Knights of the Old Republic
There haven't been a lot of Star Wars games that have been good, apart from perhaps anything involving Kyle Katarn. There was Empires At War which I'll still go back and play every so often because it's still one of my favourite real time strategies despite it's pretty crap graphics, and of course the original Rogue Squadron on PC, but that was merely only because you never got much further than the standard "shoot badguys get top score", which was fun.
There was of course Force Unleashed as well, because when will anyone ever get tired of throwing Stormtroopers or whatever you're fighting around like ragdolls and making them go on holiday via immediate airflight?
As to Knights of the Old Republic it hasn't done a lot to earn any ire, malice or hatred from me, or any other hateful emotion. My main niggle was the lack of classes, which was split into fighty, stealthy and midway between the two, and six if you included being able to be the opposite gender.
You get to be a Jedi later on I suppose but if you play a certain class then they'll work best with a certain kind of Jedi class. It's no use having a fighty character become a Force wielding maniac, nor a sneaky character become Kyle Katarn. Then again, sometimes it's fun to experiment and try to do that kind of stuff and actually try to complete the game without powergaming which I'll admit to having done around four times.
At the start you have a pretty quick tutorial level which only lasts around half an hour and that's if you're mentally retarded and can't use the map provided in the game screen and can't tell your left from right. You get to see a Sith and a Jedi have a fight which is pretty entertaining before the Jedi dies in an explosion after killing the Sith, and you get to kill a platoon of Sith troopers who are only named Sith because they're part of the Sith invasion force and can't use the Force so much as a monkey can run a country.
You then meet up with one of the Republic's war heroes and leave your ship to be destroyed by the Sith. You find yourself on Taris and start running around with weapons in broad daylight and no one including the Sith seem to take offense at you looking like bandits and criminals. On Taris you meet a kid Twi'Lek and a Wookie and later these guys join your party before you get a real character, like Bastila or Canderous.
By far my favourite thing about the entire game is HK-47, a sadistic, homocidal, muder intent assassin droid which is found on Tatooine who can speak Tusken and can be bought for an unfeasible amount of credits which isn't fair and you can make things up to yourself by doing the quest for the Tuskens and getting them the moisture vaporators and then opening their boxes which causes them to attack you. Did I mention HK-47?
Other characters include Canderous who is perhaps my second most favourite character, aside from HK-47, and is a Mandalorian veteran from the Mandalorian Wars. At the start he's found wielding a repeater blaster but I quickly replaced this with dual swords and had him carve his way through animals, Sith, other Mandalorians, humans, aliens and the occasional droid.
The last character worth mentioning is Jolee Bindo, some crazy old hermit Jedi found on Kashyyyk and is neutral rather than good or evil like most other characters and a Mage... I mean Force User rather than a Fighter. He can wield two Lightsabers just the same as all your other Jedi but personally I always found it amusing for him to run around Force Lightning everything to death while everyone hacked limbs off. He also had various adventures which if you can be bothered to wait through all the long talk of it can be pretty interesting if you can stand playing the game without having to kill something every ten minutes.
Knights of the Old Republic includes your standard bad guys ranging from evil Sith with Darth Vader wannabe jaw mask and cool armour and cape. It turns out later in the game that he was your player character's Apprentice before they went away after the Mandalorian Wars and reappeared with a mahoosive fleet and army and started blowing stuff up before Malak decides to betray you, Darth Revan, and reveals that Bastila was the person who took your unconscious body away and saved you. Being a cruel bugger Malak then stuns the two characters you're with and you're forced to fight him alone, fight him off and then chase him. Bastila eventually gets left behind as you and your buddy Carth run away where you reveal to the crew who you are. This is where my second niggle in the game comes in. Rather than turning on you half of the characters just say "meh whatever" and go off and do their own thing while HK-47 seems pleased at discovering who you are.
You go around the rest of the galaxy, crash land on a planet, go kill some different aliens and then invade a temple full of Sith and rejoin with Bastila. Only she's now evil. You easily whoop her ass and she runs away and you give persuit to a mahoosive space station and cut your way through the constant amount of respawning enemies. Unfortunately this isn't like Force Unleashed where you can carve through armies by yourself with your health regenerating from killing nearby rabbits with overpowered blasts of Force Lightning and eventually you have to move forwards where you fight Bastila on your own, beat her, and she comes back to the Light Side (this is if you played the game properly, of course, and didn't be a retarded git and go for the Dark Side because you preferred to kill people rather than find their Ewok skin shoes). Then you go through a corridor and kill more stuff. Then you fight Malak who drains the Force energy of Jedi who are injured but not yet dead as it seems and you have to kill Malak about fifty times before he finally gives up trying to argue with you.
The twists in the game were joyful and not overly obvious on the first run through and gave me a pleasurable experience where I just had to replay the game again and again just because of the lovable characters and storyline, which sadly didn't continue into the second Knights of the Old Republic, but what can you say when Bioshock didn't make Knights of the Old Republic II?
The last few niggles I had about the game were the characters not sticking to the ground. On some terrain they walked through the air or through objects, and turning in cutscenes always seemed jerky. The controls were pretty good but nothing ground breaking as far as a console RPG goes.
Finally, T3-M3, Mission (the Twi'Lek girl) and Carth were annoying characters. T3 was Artoo in disguise, Mission was basically your wet behind the ears private but only she sneaks around and stuff and Carth is basically Tom Cruise mixed with emotions about his wartorn home and dead wife which is as best as I can describe him.
Actually I lie because I can describe Carth better. Carth is basically Tom Cruise mixed with emotions about his wartorn and dead wife and son while constantly saying that war is bad and that he doesn't trust people and doesn't like it when he's left out of the loop because he's going emo and decides that he wants to be part of everything that has nothing to do with his business including knowing who you are and fights with Canderous, Mission, Bastila and possibly a few other characters but he never got that far because I never let him.
Overall Knights of the Old Republic revitalised my RPG playing bones and love for the stories behind the games because most of the time they're well thought out and planned, except for Knights of the Old Republic II but there's always exceptions, and are much better storyline wise than the standard first person shooter, which Yahtzee from the Escapist has supplied the perfect phrase; run shoot kill teabag. Knights of the Old Republic has none of that. Just; run Lightsaber kill loot.
