Star Wars: Bounty Hunter

Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is a 2002

Completing levels and capturing bounty targets rewards the player with credits, which can be used to unlock concept art. Each level has a secret feather, which unlock cards from the Star Wars Trading Card Game by Wizards of the Coast; if all feathers are found, bonus footage is unlocked. After every level, pages of the comic Open Seasons are unlocked for viewing, and after completing chapters, "blooper reels" for the cutscenes in that chapter are unlocked.^[2]

Plot

Ten years before

Jango journeys to Bogden's jungle moon Kohlma, the Bando Gora's secret headquarters, where he finds Montross waiting for him in front of Vosa's citadel. Jango defeats Montross and leaves him to be killed by the Bando Gora, refusing to give him a warrior's death. As he enters the citadel, Jango is captured and tortured by Vosa, until Wesell suddenly arrives to rescue him, getting herself injured in the process. After finally defeating Vosa, Darth Tyranus arrives and chokes her to death, before explaining to a stunned Jango that the bounty was merely a test to find someone worthy of becoming the genetic template for a clone army, and that Jango passed it. The bounty hunter agrees to be cloned but, in addition to his monetary reward, demands that he get to keep one unmodified clone for himself (thus honoring Rozatta's final wish). The game ends with Jango carrying the wounded Wesell to Slave I, while telling her not to push her luck when she asks to split the reward 50/50.

Development and release

Development of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter began when LucasArts was asked to make an Episode II-based game which featured the character, Jango Fett. In March 2001, game design documents were presented, and development began shortly after.^[3] The PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions of the game have different custom in-house graphics engines, each designed specifically to take advantage of the two platforms' unique strengths and work around their unique limitations, but the core game engine is identical. In the PS2 version, the developers took advantage of both vector unit (VU) chips to drive the graphics to maximum performance. The DMA bandwidth was taken advantage of to use a high number of textures. There is full-screen antialiasing and texture mip mapping support. The second VU1 chip was used to handle all the character skinning and VU0 to handle all the skeletal animation transforms. Which enabled dozens of characters to be on-screen without bogging down the frame rate. 10 individually optimized rendering loops were used on VU1 to speed up the rendering process. Their PS2 graphics engine could move 10,000,000 triangles per second, and adding the gameplay, collision, logic, textures, sound would go down accordingly to around 30,000 to 50,000 triangles per frame, all at an average frame rate of 30 frames per second.^[4]

In the GameCube version, developers took advantage of the system's fast CPU to achieve a higher frame rate, and added more polygons to characters, especially Jango, who has roughly twice the polygon count on GameCube. The GameCube's texture compression allowed them to use high-resolution textures. Texture compression also allowed for improved color variance on textures. MIP mapping support across the board on all textures helped provide a rich and consistent environment. Additional memory was exploited to improve load times. Projected shadows were implemented on all the characters and an increased draw distance to allow for vista views.^[4]

Level design began with what designer Michael Stuart Licht referred to as spatial studies. Design began with paper cut-outs of various rooms. Licht would rearrange these rooms until he found a design that he felt worked. The papers had design ideas written on them so that other developers could understand the overall flow of each level. Bubble diagrams were then created which represented main ideas for each space. This was followed by various stages of overview drawings and other drawing studies. The 3D level design began after such studies were completed.^[5] In-game cinematics were created by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and marked the first collaboration between LucasArts and ILM.^[6] Composer Jeremy Soule wrote music for the game, including both cutscenes and gameplay. The characters Jango Fett and Komari Vosa have their own leitmotifs.^[7] Both Temuera Morrison and Leeanna Walsman reprise their roles from Attack of the Clones as Jango Fett and Zam Wesell, respectively.^[8]

Production began in November 2000 when LucasArts was asked to make a game based on Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones featuring Jango Fett. The game design proposal was presented in March 2001, and development started soon after. Jon Knoles revealed in an interview that they wanted to develop Jango into the ideal action-based video game character and that he was to be exciting to watch and fun to play. Secondly, LucasArts wanted to develop a story that fleshed out Fett's character more fully than in Attack of the Clones, while at the same time remaining true to the spirit of his character as seen in the film. It was imperative to not dull the game with a slow story and leaden script; as such, their goal was to work a fine balance between backstory, narrative, and action-packed gameplay. Knoles said Jango Fett was developed to be an extension of the player's will, the ideal vessel through which the player could live out the fantasy of being the galaxy's most dangerous bounty hunter. His movement and animation blending system was designed to automatically react to other world objects and to never be unable to use his weapons or devices in any situation. The jetpack was originally designed to be used in areas specifically designed for its use. When the team got it working, they changed their minds and implemented a rechargeable timer on it so the player could use it anywhere for a limited time.^[4] At the most, the crew was over fifty people that were working on the game, excluding Industrial Light & Magic (ILM).^[9]

Concept artists looked to the team's favorite graphic novels for inspiration and the concept artwork by

Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound assisted in the creation of the game, which was the first collaboration between LucasArts and ILM in the field of in-game cinematics.^[10] Knoles said LucasArts and ILM learned a great deal from their cooperation, which allowed ILM to try new methods for creating scenes, as well as new tools and techniques. LucasArts provided ILM with models, textures, and a storyboarded script, and then applied their cinematic expertise in adapting the script into dynamic and visually stunning films. The sound designers of LucasArts and the sound designers at Skywalker Sound worked together to create the game soundtrack. Skywalker Sound made sounds directly for game animations and events, and created foley sounds.^[4]

The game was released in 2002 for PlayStation 2 in North America on November 22,^[11] and in Europe on December 6.^[12] It was released for the GameCube in North America on December 5,^[13] and in Europe the following year on February 7.^[14]

Reception

Bounty Hunter received average reviews. GameRankings and Metacritic gave it a score of 71.06% and 67 out of 100 for the GameCube version,^[15][17] and 69.26% and 65 out of 100 for the PlayStation 2 version.^[16][18]

Less impressed was GameSpot, who awarded the GameCube version 6.5 out of 10^[27] and the PS2 version 5.4.^[28] They found the technical issues of the game to be too significant; "Bounty Hunter suffers from an array of technical problems that have plagued other third-person action games. You can move the camera perspective using the right analog stick, but the camera will still cause you some major headaches when in tight corridors or when trying to draw a bead on a specific enemy. Often it'll automatically swivel to point you in entirely the wrong direction. Clipping and collision-detection issues also abound." They also criticized the graphics and the overall gameplay, concluding that "Star Wars Bounty Hunter may have all the basic ingredients needed for a solid third-person action game, but it falls flat in the execution and is far too often cumbersome, confusing, or in some other way un-fun to be recommendable on its own merits. Serious Star Wars aficionados should enjoy the game's story, but they'll be forced to slog through a lot of tedious action to see how it pans out."^[28]

References