Lock consoles in attack position: Force UnleashedApril 27th, 2008 by Jen
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There’s a certain sense of inevitability waiting at the end of the corridor. The young man’s parade boots echo sternly on the grated floor as he strides purposefully toward the blast doors. After a theatrical pause, the blast doors fly open and the snap-hiss of a lightsaber ignites the air with a sharp tang of ozone. With a nod, the TIE fighters in the hangar swerve into motion and systematically crush the scrambling stormtroopers clinging to each other for dear life. I’ve dreamed of this before.
Since early childhood I’ve been compelled by the darting lasers of interstellar battle juxtaposed with the serene mysticism of the Force–and I’m certainly not the only one. LucasArts has created a veritable empire, no pun intended, from the interest garnered from a simple desert farm boy’s destiny. Obviously the screaming TIE fighters, Mandalorian armor, wookiees, wry robots and promise of planetary destruction helped too, but since the spawn of Star Wars in the late seventies, we’ve seen three more (admittedly lukewarm) movies, PEZ dispensers, action figures, bed sheets, lunch boxes, over a hundred books, Legos and, more pertinent to this discussion, over seventy five video game titles.
Remember the good old days when you wanted to wear a t-shirt with Samus on it, you’d have to print out the image backwards on transfer paper from your printer and then ask your mom to iron it on a plain shirt? Unless you were one of the lucky kids who got video game apparel from Japan, seeing a gaming shirt was a rarity. One kid would come to school with a Nintendo shirt and was considered a god not only between gamers but to the rest of the school yard.
