Author Topic: Which one's the best?  (Read 4632 times)

Offline Matt_Fury

  • Jedi General
  • *
  • Posts: 9365
  • I aim to misbehave.
    • View Profile
    • Every Action Figure Parody has a beginning.
Which one's the best?
« on: October 2, 2005, 02:54 PM »
I just got this thought while watching the new Battlefront 2 trailer.  The announcer says that Battlefront is the highest selling Star Wars game of all time.  It's a great game, but is it the best?  What are your thoughts?

Just list which game you think is the best, and why.  I think it would be interesting to see everyone's opinions on this one.  Although I'm tempted to just put Force Commander down for Jesse James so he doesn't have to type anything!   ;)

For me, actually it's a toss up between Jedi Outcast and Knights of the Old Republic.  While I love playing Battlefront for hours on end online in multi-player.  These two games have amazing and compelling storylines in them, huge levels and especially with KOTOR, the chance to play it over and over with different results.
This is the way.


I have spoken.

Offline Ryan

  • Retired Staff Member
  • Jedi Master
  • *
  • Posts: 5863
  • Destiny is all
    • View Profile
    • JediDefender
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #1 on: October 2, 2005, 04:54 PM »
Hmmmm, while I love Battlefront, I'd say for me it is a toss up between KOTOR1 and Rogue Squadron. At it's time Rogue Squadron was my favorite N64 game, rivaled only be GoldenEye or Perfect Dark. I really liked the sotry behind KOTOR though and that is one of the main reason I play SW games.

On a side note I think that the bad guy in Serenity did the voice for Bao-Dur in KOTOR2, his voice sounded almost exactly like him.
"This is the way."

Offline Reid

  • Jedi Knight
  • *
  • Posts: 3255
    • View Profile
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #2 on: October 2, 2005, 05:04 PM »
For me, a toss up between KOTOR 2 and BF and BF 2. I love how you can create your own character in the KOTOR series, but I also love how you get to be a frontline grunt in BF and BF 2.

Offline Jesse James

  • Staff Member
  • Grand Master
  • *
  • Posts: 35448
  • Slippery When Poopy
    • View Profile
    • JediDefender.com
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #3 on: October 3, 2005, 01:24 AM »
I'd put FC as one of my top SW games, but not top games...  FC would make my top 5 SW games though I think, definitely top 10 but that's starting to dwindle in what's great, good, mediocre, and flat out bad...  So I wouldn't say FC dominates my game list even if it was SW specific.  It's just a GOOD game and better than you give it credit for Matt. :)

My list would go like this I guess:

1) X-Wing: Alliance...  While I love X-Wing and TIE Fighter, the appealing qualities of Alliance are the greater detail levels, better overall engine (much better physics), one of the best EU Storylines ever (and sadly one that has yet to be finished due to Lucasarts politics  ::) ), and it encompasses my personal favorite aspect of Star Wars with its space combat simulation.  XW and TIE are great games, they started the series, but XW:A is all the great things the first two games were plus a better gaming engine.  It even still has a VERY active modding/editing community since their options for a new game engine to work with are basically nill.   And given what they can do with the XW:A engine, the game's adaptable to higher performance machiens without really missing a beat.  That's impressive.

2) Jedi Knight...  I've probably logged more hours playing Jedi Knight than any other Star Wars game.  The modding community for this game is as dead as I've ever seen it (a game still comes out from time to time though), but when it was at its height it was amazing.  This was THE game to own for Star Wars too, and I don't think that Outcast or Academy ever improved on the Dark Forces series like Jedi Knight did.  JK was an improvement on First Person gaming though, not just over Dark Forces but the genre overall, and it's still a fun game to bust into.  Some of the custom levels out there for it are just fantastic and only add to Star Wars as well.

3)  X-Wing & TIE Fighter...  A tie for 3rd I'd give to these two games.  XW was the first SW game I really had when I was REALLY getting into Star Wars as a hobby overall.  I loved it so much I played it even before I could afford a joystick and had to use the mouse/keyboard.  Talk about difficult!

TIE Fighter was just mindblowing as an overall improvement, and pitting you as the "bad guy" was a headtrip to say the least.  The story, even moreso than X-Wing, was intricate and just added to the STar Wars universe greatly.  I feel you don't truly know either game unless you read the companion Farlander Papers/Steele Chronicles that accompany the games via their strategy guides.  These were the 2 games that really started it all with me even though I had the SNES trilogy and NES Triloty that I played religiously.

4) Dark Forces...  Around the same time the above were just keeping me glued to my computer I was playing Dark Forces.  It was great to play a game like Doom but set in Star Wars.  The greatest things though were that Dark Forces put us in a great story, the game's engine was superior to Doom in most every respect, and like Jedi Knight it really advanced the first person genre and marked the kind of quality Lucasarts had earned respect for...  Oh how I miss those days.  Dark Forces is a game I still take a tear through now and again, and even though it's long-past its day for graphics, it's still a great story to relive and sparked what I think is the best SW gaming series ultimately.

5)  Now Matt's nemesis Force Commander...  Squeaking in at #5, though I think I could probably have put Bounty Hunter in here too as well as perhaps one or two of the Rogue Squadron games.  Irregardless though FC earned a spot here in my view.  The game's got, again, a compelling storyline which to me is paramount to ANY game but maybe moreso for Star Wars due to it being my favorite "thing".  Beyond that, Force Commander was a new design Real-Time Strategy Game taking one of the first steps to going from 2-D maps with spirtes and simplistic graphics to using a 3-D terrain and 3-D combat units on the field.  The game has an ingenous command point system, probably it's highest point for gameplay, and graphically it was quite nice at the time (few weak points, but that's to be expected and still have the game runnable on machines at that time).  The storyline is just hardcore military action in Star Wars, and it really laid out ground combat as we had never seen done outside of the RPG community.  The game's challenging, frustratingly so for many, but not unbeatable.  There's multiple ways to win almost any level in the game so there's replay value.  The interface is the only place people have much complaint, but it's not something that cannot be learned either.  I actually quit Force Commander for about 6 months after I first got it because I too couldn't control the game.  I then went and played a number of lop-sided skirmishes (lop-sided in my favor) to "learn" the game, and in about a week I was in the thick of the story.  This from someone not as into RTS games at the time either.  I have since beat the game several times through, and each time I've been hung up at various points due to the challenge of the game.  Force Commander's greatest flaw was that it was never watered down for casual gamers, and that meant a not-so-fun experience for many.  Like chess though, you just don't jump into it and master the game, so I give FC much props because it flat out deserves them. :)

Honorable mentions to:

-Bounty Hunter
-Rogue Squadron
-Rogue Squadron: Rebel Strike & Rogue Leader (though they're not equally good...  The 3rd installment was a vast improvement in story and overall quality)
-Knights of the Old Republic (I & II, though I think 1 was better and 2 could've done more to improve)
-SNES Trilogy
-Jedi Academy (Outcast to a lesser extent...  Academy's a nice "fix" to Outcast's shortcomings)

Bounty Hunter's probably one of the MOST underrated SW games ever.  I think a lot of people didn't wanna risk another SW game after some of the recent crap.

I think Star Wars is LONG overdue for lots of games though...  Like the X-Wing: Alliance story should be continued in a sequal to Alliance, built on an all-new engine preferably, since I just know they can do something incredible right now.

Kyle Katarn's story is beat to death post-jedi, but I think a pre-Jedi Knight story would go over great.  A firearm-focused shooter, something that incorporates great puzzles with elements of "stealth".  Screw the lightsaber crap, as it's only served to dumb the series down steadily to the point where you don't even NEED the other weapons.  You should need them though to survive the game.  Hopefully Katarn's series sees an update.

I'd like a Bounty Hunter II myself, focusing around Boba perhaps, and the Jedi Purge/hunt between E3 and E4.

A squad-based combat game, one far superior to the lacking effort of Commando, would be nice.  Something less cartoony, and more of a clone of either Conflict Desert Storm or (preferably) Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon series.  I'd like that myself since their realism's fantastic and that type of gameplay in Star Wars seems ideal for the Spec. Forces units EU has established such as the Imp. Commando's, or Alliance Infiltrators.  Fun Fun Fun!

I would DEFINITELY not put Battlefront high on the list.  That's not to say I disliked the game by any means, and it'd maybe make my top 10, I'm not sure.  I'm not a multi-player fan, and the single-player for Battlefront was lame.  Battlefield 1942 was actually a BETTER game and Battlefront's merely a copy-cat of that gaming engine so how they lost a step in that, I do not know.  I like Battlefront for what it is, but to me it's the type of game that shouldn't cost as much because it just doesn't give you as much as a game with a single-player storyline as its focus and a multi-player gaming feature secondary. 

I think BF only is the #1 selling game because if I'm not mistaken KOTOR isn't available anywhere but the PC and X-Box while BF was on PS2 as well as XB and PC, not to mention the PC release of KOTOR was very late coming.  It's still a good enough game, but I think there's MANY SW games that are far superior, much less many other games in general that blow it away.  It's fun to play through and have in the library but loses its luster over time.  Other games like Alliance don't lose that step no matter how old they seem to be.

I wish Lucasarts would live up to its old reputation but it seems like they're just fading away here and there.
2011 Rebel Fleet Trooper Gets My Seal Of Approval!  But Where's The Friggin' Holster On Him!?
Jedi Defender.com Contributing Editor, Twitter @JediDefender & @Jesse_James77

Offline Ryan

  • Retired Staff Member
  • Jedi Master
  • *
  • Posts: 5863
  • Destiny is all
    • View Profile
    • JediDefender
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #4 on: October 3, 2005, 08:38 PM »
I completely forgot about SOTE for N64. I LOVED that game. It was great because there was such a wide variety of stuff that you could do in the game. There were all the flying missions, the speeder chase, and of course the FPS aspect. At the time no other game had that, SOTE was like 3 games rolled into 1, and it had the great SOTE story line to back it up. All of my friends even the one or 2 who don't like SW loved that game. I am almost exclusively a console gamer so I never played the older Star Wars PC games, I can't deal with computer/mouse controls and I'm to poor to buy a controler pad.

I do play RTS games and I liked Battlegrounds, but it got boring easily and took way too long to build up sizeable enough armies to wipe out an opposing base. I never did try Force Commander, I wanted to at the time but I couldn't afford it when it came out, I was probably about 11. I'm really looking forward to Empire at War, I think that it should be a really fun game, the visuals are amazing. The scale of those space battles blows me away, I can't wait for that game. :)
"This is the way."

Offline ponda barfly

  • Youngling
  • *
  • Posts: 39
  • he doesnt like you
    • View Profile
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #5 on: November 1, 2005, 06:17 AM »
been thinking about this for a while lately, i think best has gotto be dark forces. it was amazing to play at the time, great level design and very authentic.

after that i would say battlefront, simply because its so much fun to play, very authentic and one of the few games(along with the gta series) that you play just for the hell of it, without progressing/unlocking anything.

I did like jedi starfighter, but a little too eu. in some levels its just not star wars at all.

Loved the old x-wing and particulary tie fighter games on pc. Back in the day when lucas games where the best around.

Anyway just my thoughts, and hello all been awhile.

cheers barfly

Offline Ben

  • Jedi Master
  • *
  • Posts: 6577
    • View Profile
    • greatest blog ever written.
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #6 on: November 26, 2005, 11:49 PM »
I used to like Rebel Assault. I had a really crappy Mac to play it on, and it couldn't handle the game (any game at all for that matter) but I'm not a PC gamer at all. I sold it with the Mac years ago. Wish I'd have kept the game since I'll be getting a Mac laptop shortly.

I also liked the SNES Trilogy. I still have a hell of a time getting out of the 2nd Death Star after I've blown the main reactor. But it's the best representation of the OT in video game form.

I've played some of the more recent SW titles for XBox, and I seem to like Battlefront the best. KOTOR and Clone Wars are pretty good too, IMO. I have yet to purchase BF 2.

I'm thinking about getting a 32X drive for my Sega Genesis to play Star Wars Arcade. Does anybody have the game? Is it worth my time? That game is the only reason I'd be getting the 32X.
don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk

Offline Jediknight760071

  • Jedi Apprentice
  • *
  • Posts: 1430
    • View Profile
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #7 on: December 22, 2005, 04:10 PM »
I used to play Dark Forces and Rebel Assault II for hours at a time, but I'd say the best, in my opinion, is Jedi Knight. It was the most interesting and innovative game of its time, but sadly, I never played the multiplayer portions of it.

Offline Errex

  • Youngling
  • *
  • Posts: 55
  • Gra'tua Cuun!
    • View Profile
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #8 on: December 22, 2005, 05:38 PM »
I'd vote for the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series, although both Battlefronts and KotORs would rank closely behind.

Call it a guilty pleasure, but I also  like Republic Commando

Offline Clone Commander

  • Jedi Padawan
  • *
  • Posts: 640
  • I ate my Lama!
    • View Profile
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #9 on: February 4, 2006, 07:04 PM »
I enjoy BF1 and BF2.
I meen I dont really see an equal on the ps2 system unless there is going to be a BF3!  :)
Clone Commander Appo.

Offline Jesse James

  • Staff Member
  • Grand Master
  • *
  • Posts: 35448
  • Slippery When Poopy
    • View Profile
    • JediDefender.com
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #10 on: February 6, 2006, 01:29 AM »
I played Bounty Hunter all the way through again this past week, and I have to say this is one of the most innovative games, and has one of the most compelling storylines of any Video Game I've ever played...  It really makes me wish they'd continue it with a whole series on a number of bounty hunters.  Obviously a Boba Fett one set in the classic (or just prior to ANH) era would be the next big step but I could see doing ones based ona  number of characters... 

It's not the best since it's only one...  I'm still leaning towards the X-Wing/TIE Fighter (I consider them all one game line) series to be the tops, but Bounty Hunter's really a favorite of mine.  Highly overlooked by gamer fans I think.
2011 Rebel Fleet Trooper Gets My Seal Of Approval!  But Where's The Friggin' Holster On Him!?
Jedi Defender.com Contributing Editor, Twitter @JediDefender & @Jesse_James77

Offline Clone Commander

  • Jedi Padawan
  • *
  • Posts: 640
  • I ate my Lama!
    • View Profile
Re: Which one's the best?
« Reply #11 on: February 11, 2006, 03:46 PM »
I almost forgot!
I loved bounty hunter, it was my first gamr for ps2 and I played it almost 24-7.
I hope they make a Boba Fett game too.
Clone Commander Appo.