As I mentioned recently, A More Civlized Age has pivoted to covering Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 in order to remain compliant with the BDS movement in a way that aligns with their morals and ethics as a group. Which means this is the first video game I’m going to play for more than a few hours since I started playing Final Fantasy 14 back at the start of the year (literally January 1st). Furthermore, the group has released their mod list (which seems to have been put together by Austin Walker, the only person in the crew to have previously played this game), so I’ll also be spending a decent amount of time (an hour or two at most, I’m sure), setting up my own mods. While their coverage of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was a lot of fun to listen to, AMCA has mentioned that multiple people in their fan/Patreon community had a difficult time following along with the podcast if they weren’t playing the game. Which makes sense. While they cover a lot of the details of the game, lacking the accompanying visuals and all of the pieces that go between what they directly mentioned in the podcast would make it difficult to really get a sense of the game being played. This time around, Austin is playing ahead to hopefully steer the group toward a better structure for the show as a whole by figuring out where good stopping points are via his own play rather than trying to guess at them based on his recollections of having played the games in the past (which didn’t work out the best in their KotOR coverage for a lot of reasons but I bet that some of the planets being of very different lengths and levels of involvement didn’t help much). Additionally, Austin’s also recording his playthroughs and posting an edited version of them as a let’s play, skipping over the boring or repetitive bits (or the bits where he looks stuff up for six minutes), which he’s posting to their YouTube channel the week before each new episode releases. Between these two changes, I think AMCA should have the game pretty well covered even for their listeners who haven’t already played it or aren’t currently replaying it in parallel.
Continue readingKotOR
Closing The Door On KotOR (For Now)
After what feels like a month and might have actually been a month (it took about 45 hours of gameplay, not counting time lost to reloading old saves to get around glitches and save file corruptions), I’ve finally finished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The end of the game was mostly as I remembered it, except that it was so much easier this time around because I’d built a combat-functional character instead of one that relied on skills to be useful to the three-character team and a combination of mines, flight, and the one-medpac-per-turn-via-the-inventory-screen feature to win the final boss fight. Which was almost frustratingly easy this time around, as was pretty much every fight. I just loaded up on buffs and unloaded on ever enemy I came across. I rarely bothered to control my allies, even, since what actions they took largely didn’t matter since all I had to do was move from foe to foe, mowing them down with my dual-wielding powerhouse that slapped the final boss down in two rounds of attacks (since I didn’t bother using Critical Strike to potentially get that down to one turn). At least it wasn’t the nightmarish fight I remember from my youth, though I’ll say that there’s actually a lot of fun to be found in that kind of fear and suspense.
Continue readingRevisiting Knights of the Old Republic Two Decades Later
I’ve once again reached a branch in the saga that is listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age. This time, I’ve begun playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on my PC, for the first time in years. KotOR, as I’ve mentioned years ago, was the game that made me fall in love with RPGs. It is also one of the few games I didn’t replay post-high school since it went “missing” at one point after my brother came home from college for a vacation and then, when I got it on Steam as part of a Star Wars bundle, I just couldn’t get into it again. I played it so much in high school that I’d basically memorized the entire game and I was pretty much the only person I knew who was really into Star Wars stuff so I had no one to talk to about it. There was nothing to keep me there. Which has all changed this year. Now, one of my closest friends is more into Star Wars than I am and my current podcast listening focus is a podcast all about Star Wars media that played through the game themselves! How could I not replay it? I mean, I could have tried to wait for whatever remake is going to happen (which, as of an interview in April of 2024, is still being worked on), but it has been several years since it was supposed to be done the first time and it spent most of the time since then looking like a dead project, so I’m not expecting that to ever bear fruit. Instead, I’m playing the old, kinda janky version of the game (with no mods so I can get the unadulterated experience) and having a blast most of the time.
Continue readingMy Biggest Gaming Influences
One of the first games I actually bought for myself was Age of Empires II (the special “The Conquerors” Expansion edition). Up to that point, I mostly got games for birthdays and as christmas presents, and I didn’t get very many since most games up to that point had been console games and my parents had set up consoles as “family owned” objects so no kid could claim ownership. When I bought my own laptop at 13, a few years after The Conquerors came out, I bought a handful of computer games to play on it. Knights of the Old Republic and KotOR II were two such games, but those came later.
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