Welcome to another Saturday Summaries! I'm spending most of today in our chat room, watching Alex "Rock God" Navarro drum for sixteen hours for our Extra Life charity streams. This will be a shorter Summaries as a result, but there was one sorta nerdy talking point I had in mind for this intro before we dig into what I've been playing this week.

When Star Wars started over, tossing out most of the EU for the sake of the new continuity post-Return of the Jedi, there were rumblings from the fan base about tossing out the baby with the bathwater. While the EU was this wild and unfettered land of occasional crazy stupidity, there were certain stories, characters and moments that anyone who explored beyond the core movies were sad to see go. The new continuity, post-Lucas, has been happy enough to bring in all sorts of creative talents and has been busy its own slightly more legitimate EU with the likes of the animated TV shows, books, comics and such, but we're also seeing bits and pieces from that expunged universe - say, Admiral Thrawn popping up in Star Wars: Rebels - still make their way back into the new one. Anyway, one of the "least essential" aspects of the EU were the video games: video games generally create throwaway plots of a questionable canonicity for the sake of delivering their thrills and spills, and I sincerely doubt to see Kyle Katarn ever appear again. Yet, the games have had a significant impact on the direction of the Star Wars movies from the Clone Wars trilogy to the new one. Specifically, in how they helped codify just what a Jedi could do, and how one's allegiance to the light and dark sides of the Force determined your effectiveness in channelling same.

Take, for instance, Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. I think that's probably the most famous and well-regarded of the games that let you be a Jedi, excepting maybe sequels like Jedi Outcast or BioWare's Old Republic series. In addition to swinging a lightsaber around and influencing weaker minds, the designers had to invent a lot of additional powers that Kyle could choose to purchase from the power-up menu, ones that would not only assist him in fighting the Empire and the machinations of the Sith, but help him get around the levels and potentially unlock secrets to reach. To that effect, there's a "Force Speed" and "Force Jump", the former for quicker backtracking and getting past certain timing-based hazards, and the latter for reaching high areas where valuables could be found. They're not particularly flashy powers, nothing like firing lightning from your fingertips or hurling boulders around with your mind, but they both found plenty of application in the game. So it was a little surprising to see both turn up in The Phantom Menace, as Obi-Wan and Qui-Gonn sped through the halls of that Trade Federation ship during the prologue and Obi-Wan made that giant leap during the climactic duel against Darth Maul. At that point, those simple running and jumping enhancements had become established in Jedi canon - though I hesitate to think of any situations where Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader ever called upon them.

But what I think is more low-key and pervasive is the idea of min-maxing morality. In Jedi Knight, you were screwed if you tried to role-play Kyle Katarn as anything but a holy beacon of light or pure evil: this is because the strength of your powers was irrevocably tied with how far along the light/dark scale you happened to be. Jedi Knight's hardly the only game with a morality system that is skewed against those looking to play a more morally gray protagonist, but it was a system that future Force-based games leaned into to the extent that the Star Wars universe is now one of extremes. Perhaps for the best, given it's a franchise intended for children (shut up, it is) and it's easier to keep things black and white. At any rate, you might notice from the new movies that the character of Kylo Ren kind of personifies this struggle: he's not going to a particularly powerful dark side of the Force user unless he starts being more evil, but finds himself hesitating to push himself over that moral event horizon. The end of The Force Awakens, and a particular shocking scene that occurs, is meant to signify that Kylo Ren is ready to fully tip over to the dark side for the Force-user potential that eludes him and prevents him from being the ultimate badass his grandfather was (the irony being, of course, that his grandfather was ultimately equally hamstrung by his contradictory allegiances). It's an odd concept, that to be the best you have to be thoroughly one extreme or the other rather than some measured and nuanced middle-ground, but it's lead to some interesting character moments in the new movies and maybe explains some odder decisions. Like Anakin slaughtering the "younglings" - which maybe less to do with Anakin suddenly becoming the worst person ever, but someone who had to quickly commit an atrocity or two to be strong enough as a Dark user as he was as a Light user in order to take on his former Jedi Masters. Thinking in those terms, it kind of adds weirdly RPG-like artificiality to those movies, but one I think still fits somehow.

Anyway, enough nerdy ponderings, it's time for... oh, more nerdy ponderings. I forgot, that's I all I ever write. Here you go then, the week's new blogs:

• The Indie Game of the Week this time was the excellent but demanding platformercurial (sorry, fine, "roguelikelike platformer") Flinthook. I'm digging a lot of what Flinthook's about, but it's definitely shaping up to be a game that I can't play in longer stretches. If I manage to complete it this year, it'll probably find its way onto whatever my GOTY top ten looks like, but I suspect I'll still be bashing my head against the second chapter's chicken boss and have to mark it with an asterisk on the final rankings. (Fun fact: this slot was originally going to be for The Shrouded Isle until I realized it was one of those "make hard decisions and keep everything balanced" games. I hate those. So stressful.)

There's no supplemental section this week! I ran out of time, and like I said in the lede I'm busy today watching Alex drum himself into a coma in real-time in our chat. Not to worry though, as all I played this week (besides Flinthook) was more Horizon: Zero Dawn, and that'll be covered thoroughly next week when I hope to have completed it. Not that I'm not enjoying myself, mind, but I have Nier: Automata and Ys VIII to bash out before the year's end. (Not that I'll be in any hurry to complete those either, I suspect. Man, what a great year for games.)

Oh, and I'll be resuming The Top Shelf blogs next Tuesday and beyond. I have all eight planned out for the final eight Tuesdays of the year, with the finale and a list of the final forty-four winners showing up on December 26th. Almost like I intended for it all to happen this way back when I started the series in January. Almost. (I hadn't.) See you next time.