the force unleashed
Culture
LEGO: Force Unleashed
5:30PM Luke Plunkett | Sadly, this is not a real game. Lucasarts and Traveller’s Tales aren’t that out of ideas. What it is, however, is the most amazing stop-motion Lego lightsaber battle you’ve ever seen. More »
Features
4:08PM AJ Glasser | Fathers are easy to find in video games. When they’re not antagonising their offspring or killed off in the first level, they often serve as our main characters’ major motivation. More »
Father Knows Best: Best And Worst Fathers In Video Games
4:08PM AJ Glasser | Fathers are easy to find in video games. When they’re not antagonising their offspring or killed off in the first level, they often serve as our main characters’ major motivation. More » 
Ex-Force Unleashed Producer To Tackle MMOG
10:40AM AJ Glasser | Ex-LucasArts producers Isa Anne Stamos signed up with Berkeley, CA game developer MindFuse Games today to work on their “advanced-casual MMOG” Gatheryn. More »
PC Gaming Alliance Sith Saber Slashes LucasArts
1:00AM Owen Good | Remember the PC Gaming Alliance? Yeah, formed back at the Game Developers Convention, it has representation from pretty much all of the big hardware brands in PC gaming, plus publishers Activision and Epic. And its president, Intel’s Randy Stude, just went off on LucasArts for not creating a PC version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. LucasArts’ reasoning was that the variety of gaming PC setups out there, plus the limitations of lower-end configurations, would make it difficult to create a version of SW:TFU that everyone enjoyed. Stude, in an interview teased on Videogamer.com, called that an “uneducated” excuse and added “LucasArts hasn’t made a good game in a long time.” Said Stude: “In the last several years there have been at least 100 million PCs sold that have the capabilities or better of an Xbox 360. It’s ridiculous to say that there’s not enough audience for that game potentially and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That’s an uneducated response.” But wait, there’s more: More »
A Talk with LucasArts: On Plagues, Reviews and Internal Development
4:30AM Brian Crecente | When I spoke to Haden Blackman, executive producer of The Force Unleashed, last month about the upcoming new level of the Star Wars game he told me that they are considering giving players new force powers down the line as part of a downloadable content pack. But what interested me more were the cut force powers. “We implemented more force powers than we shipped with,” Blackman told me. “We removed some because of consumer feed back. There were too many in the game and (the force) started getting watered down. “We do have other ones we could go back to look at.” While Blackman declined to list out the cut force powers, I did manage to get him to talk about one of the cut powers he particularly liked. More »
The Force Unleashed On Everything Mobile
3:40AM Mike Fahey | THQ today announces that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is now available on mobile handsets the world over. This includes the iPhone, where it has been lurking for quite awhile, Nokia’s N-Gage gaming platform, and more than 850 different cellular handsets. Should you pick it up? Well Star Wars plus iPhone equals extra nerd chic of course, and Star Wars plus N-Gage equals you might as well, you obviously went out of your way for an N-Gage platform supporting phone. As for the remaining 850 handsets, this is a good time to check and see if your phone needs upgrading. If yours isn’t one of the 850 you obviously need to step up to a newer model, unless that military field phone is part of your whole campy, retro vibe. More »
News
Don’t Count Out A Force Unleashed Motion Picture
8:00PM Brian Ashcraft | The Force Unleashed the movie? “Not impossible” says the game’s project lead Haden Blackman. Already getting a comic book and a novel tie-in, The Force Unleashed is set between Episode III and Episode IV and follows Darth Vader’s secret apprentice as he hunts down Jedi. About the chance of a Force Unleashed flick: Never say never. George [Lucas] has looked to tell new Star Wars stories through the games and with the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe, and then he has also shown a willingness to let the characters come into the films. Kinda wish they would’ve made The Force Unleashed as the third movie, Episode III as the second movie and Episode II as the first movie. Episode I could’ve done with a good shitcanning. Will ‘Force Unleashed’ be the next ‘Star Wars’ film? [LA Times via The Escapist via Go Nintendo] [Pic] More »
Frankenreview: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
4:30AM Mike Fahey | When LucasArts first announced Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the game where continuity is tussled in order to introduce a secret apprentice to Darth Vader, gamers were excited, and hardcore Star Wars fans were a little outraged. Star Wars continuity is not something you want to screw with unless you’re George Lucas himself, and even then they’re not too sure about it. Now time has passed, emotions have settled somewhat, and what is essentially the next installment of the epic Star Wars story is upon us. Has LucasArts managed to appease both gamers and Star Wars junkies, or have they left both groups out in the cold? The game critics tally midi-chlorians, after the jump. More »
The Force Unleashed Review: As If Millions of Star Wars Fans Suddenly Cried Out
4:00AM Brian Crecente | In many ways Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is more than just a game, it is a chance for George Lucas and the team at LucasArts to tie up a lot of loose ends, string together the gap between the films Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. It’s also another chance, perhaps the greatest since Jedi Knight, to let gamers tap fully into The Force in all of its deadly nuance. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, packed with new AI and physics technology and a story written by Haden Blackman, certainly has potential, but is The Force with this game? More »
