Jedi Survivor and Star Wars Games

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a pretty cool podcast. Welcome to Trip and Click where we bring the games to you. Today, we are talking about Star Wars, Star Wars video games, starting with Jedi Survivor, which we've all played. We give some impressions and talk about Star Wars games in general. We're just opening with that. You can just start hitting that fast forward button, skip 45 seconds a whole bunch of times, and you'll immediately hear, this is really mimicking the release of Star Wars Jedi Survivor in a lot of ways because it's like the listener, the gamers out there are already in their head wishing they could fast forward the tears of the kingdom, but they're giving short shift to a pretty cool Star Wars game. Yes, and similarly, they would be giving short shift to what I think will be a pretty cool episode. I agree, I hope so. I hope so. But we'll see you about that. Anyway, we want to help support our show so we can keep talking about Star Wars and Zelda and all those other delicious things. Please become a member of our network, maximumfun. Go to maximumfun.org slash join, and in addition to being one of the very fine listeners who helps us make the show possible, you will also get bonus content from TripleClick every single month. We do a bonus episode, including this month, which is a big deep dive into Persona 5. Royal. Classic. The Royal one. Not just any Persona 5. Yeah, and we're going to talk about Royal. We're going to talk about the new stuff they added. It'll be really fun. That will be available Monday, Kirk. Soon. It will be available Monday. It will be available Monday. Yeah, I believe Monday, which is technically May 1st, but it's our April bonus episode. That's fine. That's fine. I think people will forgive us. I think people will forgive us. 30 days. So really, it could be like a few of them. Yeah, it's April 31st. Exactly. April 31st. It'll be available on April 31st. That's right. But of course, you have to be a member to check it out. So go to maximumfun.org slash join and help us make the show possible. So we are getting pretty close to selling out tickets to TripleClick Live on May 18th, which is coming up very soon. Yeah. Because only three weeks away. So get your ticket now if you want to. I imagine that it will be sold out by like the days beforehand. So don't procrastinate on that one. Second away from when you're listening to this right now, it's going to sell out. Yeah, exactly. You're going to be trying to check out and it'll be gone. But if you can't make it to New York, you can also buy a ticket and watch it digitally. So you can check that out too. Link will be in the show notes. And I believe we're going to post that episode in the feed the following week. Yes. So you will get to hear it no matter what. But if you want the live energy, if you want to get to actually see it as it's happening and also see it rather than just listening to it, then you got to get a ticket. I believe that is it for our pre show stuff. So Kirk, take us away. All right. Well, we're going to be talking about Star Wars this week. And that is of course due in large part to the pending release of Star Wars Jedi Survivor, which is coming out, I believe what the day after you hear this episode is on the 28th. Okay. So it'll be it'll be imminently coming out when you listen to this. And we've all been playing early release codes that we got from EA. And we're going to talk more about it next week when we've had more time to play a little bit more because it's a pretty big game. There's a lot going on. So we thought that for this week, it would be fun to just talk a little more broadly about Star Wars and video games and the two things separately and then also Star Wars video games as a concept because they're kind of interesting as separate things. Of course, we've done a lot of episodes about Star Wars, you know, about Star Wars shows and stories movies. Yes. Right. That's true. A lot of those bonus episodes. So this whole interesting intersection between the world of video games and the world of Star Wars, so we're going to talk about that some, I guess let's start with Jedi Survivor because we've all played some amount of it. Let's just talk a little bit about it, what we think of it so far, how much we've played. So I believe, Maddie, because you've been catching up on Persona, you've played a little bit less than Jason. I think Jason's played a little bit more than me. So Jason, why don't you start? How much have you played and what are you thinking of the new game? Yeah, I've actually played a good chunk of it now. I want to, I guess technically the third planet, but really the second major planet because the first planet is just kind of like an intro section to the game. Oh, yeah, in Coruscant, right. Yeah, it starts on Coruscant. It starts on Coruscant, then you go to a big old planet called Kobo, which is like this big open world, the section of the game, and then I am on the planet after that. Yeah, it rules. It's really, really good. And I'm not surprised that it's really, really good because Jedi Fallen Order was pretty good, but yeah, I'm just really enjoying it. It's got that kind of recipe that I'm really into between the kind of soul slash Sekiro-style lightsaber combat and the structure of having the meditation point slash campfires that let you save and that you can take shortcuts to and stuff that if you played Jedi Fallen Order, you're very familiar with. That mixed with like really cool traversal stuff and some really interesting, just kind of like open world, meaty goodness and Metroidvania teases as you go where it's like, oh, hey, that thing, I'm going to get something that let's me go there soon. Yeah, I'm really into it. One, I think the really the smartest decision that the developers have responded made when they were going into this game was saying, hey, instead of doing the whole classic like Samus thing where we reset your powers to zero at the beginning of the game, so you can collect them again, you actually start off with all of the powers that you got in the first game, which is awesome for several reasons. One, because it doesn't feel like you're retreading your steps and it's like, oh, well, this dungeon is going to have the boomerang again. Gotta do that. But two, I think this is the most important thing. It means you have double jump from the first second of the game up until, well, I mean, presumably the end, the list gets taken away at some point. It gets taken away. That's crazy. Double jump makes such a big difference and I remember feeling this way in Jedi Fallen Order that like getting the double jump really changed the nature of the game because you feel like you can do so much more. This is true of pretty much any game that has a double jump in it. And with this, because Survivor is built and designed to have double jump from the get go, there's a lot of cool traversal stuff you do, a lot of flipping from wall to wall and jumping between platforms and climbing. There's a ton of climbing in this game, even more so than the previous game. So yeah, I'm really into it and double jump, I'd be the number one reason why. Nice. Maddy, how much have you played and what are you thinking of it? I think I'm about six hours in. Oh, wow. Okay. I'm still on the second planet. Definitely got lost on Coruscant for most of the six hours if I'm being honest. Wait, you got lost on Coruscant? Yeah, of course. Couldn't figure out where to go. And this game, we don't need to get into it. It's fine. I'll be fine. It took me a while. Anyway, you get a grappling hook eventually and after that it's smooth sailing, but up until that moment, if you're someone who gets lost in games, good luck. I am also having a great time with it. Story isn't super grabbing me yet, but that isn't worrying me because I'm really enjoying the lightsaber fights. I remember feeling like the parry felt kind of weird and fall in order and there were like a few things about the combat that just weren't quite as tight as I wanted them to be and this game has sanded off some of those issues and I'm enjoying it a lot more. It's still not, I mean, I know you compared it to Sekiro Jason, it's still not like Dark Souls level in terms of feeling extremely precise in every movement that you make. Maybe they'll get there in the third one, but it's definitely an improvement and the fact that you have multiple stances in this game is pretty fun. I know you unlock more right now. I only have a couple different ways to wield lightsabers. I've got just the regular one and the double bladed Darth Maul situation and then also just holding two lightsabers. I hope you guys, so see, this is a spoiler, but I've heard that you get to do one lightsaber in one hand and a blaster in the other hand and I'm really looking forward to that because then I'll just feel like a cool pirate. That's full bloodboard. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I want pirate mode. So I'm just enjoying the combat a lot and hoping that the story slowly grabs me. I miss Marin, so I hope she comes back. She's the cool Knight Sister Force Witch from the first game and she's only been in this game for like two seconds and a flashback. Yeah, I mean, there's a pretty clear getting the gang back together by going on this game. I think it would be premature to say anything about the narrative based on how much the three of us have played. This game is obviously going to be like this epic massive thing with a huge cast of characters and all the characters from the first game will be back. And yeah, similarly, I'm on the second planet, so the first real planet. You know, I met up with Grease, so one character from the first game, but yeah, like it just seems very clear. I don't even really know the contours of what the narrative is going to be. And also, since the game is just now coming out, we won't even really get into it. So yeah, definitely reserving judgment on the story. But I will say, I think all three of us, I always hesitate to speak for all three of us, but we were all pleasantly surprised right by the narrative of Jedi Fallen Order, especially the last act of that game, which is a pretty common sentiment and an unusual thing in video games where the last act is really interesting. And the final moments, I still know. Well, yes, there is a really incredible thing that I'm sure a lot of people know, but I still won't spoil since it is such a fun surprise. But also just it kind of interrogates the nature of the Jedi and the wisdom of reopening a Jedi temple, which is Cal Kestis, the protagonist's goal throughout the first game. They wind up not doing it. And at the beginning of this game, they are kind of in the aftermath of this decision where your quest for the whole first game was to, I don't even remember, get some Jedi Maguffin that'll let you open a new Jedi Academy and I guess it's the list of the survivors. You can locate the Jedi. Yes. So it's a list. Yeah, it's a holocron. The destroyed holocron that they show you on your shelf when you first get your ship in this game. And you'll find that in Australia. And you're like, there's my destroyed holocron from the first game. It's cool anytime a story, you know, gives you a goal and then has your characters undergo the growth required to understand that that goal is a mistake. Yeah. And just because that's more interesting than just having a goal and then achieving it, which is what a lot of video games do. So anyways, I thought that was cool and I definitely give these writers the benefit of the doubt and want to see what's going to happen. Go ahead. One quick thought or one quick tip I should give you guys in Jedi survivor and many of this might help you use the force. It's going to be about the little yellow things. What? No, no, I thought. Because those tell you where to go. I didn't think of that. You give your tip and then I'll give my tip. I should be opening the map and looking at it and that I wasn't going to be able to just figure it out. But Jason, back to you. One quick tip that might help you get to that soul slash secure level of combat that you're like for Matty is to switch the attack button to R1 on your control. Oh, you know what? Yeah, that's a great idea. Because right now it's on one of the face buttons. But the classic soul's format is R1. Makes it feel so much better. I did that for Jedi Fallen Order. Way more enjoyable. Did it for this way more enjoyable. You have to do a little bit of finicking to figure out what else. Yeah, where you want to put everything around. Move things around because having square square is where it kind of defaults to you on the PlayStation controller and it makes it a little awkward when you have to do if you switch it with square because then there's like a square and circle thing you have to do which is a little weird but you can figure it out. Point more importantly having combat having your main attack on R1 I think really just changes the nature of the game and makes it feel so much better at least for me. Yeah, no, I'm going to try that after this. I did that with God of War 2 by the way. I do it with all action games these days. Yeah, God of War has a default. I believe combat set up that uses those where this game doesn't. It's a little bit tricky with this one because I'm not playing with the Xbox Elite. I'm playing on PC but I've got the DualSense plugged into the PC which means I don't have under buttons which I usually would use for dodge and that's fine but it is a little tricky the thing you say Jason where there are moves like the 4th Jedi mind trick you hold down R1 and then you hit circle. I think there's like it's kind of designed for that plus force push and force pull around the triggers and those do feel really good on the triggers and then you press both triggers to do like super pull. So there's some stuff where I do wish the combat had light and heavy on R1 and R2 but I don't know I haven't switched yet but I might experiment with it. Well there isn't really a heavy. There's kind of like a default attack and then there's the special attack that you can use in that. I mean when you're changing the player. I mean when you're playing the triangle is like hold down to do a thrust like that's very heavy attack like. Sure. Yeah, well I mean I left that on triangle. I actually maybe I will switch it to R2 because that might feel better too and then maybe play around a little bit more with the force pull and push but you're right that does feel good on L2 and R2 the force pull and push but having the attack on R1 for me is just has really made it feel much better. Worth trying. All right well this is something and this is a little in the weeds considering that the game is an out. I think we'll all have kind of figured out the controls a little bit more next time but I will say that the quick tip for anybody who's about to play the game that I think that I was going to say to you Matty is this is the thing I kind of figured out at one point is when you look at the map which is pretty useful but also has a lot of information it's a Metroid Prime style of 3D map. I am sorry I've derailed this so much by talking about it but keep going. Well there are these yellow little yellow brackets that will go around basically where you're supposed to go and there are times there's a point on Coruscant where there's like a little tiny corridor that Cal has to crawl through that's super easy to miss and I did spend a little while just not sure I was going to go or supposed to go. Then I looked at the map and it's highlighted in yellow and I was like oh okay that's where I was supposed to go. Yeah that also happened to me I know exactly what corridor you're talking about so if you're ever sitting there you're like where am I supposed to go don't be like me just clip the map. Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever wandered around going aren't I supposed to be a Jedi can I just sense where to go? Do you remember when they were saying that because of the fast loading times on PS5 we weren't going to have to watch characters in third person games like Riggle through tight corridors. I'm going to take corridors every other day on the PS5 and you know what it's fine. I'm not mad about it. I don't know why they told me I wasn't going to have to do that but the tight corners are very well animated. So two thoughts one is that the loading times despite the solid state drive on the PlayStation V where I'm playing this game I still in the saloon on Kobo I would be like standing in front of a door and it would take like a solid five or ten seconds before I could even be. Well we should say this is there is a day zero patch we're playing an unpatched game I don't think we should go to the technical stuff until they get the card or something. No actually I have heard and seen discussion that the corridors can be like a deliberate design decision and it did not just like a loading screen. Oh I totally agree. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes it's just like well it's cool and also it's like a good way to funnel you to the next place and to make you realize you're going in the right direction or like realize that's the main path as a person explore it like an optional. Yeah there are reasons to have those beyond just the loading screen trick. Sure. So anyways back to some just general impressions of mine of this game. Yeah I'm having a lot of fun. I'm a yeah the combat maybe is a little better than fall in order but it is not on the level of a Sekiro only because Perry's to me at least just aren't as readable. Yeah the combat in general is a little more organic it looks kind of like a movie and then it just there isn't that sense we're in Sekiro it's just crystal clear when an attack is coming there's that flash and the Perry and it like hits and you get this super clear feedback they're not quite doing that but it's really fun. I mean I really mind and the game is such an exploration game and a platformer it's doing so many other things that so far the combat has been fine. And yeah I also I agree with you Jason I knew you would be happy about the double jump just being available from the start and in general I mean there are so many little abilities that you unlocked in the first game like the ability to go down a cable you know to do a kind of zip line down a cable but then also to go back up the cable. You had to unlock that in the first game where you could only go down for a while. In this game you can just go both ways right from the start like it really does give you those abilities. Calgos both ways right from the start. You can actually customize him more too which is nice he's got a cool Mohawk from. Yeah he's got a lot of different haircuts you could make his lightsaber any color. You can make it a Barbie pink lightsaber which I did of course. Oh yeah I've got a purple one you can unlock. I'm not a customization is wild you could change like the minor granular details of the lightsaber helped and it's really crazy how much they added in there. And you can change BD1 who's always been a really enjoyable droid you can really change him around too. He's so cute. He's the best. Yeah there's a lot of customization options those aren't really I mean I do like to customize things I like his Mohawk I like that I opened a chest and got a beard from the chest. That's funny. You will do many times in this game. It's like you're exploring these Jedi ruins this temple that's been around for thousands of years and has all sorts of mystery. This is how Jedi cut their hair thousands of years ago. Interesting. Yeah and it's like oh here is a chest with a beard. What I like to tell myself is that Cal opens it and inside the chest some Jedi from long past from the high republic has sort of scratched a portrait of himself. Right that's why I picked him. Really cool beard style that Cal just never thought of. And he's like I'm gonna try this. I could rock that I think I would look good. So I do like that level of customization of making him look a little different because I always like dressing up my little dolls and video games. I'm not as into the the the lightsabers of his crazy like there's so much of it but I know some people really love lightsabers and yeah it's the whole thing with the amusement park where you can make your lightsabers from the amusement park and that's cool. Like I think some people will. Yeah it's well I'm totally not into it. I have done that. I have a Darth Vader replica lightsaber from the frickin Star Wars land. I'm not proud of this. I'm saying it in the tone of voice that you can be proud of it. It's fine. It is fine. I look at it and I'm like this is fine but I have this. So a lot of big budget games have work benches and some capacity and have like a thing you see that you can like do things on customizability, customizemapens, whatever. This is the first time I've ever seen a game that has like this ubiquitous workbench that is like around all the time that you find all the time that is only for aesthetic custom image. Yeah. It's really wild. It's funny. I to me as someone who doesn't care about customization at all to me it's a little bit like okay this doesn't feel this feels like a something I don't need in here but okay power to people who care about it I guess. It is just a little bit of a bummer to be like oh cool I'm going to explore this side path oh it's another friggin like hat I can put it in. Yeah why aren't there more hats? So we're going to talk more about this game next week so I think we're all pretty positive on it early impressions so I think this is a good pivot point and talking some about this aesthetic stuff and the tie in with the amusement park and all of that is kind of a good way to zoom this out a little bit and talk about its place in kind of Star Wars video game dim. In the galaxy? Yes in the galaxy far far away because this series it feels like we're in a kind of a new era of Star Wars games and I've been playing Star Wars games since honestly since like 1995 or so. I didn't really play X-Wing that came out in 1993 but since the Golden Era of LucasArts Star Wars games and I would say there have kind of been let's say four eras the middle two are kind of a blur but kind of four eras of Star Wars video games there's the Golden Era of LucasArts games that's kind of from 1993 to 2003 so about those 10 years this is when LucasArts was making all kinds of amazing games like Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, Knights of the Old Republic came out in 2003 toward the end of that there was Dark Forces and Tie Fighter X-Wing versus Tie Fighter some really great space like sort of combat simulators for the PC. Then after that there was a little bit of a lingering hangover period from there where games like Republic Commando and Kotor and Knights of the Old Republic II came out that was a no four and oh five then there was a real dead period throughout the kind of Xbox 360PS3 era we got like the Force Unleashed came out in 2008 which was kind of a dud I played a little bit of it but not very good game. Part two came out in 2010 that was I think really not good I never even played it that was Star Wars connect came out in 2012 there was a lot of just kind of bad stuff going on and this was due in part to the fact that LucasArts itself the studio making all these games was falling apart as chronicled by Mr. Jason Shire himself so this is all kind of during this period and maybe we'll talk a little more about that later then Disney buys Star Wars they close LucasArts entirely. Well and of course Star Wars 1313 which is the kind of information. Oh yeah. Well so that was in development during this time and there could have been this you know there was look people were like we're ready for a new Star Wars game and that was in 2012 Star Wars 1313 gets shown which is for anyone who is too young to know that or wasn't paying attention then was this very exciting looking kind of uncharted Star Wars type game that I would say is actually kind of like realized in these games in Jedi Fallen Order and now Jedi Survivor this that type of single player exciting Star Wars game but then of course Disney buys LucasArts and Star Wars they shut down LucasArts 1313 is cancelled along with first assault another big in development project this is all chronicled by Mr. Jason Shire and then we're just in this kind of quiet period which this is why I'm saying the second and third eras are kind of blurred together because this is just when there are other games in development electronic arts the publisher had sort of gotten the deals and their studios are making these games but it takes a while to make games and now we're in this kind of new era in which I'd say it kind of started with Battlefront 2 which came out in 2017 which was you know a multiplayer shooter for the most part but had a story was a little bit you know it was kind of better than people had been expecting then Fallen Order in 2019 squadrons a game that I really liked a sort of another one of those flight sim X-Wing games it was also really fun and virtual reality and now here we are with Jedi Survivor so one important part of that is that EA actually signed a deal in 20 when LucasArts shut down EA signed a deal to have a 10 year exclusive deal that only EA could make the Star Wars games and now that deal is over so now we're like I guess either in or about to enter an era where a bunch more games can come out other than the ones you mentioned the squadrons in Fallen Order and so we might actually be about to get like total over saturation the way we did with TV and movies but we will see. Yeah we will and I think I think the first thing we should talk about in this broader conversation is what it is that makes for a good Star Wars game my theory on this is that the best Star Wars games are the ones that tell their own stories that are just totally separate from the main storyline and the main trilogy and there was I mean I didn't even mention all the adaptations like the Phantom Menace game that came out in whatever 2000. Yeah why did you skip the pod racing game? I was gonna leave the one that I think is my first favorite game. So those kinds of games like those are the weakest games and that they're at their strongest when they're kind of totally charting their own course and this was true back in the 90s as well and in the 2000s. So I don't know let's start there I guess. I'll set you to super hero games and what we saw with Arkham Asylum Rocksteady's Arkham Asylum kind of broke that mold of like licensed superhero games by making this original stuff and that was a trend that worked out really well. Yeah yeah as I've been playing Jedi Survivor I've been struck by how in some ways it feels kind of interchangeable with God of War Ragnarok and even with other superhero games like Spider-Man like it just there's a sense that people have figured out how to make this kind of game and that it almost doesn't matter what the say magic or special powers are or what the bad guys are or what the government organizations are overseeing bodies are or what the large conflict you know that's framing the action is they all kind of operate in a very similar space and in some ways it makes me feel like like Star Wars has been homogenized a little bit and it's just like yeah well the magic and this is the force and you know the different parties or whatever is Separatists and the Empire and the Jedi and whoever. I don't know like it seems almost as though Star Wars identity is just is getting yeah genericized I guess somewhat. Well I mean to be fair the director of Jedi Fallen Order and now Jedi for Jedi Survivor is Stigga Smusin who before he was at Respawn was at Sony Santa Monica making like I believe the first three God of War games so this is a game that has a lot of God of War DNA in it which I think is one of the reasons it feels so similar to Ragnarok there's also people who have worked on both games they're both made in Los Angeles so there are some common common points there. Yeah let me I'm trying to tease this out because I threw that out there as it's the kind of this big idea and that I'm not totally sure. If you even believe it well it's the big idea. I do know I have a thought hang on I have a thought. Okay so if I go back to the era where Star Wars games were really exciting that's the 1990s so for me this was playing TIE Fighter playing Dark Forces and it was just a coincidence that you were like 12 then that's the games really were better than and you're personally interested. And also that there were only three towers of anything. No I'm not going to say the games were better but I think that that era is really important irrespective of like how old I was when I was playing those games and that's because it was the longest time that had passed since the Star Wars movie had come out and it was before the prequels were a thing because the Phantom Menace came out in 1990. It was a golden time to be a Star Wars fan it's true yeah so it was exciting where we as a kid you know I was in the 80s I like grew up watching Star Wars movies and then technology video game technology had come far enough that you could say hear the John Williams music at the beginning of the game and there was this feeling of like oh my god I'm in the world of Star Wars and Dark Forces especially felt that way. You're playing this guy Kyle Katarn who's just a bounty hunter you're not a Jedi notably in the first game and it has that same kind of feeling of the CD underbelly of the Star Wars world which was very exciting because it had been so long since there'd really been any Star Wars stuff and that era totally coincides with the you know there not being any movies and then when the prequels come out that's right when the wheels start to come off the video game thing. I don't think that's totally a coincidence. Yeah probably not and it's probably not a coincidence that the wheels going back on the Star Wars franchise and really resetting them in 2016 is when Force Awakens comes out and then 2017 is when you marked the the next era of Star Wars games kind of figuring out the tone again and the aesthetic of Star Wars that people like. I mean the movies are kind of inseparable from how people perceive the games whether we like it or not. And then I guess there's kind of a distinction between the era that we're in right now and that 1990s era and that is that Disney now owns Star Wars and Star Wars has kind of transformed into something more akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe where there's a sense that it's just been we've they've got it dialed in they know what Star Wars is there's all these different TV shows and as a result you kind of get a little less of the idiosyncrasies and the weirdness you know like a Dark Forces or a Tie Fighter a game where you're playing as like a jack booted Imperial Tie Fighter pilot who's taking orders from Darth Vader and killing rebels like that was a game that came out in 1995. Now we get Jedi Survivor a great game a great story but it does feel like that kind of I don't want to say MCU if I because it is its own identity and I don't like just comparing everything to Marvel but it's like a more corporate and more controlled a more like big picture idea of what Star Wars is and it seems like we're gonna get fewer of the kind of weird things even though you never know right like Midnight Suns happened last year in the Marvel world right like it could still happen. I think what you're describing is more the kind of like I don't know sanitization of AAA games where it's like these games cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and so they can't take a lot of risks and so they wind up feeling very similar in that sense I mean good luck like pitching a game these days without a skill tree attached in your action adventure right yeah and also like Calcustis yeah well I mean the the meditation points actually feel like a bit of an innovation because they're well they're in dark salsy but yeah yeah and usually a game wouldn't take that kind of risk although Jedi Survivor kind of mitigates that by adding easy mode which a souls game never would have and fast travel which Alden ring may help out yeah well yeah but um so so I think that uh uh that there might be room for that grittier Star Wars that you might be looking for a carker that quirky or Star Wars in lower budget projects and maybe as we see Lucasfilm start to kind of spread the wealth with Star Wars games it's given a bunch of different projects to a bunch of different people maybe we'll start to see a little bit different different feels to that I mean even respawn alone respawn of course the makers of these games is making in addition to Jedi Survivor and presumably its sequel is making a first-person shooter seven Star Wars and overseeing a real-time strategy or sorry a turn-based strategy game which was a strategy game based on Star Wars so there's a lot a lot a lot cooking right now and maybe one of those games that isn't like a nine-figure budget maybe that'll deliver more along the lines of what you're looking for a car make sense and it's kind of in line with the general flow of Star Wars at the moment where I actually just wrapped up Mandalorian season three which I wasn't a huge it was fine it had it's moments but it's that show has really become sort of franchise maintenance mode it feels a little like live action Clone Wars at this point where what was exciting about it in the first season was that it was this kind of Xeno Warrior Princess one-off episode of the week thing about this bounty hunter and now of course it's just Jedi stuff right and left and massive lore and tying in with all the stuff from Clone Wars and then of course Andor also exists right and Andor is maybe the exception that proves the rule in that it's the only thing like that that will ever get out of Star Wars but it is certainly an exception that was incredibly good and did happen like it was funded by Disney yeah that's part of why I want to push back a little bit because I think what you've identified Kirk is that the enjoyable parts of Star Wars the weird parts of Star Wars happen in between each trilogy whether the trilogy itself is good or not so like in between the 1977 one and the prequels we had like a huge amount of Star Wars novels that are all not canon anymore but include a lot of really cool ideas and experimenting with the idea of the force and like new characters that people still really really love and are attached to and still write fanfic about and so on and so forth like that's its own contained world and it's also the what you describe as the golden age of Star Wars games you really liked but then we get after the prequels and we get the Clone Wars cartoons that I really like which have inspired stuff like Andor and other sort of more rebellion stories that all of us really dig that are very on the ground level like just humans surviving in the world of Star Wars and not necessarily being like the super powered beings like Obi-Wan and Darth Vader and just regular people like those kinds of gritty stories are what we all seem to really dig and there's a lot of that in between the prequels and the Force Awakens because people were like well the prequels are really bad how can we fix this let's try a bunch of weird shit just to try to fix this stuff and right now we're in this post- Force Awakens era where we've got a lot of different kinds of TV shows and some of them are like corporate stuff like Obi-Wan which I still haven't watched and maybe never will and some of them are older stuff like Andor and the games are maybe about to enter that zone too like I remember feeling like fall in order had a lot of promise when it came to that despite being a huge AAA product it still ends with the characters feeling like kind of different from the hero's journey as we've as we've described here like it's not necessarily a classic Star Wars story and we haven't beaten this game yet but I don't know that it's going to be a classic hero's journey thing either and I'm also like Jason very hopeful about the idea of all these other studios having a chance to take a crack at big and small weird Star Wars stories until we get another big series of movies and theaters that we all have to alter the gravitational pull of Star Wars thoughts to gear towards something that I think that we're that is relevant to what we're talking about here is the Jedi factor yeah and I think it's it's relevant to video games in particular well it's relevant to video games in particular because there is the narrative promise of a Star Wars story and then there is the power fantasy of the Star Wars story which is I think also tied in with the hero's journey of it all and if you're looking back at the original trilogy which is Luke Skywalker is follows the traditional path of a video game protagonist he starts out level one he's just a kid going to get some moisture what are what is he trying to get moisturizer moisturizer something like that he wants to go to Tashi station to pick up power converters but your power converters that's it right thanks so he's he's level zero he just wants to get some power converters and then he starts leveling up he gets a cool sword he like levels up even more and get some new abilities he gets a new lightsaber that he makes himself he gets even more powerful he fights a series of bosses he becomes all powerful he basically does a video game level before video games even existed by defeating the Death Star in a very hyper specific way yes so you can map that progression onto a video game really smoothly and to go back to my sort of old school pc games that I used to play this happened kind of fascinatingly from dark forces to dark forces to Jedi Knight and the plot of that is that Kyle Katarn the bounty hunter hero of dark forces kind of anti-hero becomes Kyle Katarn a Jedi in Jedi Knight because I can't even remember narrative reasons he turns out he's force sensitive so they basically realized well wouldn't it be cool though if you could I mean this the force and Jedi powers really lend themselves to video game so let's make Kyle and do a Jedi and then you can get a lightsaber and you can unlock new powers and you can be light side or dark side and we can do multiplayer you know PvP lightsaber battles and add all this cool stuff then Jedi Knight 2 comes out that's a great game notably not dark forces three Jedi Knight 2 it's just Jedi Knight 2 like the series basically morphed into a series about Jedi so it would be like if in Andor season two Cassian Andor it turns out it's a Jedi and then it's all just Jedi stuff and I think that that is a unique or unique isn't the right word but I think that it's not a problem but it's a sort of it can be narratively limiting to tell a Jedi story because we've heard so many Jedi stories and the Jedi thing like I think I at least feel that there's so much potential for storytelling outside of that in the world of Star Wars as we learned in Andor and as we've learned in other other series as well of course the flip side of that is that probably the best Star Wars game is Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic which is a Jedi story through and through right we haven't really gotten too much coach or talk but that game I mean that game talk about subversive the twist in that game is one of the best twists in video game history and it's not something that a Star Wars a traditional Star Wars thing would really include yeah I don't know I mean I you mean a traditional Star Wars thing like a thing that wasn't about Jedi yeah or yeah a movie or kind of like I don't know it feels it feels a little bit different in in that way it's like oh hey you were you committed genocide and stuff so it's well I mean I think that the the benefit that that game the thing that game had going for it was the Old Republic part of it that it was exploring time period that I can of course yeah I guess the point that I'm making is that a game can have its cake and eat it too it can be that the fantasy of being a Jedi and also tell this really interesting unique story and I think it's a credit to Bioware and the writers on that game that they were able to come up with that and the Knights of the Old Republic too takes that even like in different ways and introduces all sorts of interesting nuance and ethical questions about the Jedi and the Force and the Darks and the Layside and so so I think that there's room for exploring some interesting Jedi stories again Jerry's still out on Survivor and what that asks and does in a way that maybe isn't possible as much in the movies and TV shows or at least hasn't been done in the movies and TV shows so to your point Kirk I think there's a way to play that power fantasy and also tell interesting stories of these games yes and that's not I want to be clear that's not what I'm saying like where I'm going with this is just that the it's almost an irresistible idea like telling a Jedi story for a video game because you grow up well these games are also made by people who grew up wanting to be Jedi's and the 80s right the Jedi are really cool and yeah like I'm saying they lend themselves so well to a video game and as we saw in Fallen Order and as we're seeing a Jedi survivor it's the same thing where you unlock cool new powers it totally makes sense as a magic system so right I'm not saying that like you can't tell a good story about Jedi because of course you can nicely the Old Republic is a great example so is Jedi I mean so were Jedi Knight 1 and 2 and 3 also a new hope is pretty good well yeah in Jedi Fallen Order like that game also was like interesting in a similar way to you know I don't know like I'm someone who really likes the last Jedi which also I think was an interesting Jedi story but I do react a little bit to just I'm always feeling a little Jedi fatigue and yeah I think more and more video games coming out means more and more opportunities for someone to say all right we're gonna take a chance here this isn't going to be a story about Jedi and I think that's cool just because it immediately opens a whole bunch of new possibilities do you think it's more just here was Journey Fatigue because I feel like part of what we all liked about Fallen Order is that it's it's more of the Bioware vibe of like you get this ragtag group of friends some of them has forced powers but not all of them do and you're all on this journey together like that was the piece of it that I really liked and learning about these different force users who aren't Jedi like just having a more colorful cast automatically makes it a different story because it's an ensemble and it's not necessarily about one person yeah meeting an old guy who dies and then they get a new weapon and then they destroy the Death Star yeah I think it's also that it gets it out of the Skywalker realm so it's not just about this one bloodline in this one family it's just about you know a whole religion and a sort of mystical way of life intersecting with a broader galaxy yeah yeah I like that too even though it does make these games kind of sad because I'm like well I guess all these characters have to die because none of them are in Star Wars huh I guess I think about that a lot of them play they're they're holed up somewhere no there's not I mean I don't think about that while watching Andor for pretty much the whole dang time well and Andor is made with that in mind I mean it's supposed to hang over Andor well we know that the doom of the danger and I kind of have that sense in this game I want I want a game on Coruscant where you play as a senator and you have to navigate politics like I want to go to the Warr Crusader Kings of like you know if if the heyday of telltale games had corresponded with this new era for video game development car started coruscanted I think that that could definitely happen and it still could happen that's the kind of thing I could see a game like that and that's the kind of thing that yeah hopefully there will be room for and also an appetite for to make it so that more of those kinds of things get made because you never know I mean it seems pretty safe to say that Jedi survivor is going to be successful but then when you get into the smaller stuff it's hard to say like Marvel's Midnight Sons apparently was not that successful despite the fact that that game rules and does have the feeling of it feels in that way that those 90s Star Wars games felt like just people having fun ideas and trying stuff it had that feeling which feels even rarer today so I do hope we get some some of that in the Star Wars world in the years to come I hope we get Star Wars Connect 2 that too another dancing game would be wonderful you know all right well we've got a little extra to talk about in one more thing due to well something that Jason already already didn't just foreshadow just told us about so let's take a break and then we'll be back with one more thing hi I'm Jackie Cachan hello I'm Laurie Kimerton we do a podcast called the Jackie and Lori show and you could listen to it anytime you want it because there's hundreds of episodes yeah I mean we've been doing comedy forever and wish you both quit so why don't you listen out and before we leave this not only terrible business but this awful world and find out why we can't because we love it so Jackie and Lori show every week you're on maximum fun. I'm sure you've noticed how giant corporations are controlling more and more about what we consume whether it's our food our news or even the shows we enjoy the greatest generation is a show that stands up to big Star Trek and says no we can laugh about costumes that fit too tightly in the groin area we can make a Star Trek podcast that's basically only about that the greatest generation the show for free and independent thinkers about Star Trek and the groins of different costumes reviewing every episode in order so subscribe to the greatest generation on maximum fun.org you'll be doing your part in telling the Star Trek industrial complex that they can't control your mind and we're back with one more thing Jason Shire you played a really exciting video game why don't you tell us about my one more thing is the Legend of Zelda tiers of the kingdom so here in New York Nintendo had a preview event for that old video game which is kind of a fun thing it's it's weird to have a preview of a game just like three weeks or four weeks before it comes out but in this case they've been so quiet about the game for so long and only just recently started the actual marketing process and like showing us what it is that it actually works out nicely so I went to this this kind of like art gallery area that they rented out in Chelsea down in Manhattan and I went up to this big room where they were doing demonstrations on like the 25th floor of this big building with big views and they took us outside and they were like you see that building you can climb it. So what they did was it was a two-hour session and basically they gave us a little hands-off presentation and then they showed us they gave us time to just kind of like experiment with the controls and the new abilities which include his fusibility and his ultra hand ability I'll get into that in a second and then they gave us like 60 minutes 70 minutes to actually play the game and they put us in front of this big fortress full of macobblins and a tower and said your goal is to get to that tower and then get into the sky from the tower to the sky islands. First caveat here is that they gave me a pro controller which I'm not used to using I'm used to playing the switch in a handheld mode or during the rare times when it's on a handheld mode using just the joy cons on their own and a pro controller feels a lot with like an Xbox controller with it which I am used to using except the a and b and x and y buttons are all flipped and so I stumbled so much trying to play this game because it would be like press a press b and I would just get it totally wrong and so it was very difficult for me to preview this game. That said it's really interesting because imagine Breath of the Wild and all of its physics capabilities ramped up because suddenly you can build things and you can make airplanes and flying air balloons and rockets and attach rockets to different contraptions and it adds a really interesting dimension so like I mentioned before there is that fortress and so instead of kind of storming into the fortress and trying to use the weapons and stuff to take out these enemies who were there I built this contraption and tried to get straight to the tower and skipped all the fortress and just skipped the whole thing which I was able to do the third time after a couple of hilarious mishaps involving like rockets that are misaligned and like setting my whole thing on fire it was very there's going to be a lot of good memes coming from this game I will say. One thing that I will say is that so Link's main new ability the big selling point in this game is the ultra hand ability which is what you use in the wild to kind of hook things up together so you want to hook up some wood and put a fan on it to create a little boat that's what you use you use ultra hand. It's a little bit finicky to use and again this is a game that is tough to demo because it's like you really need to take a lot of time to get the hang of the controls and like if you're attaching a rocket to something you have to rotate it manually to figure out the right angle for it and if you're even slightly off it all the game's physics system will send it in that direction so it's it's definitely going to take some getting adjusting to to really master this game and the kind of mechanics of it. That's it the third time around I was able to build this like hot air balloon and just go straight to the tower and skip the whole thing which is fun and then the part in the sky islands was also pretty fun lots of stuff to do up there it felt like exploring this whole new area of the game I could kind of I got a glimpse of like the breath of the or the tears of the kingdom map which looks a lot like the breath of the wild map I saw like the temple of time in the in the background something like that. It's all really interesting to see it's not clear it wasn't clear from my demo like how we're where we are or when we are in relation to breath of the wild if it's like a post-apocalyptic version or I guess post-apocalyptic version or whatever it is not clear on that but yeah so I got up into the sky one thing that is worth noting here is that like one of the ways in which you build these contraptions is through these items that are called like zonai items so like there's a zonai fan a zonai rocket a zonai igniter for like a hot air balloon that just like shoots fire at it and then you these things are limited so you can't just build an unlimited number of machines that you want to build you have to you have to get them and you can find these items I guess called zonai charges that you put into this like giant ball that looks like a big like I don't know like an arcade machine that like that's out yeah I got a ball machine that's got those go balls. Polygones make them already called it it's a huge gumball machine and you trade in the zonai charges and you get like a random item like a gacha yes mechanic where you get like a random zonai item and then you can use those to build your contraptions so I was playing around with that. Core-ac seeds are back still still core-ac puzzles everywhere found some of those. I found this wild looking boss that is like a bunch of blocks put together that you can like use your abilities on and yeah it seems like it's it's going to be the game that everybody hopes it is from what I glimpsed. I didn't get to see any story or play any real story parts of the game so no idea what we're in for there and I also didn't get to see if there's like an underground component but it sure seems like there will be. A few new things that they showed off are like there's like a light system now so you might be in a dark area and you have to light up a torch and see things that way. There's a lot of just kind of like rails and carts and all sorts of other stuff just like lying around everywhere. Yeah there's a couple more things you can dive in the air while you're gliding there's like a button in the pop stuff that it says dive and then you can dive straight the opening moments of that trailer that you can actually go when you're on the island portions of the game you can dive straight down to the surface and like go straight down. Yeah like kitty pride if you like go through surfaces of any kind. One important one other important thing is that the DLC for Breath of the Wild added this ability where you can like set up a recall point and then fast travel to that point at any time. This lets you do that which is important because if you're on the islands and you accidentally fall off and land on the ground on that surface you might want to get back to where you are so now you can just fast travel using those. And yeah man it seems cool it seems really interesting. One other important thing that's worth noting the feasibility that everybody was kind of memeing all about which lets you attach things to your sword and shield and stuff. You can only fuse one thing at a time you can only fuse two objects together so gone are any dreams of like creating a stick that is attached to a stick that is attached to another stick that just goes on forever sadly but I did play around a little bit with that which is fun I put a mushroom on my shield still not sure exactly what it did but hey I had to shield with the mushroom on it. One final thought is that the ability whale that I saw we've the the abilities that were shown off in the Nintendo video a couple of months ago are really the only ones I saw there so that is fuse which I mentioned ultra hand which I mentioned. Recall which lets you kind of set things rewinding rewind things in time so like if an enemy throws something at you you can send it back at them or if you screw up with like one of your rockets you can hit recall and catch it in there and then send it back to you so you can jump back on it and then ascend which lets you jump into and like if there's a rooftop above you you can ascend straight into it and like pop out through it. I didn't see the magnisis or stasis or bombs or cryosits and it's the old abilities. I don't know if they're going to play into it in some other way. For example you can get bombs I believe or bomb flowers as objects now and you can attach one to an arrow and shoot it at an enemy so maybe those are all replaced by the other stuff I'm not sure but yeah the new abilities I mean ultra hand it's going to be once we really get to dig into it and see the full capability of what you can actually build in this game I think it's going to be pretty wild. I definitely left it wanting to play a whole lot more and especially wanting to play more that was not on a controller that felt like an Xbox controller because I feel like I'm going to be way way more comfortable with it and I feel like the controls are way less than we all do but yeah even with that even with normal controllers I think the controls are still going to feel a little unwieldy and there's no button remapping much to my dismay you have to do it on a system level you can't go in the menu and and remap your buttons. Yeah that's about it. Two's of the Kingdom comes out in a few weeks we'll be talking about it much much more but yeah having played it I am excited. Nice yes I'm excited as well. Maddie what's your one more thing? Okay so we're going to talk about Star Wars again because I decided to go all the way back to the very beginning of the blank check podcast which we have talked about before and which many people talk about because it's a very popular film criticism podcast that is occasionally also funny and at its inception it was not that it was a comedy podcast about Star Wars and it's so funny and I didn't know that this was how the show started and I just want to recommend that more people check it out. I don't know why anyone came up with this idea but Griffin and David who are the hosts of that show decided as a joke to pretend that the Phantom Menace was the only Star Wars movie that existed and to evaluate it as though it had no predecessors and no social context surrounding it whatsoever and it's incredible because the characters in that movie are not introduced or explained nor is the world explained at all and so they like delve into the Phantom Menace for 10 episodes straight again pretending and so they have absolutely no other context for who any of these characters are and they're like here's what we've learned about who the Jedi are and like how the force works based on this one movie that's the only Star Wars movie that exists at the end of those 10 episodes they pretend to discover that there is in fact a little known sequel to episode one and they do 10 episodes about attack of the clones which are just as hilarious and it goes on and on like that and I listened to all of it and laughed so hard and enjoyed it so much and I really recommend it and it it really made me think about Star Wars in a different way and I know we say this all the time because we talk about Star Wars freaking constantly and like I watched so many Star Wars things and talked to YouTube about Star Wars so much that I realized I sound insane by telling two of you that I listened to some new Star Wars content and guys it really made me think about Star Wars differently but it did because it's like crazy to evaluate the movies in that way and I love it like I loved thinking about them in that way and kind of having that mind game and being and having like David and Griffin pretend in the episode three that it's a huge twist that Anakin becomes Darth Vader and that it's shocking that this is the three episode arc that the the main character of these movies becomes evil and they're baffled by it and like how baffling would that be if that were a three three movie arc would just be ending in the most horrifying thing ever like it would be bizarre if that were an actual three movies that someone made anyway I don't know listen to it the blank check guys are always joking that their first episodes are terrible but honestly I think they're really great and I think people should check them out so just scroll all the way back in your podcast platform under blank check and listen to them different theme song different intro it's a different show essentially but it's in there I have their first episode downloaded and yeah I started listening to it and I think I started with that the sort of later episode where they were still occasionally referencing them that bit but then being like no we're done with that that we're not doing it anymore because they kept joking about it because I've been listening to old blank check episodes anyway um and they kept joking about the Star Wars ones on the older episodes of the archives and I was like why do they keep making fun of themselves like how bad could it be and then I listened I was like this is amazing like I don't know why no one talks about this so yeah if you like Star Wars and you want to go insane with those two guys you should check this out nice yeah I think I will all right well I'll go last um because and I'll go briefly because my one more thing is a book I've read that I don't want to say too much about because part of the joy or at least the the amazing thing about this book is the way that it reveals itself to you so I finished a book called The Last House on Needless Street which is written by an author named Catriana Ward it came out in 2021 it was recommended to me by a friend who kind of similarly recommended it and said it's a horror book it's pretty scary it's pretty intense but um just read it I want to know what you think so I started reading it and I will the framing of the book is that it's kind of like serial killer how scary there was a missing girl 20 years ago is this guy the killer his her sister's looking for her very kind of Stephen Kingy Stephen King endorses this book and like loved it and so it starts there and then it very quickly starts to peel away at its own reality in a way that um you'll start to notice as a reader because you'll start to realize very quickly that all of the narrators so it's narrated by this man Ted it's narrated by this woman D it's narrated by Ted's cat Olivia it's narrated by Ted's daughter Lauren they each get different chapters and as you read their chapters things start to not add up and the book a Catriana Ward really the author does such a good job of inhabiting these different voices and then keeping what's really going on occluded from you but then revealing things in a way that only really an unreliable narrator can where it's like the narrator sees the world and describes something or observes something and you're like oh so wait that must mean and then you're like but how does that square with and then you keep thinking and going and it winds up being a really fascinating psychological portrait of a book I thought I will say as a warning it is in pretty intense it has depictions of abuse and trauma there's some pretty awful stuff that happens to characters in it that are central to the point of the story but there is a lot of that stuff so if you're not into that kind of story steer clear it is pretty intense in that way but I really thought it was interesting I think Catriana Ward this is the first book of hers that I've read just has a fascinating writerly voice and she came up with characters that I just thought were so interesting and kind of different they express themselves differently from a lot of other books that I've read recently so if that sounds like your cup of tea a really twisty kind of psychological thriller that reveals itself to you over the course of the novel I really do recommend it it's a fascinating and and I thought really good book so that's the last house on needless street by Catriana Ward and yeah pretty pretty cool stuff that seems like such my cup of tea I opened a tab and added it to my cart on bookshadow yeah I'll be I'd love to talk to you yeah both of you about it if you want a chance to read because yeah it's very very interesting and that's it that's our show we'll be back next week to talk even more about Star Wars but more specifically about Jedi survivor which I'm psyched to play more of it's a fun game it rules it's really really rules so far so that'll be exciting and uh yeah until then I will see the two of you next week see you next week bye triple click is produced by Jason Shrier, Maddy Myers and me, Kirk Hamilton. I had it mixed the show and also wrote our theme music our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration you can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple click is a proud member of the maximum fun podcast network and if you like our show we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org. Join find us on Twitter at triple click pods send email the triple click at maximumfun.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening see you next time ♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪♪♪ we're gonna make it so much fun. How about the next song? We're gonna make it so much fun. So we're gonna make it so much fun. So it's gonna be so much fun. So we're gonna make it so much fun. So we're gonna make it so much fun. So we're gonna make it so much fun. So we're gonna make it so much fun. So we're gonna make it so much fun. So we're gonna make it so much fun. So we're gonna make it so much fun. We're gonna make it so much fun. We're gonna make it so much fun. It's like a long-singer like sequin jacket. Yeah. And sing Star Wars to the tune of Star Wars. Please let these Star Wars stay. That's fantastic. Yes. With lyrics that they made in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season. And they made it in the first season.