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Will Wright's Dream Machines 116

Posted by Zonk from the where-does-he-get-those-wonderful-toys dept.
Mike writes "Will Wright writes in Wired Magazine, primarily centering his focus on imagination, how it affects the way we play games, and how it is affected in turn by the games we play. From the article: 'Games cultivate - and exploit - possibility space better than any other medium. In linear storytelling, we can only imagine the possibility space that surrounds the narrative: What if Luke had joined the Dark Side? What if Neo isn't the One? In interactive media, we can explore it.'"
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Will Wright's Dream Machines More

Will Wright's Dream Machines

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  • Eh ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <{slashdot} {at} {monkelectric.com}> on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:02PM (#14968983)
    We can explore any aspect of the story that the developer already thought up and wrote code for ...
    • That is now. Will that be true in the future?

    • Re:Eh ... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Hannah E. Davis ( 870669 )
      I think that he's speaking AS a developer there. Sure, regular authors can write alternate endings too, but Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books are a lot more limited than modern games.

    • Re:Eh ... (Score:4, Informative)

      by MavEtJu ( 241979 ) <[gro.ujtevam] [ta] [todhsals]> on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @11:33PM (#14969380) Homepage
      The developer maybe, but that might not be the final developer. As a (former) coder on a MUD with an internal TCL scripting language, I was most of the time happily surprised to see what the people who build areas in the MUD came up with. A lot of that made me go "I never would have come up with it", but still I'm the one who made the original code which made this possible.

      So possibilities don't end where you fantasy ends, it ends where the combined fantasy of others end. And that is often much further and in a way different direction that you can come up with.
    • i've been around too long, your Subject line made me flinch.
    • Sure, all games have some limitations, such as where the content ends. For example, to take a game which did offer a GM mode so people weren't only limited to the single-player story, you still take your "Vampire, The Masquerade - Redemption" character to Toronto or visit the Kremlin, for example, because those maps don't exist.

      On the other hand, some still offer a lot more possibilities. E.g.,

      - some games do offer different ways to solve a quest. It's not complete freedom, but it _is_ more than a book or m
    • While what you're saying is true in a macro sense, the truth is that games are becoming more evolutionary in their gameplay. Spore, while being a forefront leader (from what all accounts are saying) uses other-player-created-content to populate the worlds you create. Therefore, no developer had to design your world. You and friends did it on the fly.

      Think of it like a big box of Legos. A developer needs to make the Legos and needs to make them interoperate (put the nubbins and the spaces in them to lin
      • The entire point of Will's article is exactly the opposite of what you've written. The old-school way was to say "you can do and go and interact with what I've created only. Otherwise we get off track and potentially buggy." But now, developers are starting to get the idea that players really dig doing their own thing. Crafting in MMORPGS, user-created content in the Sims, and now, with Spore, it's this whole "we give you the pieces, you build the worlds" idea.

        Maybe you're playing some game I'm not aware of

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:04PM (#14968998)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Well... Linear except for dying (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cinnamoninja ( 958754 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:11PM (#14969031)
      Even in the most linear stories, traditional media has to work very hard to make a reader/watcher feel the tension of the main character's choices. We are desensitzed to the classic hero position -- "Choose right or die." It takes an extremely talented writer to really make you worry. But even in the most unoriginal and linear games, you are in the hot seat and you can *die* if you choose wrong. This is especially try of nethack/moria roguelikes, where death doesn't just mean load up the last save point. It immerses you in a story. Games have emotional power -- I hope to see more developers use them to tell a story and not just see pretty pictures. Cinnamon

      • Re:Well... Linear except for dying (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ToasterofDOOM ( 878240 ) <d.murphy.davis@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @11:34PM (#14969386)
        I had no idea how in depth games could get until I started just recently playing nethack. I think that if the devs wanted flashy graphics, it would take away from the immersion (my friend says anything other than the tty interface is blaspheme) You are right about how roguelikes got it right. When push comes to shove, you must remember that death is really meaningful. It's a pity that we discovered roguelikes so soon before Oblivion (=D), and i truly hope I won't forget them. Few games, if any can truly make the characters decisions as weighty as a roguelike. Several times I have been insituations where I agonize over whether or not to fight, flee, or pray in a battle, and no modern game has given me that personal level of tension, satisfaction, and ultimately not feeling as bad when I waste a great sunny afternoon killing grid bugs and cursing those damn nymphs.
    • RPGs are generally designed to be an evolution of movies, although the length lends more towards books. You tell a predefined story and allow the gamer to interact with it. His descisions really play no part in the game. Even the massive Morrowind (which I attmittedly never finished) has a pre-defined ending. So do the KOTOR games. The closest we usually get to open ended gaming are (suprise suprise) the types of games Will Wright and Maxis have created. The Civ games have obvious conlusions, but theoretica
      • Text-based MUDs are about as close to a true non-linear game as you can get. Something like Lambda MOO is extremely flexible. When these fancy 3D graphical MUDs figure out how to capture that same flexibility and open-ended play then they'll have a real winner on their hands. The closest I've seen is Second Life but it isn't quite there in the area of user-interface and it still isn't quite as flexible as something like Lambda.

        If Second Life could recruit some major game designers to join in and help them i
        • Trying to create true non-linear gameplay for MMORPGs is a two-edged sword, mostly because in open ended play, *something* is always exploitable *somewhere.* The beauty and true enjoyment of this model is in the act of searching for that *somewhere.* It encourages you to think, try out different combinations, experiment. If you try to do that in an MMO, however, you will have alienated your Lowest Common Denominator, which is arguably your majority of your subscribers - therefore causing your 75% of your ma
      • As far as I know, Morrowind has _eight_ totally different predefined endings, depending on your actions in the game. And there's no need to go for any of them, you can just play and do what you want.
    • It's true that a lot have, but there are others that maintain an enormous amount of open-endedness, such as the Elder Scrolls titles.
      • As much as I love the Elder Scrolls, they are not "open-ended" because the end of the main storyline is the same no matter how you play.

        For Example, in Morrowind you could only destroy the tools, not use them to make yourself a god, or use them to make the Three gods, gods again

        But they are awsome in that they are open games, with many many diversions which allow for multiple hours of fun without playing the "main" Game. And with the PC versions you basicly have an almost unlimited ammount of extra fun, (th
    • Nethack has a mostly linear series of dungeons you go through, but most of the levels and items you encounter in them are algorithmically generated... and what's more, there are so many different combinations of items that you're constantly discovering new ways to do things.

      I think we need something like that, except, in place of just many combinations of item usage, we could have algorithmically generated character interaction, generated dialog.. I think that'll be the key to busting open the range of stor
    • Only Japanese-RPGs. Meanwhile, western RPGs (like the Elder Scrolls series, the latest of which came out just this week) have been moving the exact opposite direction.

      Make sure you qualify when you're making that point or you'll look like an idiot, because it's easy to find counter-examples in western RPGs.

  • Back in my day... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Back in my day we were happy with a ball of aluminium foil and a pizza box.

    We didn't need any of these newfangled vi-jeo games.
  • It all sounds great, but someone has to produce all this content. Given what I've seen from MMOs I don't expect to see the kind of experience described in the article within the next decade or two. Developers don't have the resources or desire to invest in that sort of venture.

    While there are plenty of people out there with plenty of imagination, there are many more who lack it and as we all know the vast majority of companies are very averse to risk. If you're going to invest millions in a game you want to

  • what if? (Score:5, Funny)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:21PM (#14969078) Homepage
    What if Neo isn't the One?
    Game Over
    • Then his name is a very big coincedence, plus all that religious symbolism...man just wasted...and that whole christ image thing at the very end...

  • What if Neo isn't the One? (Score:4, Funny)

    by merreborn ( 853723 ) * on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:33PM (#14969137) Journal
    What if Neo isn't the One?

    Then the credits woulda started rolling right after the oracle told him he wasn't, halfway through the first movie, and we'd have all been spared an hour, and 2 crappy sequels.
    • I'm more interested in the question, What if Neo wasn't the One, but succeded in saving Zion anyway?

      If he could fulfill the Oracle's prophesy while not being the correct "solution" to the Architect's equations or whatever Neo was meant to be, his success would have drastic and unforseen consequences on the result of his re-integration into the Matrix.

      Beyond that...if he wasn't the answer but solved the equation anyway, what does that say about the equation? That they were fundamentally flawed; that the ver
      • I agree, that's a much better ending to the whole damn Matrix thing. Already I reflexively roll my eyes whenever anyone in any book, movie, show or game is "chosen" in any way. When it's Keanu Reeves that turns out to be the Messiah, it makes me want to shake my fist at God.
    • Then the credits woulda started rolling right after the oracle told him he wasn't

      Or, in a possibly more entertaining vein, we spend another hour and two sequels watching Agent Smith beat the everloving hell out him.

  • Sometimes fanfics are better than games (or anime) because they explore the endless possibilities of the games they're inspired in.

    But yes, I like games with multiple stories. Imagine that in say, FF-X you would be able to get involved with Rikku instead of Yuna, and you could see different scenes about it and the story evolved...

    That would be great for Square-Enix games, for a change.
    • That's what the whole second disc of the Japanese version was for! But since Rikku wasn't exactly legal, and they made it seem that Tidus was, they weren't allowed by stupid American lobbyists.
    • That was one of my favorite parts of FFVII; the date scene. When I first played through the game, I did it fairly normally, and ended up with Aeris. The second time, I played a bit more towards Tifa (Something about knowing your girlfriend decides to do something incrediably stupid and gets killed over it kinda turns me off...), and was amazed when SHE turned up for the date. At that point, I started the other things that *could* happen if I played differently, and was a bit dissapointed when they didn't...

  • RTFA (Score:3, Interesting)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:48PM (#14969200) Homepage Journal
    I consider it a given that eventually games will become more about enabling third parties (or "modders") to easily tell stories to players in real time. i.e., online games will become more like pen and paper RPGs with a real life game master sitting there making up the story as you go along. So when you ask that witty magician why you can't just break the lock on the chest instead of going up the mountain and fighting the dragon he actually has a real answer because there's someone in the background ready to supply that answer. How will you possibly afford to pay all these people to answer inane questions all the time? You wont. They'll do it because they enjoy seeing a thousand different player's reaction to their story.
    • You can play the game multiplayer and have game masters. GMs can control characters and monsters, spawn things, etc. Combined with the quite powerful level designer, you can make your own stories for players to carry out, and then control them as they do.

      Not sure how well it works, I never had the patience to get an NWN group set up.

    • Looking at the current state of things, I'd say we're far from it being "given" that games will become just tools for Dungeon Masters and the like. Only a small set of games have actually released tools powerful enough for developers to modify. Unless the code is released, all you're doing is modifying the artwork and some weapon characteristics ala BF1942. I think if anything, creativity and flexibility are being given up because the publishers don't want to take risks on things that won't sell. They w

      • marketing tactics and game journal articles that always feature a game developers "newest and greatest engine."

        This sounds like the argument that no one can be famous for more than a finite and limited amount of time. The Beatles beat that by changing over time.

        Have you noticed that those same articles featuring the "newest and greatest engine" also talk about "newest and greatest features"? Everyone was talking about the Source engine's HDR, just as much as they were talking about the Doom 3 lighting whe

  • I knew I was a strange kid... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LordNightwalker ( 256873 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @10:59PM (#14969255)

    Just watch a kid with a new videogame. The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens.

    Heck, I must have been one strange kid then... Usually the very first thing I'd do was read the manual, especially the background story. My cousin or my friends on the other hand didn't. Never really thought about it, but I always figured I was the normal, albeit somewhat brainy type, and the others were just lazy or dumb or something. Now it appears I was the weird kid, and they were the normals...

    Just out of curiosity... How many of you guys actually read the manuals to each and every piece of hardware or software you ever bought? I assume the proportion of anal retentive manual readers in the general population is somewhat elevated here in our beloved slashdot community. ;)

    • Hell no. I don't read the manual until something goes wrong or what I'm using is incredibly expensive and likely to break if I use it wrong.

    • Re:I knew I was a strange kid... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I always read the manual on the way home from the store as a kid. wasn't quite as good as actually playing the game, but it would hold me over till I got back home.
      • Exactly, I would psyched up reading the manual on the way home, and then when I started playing the game I wouldn't need to look at the manual...except for space sims like Privateer 2 and such with their multitude of buttons
      • I would always check out the manual during a shitbreak soon after purchasing the game and playing it for the first or second time. Other than that, I only look at it for things that aren't completely obvious. (Example, when I started plaing KOTOR2 I entered into a game of Pazak (or however it's spelled) realizing that I couldn't recall the rules from the last time I played KOTOR1, so out came the manual... and eventually the internet since the manual didn't explain the rules either.)
    • I was the same with games that had story lines. Starcraft, I read the manual like 200 times. The information in there was great. But for something like Smackdown vs Raw 2006 or EA Games Generic Sports Game *YEAR*, there's nothing in there you wouldn't learn in a better way by just playing the game.
      • I'm just the opposite. If a game is heavily involved in story then it had better tell me what I need to know on-screen instead of making me flip through stupid manual pages just to know what's happening. On the other hand, EA's yearly sports games usually change at least some aspect of the control system every year (this year's Madden added QB vision and changed the default QB running system). I always read the book beforehand to familiarize myself with the changes.
    • The manual used to be my secret weapon. I didn't get a gaming console until I was old enough to afford it with my own money, which meant I was always playing at friends houses. Whenever I would rent a game with my friends whoever owned the console would play first. This left me with sitting around reading the manual, so by the time it was my turn to play I was ahead of the game (so to speak).

      Occasionally this meant my play session degenerated into cries of "Hey! How did you do that?", but it was always a
    • Definitely not. The way I figure is that it should be at least relatively intuitive, and it usually is. Although I hate when games have an undisableable tutor mode in the front when you already pretty much know how to play the game type.
    • I used to read the manuals back in the day when they were actually worth reading. At the late SNES/early PS1 days is when they suddenly became nearly worthless black & white pieces of garbage. That's when I stopped looking at them.
    • I read the manuals while things are installing usually, although mostly it breaks down to:

      1. Read the background story (not so valid these days, as it is usually covered in the intro video to a game, or on the back of the box)
      2. Skimming over the controls to see if there is a new sequence of things that I haven't seen before (again, this is usually covered in a tutorial at the start of a game normally)

      These days most games don't really need a manual to play the thing. "Pick up and play" is what the masses w
    • I almost never do with games. I've found many game manuals contain massive spoilers, even going so far as to layout out all the motivations and goals of the characters. If there's supposed to be a plot twist, I don't want to know about it. I want to play it.

      If the game isn't a plotful game (Mario Kart, Smash Bros) I will. And often I will once I've beaten the game. Sometimes I will if I think there's something I'm missing with the controls - but even then I carefully avoid any pages full of game description
    • Because I can get that far while the game is installing and patching.

      But really for most games these days do you need a manual? If you've played civ 1-3, civ 4 isn't that different, and what is different is helpfully covered in a short little section of manual titled something handy like, "differences for veteren civ players."

      The world of warcraft manual was shockingly useful considering most MMO manuals are a waste of paper. But even still, if you've played one MMO you've played them all. You probably don'
    • I always read the manuals. As a kid they were perfect for whetting the appetite for the game on the ride home from the store. If the game was a present, the manuals allowed my brothers and I to all play the game at once. One would start the game right up, the others would either read the manual and relate relevant bits to the player or soak up the game's periphery.

      I also read the manuals for every computer part and system I've ever owned or used. Be it a wireless router, Gentoo, OS X, or even a mouse.

      Ditto
    • I think he's also overselling the idea that it's scientific method.

      Half the kids I know that picked up the controller and started mashing buttons wind up looking like Skinner's Superstitious Pigeons.
    • I stopped reading manuals when games started to include unskippable tutorials, it's pretty pointless to read something the game forces you to read again as the first action after starting it.
    • Yeah, if you are part of the older generation like me, we would read the manual, because the manual was actually a big thick book, with lots of information, backstory, etc.

      Nowadays, manuals are largly irrelevent. Story can be told in the game... and there is usually a tutorial in the game for how to play.
  • To me there is nothing worse than going into a game knowing that I can change absolutely nothing about the outcome and my options are I will either reach the predetermined static ending, or I won't.

    Linear gameplay in titles that are intended to be immersive and have some depth (which means I'm not bitching about the lack of story branching in Tetris) is really a waste of the medium. When I spend my $50-$60, the last thing I want to do is be tricked into thinking that there is anything I can do to impact
    • I think you should try the game Fahrenheit (also known in the US as Indigo Prophecy). It may change your perspective on things a bit.
      Failing that, there's always Knights of the Old Republic. KOTOR is to scripting and storytelling what Doom 3 and FEAR are to graphics.
    • There are those, but there are also others that play those linear games for the story, rather than for the gameplay experience. It's an approach more similar to a book. Especially one of those Adventure books...
    • Heh, you're right in almost everything.

      Thing is linear games can be immensely fun. Once. Near zero replayablity factor. Once you're through with the linear story, there's very little more to do. But if the game offers deep branches for your possible actions, you try to play all of them.

      You haven't really finished Morrowind unless you've been proclaimed master of each faction (and some are mutually exclusive!). You MUST play through the Bloodmoon extension ad human and as a werewolf, otherwise you miss half

  • Sure, kinda (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday March 21, 2006 @11:51PM (#14969471) Homepage
    From the article: 'Games cultivate - and exploit - possibility space better than any other medium. In linear storytelling, we can only imagine the possibility space that surrounds the narrative: What if Luke had joined the Dark Side? What if Neo isn't the One? In interactive media, we can explore it.'
    Sure, we can explore what ever alternate paths the progammer/developer/marketing director puts into the game. And no matter how many alternate paths they add - it's still canned.
    • It doesn't have to be canned is what he's saying. This spore game, the latest one he's dreaming up isn't canned at all. If it works anything like he says it does, as people create things in their own worlds, these things get uploaded to an internet database which tabulates what these creations would be good for. Then, seamlessly to the player, the world gets populated with new things based upon the need of the individual environment. A nice example might be maybe your ecosystem has too many of a certain

    • Re:Sure, kinda (Score:3, Informative)

      by RexRhino ( 769423 )
      In most games, what you are saying is correct.

      But there are plenty of games which are based on randomness and emergent behavior that isn't canned. For example, the Sims/Sims2 and Sim City narrative isn't canned. The game simply provides a sandbox that the player is able to create their own story in. Same goes for games like the Civ games, or The Movies. MMPOGs have narrative that comes from player interaction. Even the new Elder Scrolls: Oblivion game gives you a whole dynamic world that you can create all
  • The fact remains though that gaming is a medium, much like TV, movies, or radio, whether something is linear or free roaming does not necessarilly make it a good game. Morrowind is considered by many to be a fine piece of gaming history, and I admire its ambition...at the same time I don't enjoy playing it simply because of its lack of focus...there's too much to take in, too much to do, too much to see...thusly I often end up wandering lost and alone, cursing the lack of guidance.

    Similarly you have stuff

    • Morrowind is considered by many to be a fine piece of gaming history, and I admire its ambition...at the same time I don't enjoy playing it simply because of its lack of focus...there's too much to take in, too much to do, too much to see...thusly I often end up wandering lost and alone, cursing the lack of guidance.

      I understand why you don't like Morrowind. It almost seems like there are no goals and you are just a wandering soul. However, there are open ended games AKA the sims, where you are given t

    • remember that all good books are entirely linear and only have one set ending, same with movies, some leave little to the imagination, others let you do the work instead, surely the same should be true of games?

      Yeah but good books and good movies have good characters and good plotlines..etc,etc,etc. And very few games have this, and even games that have a good plot would be 10-15 pages if written up. If they wrote the story for Linear games the same as they wrote them for books/movies then yeah there wou
  • ... are the ones that try to mirror the DM vs Player environment of PnP Role-playing such as Neverwinter Nights. You need a content creator that can create new content on the fly, or else you can only work with what is pre-set, at this point in time anyway. Although the NWN DM engine has nowhere near the amount of content dexterity that a PnP DM has, because you still need to prepare content before the player "sees" it, even if it is a few brief moments before the player gets there. With a vocal medium, you
  • ... back when I was a flunky for Coleco (remember Colecovision [classicgaming.com]?) I was struck by the fact that the last line in nearly all their game documentation was something like: "The Thrill Of Discovery! This game has other features which you can discover by as you play."

    At the time, I thought: Brilliant; if the game has bugs, no problem, it's just a "feature".

    But now I think that actually, exploring the official, authorized, documented limits of a game or other toy to see where it acts in ways that the designer d

    • strafe-jumping, rocket-jumping, grenade-jumping, bunny-hopping, all these were 'unintended features'. And mastering them means immense advantage in multiplayer environment.
  • You mention Star Wars or The Matrix on Slashdot...it's going to get ugly. 800 cubicle geeks with father figure issues crying about how Nethack was the greatest thing since silicon was created, and 700 people backing them up with crappy Family Guy quotes.
  • Interactive media promotes the idea of fanfic, just on a graphic level.
  • Thank the heavens!

    When I read the post title on the front page, I thought that the comments page would be a horrific cross-fire of mangled misinformation about Morrowind and Fable.

    Thankfully, the first post reads 'We can explore any aspect of the story that the developer already thought up and wrote code for ...', and many more posts of the same ilk follow. I'm so glad you said that.

    The only truly non-linear games are ones that, as it's been said in posts previous to this, to have some kind of content gener
    • Also, I'd like folks to play Spore, and then those crafty Swedes to get into it and find the base rules under the hood, and then we can all go 'Ahh. These critters a'int procedural, they're precalculated imported creature part-sets, categorized into broad sets and parameterised to create many permutations'. That would be pretty amusing.

      So in other words you hope they find they aren't procedural but simply procedural?

      • Alas, no. :)


        I hope they're procedural, and the dog's nads, but a large section of my brain is telling me that it's going to be a bit crap in practice.


        The great thing about pessimism is that you're never disappointed: If it's crap, you were right: go you. If it's good, then it's good: Go Will! I wish 'em all the very best of luck! :)

  • We can explore possibilities even on traditional media. The way to do this is called "fanfic". Sure, most of them are crap, but the ones that aren't are typically far superior to their source material. And sometimes the crap ones are too ;).

    And then there's the category that reads like it was translated from Japanese to English word-by-word with a machine, and once you get past the sentence structure makes it clear that the author had taken something stronger than alcohol before writing it. For whatever r

  • Wil and others have given a lot of press to user-made content, with games like Spore and Second Life usually given as prime examples. But frankly, I don't think user-made content will take over gaming any more than fanfics have taken over literature, or blogs have taken over journalism.

    The fact is, populism aside, there are some people who are simply a lot better at creating content. And if we're just relying on them to create content for a lark in their spare time, we're really hurting the community. Those
  • I think the problem a lot of people have can be taken from the term open ended. For something to be truly open ended, there will be an infinite number of possibilities for potential endings. This is damn near impossible to code and create without some level of human interaction on the other end to go "Oh crap we're out of Mtn. Dew....uh you save the kingdom and ride into the sunset." I think what Will is talking about is games give the ability to explore other possibilities, not INFINITE possibilities.
  • Albeit briefly:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Empire [wikipedia.org]

    In Dark Empire, which is set shortly after Timothy Zahn's trilogy featuring Grand Admiral Thrawn, Palpatine returns from the dead in the form of a spiritually-possessed clone body and successfully turns Luke Skywalker to the dark side of the Force. Palpatine is killed many times throughout the series, always returning in a new clone body. However, he meets his "final death" at the end of the series. Luke is turned back to the light side by his sister, P

  • This is Will Wright (Score:2, Insightful)

    by billcopc ( 196330 )
    Overlooking the obvious, has anyone seen the Spore demo yet ? That's what they're talking about. All of you have played SimCity or The Sims at some point ? That's what they're talking about. They're talking about games that let you do whatever the interface provides, with very few rules or restrictions. Not much of a pre-scripted story or bulletized goals, just a free-roaming environment for you to play in.. play like a kid, using a few props and a double-dose of imagination and creativity.

    The magic o
  • What if Luke had joined the Dark Side?

    (Assuming an end of ESB conversion to the Dark Side)

    Well, depending on whether Luke decided to side with Daddy, Palpy, or try and take over the galaxy himself, we could have seen some awesome Dark Side fights and elaborate superweapons being used indiscriminately.

    Unfortunately, coming up with a game that allows these possibilties would take a hell of a lot of work and imaginiation, something that is lacking in big market games these days. But hey, as long as Luke

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