SAN FRANCISCO – Levitating stormtroopers and flinging them into space? Smashing TIE fighter craft together using nothing but the power of the Force? Why hasn't there ever been a Star Wars game like this before?

This September will mark the long-awaited rollout of The Force Unleashed, LucasArts' suite of Star Wars videogames set between episodes III and IV. Much like Shadows of the Empire a decade ago,Unleashed is a multimedia project that will be officially entered into Star Wars canon, with novels, comics and a line of action figures.

But this time around, the games are clearly the centerpiece. A version of the game will be released for every platform of significance: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, PS2, PSP and Nintendo DS. Last week, at the Lucas campus in San Francisco's Presidio, I got some extensive hands-on time with the three major versions of the game. Star Wars fans will get a solid Force Unleashed experience no matter which console they have, but if you own every game machine, there's one version that looks like a clear winner.

I started off playing the Xbox 360 version of the game, pictured above. (The PS3 version is identical.) This is the lead platform with the full Unleashed experience that LucasArts has been toiling away on for years. At E3 2006, company representatives showed us their initial work on simulating a variety of different real-world materials, from metal to wood, and how they could realistically deform or shatter them. This became the basis for Force Unleashed's gameplay, which is centered around using the Force to wreak havoc on people, things and environments to destroy them in grand ways.

I don't know much about Star Wars, but I do know that if you want your game to star a Force user who just goes around destroying people and things willy-nilly, that person cannot be a Jedi. Thus, you're playing as a Sith: an apprentice being trained in secret by Darth Vader (which conveniently explains why we have never heard of the character before).

The games' opening moments actually put you in the shoes of Vader himself as he invades the Wookiees' home world, which I assume is called something like Nyaaaaaaaaaaargh, looking for a rogue Jedi who escaped the Jedicide at the end of the last movie. Not only does this set up the plot and the discovery of Secret Apprentice, it lets you play as a fully maxed-out character who can destroy just about anything with great ease. So for the first 20 minutes or so, you're flinging Wookiees off bridges, throwing trees on them and just generally being a huge asshole. At first it's kind of sad hearing their plaintive cries of death, but then it becomes fun to see how far you can throw them.

Holding down the right trigger button lets you Force-grab something. Once it's up in the air, you use the left analog stick to move it forward, backward, left and right, and the right stick to move it up and down. Throwing things is as easy as holding the stick in the direction you want to throw and letting go of the trigger. It takes a bit of getting used to, but the Vader section is designed to let you play around and experiment.

Of course, you've got plenty of other options. You can engage every enemy with your lightsaber or Force-push them away. This move can be charged up to unleash even greater destructive power – at one point, the Lucas rep told me to stand in front of a massive covered bridge filled with Wookiees and charge up a Force push. I did, and the resultant wave of blue energy went straight down the bridge, flinging Chewbaccas into the ravine on either side and ruining the entire top of the structure. There's quite a bit of scenery that you cannot destroy, and for good reason: You can't ruin the bridge and make it impossible for yourself to get across and finish the level, for example.

But this illustrates just how powerful your main character can eventually become. When you finish out the Vader section and begin with the apprentice, he's got a wide variety of powers already but lots of room for improvement. From that point, things progress pretty much in the style of a God of War game: You plow through level after level of enemies, making things explode and gaining experience orbs that you can apply to a variety of different abilities and powers. You can make your Force push more awesome, or add new moves to your lightsaberlike Saber Sling, which lets you home-run enemies by swinging it like a bat.

Side missions in each level will let you gather more experience orbs. For example, when you enter a hangar on which TIE fighters are suspended from the ceiling, you can destroy them by grabbing onto them and smashing them into each other. Destroy five and you're rewarded. And it's not all about wanton destruction, as you'll need to solve some minor puzzles with the use of the Force to progress – pulling platforms out so you can stand on them, for example, or shutting off force fields by pulling the giant batteries straight out of the generator that powers them. (You can then, of course, take said giant battery and throw it into a person or a TIE fighter or whatever to cause a huge explosion.)

The first two levels in Force Unleashed are filled with humorous moments, both scripted and impromptu. Picking up stormtroopers just to torture them is great fun, especially when they grab at things (like another stormtrooper) in an attempt to stay on the ground, and then you're playing Barrel of Monkeys with them. The cinema scenes in between levels are well done, especially the one where you meet your homicidal robot partner and new pilot. (Vader, you tell her, killed the last seven pilots.)

If you own an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, that is where you'll want to play Force Unleashed. It's the grandest representation of the original vision for the game. The next game down the list, the version for Wii, PlayStation 2 and PSP, looks like a solid, fun version. The story is identical, although the telling is different: The graphics, levels, environments, cinematic scenes and voiceover work were all created especially for this version of the game, so it's a noticeably different experience – perfect if you're a crazy Star Wars fan who just has to play through every single different version.

Given the lesser powers of PS2 and Wii, what your characters can do in this version has been scaled back: You have a lesser range of motion when you move things around with the Force, and the general sense of ruining the living hell out of everything isn't nearly as impressive.

The Wii version, which I played, makes use of a lot of motion control, although for the most part it's just swapping out button presses for gestural inputs. Shaking the Wiimote swings your lightsaber, but it doesn't matter how hard you shake it or in which direction. Thrusting forward with the Nunchuk executes a Force push – a clever idea, but again it's just a replacement for a button press.

One exception is shown above: When you get into a lightsaber lock with an opponent, you'll play a little minigame where you have to twist the Wiimote around to match up with the onscreen indicator to successfully parry an attack. This is cool, but with Steven Spielberg's game Boom Blox illustrating just how much fun it is to manipulate objects in 3-D space with the Wiimote, it's disappointing (if economically understandable) that the Wii version wasn't created from the ground up with motion control at the center of the game design.

One thing that the Wii version does feature that other versions do not is a two-player duel mode in which all manner of characters from the series' history can square off in some very, very non-canon battles.



Finally, there's the Nintendo DS version of the game (right). While the DS game has of course been scaled back even more (looking more like Shadows of the Empire than anything), the story is the same, and things still begin with Darth Vader invading a miniature version of Wookieestan.

While I haven't played nearly enough of this version to judge, I'm not sure whether I like the direction they took with the controls. The touchscreen (right) is filled with icons that represent the different actions you can take (clockwise from top): lightsaber throw, force lightning, lightsaber swing, grab and push.

Instead of just assigning these six different attacks to the DS' six different buttons, the game designers force you to use the stylus and tap the moves you want to use. You can actually drag the stylus across two different icons to create combo attacks, which is an interesting idea – but again, couldn't this have been done with buttons?

My initial misgivings about the control scheme aside, the DS version of Force Unleashed is pretty fun. There are plenty of stylus-based mini-games, like one where you have to drag little balls of ... of Force or something ... into a vortex to power up a massive move for Vader, and the "saber lock" minigame as seen in the Wii version becomes something a bit more meaty here, where you have to drag your lightsaber around in a circle and keep it perpendicular to your opponent's for a set amount of time to break the lock in your favor.

Whatever game system you're stuck with, there will be a version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed designed – to a certain extent, at least – with your best interests in mind. Every version lands Sept. 16 in North America.

Images: LucasArts

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