32 BBY: Jedi Power Battles

Of all the video games adapted from The Phantom Menace, Jedi Power Battles seemed to be the most fun to play.  I watched this walkthrough, which featured two players going through the content as Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi.  As a matter of interest (for myself mostly) there were 17 videos all together, totaling a little over 3 hours of footage.  It took me nearly two weeks to find the time to watch them all.  Anyway, the two-player feature I found to be very cool, as it reminded me of my days playing Contra in elementary school with my buddies.  Games are more fun when there are two players working together.

The platform for this game was the Sony Dreamcast, which had better graphics than The Phantom Menace from the PS1, and slightly worse graphics compared to X-Box’s Star Wars: Obi-Wan.

As seems to be a common feature of walkthroughs, the commentary was terrible – the players were mostly cussing their way through the content.  In the last two walkthroughs I’ve watched neither of the players made a concerted effort to at least partially script out what they might want to talk about as they play their way through.  It’d be nice if walkthrough players discussed the finer points of Star Wars as they played through a Star Wars game, but I may be asking for too much. 

As it is, for this walkthrough I listen to the latest podcast from www.forcecast.net (episode #247), which talked about the latest news and rumors behind the cancellation of The Clone Wars – a sad day for all Star Wars fans.  It would’ve been nice if the show had segued into Episode 3 the way the Genndy Tartakovsky version did, and then was reborn as Star Wars: The Dark Times. Unfortunately for fans of the show (myself included), the show has been killed. 

Moving back to my reactions to Jedi Power Battles, at this point in the project there is almost nothing fresh regarding Phantom Menace content.  Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan played through some levels and defeated Darth Maul at the end – the notable difference being Qui-Gon’s survival in two-player mode.  I suppose I could speculate about what Star Wars history would've looked liked if Qui-Gon had survived, so here is a bold and unorthodox prediction: he would’ve joined Count Dooku and fallen to the darkside.  Yes, that’s right.  I think it’s completely reasonable to think Qui-Gon would’ve turned.  Without getting into a long diatribe of Qui-Gon’s questionable actions from pervious sources, check out my response to one reader’s reactions to my own thoughts on Gray Jedi in my post on KOTOR II: The Sith Lords.  I basically argue that Dooku was not completely off base when, in Attack of the Clones, he told Kenobi that his former apprentice would have joined the Separatist confederacy.  Crazy, I know.  What do you think?

For my next post I’m going to briefly look at the video game Jar Jar’s Journey.  Until then my friends, may the Force be with you.