jeff eaton

For many years, I've heard rumors of the infamous Star Wars Christmas Special. It went straight to television in 1978, just a year after the explosive debut of the first Star Wars movie. It's spoken of in sad, hushed tones -- like a little-mentioned brother that died trying to juggle power drills.

Jason and Steph have a copy of it, thanks to a hardcore geek friend of ours, but I've never gotten around to watching it. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, though, it's now available for viewing on YouTube. Naturally, I clicked.

Just two minutes in, I can see that the rumors were true. It is not, in fact, a terrible Droids-esque cartoon. It is a live action drama starring all the original actors! This isn't the respectable art-film sort of train wreck. It's the bury-the-footage, pretend-it-never-happened cut-it-from-the-continuity sort of trainwreck that only happens when words like contractual obligation and thirty kilos of mescaline are involved.

It's a Christmas Special. It's Star Wars. And Chewbacca has a wife named Paula. This one's a keeper.

Edit: Five minutes in, now. The opening scene is a cozy domestic act, with Paula tidying up the house and pining for Chewbacca's return. Their son Lumpy and his grandfather Itchy -- yes, Lumpy and Itchy -- scuffle playfully. What's wrong with this picture? They're all wookies, and none of them speak english. It's like Leave It To Beaver meets the first twenty minutes of 2001...

Edit: Ten minutes. Mark Hamil. Art Carney. R2D2. Paula the wookie preparing dinner while watching a purple, four-armed Martha Stewart alien on television. Slapstick comedy. Camera cuts away to a tie fighter battle. Hello!

Edit: Fifteen minutes. Art Carney just gave Itchy the wookie LSD-influenced holo-porn as a LifeDay gift. Sample quote: "You... are my fantasy!" Cue suggestive wookie growling. Cut back to the holo-fantasy... singing a wookie lounge song! The goggles, they do nothing!

Edit: Fifteen minutes, thirty seconds. More tie-fighters. Chewie and Han are running a blockade.

Edit: Sixteen minutes.Uhoh. Storm troopers everywhere at wookie home! The tidy domestic scene is threatened. They're searching the house, and asking questions... A stormtrooper opens a device of some sort, and... Jefferson Airplane appears. In the middle of a giant purple kaliedescope. Playing a ballad. What... The...

Edit: Eighteen minutes. Cartoon interlude! Mark Hamil and Carrie Fisher look like extras from Aeon Flux! Fistfight with Boba Fett! He's riding a sea monster!

Edit: Twenty-two minutes. Bea Arthur is a bartender as Mos Eisley Cantina. And a lounge singer. This isn't happening to me. Dear God, this isn't happening to me.

For quite a few years, I wasn't interested in real-time strategy games. Sure, Command and Conquer was cool, but eventually everything started to look like variations on a theme. Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth was what brought me back to the fold. It discarded certain inappropriate conventions of the genre and twisted the entire gaming experience towards a single goal: achieving awesome cinematic moments reminiscent of the LotR movies. It succeeded, and for that I will always love it.

Star Wars: Empire At War is a game that succeeds in the same way. Forget, for a moment, all the hairsplitting details. This is a game that allows me to wage pitched space battles against the Empire while orbiting above strategic moons. Admiral Akbar can cry 'Concentrate fire!' at critical moments, directing entire swarms of X-Wings at key hardpoints on an approaching Star Destroyer. Obi-Wan Kenobi can sacrifice himself heroically to hold off Darth Vader. Chewbacca can hotwire and steal AT-STs. The Death Star is a playable unit. Seriously, what isn't there to like? Not much.

Gameplay revolves around a clean spacey-looking galactic map. Garrisoning troops, building spacecrraft, launching invasions of enemy-held moons, and so on all happen at that high level. Once you've built up a fleet, you can sling it from planet to planet until it meets resistance, triggering a real-time space battle. Unlike most RTS games, it's impossible to build new units while you're in combat. You prepare your forces during the lulls, and find out how well you've done when combat commences. If you're victorious in orbit, you can send down a first wave of transports to launch a land battle. Capturing key points around the map lets you pull down additional reinforcements from your orbital fleet, but the no-new-units-in-combat rule holds true. If you come to a fight with a weak mix of forces, there's no way to recover save retreat.

The three modes -- map-based resource allocation and fleet-building, real-time space combat, and real-time ground combat -- make an interesting mix. In addition, whenever a battle is initiated it's possible to auto-resolve the conflict. Rather than sloging through a fight yourself, the computer can skim the statistics for the two warring fleets or armies and figure out who'll come out on top. If all the battles are skipped, Empire At War actually reminds me of old galactic conquest sims from my early gaming days.

After playing, though, it's not the tweaky details that stand out. It's stuff like 'The Millenium Falcon chasing down a Tie Fighter while Chewbacca growls victoriously.' It's a good season for geeks, I think. Even though the latest Star Wars movies were cringe-laden franchise-milking, the games hitting the market capture the fun I remember from the first three films. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to take down some AT-ATs...