Stolen Pixels #216: Pull it Down!

By Shamus Posted Friday Jul 30, 2010

Filed under: Column 78 comments

splash_star_wars.jpg

A comic about one of the big set-piece encounters in the game, the part where you pull down a Star Destroyer.

I actually hated this part of the game. The controller cues were very misleading, and I ended up looking online to see what I was doing wrong. At the bottom of the screen is an icon of a couple of analog sticks, indicating which way you should be moving the sticks you have under your thumbs. Except, they didn’t do a very good job.

The right stick just indicates “up” or “down”, but there’s a certain inertia to what you’re doing. You’ll hold down the controller for several seconds with no real idea of what this is supposed to be doing. (You’re leveling out the Star destroyer. Because… Uh. Actually, why the crap does the thing need to be level if I’m just yanking it out of the air? Which is part of the problem. This isn’t something I expected I’d need to do and so I was just following the on-screen prompts with no idea of what I was supposedly accomplishing.) But if you just hold the stick you’ll overshoot the correct orientation and then have to push the stick the other way. You actually need to “nudge” the stick as the ship gets close to level. If you just follow the prompts you’ll never get it into place.

While you’re pondering all of that, you also need to be worrying about the left stick. (And unlike the other stick, you don’t really need to nudge it.) But because of the way the icon looked I couldn’t tell if it was telling me to hold up-left, or if it just wanted direct left. It could be saying either way depending on if you believe this to be a perspective view of the stick or a direct overhead view. (Answer: Perspective. Just hold the stick left.)

And while you’re trying to do all of this, TIE fighters are coming. Just about the time you’ve got the thing maybe figured out, you have to stop and fight a bunch of TIE fighters. By the time you’ve dispatched them, the Star Destroyer is again crooked. (Again, why do I care how it’s aligned? I’m just pulling it down! And the cutscene shows it crashing nose-first despite all this leveling out nonsense.)

Anyway, eventually you’ll get the ship into position and you’ll be prompted to pull down on both sticks. But the way the icons showed the sticks constantly moving down, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to hold them down or if I was supposed to move them forward and backward repeatedly.

And even if you do this all correctly and understand everything the icons are telling you, you’ll still need to go through the process three times and fight three waves of TIEs before you bring it down. And you don’t really get much in the way of positive feedback to let you know you’re doing it right, so when the process begins again you’ll be left wondering if you’re being punished for doing something wrong or if this is just another game designer-imposed time sink.

All of this is in addition to the fact that the game is throwing these icons up and forcing the player to stare at them instead of watching the action going on in the background.

This is the only time in the game you see these icons, and so instead of an epic event I felt like I was playing a tedious guessing game interrupted by flow-breaking TIE fighter exploding commercial breaks. I think the entire mechanic is a horrible and unsatisfying idea, but if they were going to put it in they should have trained the player in following the prompts earlier in the game. Perhaps they could have given the player a bit where they have to lift (say) their own ship out of a bog, Empire Strikes Back style. The player could fumble around and learn how it works without having waves of tie fighters strafing them while frantic NPC’s scream unhelpful things at them.

I’m sure some people got the idea the first time through, but Googling around showed that I wasn’t the only person who wondered what they were supposed to be doing. This was a fun idea marred by badly designed mechanics.

 


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78 thoughts on “Stolen Pixels #216: Pull it Down!

  1. Vladius says:

    Worst part of the game, by far. All of your complaints are shared.

    1. Agreed. I literally couldn’t proceed past this part of the game, because of this “boss”, which was a damn shame.

  2. tremor3258 says:

    I think this qualifies by TvTropes as So Last Season, actually.

    Didn’t Zahn do some work to try and bring the scale back down before the switch to NJO?

    1. Tizzy says:

      It appears like “So Last Season” is more about the need for protagonists to evolve new tricks/techniques, not necessarily that the whole universe is getting more and more badass.

      1. tremor3258 says:

        Pandering to the Base on Jedi? Popularity Power?

        1. Will says:

          The trope you’re after is Power Creep Power Seep.

  3. wtrmute says:

    I played it on the Wii, and I think the controls were easier to manage there. Really, I think the Force Unleashed wasn’t ported well to the other consoles; it loses quite a bit when you’re not using motion controls…

    1. somebodys_kid says:

      Speaking of poor ports, try doing that scene with a mouse and keyboard. Physically impossible. You had to pick the mouse up and drop it back down at a RAPID pace to maintain the leftward nudge. Frustrating as hell, I had to plug in my handy logitech controller to get through it.
      This is probably the worst PC port in the history of bad PC Ports.

      1. acronix says:

        A friend got it for PC and talked very badly about it, but not about the controls, but about the graphics quality, the lack of optimization and the absence of options.

        1. somebodys_kid says:

          Really? The graphics were fine…looked very pretty on my rig. There were little to no customization options though; and the controls were fine except during this Star Destroyer scene.

      2. Veloxyll says:

        Actually, it turns out that it tracked movement. Any sort of movement. So, the easiest way to do it was actually to move your mouse VERY VERY SLOWLY. I had tried 18 times in a row frustratingly smashing my poor mouse down on the mouse pad in a flurry of activity trying to align the Star destroyer to no avail. (left right was done using the A and D keys and was incredibly simple – me thinks it might’ve been better to just pull the ship down with the d-pad on consoles and WASD on PCs)

        I think whoever ported that scene has never touched a mouse. By Shamus’s description, they’ve never touched a controller either

    2. Lambach says:

      I also played it on the wii all the QTEs amounted to “Shake controller” or “Shake nunchuck”. The Icons were big and on opposite sides of the screen.

    3. Binks says:

      Yeah, the Wii version probably had the best controls. I’ve got both Wii and Xbox versions, and I still haven’t beaten the Xbox one, because despite looking much better and having more fun to mess with physics the controls are just too frustrating to play.

      I did love when my friend got to this scene though. We were hanging out while he was playing (the Xbox version is a fantastic spectator game :P) and he got to this part. I knew what was coming, since I’d already read a lot of the ‘star destroy scene controls suck’ messages so I told him to just ignore the prompts and ‘trust his feelings’. He pulled off the scene in 4 tie rounds. We both had a good laugh about how he’d ‘switched off his targeting computer’.

      If there was any other reason to think so I’d be half inclined to think that the horribly-ness of the prompts was purposeful, to get the player to stop using the prompts and ‘trust in the force’ or something…but I don’t think that developers thought that far ahead. I suspect this scene was just playtested by people who already knew what they had to do, so they read the prompts a certain way. A single inexperienced person could have spotted a major flaw like this so the fact it exists in the final product is pretty good evidence that the testing was done wrong.

  4. Tizzy says:

    It was not easy t find, but http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeyondTheImpossible is the relevant trope; it even references “Force Unleashed” specifically.

    Usual warnings about links to TVtropes apply.

    1. neothoron says:

      I would rather cite “Up to Eleven” as the relevant trope. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UpToEleven

      “you would like to take something, and push it beyond what’s been done before.”

      It cites both The Expanded Universe, and Force Unleashed.

      1. Eric J says:

        Must…not…click…on…TV Tropes…links…Too…much…work…to…do…

      2. bit says:

        I think that the specific trope he’s referencing, especially in the discussion of the movies, is power creep/seep;
        http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PowerCreepPowerSeep
        Which seems to fit within both the expanded and movie universe.

        1. Jarenth says:

          Damnit, that’s three Tropes links in one comment thread.

          Are you people trying to mess up my sleep schedule?

        2. DKellis says:

          Up To Eleven is when you take something beyond what’s been done before, while Beyond The Impossible is when you take something beyond what you think is even possible. Quad-wielding lightsabers is Up to Eleven (used to be dual-wielding, but now apparently it’s passe), using a single huge lightsaber to cleave the Death Star is Beyond The Impossible. An example can be both.

          Power Creep Power Seep deals with the fluctuating power levels of characters in both directions as dictated by the story. In the case of SW, compare Yoda flinging around Senate chairs in Episode 3 to his slow-and-careful attempt to lift an X-Wing in Episode 5.

          If it’s how two (or more) factions in-universe try to outdo one another, it’s Lensman Arms Race. If it’s about the way successive stories try to ramp up power levels (as an out-of-universe motivation), it’s Sequel Escalation. If it’s how the characters get stronger and have to face stronger opponents, it’s Plot Levelling.

          So in this case, pulling down a Star Destroyer could be an example of Force-user Power Creep Power Seep due to Sequel Escalation, where Starkiller takes his Force abilities Up To Eleven to accomplish something Beyond The Impossible.

          Yes, it’s confusing.

          Part of the reason I left the TVTropes community is because of the endless arguments on this sort of thing. Does it really matter if it’s supposed to be Beyond The Impossible or Up To Eleven or whatever?

  5. Jokerman89 says:

    Yea i had to look this one up….its the worse part of a half decent game..i came in with no hype unlike some who were left disappointed. What do you think about the rest of the game so far? I found it decent but repetitive.

  6. Ace Calhoon says:

    A status update of mine, from around that time: “The Force Unleashed is pretty cool. But how did they make grabbing a Star Destroyer with the Force unfun?”

  7. Jason says:

    Shouldn’t it be #216 in the title?

  8. BeamSplashX says:

    I hear this sequence is removed from the PS2 version. After seeing my friend spend a good 15 minutes on this sequence getting strafed repeatedly before getting it, I can say the PS2 version is sounding pretty good now.

    Too bad they made him hold his saber the normal way in the PS2 and Wii versions. They also changed Link’s sword arm for the Wii version of Twilight Princess to accommodate the right-handed majority. Why on Earth do developers try to cater for what people are used to with a control scheme that’s relatively new? Holding a Wiimote with a reverse grip or the other hand couldn’t be THAT hard…

    1. bit says:

      The thing is, the movement stick NEEDS to be on the left thumb. Seriously. Try playing even a simple platforming section of Mario Galaxy with the controllers reversed; you WILL die and it WILL suck.

    2. Bryan says:

      Interesting sidenote is that in the Gamecube version of Twilight Princess Link is left handed. In fact, the whole world is left-right flipped.

  9. Insufferable Bubbles says:

    They’d already one-upped it in 1994. One of the comic series, Tales of the Jedi: Dark Lords of the Sith, had a character essentially smash two stars together to cover an escape.

    Imagine the quick-time event for that! :P

    1. ps238principal says:

      I can’t envision it without Katamari balls being involved.

    2. (LK) says:

      “Well, they’re pulling together stars, right? So they should probably mash the A button rapidly at least 100,000 times…”

      1. Jarenth says:

        Now imagine that in Wiimote waggles.

  10. PurePareidolia says:

    So yeah, I tried that on PC, and the “pull analog sticks” prompt was a “move mouse” prompt. I took about half a dozen tries to figure out that I had to just gently slide the mouse in the direction I wanted it to go as opposed to sliding it as fast as I could to try exert maximum force on it (usually analog sticks scale force based on how far down they’re pressed, letting you walk or run for example, so I was just guessing as to how that might be translated).

    And the TIE fighters are infinite. If you’re like me and trying to use PC controls when the console ones were already frustrating, you took down at least a dozen waves of TIE fighters before getting it right. Per life.

    Great idea, wonderful way to illustrate the “size doesn’t matter” concept and it looks awesome in the trailer, but the execution was ABYSMAL. hands down the worst sequence in the game.

    ———————
    Side note: Shamus, have you ever considered doing an actual interview with the New Vegas devs? Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer have active twitter accounts and they do respond to people so you could use that to arrange it. Speaking of which, I actually showed Chris the Spoiler warning episode where you specifically addressed ‘any Obsidian devs who may be watching’ (to which he replied sometime later “cool, haven’t seen those reviews before” or something along those lines).
    Alternatively: try get Larry Liberty – he has the best name ever. If he isn’t a super hero of some sort, he should be.

    1. Valaqil says:

      I played this one on the 360. You don’t even need PC controls to have that happen. I saw the trailer, thought “Oh cool!”, and looked forward to that section. (Consistency through the EU would be nice, but it’s a game. I’ll take the Rule of Cool.) First time through? I must have fought wave after wave of TIE fighters for 10 or 15 minutes before I _gave up_. I quit that sequence and _turned off the console_ because I literally couldn’t figure out what to do. Between the controls and the weird prompts, I simply couldn’t do it until I looked it up.

      1. PurePareidolia says:

        Yeah, the worst part I think is the prompts that tell you to push upwards for a split second when you’re trying to pull the ship down (as opposed to aligning it neatly so the cinematic can maintain continuity). They’re entirely superfluous and only serve to throw you off and further reinforce the notion I’m supposed to be moving my mouse down with a certain speed or timing or something. Stupid prompts.

  11. pnf says:

    Rather like the power escalation that occurs in comic books before they reboot the characters.

    I understand that back in the fifties, Superman was pulling stunts like blowing out stars.

  12. Meredith says:

    I played this game on the DS because it was all I had when TFU came out and if there’s a Star Wars game, I must play it. Oh my gods, so horrible…don’t ever play the handheld port.

    This sequence was fairly simple, though. If I’m remembering correctly, it involves using the stylus to keep some shiny orbs inside a big circle for long enough to build up the force power or some such silliness. I think it’s time I play a console version now that I have one since this game seems well-liked by most people.

  13. Nixorbo says:

    I’m pretty sure *EVERYBODY* hated that section of the game.

  14. Diremongoose says:

    This bit very, very nearly made me put the game down and never pick it up again. I played it on the PC. As PurePareidolia notes above, the mouse had to be constantly moving to simulate the pushing the joypad in a certain direction. However, not everyone has infinite mouse space, and lifting the mouse to move it ‘centres’ the ‘joypad’, causing it to spaz out and undo some of your hard work. Horrific design.

  15. Scourge says:

    Wasn’t that particular segment removed in one of the many versions only because the controls were so horrible no one could be bothered to play it?

  16. Factoid says:

    I wonder: When Empire came back were there “star wars purists” who bitched and moaned about how Luke was suddenly telekinetic? Surely if those two movies came out today that would happen. People would be all like:

    “Hey what the heck? The Jedi just fight with laser swords and have great reflexes. The force is about spirituality and belief! By making it about telekinesis you’ve now made it into verifiable fact instead of mysticism! George Lucas you’ve ruined Star Wars!”

    And to be fair to Yoda…he didn’t even break a sweat when he lifted that x-wing. I’m pretty sure the inspiration for the “crash a star destroyer” thing was from the Clone Wars animated shorts (not the crappy 3D animated series) where Yoda grabs two droid troop transports flying over corscant and smashes them into each other in mid air. It was ridiculous, but it was also badass.

    1. Mari says:

      I’ve actually witnessed geek wars about the nature of the Force and Jedi like that. For the record, though, I can’t buy the purist side of the argument considering that while telekinesis isn’t in the first movie, Obi-Wan is clearly shown using the force for mass hypnosis (“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”) which I think kind of negates the “the Force is about mysticism and spirituality” argument. IMO, once something has a measurable effect like that, it’s no longer mystical.

      1. LafinJack says:

        And wasn’t Vader’s force choke in the first one? That’s telekinesis.

        1. James Pope says:

          It’s not telekinesis – it’s “holy cow, I better pretend to go along with Vader’s crazy hand thingee or else he will cut me up with a laser sword.” Just like Vader talked that naked chick into jumping down the steps in Conan. You do not mess with James Earl Jones.

    2. acronix says:

      On the other hand, Yoda looked like he needed to make a great effort to lift that metal tank Dooku drops on top of the heroes in Episode 2.

      1. Atarlost says:

        Could be about having another force user interfering. Obi-wan had to make a tremendous effort to flip a switch controlling a bunch of forcefields to get to Darth Facepaint in episode one.

        Shamus also missed a lot of the TK in TESB. Like Vader’s crate and pipe flinging on Bespin. They did scale that up to flinging senate hoverpods in RotS, but those did have countergrav. For that matter so did Luke’s X-wing. No other way for it to fly in an atmosphere and the setting’s known to have the tech. Wouldn’t it be just like a master mystic to claim very real limits on his power didn’t exist while cheating with technology?

      2. Jarenth says:

        Could be he didn’t have his midichlorian coffee that morning.

        Who knows.

  17. rofltehcat says:

    What? Pulling down a star destroyer?
    Sounds a bit ridiculous, especially when in the Star Wars movies and games jedi are powerful but not THAT powerful. Even Yoda had some problems lifting that reactor-thing on geonosis.
    But thinking of it there are some of those monstrosities in other games. That ‘hole in the force’ guy from kotor for example. But those are more like abominations of the force rather than enemies that got so strong by training or destiny.

    1. PurePareidolia says:

      Well given the entire point of TFU was to show a version of the star wars verse where the force was cranked up to eleven…

  18. Canthros says:

    As everyone else has said, it’s a very poorly realized piece of gameplay. One of the things fixed in an early patch had to do with the directions indicated by the stick icons in that sequence. That is, at release, it was even worse. Not much worse, though, because the ‘fixed’ icons aren’t much more useful than the broken ones, if memory serves.

    That said, I had a lot of fun with TFU. (But I’m no scientist. It could also be the wookiee straw.)

  19. Zethavn says:

    Zhan DID pull things back to reasonable levels, and I found that subsequent books in the New Jedi Order kept the Jedi powers relatively reasonable.

    The books prior to the Hand of Thrawn set were among the worst and most ridiculous books I’ve read. One of them has Luke (a Jedi Master) unable to stop himself from killing a guy with his lightsaber (in his hand!) when he starts 10 meters away from him…then making an entire planet invisible forever at the end of the book. In another one, Luke telekinetically rebuilt Vader’s private lakeside fortress in a matter of seconds, to the point where all the lights and computers worked!

    The impression that I got from the game was that the kid was an experiment Vader was running, so who knows what kind of modifications have been made.
    If you’ve seen the trailer for the sequel, it hints that the kid might be a clone. Maybe the story is that Vader found a way to increase concentrations of midichlorians in someone? Sith Chemistry techniques that increase their force-sensitive pH balance? (this can’t be any worse than the other Sith techniques that have been introduced by the “official” authors)
    I hate the whole “mysterious magical symbiote” idea. Lucas should never have caved to Trekkies who needed a “scientific” explanation for mystical occurrences :P

    The game was a lot of fun, though, and I found most of it was fairly reasonable power levels, though being able to grab moving TIE Fighters and toss them around felt a little genre-breaking. To attempt that sort of thing in the tabletop RPG version, you’d have to be a level 17 Jedi Master with Skill Focus: Move Object, it would eat up a quarter of your Vitality Points, and you’d still have to roll at least an 18 to manage it. In the game, you just press a button when the brackets appear on the object you want to move…

    Z

    1. Atarlost says:

      I strongly favor the notion that midichlorians aren’t one thing at all but are a broad term for anything medically testable that correlates strongly with force power. Correlation doesn’t necessitate causality, and even if there is causality there’s no reason to believe midichlorians are the cause and magic the result rather than the other way around.

      This, of course, means that Qui-gon is an idiot for attributing will to them, but I’m willing to live with that. Having Anakin trained turned out disastrous for everyone and if the decision was based on a stupid mystical interpretation of what even the other mystics recognized as a merely useful diagnostic that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

    2. ps238principal says:

      Lucas didn’t “cave to Trekkies.” Lucas just can’t write anything well without lots and lots and lots of help, which he apparently didn’t accept.

      1. Zethavn says:

        Touché

      2. (LK) says:

        THX-1138 wasn’t bad… though I guess Robert Duvall sort of carried the film.

    3. PurePareidolia says:

      If Darth and Droids has taught me anything it’s that you can inject people with midichlorians in order to increase their force powers like psychic steroids. If you feed a kid a diet of nothing but midichlorians all his life, he’s going to be pulling down star destroyers and deep frying rancors.

  20. UTSquishy says:

    I stopped playing this game after 3 fights with quicktime endings. I had to redo the first fight probably 50 times before I figured out what I was supposed to be doing, the second took me only 49 times probably, and the third maybe 100″”at least that’s how it felt.

    I just said screw it, I’m not interested anymore. The fights were fun until the wierd finishing moves. I wish I could turn them off.

    At least the game was borrowed, and I’ll never buy a game that has these elements in them. They’re too frustrating””I litterally found them to be more frustrating that Nintendo Hard.

    1. Sheer_Falacy says:

      I don’t really see why – missing it the first few times is fine, but the finisher QTEs are static, never change, and have fairly obvious lead-ins in the graphics. It should be pretty much brute forceable, no reflexes required.

    2. ps238principal says:

      Hear, hear. Making finishing off someone a QTE was stupid, especially in a game with loads of complicated combo attacks. Either let me just polish the boss-guy off in my own ham-fisted button-mashing way, or save the “FINISH HIM” stylistic death sequence for a cut scene (which I can at least enjoy watching since I don’t have to follow the game’s instructions on which control to manipulate).

      If I wanted to play Dragon’s Lair, I’d play Dragon’s Lair.

      1. acronix says:

        It´s curious that you say that. Recently I discused this with a friend, giving him the exact same things you said (except the Dragon´s Lair bit). His answer was that he prefered the Quick Hell Events because it was like he was making the character do whatever the characted did in the cutscene. Which means he prefers to make whatever acrobatics the game asks for and watch the last bit of the action instead of seeing all of it.

        1. ps238principal says:

          Egad. That sounds like some kind of video game dungeon fetish.

          “What button should I press now?”
          “That’s ‘What button should I press now, Master,‘ you pathetic fleshling!”

  21. eri says:

    Shamus, I love you and everything, but please, can we get a post about something that isn’t quick time events? I’m not that picky!

    1. Robyrt says:

      This one is more like a Slow Time Event. It takes upwards of two minutes, and you’re probably doing it wrong and have to start over.

      1. kingcom says:

        Its not really QTE, its more, umm what am i doing, am i doing it right? Kinda mcjiggy….

    2. Syal says:

      Did you miss the posts about WOW?

  22. Dev Null says:

    Wait wait wait. You just wrote 9 paragraphs about how badly done this scene is, and you didn’t once mention the ludicrousness of the premise? You’re pulling a multiple-million-ton floating city, with engines capable of flying faster than light and accelerating at hundreds if not thousands of G’s, out of the air from a range of what appears to be miles? With your mind? And you’re worried about getting off the planet? Put on a damn spacesuit, and _fly_ out you idiot!

    So, who are you, and what have you done with Shamus?

    (Oh wait; whew. You skewer the premise in the comic sidebar – I read this first. Thats all right then. Carry on.)

    1. ps238principal says:

      Every time I see Force-style telekinesis, I think of Babylon-5 where the Psi Corps (an organization of telepaths) was revealed to be trying to create a telekinetic power rather than the usual mind reading stuff.

      One character questions why this would even be done? It turns out that the best results allow the person in question to maybe move a penny around at short range. It’s then explained that such force is all you’d need to pop an artery in someone’s brain or something, making them the perfect assassin.

      Pulling down Star Destroyers is all well and good, but if you really just want to take someone out, that’s overkill.

      1. Legal Tender says:

        It could have been an original thought but Larry Niven covered this in detail in his short stories collection Flatlander

        IIRC, Niven ascribes it partly to the phenomenon of ghost limbs and the protagonist, while openly admitting it is little less than a parlor trick (he can only lift about a shot glass worth of weight), uses it to great effect to get out of a near-impossible situation.

        It’s a thouroughly enjoyable read. I recommend it.

  23. Sheer_Falacy says:

    Well, the Star Destroyer is pretty damaged when you’re doing this – it’s possible that it can’t use its engines to get away.

    As for the stick directions, the first time I played the event I worked every hard to align the Star Destroyer, then waited for it to hit the ground, again and again. I don’t remember how long it took for me to realize I needed to pull the sticks down and yank it out of the sky.

    On the other hand, there is positive feedback. It gets closer (larger) as you pull it towards you.

    1. PurePareidolia says:

      Yeah, but the star Destroyer ISN’T damaged when you do this. You fire the ore cannon at the star destroyer factory, blowing it up, and this one star destroyer happens to survive the explosion and come down to blow up the area. It does this under it’s own power, I think that’s also how it reorients itself.

  24. Ramsus says:

    I was actually stuck on that part so long that I ended up figuring out the most efficient way to kill the tie fighters. I can’t actually remember what that way was but I know that within seconds of them showing up I’d be back to trying to figure out how exactly I was supposed to be stroking my over inflated ego.

    Seriously, I’m surprised they didn’t run out of tie fighters.

  25. Spluckor says:

    Don’t know if someone has mentioned it, but I remember someone telling me that luke closed a black hole. Not sure if it’s true.

  26. Neil Polenske says:

    Regardless of whether it’s a fun mechanic, if the inevitable result is the thing crashes into the ground, then IT’S RETARDED TO IMPLEMENT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE!

    I honestly cannot wrap my head around this part. I haven’t played any of the Force games, so maybe there’s context I’m not getting. Is the goal specifically TO crash it? What happens if you fail, it flies away? Are you force fighting with the pilot of the ship to get it on the ground…or impact it with the ground?

    I don’t get how this mini-game can be implemented if the goal is ‘crash Starship’. There’s no logical justification for any controller input other than ‘analog pushed down’ (or up if you’re used to flight sims :P). If this isn’t the case, it’s a dick move by the developers to have it crash anyway, rendering all your work meaningless.

  27. ima420r says:

    It took me soooo long to get that star destroyer to crash! I didn’t know the on screen prompts were not telling me the right thing to do until just recently.

    I almost want to play through the game again and try this part one more time now that I know what I should be doing.

  28. winter says:

    So, having watched this sequence but not played the game, what the eff???

    The basic premise of the sequence is that you want to pull the star destroyer down. As Shamus notes, why do you even care which direction it comes down in? Is there some sort of reason for that? It seems like the thing that makes this scene so awkward is that you’re trying to pivot the thing on its center point, but in “reality” you really don’t give a damn about the center point. There’s no reason to be doing that. It should really be about balancing forces (the star destroyer struggling with thrusters, or whatever, vs. you throwing it around with the force–so spend most of your time holding the sticks down, then a bit of sideways as it struggles) rather than trying to align it. You could also make it care about the alignment of the sticks–so if you’re holding them both in the same direction you move it, but if one is off it’s harder to move.

    What if that doesn’t make it crash the way the cutscene wants? Who cares, just make it always come towards you the way the cutscene requires, no reason to do anything else really.

    The whole scene looks kind of weird.

    Maybe they felt like making the star destroyer struggle would make an already ridiculous scene look even more ridiculous? It probably would, but so what–isn’t that the ENTIRE POINT of the scene?

    Very weird.

  29. [d20]thegrinner says:

    Maybe it’s fridge brilliance in the sense of keeping it level so it undergoes reentry without fragmenting or generating too much heat or whatever a bad reentry angle would do to a star destroyer?

    1. ClearWater says:

      I was thinking you need to “level” it out so that it crashes nose first, otherwise it’ll just bounce off the atmosphere like ships always do in Star Trek^H^H^H^HWars.

  30. Nick says:

    I would have thought that star destroyers are purely zero atmosphere ships, wouldn’t bringing into the atmosphere crush it? At the very least, its mass would collapse its lower hull when it was placed on the ground.

  31. Andrew says:

    Not Super Saiyan. Just a Navigator. Also, I feel compelled to point in this direction, which seems like a long journey round a big circle…

    See, I’m testing to see if you really read a reply on your post nearly a month later. OK, I’ve been behind on my RSS feed reader. I’ve been busy.

    1. Shamus says:

      Wow. That Darths was fun. I can’t believe we both did planet-moving Star Wars jokes so close together.

      1. Andrew says:

        Ha! So you do, impressive! Also, Happy Birthday.

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