THE FIRST TWO HOURS - STAR WARS: THE FORCE UNLEASHED II

This was well written, and managed to answer some questions I had about this sequel as well as neatly sum up my feelings on the original

One thing though.. STAR KILLER does not look like NPH. He looks like the actor who voices him. The facial model was based on the voice actor, and that guy is someone I've seen in various movies and TV shows I can't remember because they probably were not very good

That guy, however, looks surprisingly like Neil Patrick Harris.

Fair enough, I don't particularly see it, but I was just saying that when I looked at that still my main association was the voice actor's visage

I knew exactly who the character was modeled after, just thought it would be fun to draw the correlation between him and Harris.

I assumed you knew (since you're writing about the game you'd no doubt have seen press clippings ETC about tha fact), I was mostly posting for the benefit of the people on the board who may or may not have known

I thought your writing about the NPH likeness was very funny, and I enjoyed your article. The fact I don't' see the NPH resemblance is not meant to reflect on the quality of your journalism!

Kate, you're hilarious - calling my stuff "journalism"! I really appreciate it.

Hating the game from outset really hurt this article.

Why? These aren't traditional reviews, more like diary logs. Plus, I never said I hated this one going in: it was the FIRST game I didn't like before.

I was prepared to like it, but wasn't surprised when I didn't. Simple as that.

That whole behind the back thing is ass. Starkiller is garbage.

HAPPY ENDING! Had fun reading this one. Thanks for the good laughs at work.

Well that's disappointing. I was considering renting this one because most of the other reviews seem to be glowing. Although some of them were gobsmacked by the visual quality and overlooked the faults.

But it looks like it might be worth picking up an copy of KOTOR on Xbox, so that's something.

You should rent Unleashed, maybe you'd find more to like about it than I did.

And KotOR on Xbox is great, but it's a lot better on the PC. There's a ton of great mods available, ranging from clothing, weapons, new characters and added content. You can't access those on the Xbox.

I always thought Starkiller looked like a Gladiator/Twin Peaks era James Marshall.

Thanks for the great review Steve. My eight year old likes it for exactly the reason you don't. He wants to mindlessly hack, slash, and force crush everything. To reiterate your point, it's really a terrible game that's terrific to look at.

I played the Wii version of the first Force Unleashed game. My impression was that the game would really appeal to the type of gamer who likes to go through single-player games on God mode. There were few instances where it took any skill to complete a level -- it was just button mashing and waving your arms around a lot.

I'm not surprised to hear the sequel is more of the same, though I was hoping that it'd be a departure from the first game's mechanics.

I have a feeling that the Kinect Star Wars game scheduled for release next Christmas will feature similar gameplay. But at least it'll also generate hours of goofy videos as gamers try to use the Force.

Great review.

I actually enjoyed the first game for what it was, and based on that I put it on my Christmas list. If this one is more of the same though that sounds like that was a bit of a mistake.

Am I missing something? Why is there a review for a videogame in the Focused Film Discussion forum?

Jon - there'd be no need to go through this on God mode as it's too easy to begin with, and there are tons of checkpoints.

Ken - you need to rent it first, especially if you liked the original.

Rob - I failed in pointing out how it wasn't developed for the hardcore gamer, aimed more at the casual one and younger people. I dropped the ball there.

Jacknife - because our backend populated the thread in the wrong place.

I just bought part 1 for my 7 year old, and he loves it. He plays everything on easy and just mows people down and laughs, but at least he's having fun. He had so much fun I decided to play it, put it on Medium, had about 5 minutes of fun rolling through people. Thought the initial story (flimsy as it was) was at least interesting enough to plow through. Got to the 2nd boss, got worked. Over and over and over. I eventually beat it, got to the 3rd boss, got worked. You just run through that game destroying everything effortlessly to the point that the difficulty scaling from the normal game to the bosses is just insane, and frustrating. This just sounds too much like the same thing.

There's more wrong with this franchise than just the fundamental game mechanic issues (like the second boss being more difficult to defeat than Palpatine).

Starkiller is such a weird, lazily-written and mishandled character, and the storyline is written to fit this flimsy character instead of the two matching harmoniously. We've given the idea of Vader taking a secret apprentice -- and okay, that in and of itself is a huge stretch, but whatever. But while they were hyping the game, they boasted the idea that Starkiller, already powerful from a young age, was twisted and screwed with by Vader for most of his life. Starkiller was supposed to be a human wrecking ball by design. A mad-dog assassin; someone unbridled, using the Force with virtually no restraint.

And the first thing we see him do is pal around with his best buddy and get a crush on a girl.

There was never any arc for the character because he was always a good guy, despite what his situation should have told us about him. A good writer would have created Starkiller as being a cold, one-track minded slave who slowly came around to being a good guy. Instead, we got a goofy, Luke Skywalker-esque character, only he didn't happen to know he was playing for the wrong team.

It makes slogging through a tedious game even more tedious because there's no meat on the story's bones.