Facebook – Top 100 FAVORITE Video Games: 14

14: Star Wars – Knights of the Old Republic (PC/Xbox)
Developer: Bioware
Year: 2003

“I only got 3 words for you,” I said to a friend today when he asked which game would be featured today. “H. K. 47.” He immediately smiled and nodded his head, and I knew I’d said all I’d need to in order to convince him of this game’s worthiness.

I could sit here, in my home, and type paragraph after paragraph about why this game deserves this spot. It’d be easy to talk about the awesome thing Bioware gave the world, about the cool characters, about how this is a game with lightsabers that doesn’t suck, or about how no Star Wars game will ever be better than this. It’d be really easy. But pointless.

I say pointless because no one needs to be told this game was awesome. If you’ve played it, you know all about this pre-Mass Effect giant. If you haven’t played it, you probably don’t care and, should you feel its my job to convince you, then nothing I say in this note will really do the game  justice. I think you can download it just about everywhere, so just go get it.

But if you need some points to tide you over until you get it, just know this: after I installed this game, it ushered into the world my longest single sitting during any game. I think I put in a full day’s worth of gameplay with only one small nap in there, likely 17 hours in one sitting. Granted, I beat the shit out of Metal Gear Solid 3 in one sitting my first time through it, but that only took me 11 hours. After 17 straight hours I was only three planets into this game, with tons of content left to go, levels to gain, and party members to recruit. Soon after this, I had a snow day that saw me put in the final 10 hours in one sitting. Its one of the fiercest run-throughs of any game I’ve ever done. Period.

All in all, KOTOR AM LOVE KOTOR DEMAND REPLAY. If you don’t get that joke, don’t worry; it wasn’t really that funny the first 100 times I used it.

Classic Moment:
Everyone talks about the Revan reveal, and that’s cool. But, for me, the best moment of the whole damn game is the fact that it finally allows for two different games based on your choice of Light Side or Dark Side. Should you decide to be evil, there’s a fight right at the end of the game vs all the Jedi who think you should be put down, including a cat girl and Mace Wind… Jolee Bindo. This fight, if you were unaware, is hard as shit if you’re unprepared. One of the only good things about it is that you can have HK-47 on your side the whole, a guy who never cares if you hate someone or want to kill everyone (actually, he really likes it when you kill everyone). Case in point, when you convince everyone involved in that big family feud on Dantooine to massacre each other. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this RPG did the Light/Dark decision right, something that hasn’t been topped in any Star Wars (or, hell, any Bioware) game, since. Disagree? Pfft.

PS: toyed around with only posting the first paragraph, so there’s that

---

Added April 10, 2017
Broken record time: COME TO THE SWITCH, YOU FOOL.
All joking aside, I can’t wait for the day they do a full remake of this one.
Pete and I devised a way to over-power a character. This is a game where you have to go to a menu to level up a character, it doesn’t force you to do it at any given moment. So if you’re good, you can never level up your main character and then – when you get Jedi powers – you can finally level up and get nearly twice as many points to spend as a Jedi/Sith. It is cheap and effective, but it requires you to get really good at the game in the early sections.
PS: Fuck Taris.