One of the criticisms of the recent video game "Force Unleased" there were a lot of powers manifested by the protagonist, supposedly a student of Darth Vader, that Darth himself sure could've used in the movie. Namely, the sort of 'Force Push' used in the movies is an order of magnitude smaller than the explosive blast of Force Push seen in the game, a game which was promoted early on featuring a force-adept figure pulling a hovering star destroyer down to the ground.
I don't know if it was Special Edition only or in the original as well, but Luke's fight with Vader at the end of Jedi featured some amount Force-enhanced agility, namely jumps up and down (which is seen here and there in the movies) and what appeared to be a mind-trick in the form of Luke being invisible in plain sight, something not easily communicated cinematically, but that's what I got from it. The video games enhance what works well (agility, push/pull, lightning, and of course laser-deflection and swordfighting), and avoid some of the things that aren't as easy to do, such as the near-future sense (Pod-Racer would've been an interesting game instead of a vanilla racer if the player had that sense), mind-tricks (which could easily be done in SW RPGs, and are done so for all I know). For gameplay reasons, though, it would be bad form to be as good a mind-trixter as Palpatine, who managed to befuzzle Jedis if not viewers to the fact that he was a massively-powerful force-user and evil leader, despite the fact that they visit him constantly and sense some sort of hindrance. What they really needed was a private detective.
Money-making idea: SW Detective stories.
--LAN3 Sun Dec 21 18:33:03 2008
I bow to your Star Wars extended universe knowledge and experience!
I watched my friend play Force Unleashed a bit, kinda nifty, but really I'm into Star Wars for the spaceship fights, and to a lesser extent the robots.
Your idea of Luke hiding would make sense, otherwise it just seems kind of strange, Darth poking around and Luke hiding in just a shadow.
Trying to think of what a precog racer would play like....
--Kirk Mon Dec 22 10:49:03 2008
Sadly I know little of the "Extended Universe" of the books-- I know the movies pretty well and many of the games, though in some cases I've read more of the games than played them. But I like to pick up on world-building details, and there are many on offer in the few movies. (I didn't see the Theatrical clone wars nor much of the original animated series, but I did watch the recent CG series.)
Yeah, I like the ship fights as well, even if they're whose weirdly low-tech broadside-to-broadside engagments hovering over Coruscant as seen in the 2nd or 3rd movie, I forget which. I can't imagine why ships of those tech levels would bother to engage one another in that way, but it's clear they were purpose-built to do so, so what the heck.
Yeah, I recall them showing Luke in shadow while they conversed, and yet Darth seemed unable to find him. There's only so much you can chalf up to that mask, so I always figgered the force was at work.
--LAN3 Tue Dec 23 02:11:13 2008
Most of my Extended Universe knowledge comes from a few games (especially the terrific Rogue Squadron 2 on GC; right now a used GC + RS2 is probably cheaper and more fun than a typical new console game) and lots of comics, especially the really neat Dark Empire.
I have mixed feelings about that "fight over Coruscant", which I think was the kick off to movie 3 - the broadside cannon stuff was pushing the boundary of "retro enough so that the audience recognizes it", but more to the point, the pilot chatter was consciously modeled on recreating (predicting, in story chronology) the chatter from RotJ that it added a nasty ritualistic aspect to it... rather than each big spaceship battle being a conflict with "real" pilots nervously going through a check list, it's like they're just re-enacting some odd pre-battle chant.
--Kirk Tue Dec 23 10:04:20 2008
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