David - A forced post

It has been brought to my attention (numerous times) by my fellow blogees that I have done little in the way of post recently - and by recently I mean ever. Standard reasons of ‘lack of time’ apply, but they do have a point. Therefore in order to postpone getting my face angrily scratched off the title banner I decided to do a bit of belated researching into LucasArts’ upcoming “Star Wars: The Force Unleased”.

It’s being developed by Krome Studios who have worked on, amongst others, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and Barbie Sparkling Ice Show. It uses Digital Molecular Matter and Euphoria which are both stunning - seriously, go to ‘game info’ then ‘tech info’ on the website and watch the demos if you haven’t already. Graphically (as if that matters anymore) its rather nice. Also the slogan is “Kicking ass with the Force”, so we have a nice bunch of force powers to play with too.

One point where this game may fall down (and you know the rule about Star Wars games - for every good one there’s three awful ones) is the plot. The game’s supposed to span the time between the end of Episode III and start of Episode IV, and supposedly “unveil new revelations about the Star Wars galaxy”. For starters I was fairly sure that the Imperial Army didn’t employ women, yet we have a female fighter pilot love interest for the main character. To be honest I haven’t quite obtained the level of geekiness to go and check that fact, so maybe you shouldn’t take my word for it. Still, I can’t quite see where all the story will fit in between the Force pushing, lightninging and other ragdoll making effects. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

There was one interesting fact I gleaned from the game trailer that I haven’t seen in any LucasArts press releases. In it we see “The Secret Apprentice” as the main character is called, bringing down a Star Destroyer with the Force (I like to think of it as thumbing a lift gone horribly wrong). At this point I wondered, as I am prone to do when I have more important things I should be doing, what reason could he have for crashing such an expensive piece of kit? To answer this one we have to take a screencap or two and break out the graphics packages. If you’re allergic to mathematical humour feel free to skip on down.

First draw blue lines along the gangway to find the vanishing point and horizon of the picture.

Next draw a red line for the height of the Apprentice, and two purple lines connected to the vanishing point. This gives the height of the apprentice as/if he were to walk into the distance.

Now draw a line for the base of the Star Destroyer in green, and from this find the yellow line, which is the height of the Apprentice if he were standing right next to the Star Destroyer.

Going back a bit in the video, we can see that the distance from the base of the star destroyer to that ridge-vent-thingy is about 4 Apprentices high. 1 blue bar = 4 yellow bars = 4 Apprentices tall.

Pulling back further we can see that the entire nose of the Star Destroyer is about 10 and a half blue bars high, which means it clocks in at around 42 Apprentices standing on each other’s shoulders. Represent this distance with a red bar.

Pulling right out to a full scale Star Destroyer, we can see that its 44 red bars long (probably more than that due to perspective), which means 44 x 42 Apprentices = 1848 Apprentices lying end to end. According to Wookieepedia (a website I swear I did not know the existence of before starting this post) and several other sources, your Imperial Star Destroyer measures in at approximately 1600 meters long, which means the Secret Apprentice is less than 0.87 meters tall.

It could be a different Star Destroyer class that runs foul of Mr Apprentice, but aside from Super Star Destroyers (which it isn’t), most are smaller so the Apprentice could be even shorter than that.

That’s a bit over the height of Yoda, and less than half the height of Obiwan. Now we know why Secret there has anger issues. Its going to make an interesting gameplay feature.

Disclaimer - If you read any of that seriously, and are at this minute composing an angry letter to either Mr Lucas or myself, may I suggest you first seek help then post a comment instead, so everyone can read it. It saves on stamps.
To Joe and Ian - There, you can get off my back for another couple of weeks. Besides, if I keep posting like this we’ll be out of image storage space before the month is out.

~ by OneDollar on May 7, 2008.