Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace - Star Wars - http://maxpages.com/starwarshome/Episode_I_The_Phantom

UPDATE

With two weeks left to go, the PlayStation port of The Phantom Menace is now 90 percent complete. According to Mike Gallo, the production manager, everything from the PC version has made it into the PlayStation version - dialogue, ranking system, and all. Lighting effects, characters, and weapons are also all in place. The game will support the Dual Shock controller, so weapons blasts will your hands. As for the restrictive deadlines the development team has been working under, Gallo points out that it's not an all-bad thing. "With a very strict development timeline in place from the start, we were able to streamline the entire process and do away with things that weren't necessarily needed." And, he adds, making lemonade out of lemons, there were advantages to having to turn the game around so quickly: "Certain issues had to be addressed immediately, as opposed to putting them off until a later time. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing though, since it enabled us to quickly distill the most important things that needed to be addressed and deal with them in a timely manner."

In any case, it sounds as though the game will make its deadline and be released on time, and in conjunction with the movie in May.

PREVIEW
The lines won't be as long as for the movie, but there will be a good deal of Star Wars excitement on May 24 - five days after the movie comes out and the day the two new Episode I games are expected to hit store shelves. Star Wars: Episode I Racer is coming out for the PC and N64 and Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace is coming for the PC and PlayStation. While the first is a game about speed and racing, the second is an adventure game based on the story in the movie, and the one where you get to play a Jedi.

As mentioned, you get to play a Jedi in the game - two, actually. Over the course of the game, you'll play four different characters from the movie: Obi-Wan Kenobi (Jedi), Qui-Gon Jinn (Jedi), Queen Amidala, and Captain Panaka. For most of the game (about a third of it), you'll play Obi-Wan; the developers might have wanted to divide the game time up more evenly, but staying true to the movie was of paramount importance, and a good bit of the time, the movie focuses on Obi-Wan.

As the film is only about two hours long, and two hours is a vastly inadequate amount of gameplay time for an adventure game, there are a number of things you'll find in the adventure game that weren't exactly in the movie. Without telling you how the first scene in the film - and game - opens, I'll say only that there's an action sequence and a race to get to a ship. In the film, the whole thing takes about five minutes. In the game, it can take more than an hour. While nothing about the storyline has been changed, puzzles have been added, extra enemies thrown in, and other deterrents stirred in to give the movie's story some gameplay. After all, if you wanted to see the movie, you'd see the movie.

Dean Sharpe, who, with Mike Ebert, heads The Phantom Menace developer, Big Ape, admits that working within the constraints of the movie's storyline can be a challenge. Since they're working with Jedi, the developers have to make sure that all the Jedi tricks are in the game - when you're playing a Jedi, you can use the mind trick on people (the text is different-colored on your screen) and use your force powers to push objects. Remember too that a Jedi can choke enemies (we've seen Vader do it dozens of times), which would be a great power to give all the Jedi in the game. But, as Sharpe points out, "When was the last time a good Jedi choked somebody with their force power?"

When you're playing a Jedi, you'll have the aforementioned powers, plus you'll be a better warrior than when you're the Queen or the Captain. Jedi can jump from higher distances without injury; they have more cool moves, and, of course, the lightsaber, which can be used both to attack and to deflect incoming blasts - one of the more fun features in the game. (The Captain and the Queen have their weapons - and, in fact, there are numerous weapons in addition to the lightsaber, in the game.) Altogether there are about eleven levels in the game, but many of them have side missions and secondary and tertiary objectives for you - should you choose to accept them.

For example, when you're wandering through the town of Espa, you can look for the hyperdrive (the main goal), but you can also stop and help a woman find her son. If you choose to help her, she might return the favor by helping you with the hyperdrive later. If you're in a hurry, though, you can find it on your own - it just may be a little bit harder. The same sort of thing happens in the jail - you can rescue Bob and he'll then help you and give you weapons, or you can attempt to accomplish your objective on your own - it can be done, but it's just a little harder. And if you kill innocent people, other characters are going to react and make your objective awfully difficult to accomplish - Jedi should not be killing villagers, as everyone worth his salt knows.

This game was, without a doubt, designed for the mass audience - it's not a hard-core gamer's game and it's not hardcore about the Star War details either, though it stays completely true to the Star Wars universe. Sharpe explains. "We went more for general people that want to play and are into interactive games." They didn't sweat whether the thermal detonator should go 40 feet or only 20 feet the way a Star Wars fan might have (as in "that detonator only has a range of 22 feet and in all the movies it was only used once and here they have it four times and it goes 37 feet"). Big Ape did what was best for the game. Likewise, because the Star Wars movies have such broad appeal, the developers didn't want to alienate the general public by making a game so difficult that only a hard-core gamer could play well. Like everything else about the game, it was a balancing act.

Part of Big Ape's solution to making the game appealing to many kinds of people is a mechanism for constantly evaluating whether the difficulty level of the game is appropriate for the person playing. If you play well, the game is going to get ever-so-slightly harder. (And yes, if you're playing poorly, it's going to get slightly easier). And at the end of the game, you'll get a ranking - if you did extremely well at the hardest setting, you'll be ranked very high; if you did poorly at the easiest setting, you'll be ranked very low. One thing worth noting, however, is that your ranking takes serious damage if you constantly save your game. Sharpe hates people who save before every jump or battle (it's a wussy way to play a game, according to Sharpe), but he did implement the save anywhere feature anyway. He exacted his revenge, however, by significantly lowering the ranking of anyone who saves frequently. Save all the time, and even if you played through the hardest setting and did amazingly well, you'll still going to come out pretty low in the ranking.

Originally, there were going to be two vehicles for you to control, but as the game got closer to being finished, the vehicles were cut out. With the fighting elements, the adventure elements, the puzzle elements, and all the other goodies in the game, Big Ape felt it might just be too difficult to learn and master one more thing - vehicle control. And they ran the risk of having so many things in the game that none was done well - so instead they opted to cut out vehicles (and this all happened really recently - about late February/early March). Driving and racing are being saved for the Podrace game instead.

But the Podrace isn't completely absent from the adventure game - you can go to the race and bet. This is another place where something that happens briefly and easily in the movie becomes more of a challenge in the game - more of an adventure, shall we say. Should you choose to gamble, you're going to have to get money, talk to a number of people, and you have to get to the people you're going to bet with. "It's a little bit more of a chore," says Sharpe.

Speaking of talking to people, it's worth mentioning that this game will have 3,000 to 4,000 lines of dialogue, some of which will be spoken by various creatures (like the Jawas) in Star Wars languages, but the vast majority of which will be in English and spoken by NPCs and you. There are about 150 people in Espa alone - most of them unique, many of them available for chats. Sharpe explains how much voice and sound is in the game by pointing to the characters' footsteps. "For the PC version, we have 300 footstep sounds... literally, we have footsteps for running on grass, landing on grass, standing on grass, water, stone, marble, and crates." Certainly not all of these will make it into the final version of the game, but many will.

The version we've seen on the PC looks very nice - steam floats out of grates, gas fills up rooms, monsters (new and familiar) look properly colorful. We didn't get to see anything more than the environments of the PlayStation version (people and sound weren't in yet), but it looked as though it was beginning to come together. However, we never actually got to play either game, so as for finding out how they feel, we'll just have to stand in line with everyone else at the end of May.

For more information on The Phantom Menace and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Episode I games, follow the link to our huge "Behind the Game" feature, and be sure to check out our preview of Episode I Racer as well.

Obi-Wan Kenobi

obi-wan@starsite.zzn.com

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Page Updated Thu Jul 15, 1999 2:27am EDT