New Testingstan

So not only is TCW getting canceled, but apparently the Star Wars 1313 game I was really looking forward to got canned as well.

This feels like the beginning of the end of the "era" of Star Wars that I grew up with. Disney seems to want to focus on putting stuff out there that's related to the sequel trilogy to the exclusion of everything that came before. At least for the foreseeable future, there won't be anymore interesting stories to read, watch, or play that are about Luke, Anakin, Obi-wan, or the rest of the characters I grew up following.

So as the Lucas era of Star Wars draws to a close, how about we reflect on some of the good times from that era? Share your favorite memories of Star Wars, be it playing a video game, reading a book or comic, or watching the movies for the first time. What are your best memories of the Star Wars franchise?


Note: I fully expect this thread to be at least 60% "lol lets mock the nerd for caring about a franchise, but could we at least get some serious discussion?

Solo's arc. From just being out for himself to reluctant hero to General.

It was simple, but when your ten what more do you want?

I remember one of the first Star Wars books I ever read was a collection of Brian Daley's Han Solo adventures. In those novels he's still very much the person he is in the fist movie. He sort of cares about some people, but he's still very much in it for the money. Reading those books gave me a much better idea of who Han Solo was before he walked into a bar on Tattoine and into the annals of galactic history. Having a better impression of Han's smuggler character made his change in the movies much more pronounced.

My favorite things may be fan community projects. From the 501st to fanfilms to lightsaber combat 'classes', it's really brought a huge number of people together to do things with each other.

Watching RotS in the theater after having spent the week prior watching SW for the first time.

Edit: This is not what the OP was looking for.

Mine is in Empire when Han keeps telling Leia she needed to get "kissed" and you knew damned well he was calling her an uptight bitch who needed to get laid but because it was a PG kids movie they couldn't.

One of my favourite SW memories was playing KotOR 2 The Sith Lords and feeling 'this is Star Wars, but it is not Star Wars'. It had all the familiar trappings and so on, Jedi, Sith, Droids, Lightsabres and force powers, but the storytelling was more mature and deep than anything that had come before it.

Playing the SWCCG with frinds of mine in high school.

Many feared my DS2 deck.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=USquwyGosww

yub yub commander

Hell yeah Veef I'm with you on that Red Leader

Also this might not count towards the thread but before the rancor was revealed in the Jabba's Palace act of RotJ, I thought(as did my sisters) that the dancing girl had been dropped into a room where she was shrunk, then conveyed to Jabba's snack bowl, where he ate her.

I always thought that the Emperor was the personification of evil, as opposed to some bad guy.

Veef wrote:Super Star Wars Trench Run

yub yub commander

I could never get that far in the game. I was stuck on the damn Sandcrawler.

Anyway my favorite moments would be some of the old school LucasArts games. The entire X-Wing series, from the original to Alliance, were awesome. Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight which was awesome, fun, and the modding community rocked my socks (Empire Night Club FTW). And Star Wars Rebellion which for all its faults is still one of my favorite strategy games that I play to this day. I love taking over/liberating the galaxy, it just never gets old. EaW was pretty and fun but didn't compare.

On the novels side I remember when I was young that I honestly enjoyed everything but The Crystal Star which bored me to tears, but everything else was fun and I read the shit out of the Bantam EU. Zahn, Stackpole and Allston were my favorites but I enjoyed pretty much everything.

Then I grew up and became more jaded.

But yeah, Star Wars gave me a lot of fun times from about fourth grade well into high school.

I always though Star Wars sucked. And hey, I was right!

Arguing with Kreia while she mocked my character's naivete was pretty sweet.

Losonti Tokash wrote:Arguing with Kreia while she mocked my character's naivete was pretty sweet.

There are so many things KotOR 2 did right and Kreia is at the top of the list.

I never really liked KotOR 2 when it first came out. There are interesting things going on in the game, but the horrible ending pretty much spoiled it for me.

The original KotOR however, blew my socks off back in 2003. It was, like you said, the same Star Wars, with Jedi, and lightsabers and starfighters, but it was also different and new. It was a new era that showed the Jedi at their height waging epic battles against the Sith. I was so excited that I played through the entire game in one sitting.

Some of my first and strongest memories are related to Star Wars.

I don't remember seeing Empire in the theaters, but I know that I did. I remember playing with the little metal micromachine-sized Hoth toy set while I was being rolled down a corridor and away from my parents for heart surgery. I was two years old, and most of my earliest retained memories are from the time of the surgery and my recovery. I don't know what happened to them, but I never saw those toys again.

I remember walking out of the theater showing of Return of the Jedi, hand in hand with my dad. The theater had never seemed so large and exciting. All I could think about were the chicken walkers, and I asked my dad a million questions about them and robots in general.

I remember the Kenner toys and all the stories I would play out with them. I would play beside my brother and my best friend, sharing stories, telling each other about what what happening in our little scenarios. We broke many toys and lost even more. We planted them under papers and in closet corners and had our own cosmology related to which hiding spots caused the toys to disappear. We still have a full vocabulary of inside jokes pertaining to our toys that we still use.

I remember keeping the novelizations of the original trilogy in my room to read when my insomnia was bad. Throughout grade school and middle school, I had terrible, terrible insomnia and the kind of imagine that filled the dark with horrors unimaginable. Often, I would lie there too frightened to move for hours on end, supplanting and surpassing a fear of death with a fear of being taken alive by greys and facing endless medical experimentation. (Kind of obvious why that fear lingered when i think about my first memories.) But when I could get the light on, or get to the bathroom with the night light and turn that light on, I would have the Star Wars novels to read and distract me until I was too tired to stay awake. Familiar, comfortable Star Wars. Some nights I read the entire trilogy. Usually, I would just read Empire again and again since it was my favorite of the novels. Years later, on my honeymoon, I saw a hardcover copy of Empire with the same blue dust jacket and I had to buy it in remembrance the companion I had lost sometime after adolescence. I never did read that book during the daylight.

I remember in grade school when my parents somehow discovered the Star Wars Role Playing Game and told me about it. They thought it would be a great way for me to use my imagination and socialize. They convinced some local college gamers to let me sit in on a session or two and bought me the books. We played a few times as a family, but my parents didn't really get it. My brother, my friend and I had a blast. It introduced us to a new world of gaming. Through middle school, we tried out several other RPGs, but we always came back to Star Wars. We kept playing sporadically through High School and even once or twice in college. Those experiences were never topped by any video game or board game. I used to spend long hours just thinking about the Star Wars universe and what it would be like to live and work there.

I could go on, but I don't want to bore you. [/Airplane!]

Darksi4190 wrote:I never really liked KotOR 2 when it first came out. There are interesting things going on in the game, but the horrible ending pretty much spoiled it for me.

Eh, I was never overly bothered by the ending. Even before the restoration mod came out, I was satisfied with the game. In contrast, KotOR 1 gets heaps of praise for telling what really is a generic and dull story with an ending that's ok.

The original KotOR however, blew my socks off back in 2003. It was, like you said, the same Star Wars, with Jedi, and lightsabers and starfighters, but it was also different and new. It was a new era that showed the Jedi at their height waging epic battles against the Sith. I was so excited that I played through the entire game in one sitting.

Yeah but a lot of KotOR 1's structure is really bland. Taris is a really boring place, and you have to do some of the most idiotic things in that earlygame (like win a Swoop bike race IIRC to rescue Bastila, lead a bunch of hobos to a promised land on a planet that is supposedly a city planet like Coruscant is, and in the end it doesn't matter because Malak razes the place anyway). Dantooine isn't much better. Tattooine is in the game for... some reason. Same goes for Kashyyk. Manaan has some scooby doo level bad guy shit by the Sith.

And the worst part is that a lot of these planets don't have any but the most tenuous connection to the main plot. Essentially outside of the starmaps, each planet is its own self-contained mini-campaign. Contrast this with KotOR 2 and it feels like each planet has a connection to the others; Peragus is connected to Telos, Nar Shaddar is connected to both (the HK droid on Peragus is the first you learn that the Exchange has put out a bounty for Jedi) and is also connected to the previous game due to the refugees which are still a problem x years later, Onderon is connected to Telos as it is part of the restoration project, but it is also similar to Telos in that it's threatening to tear itself apart in a civil war, Dxun is connected to Onderon and Telos for the same reasons, Dantooine is connected to the Jedi and the disappearance of the Masters you're trying to track down, as well as to the previous game with the shattered communities trying to rebuild, and Korriban is connected to the Sith who you're trying to find out about in order to defeat and is also in ruins as a result of the previous game. In fact, that's one of the major themes for the game - how do you rebuild after a devastating war has fractured whole communities and put lots of things into danger of falling even further apart. The backstory of how Telos is a massive Republic investment in trying to restore a shattered and devastated planetary biosphere, and how losing this would cause a ripple effect and destabilise the entire Republic is a pretty interesting idea to explore. There's this bit on Nar Shadar where you talk to a Hutt who can offer to send fuel to Telos after you blew up Peragus accidentally blew up Peragus, because your actions have massive unintended consequences. And Goto tells you in the long run getting into bed with the Hutts would do more damage than good. That's a level of nuance that had been sadly missing in a lot of Star Wars fiction.

Peragus is also worthy of mention as a kind of prologue/extended tutorial, it does a better job than KotOR 1's Taris did of easing the player into the game's world. Taris is full of cliche and generic stuff, and you get involved in a lot of crap for no real good reason (like the aforementioned swoop bike race and getting between two fueding gangs of swoop bikies; like holy shit, where's my 'fuck you and your swoop bike' dialogue option? Where's 'you can keep Bastila, I don't give a shit' - which is hilarious because she ends up freeing herself IIRC). Peragus in contrast unfolds like a mystery you're trying to solve, like you wake up and you quite reasonably ask where are you, what happened here, why isn't there anyone walking around, why are there corpses beside you where you woke up etc. When the Harbinger arrives and you see what is essentially a ghost ship with a Sith Lord aboard the tension gets cranked up to 11. Finding out what happened via coming across various people's logs was also a great touch.

I never was into Star Wars, so my fondest memory of the franchise is Dark Forces 2 : Jedi Knight, watching my father playing it and then playing it myself.

Ah Jedi Knight. The first game that let you wield a Lightsaber. Obviously the implementation is poor by modern standards, but that was the first game that actually let you feel like a Jedi.

most useful jedi power : jump

Stofsk this thread made me decide to go buy KOTOR 2 on steam and now I discover people finally finished that droid factory planet. This rules.

I didn't really understand what the words 'rebel' and 'imperial' meant as a wee lad, and thanks to star wars I deduced that anything rebel are good guys and anything imperial are bad guys.

That explains so much.

Oxymoron wrote:I never was into Star Wars, so my fondest memory of the franchise is Dark Forces 2 : Jedi Knight, watching my father playing it and then playing it myself.

Darksi4190 wrote:Ah Jedi Knight. The first game that let you wield a Lightsaber. Obviously the implementation is poor by modern standards, but that was the first game that actually let you feel like a Jedi.

JK was pretty much my introduction to the world of online gaming.