jedi are when they're working together, and how much of a badass Darth Maul is that he's able to take them both at the same time. And when it all comes to its tragic climax, it's easily the most emotionally affecting moment of a wildly uneven but nonetheless incredibly entertaining film.

But it also made me wonder why when Episode 1 came out, we got like 10 tie-in video games that came out alongside it while if you fast forward to Episode 9 and we get... a Lego game that still hasn't come out two years later? I mean, I guess I kind of know the reason for their downfall but I still miss the C-to-D-Tier video games that accompanied movie releases in the 90's and 2000's. The Enter the Matrix, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and The Two Towers of the world, destined to eternally fill up bargain bins at GameStops. I feel like Star Wars essentially popularized the format of pumping out this glut of dubious interactive content around every major film release, and boy is this a long way of saying that this game is just another one of those. Jedi Power Battles is just Episode 1, thus Mace's blue lightsaber, as Sam Jackson had not yet arbitrarily demanded that his be purple on the set of Attack of the Clones (hero). It's just bland grey hallways of the Trade Federation space station and the streets of Naboo. Probably a bit of Coruscant too, I forget. It's button mashing through endless waves of battle droids while Duel of the Fates plays on an endless loop. However, it does include couch co-op, which adds a bit of Gauntlet Legends flavor to the repetitive mash-a-thon and is the single redeemable thing about this game.

From watching every Star Wars lightsaber battle in order to playing this cheap movie-tie in, friends really are good at turning what would probably be a depressing act of obsessive fandom into something fun and hilarious.