Skirmishes and Sojourns of a Stellar Variety

Current mood: pic.twitter.com/mWjLvAHvCN

— Capt. Osbert Twinge, Bt. KCB. (@RMcCarthy86) May 4, 2022

You know I'm not down with this phony, made-up holiday, but I will say something in defense of Star Wars. It lends itself incredibly well to the video game treatment, and pretty much always has, dating back to the arcade trench runs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those were followed up with the Atari Star Wars arcade game, then the Sega Star Wars arcade game released in the early 2000s, leading up to Factor 5's Rogue Squadron II for the GameCube. This was a game that not only faithfully follows the events of the first three movies, but looks damn good doing it. You look like you're actually playing the movie, or at least the sprawling action sequences.

By contrast, my preferred science-fiction franchise, Star Trek, took a while to get a proper video game adaptation, because it just didn't translate that well to a hands-on experience. You had the home computer simulations of the late 1970s, which involved a lot of dry ASCII maps and tedious resource management. It was a faithful experience, in its own abstract way, but not an urgent or approachable one. 

The perspective used in this box
art always struck me as weird.
The villains are in the foreground,
peering down at your ship as they
blast it with phasers. It's like they're
watching it from the top of a fish bowl.
(image from Moby Games)

A Star Trek game arrived in arcades courtesy of Sega (conveniently owned by Paramount Pictures at the time), and while that had more to offer adrenaline junkies, it lacked the dazzle of Atari's Star Wars, boiling down to a plodding overhead shooter with elements from the series. You just dragged yourself through space at a fixed altitude... there was no sense of dimension, no ships that artfully danced around your gun sights, and no scenery streaking past you at blistering speeds. With an arcade game, first impressions are everything, and there just wasn't enough impact to Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulation to make it exciting for anyone other than fans. I was on board, but even as a Trekkie I'll acknowledge that Star Wars was a more exciting, immersive experience.

Later Star Trek games would follow, with a rough approximation of the galactic exploration of the television show, but a lot of dull, impenetrable menu-based gameplay. Set up a communications channel with alien beings, find their locations on a star chart, stop by engineering to make sure the ship is in fighting condition, warp to the distressed planet, assemble an away team and... I'm falling asleep already. A proposed 3DO game based on Star Trek: The Next Generation had promise in early screenshots, offering a more immersive experience, but alas, it never got past an early prototype.

Michael Dorn does happen to star in Mass Effect 2
as a member of the Krogan; a sharky, froggy,
snakey race considered among the strongest
beings in the game. It's like if Worf tried to take
his ship past warp ten instead of the cast
of Star Trek: Voyager.
(Image from Mass Effect Fandom)

There were other games too, ranging in quality from "oh boy, why did they even bother" (Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time for the Sega Genesis) to "okay, now we're getting somewhere" (Deep Space Nine: The Fallen for PCs), but the only game that really captured the Star Trek experience for me was, ironically, not even part of the franchise. Mass Effect 2 reproduced the vastness of space and the cultures of different alien species better than anything I had played up to that point, then added an action element that, while not original, was more thrilling than anything you were likely to find in a Star Trek game. Dialog can be a dreadful chore in other games, but in Mass Effect 2, you actively hunted it down, engaging in lengthy conversations with your fellow officers just to get to know them- and the universe in which they live- better. I declared that Mass Effect 2 was a ten out of ten in my old web site, and I stand by that rating... nothing before or since has scratched that itch to explore strange new worlds better. (Not even, regrettably, the two sequels which came later.)

Darth Vader sold separately, by purchasing
the same game for another system.
(image from Fighter's Generation)

Okay, okay, back to Star Wars if you're going to twist my arm. I recently acquired a copy of Soul Calibur IV at a thrift store, and had to fire up my dusty old Xbox 360 to play it. When I was finished (an hour and a half later) I gained a new appreciation for both the system and that game. Here's a secret nobody wants to tell you... seventeen years after its launch, Xbox 360 games still look really, really good. Not so much the launch titles like Perfect Dark Zero, but Soul Calibur IV came out in the first half of the system's lifespan and it looks gorgeous, a pumped up version of Broken Destiny on the PSP with many of the same stages. The gameplay is great too, with a lot more to do than its PSP cousin. The only fly in the ointment is a punishing arcade mode, with a procession of increasingly cheap opponents capped off by the utterly infuriating Starkiller. You will quickly grow to hate John Williams' aggressively loud and pompous soundtrack as you continually fall to this character, on loan from the recently resurrected Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

You can play as Yoda, too. Or "as Yoda too, you can play." Whatever works for you on the fourth of Nerd-ly. The geriatric green Muppet is obscenely tiny, he moves awkwardly around the playfield, and he jumps three feet in the air before every swing of his light saber, just to gain the height to stick it in his opponent's face. He doesn't add much to the experience beyond a quite respectable character model (count the individual gray hairs on his head and just try to tell me Xbox 360 games look primitive), but you've got plenty of other characters available once you've unlocked them all with in-game currency. 

People typically put Soul Calibur IV far down on their list of favorite games in the series, often right next to its sequel, but I've got to say that I enjoyed it more than the recent game released for the Xbox One. The backgrounds are more eye-catching, the three segmented armor system challenges you to strike at different parts of your enemy to wear down their defenses, and oh yeah, the load times are far more reasonable. Look, I might want to play as Yoda, but I don't want to become as old as Yoda waiting for the next stage to start.