Anyone played Jedi Knight 2 yet?

[NiGHTMARE]

I'm assuming it's out in the US, as it's out here in the UK on Friday and you Americans always get everything weeks if not months ahead of us :)

I don't normally get over excited by a new FPS, but it looks incredible, and all the previews I've read of it make it out to be simply amazing. It's also not supposedly too short unlike seemingly more and more SP FPS's these days are (e.g. Voyager: Elite Force and Return To Castle Wolfenstein).

I loved both Dark Forces (speaking of which, shouldn't it actually be called Dark Forces 3: Jedi Outcast? I guess it's the Heretic/Hexen thing all over again) and Jedi Knight, and apparently Jedi Knight 2 even recreates the best levels from those two games :)

I hope it doesn't turn out to be complete crap, but as it wasn't actually made by LucasArts (who currently seem to be making a zillion and one utterly pants Starwars games ATM, "co-incidentally" at a time when Episode 2 is just around the corner), but by Raven (who IMHO have yet to make a bad game).

Anyway, to get back to the original question, let me (and everyone else know) if this is as good as I hope it is, okay? :)

[Zaldron]

So far only Australia has the game in the shelves. Tomorrow's the big day. I won't be able to find it here, not with our current problems, but there's always that guy who sells warez at $4 the cd (home delivery included)...

[Dark-tenshi]

why it is moved to P&R?
i like dark forces.and i just picked JK last month.that's because i didn't have good computer to run it when it was released in 1997.even 5 years old title is still more fun than many modern game.i have to finish before i can pick JK2 = P

4$ for warez? it's 3$ in where i live.fortunately many game has been published in my country.the license one costs only 16-20$.not too expensive,i still can afford it.

[NiGHTMARE]

Make sure you get the Jedi Knight mission pack, the levels in it are even better than the original ones :)

$4 for warez does seem a bit much. A few weeks ago I got 50 PS2 games for $96, which works out as $1.92 a game. Bearing in mind that in the shops PS2 games tend to be more expensive than PC games, this was a pretty good deal :)

Then again, when I bought my PSX, it cost just under $100 and came with 100 (warezed) games, so that was even better ;)

And yes, I was wondering how a computer game is related to religion and politics as well...

[Dark-tenshi]

i got jk and jk mission pack in the same package.gotta fnish them as soon as i have more time to play.

[LordTrasher]

It's out? Over here? In Australia?

*looks around, nothing there. A dog barks in the distance*

Far Canel, Why doesn't anyone tell me these things?

[Linguica]

Heh, it's better than I expected it to be, although some of the "puzzles" are overly hard/lame. The lightsaber fights are quite intense but are pretty much just luck, as you and an enemy run around, wildly clicking the mouse button and hoping to land that killing blow which is randomly landed sooner or later.

The force powers are nice but switching through them in the heat of a battle is a royal pain. I pretty much always have it set to Push, so I can run into a big room with 20 stormtroopers, knock them all down, take out one or two, knock them all down again, rinse and repeat. Force lightning is a waste. The choke move is pretty nice now that I have it fully powered up. You can throw people around, bang them against walls, or the easiest solution, just drop them off a cliff.

Overall, it's a pretty cool game so far, but I just wish the lightsaber battles had a little more strategy involved and less frenzied clicking.

[geekmarine]

Jedi Knight rocks! I love the lightsaber, in fact one time I went through the game using nothing but my lightsaber and force powers (okay, so I had to cheat to get the lightsaber at the start of the game, but that's not the point). I swear, it was awesome. I really got the hang of the force pull technique, and I was ripping the guns right out of the stormtroopers' hands left and right. By the way, lightsaber battles really aren't entirely luck, as you've got to know how to go in, swing, dodge, ect. Woot!!! I hope Jedi Knight II is just as good. The levels were awesome, and I love the whole height thing which was used a lot. When I first started playing, I would get extremely nervous just looking down half the time because the levels always have huge dropoffs. I wish more games would have levels as incredible as Jedi Knight's were. I agree that some puzzles were lame and/or hard, but hey, no game is perfect *Doom is excluded from that remark, of course*.

[NiGHTMARE]

Doom is far from perfect. The one area in which it's particularly bad is level design. Even the E1 levels had their flaws.

[geekmarine]

Yeah, I know, Doom level design sucks. I just didn't want to upset any fanatics here and end up receiving death threats from people who actually own BFGs and who also can find out where I live and turn me inside out or something. I mean, how often have you just been playing Doom and wondering what the heck the level is supposed to represent? After years of working on it, my best guess is that they just made big mazes of sorts, and added extra decoration to avoid being monotonous. I don't terribly blame them, they were the first to design levels of a nature where complex detail is possible in an FPS. Basically, the designers weren't really fully aware of what they had, is what I'm trying to say, and the levels were early experiments in 3D level design. There not horrible, lord knows we've got what used to be ftp.cdrom.com's thousands of levels to show that it could be much worse, but still, it's not anything to rant over, especially Doom 2. Personally, the only episode I truly ever loved was Episode 1. It was absolutely incredible, and I actually felt that I was someplace, unlike many other levels. I would like to go on, but this was supposed to be about Jedi Knight and Jedi Knight 2, so I'll stop. By the way, I got both Jedi Knight and the expansion pack, but I lost disk 2 for Jedi Knight and so can't play the expansion pack, which uses disk 2 for copy protection reasons. Luckily, all it had were movies, but I really want to play Mysteries of the Sith, it's awesome.

[Lüt]

I'll try it if I'm guaranteed there's no impossible maps like Map06 in Jedi Knight.

[LorD BaZTArD]

Got Jedi Knight, not bad at all, Looks very nice, You gotta get used to the Lightsabre moves tho, Hell, I decided to try the bots on the simplest setting, got absolutely flooged....also Sabre control, is still a rather Click and hope afair atm, but it's better than original. The Moves you can pull off, are pretty sweet tho :D

[New Opinion] Heh, been playing more JK2 multi, bots are kinda lame, but the best way to play, IMO, is in a Saber Only, Duel arena. one with say, a timelimit of ten per round and no kill limit per round, having an ABSOLUTE BLAST, unfortunately, theres not that many of those servers around. The Sabre isn't a click and hope affair once you get used to it, but the Special moves are somewhat harder to pull off, as expected. Gonna be playing Alot of this online in the coming future :D [/New Opinion]

[also] hmm, which one was Map06 again? Remind me.. and my favourite map from JK1 is when The bad guy justs Pushes the whole freakin ship down the mountain, Damn that was awesome. [/Also]

[Arioch]

Bah, JK map06 wasn't impossible... that one was fairly easy to complete... took me a little while but it was done.

It's the frickin' canyon ascent level that's impossible.

[IMJack]

I forget what the sixth JK map was all about. I managed to beat JK with the good-guy ending in about a week's worth of playing. IMHO, nothing more fun than snatching the enemy's blasters out of their hands w/ the Force Grab skill. They're so scared and defenseless afterwards. :)

[Arioch]

Originally posted by IMJack
I forget what the sixth JK map was all about.

That was the tower ascent level, where you had entered into the center of Barons Hed ... starts out at the base with a bunch of AT-ST walkers, you had to use force speed to complete a ramp and jump across, etc.

[Lüt]

Originally posted by Arioch
Bah, JK map06 wasn't impossible... that one was fairly easy to complete...

Well, it wasn't like there were too many enemies or anything, but there was just no way into that last control room, or whatever. There was a section where you flipped a switch and a floor rose to the ceiling, and it looked like you were supposed to be able to jump into these two holes in the ceiling, but there was no way to make the jump.

[pritch]

You're still banging on about that?

Let it go, Lüt..

[Arioch]

Originally posted by Lüt
There was a section where you flipped a switch and a floor rose to the ceiling, and it looked like you were supposed to be able to jump into these two holes in the ceiling, but there was no way to make the jump.

Uh, if you're talking about that one area, there's two teeth in the rising gate, you could go into one of the teeth, and run out into the hole when the gate reaches the ceiling, but before the locks pass through the teeth so you don't get crushed.

[LorD BaZTArD]

Ah, that area. Yeah that part drove me nuts for a while, I can't remember how I ended up solving it, but I think it was ridiculously simple..yeah., took me bout a week to get the good guy ending...but I never unlocked the Bad ending.. I mis-saved, and wasn't able to select dark powers at the decision point...not sure how that happened..ah well, too bad...Jedi Knight 2 is damned good, I'm not fussed about JK1 anymore.

[Captain Red]

Well, I hevent played it much so far, but jedi outcast has some very imprisseve AI. I meant the storm troopers call out, retreat wile fireing, and regrope realisticly. even better then half life IMO.

i don't get how people can say that games like MGS and Deus Ex have good AI when you can stand right infront of a gard and he will take 2 seconds to see you, if at all! and the fact that they "forget" your there after a minute or so is hardly realistic.

[dsm]

Yeah, I know, Doom level design sucks. I just didn't want to upset any fanatics here and end up receiving death threats from people who actually own BFGs and who also can find out where I live and turn me inside out or something. I mean, how often have you just been playing Doom and wondering what the heck the level is supposed to represent? After years of working on it, my best guess is that they just made big mazes of sorts, and added extra decoration to avoid being monotonous.

What did ya expect of a 9-year old game for crying out loud!? Compare Doom to Wolfenstein 3d and you'll understand why I don't give a rusty nail about people saying that Doom's level design sucks. It looked believable enough back then and was fun as Hell to play through.
And don't worry, I wont hunt you down and kill you just because you don't like Doom's level design (too many people use that imo weak reason to bash Doom, so it doesn't really piss me off any more) ;-)

Back to the topic: I haven't tried JK 2, but Maonth has played it repeatedly during the end of the Easter holiday and he claims that it r0x0rs his b0x0rs.
I dunno, Star War games ain't my cup of tea.

[NiGHTMARE]

Personally, I would say that level design is a fairly important part of a game, seeing as pretty every other part depends on it.