Super Vader Bros.?

Even for a big gaming year with a handful of titles crawling out of their parents basements and making it mainstream (World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero and Madden's usual fall dominance) Star Wars products had a pretty good year.

Taking three of the top ten best-selling games, Lucas Arts all but flooded the market with games running the gamut from the usual first-person shooter mode to what amounted to SimGalaxy with far-reaching intergalactic war games. Nice job, Lucas Arts.

Gamespot is now reporting that a Darth Vader game is in the works to cover the time missing between the old and new trilogies. This isn't such a bad thing, considering how well the production company has done over the years, both in its Star Wars spinoffs and other titles.

In the 90s, they helped lead the way in story-based, puzzle-solving titles with good plots and writing. While this sounds incredibly geek-centric, it really marked a departure from the usual shoot em ups and introduced Day of the Tentacle, The Dig and Sam and Max Hit the Road, an underrated, but phenomenal video game from the mid-90s.

Lucas Arts releases were an event for gamers and the nice thing was that the games would last forever because the puzzle sets weren't cakewalks. (Maybe we were jst dumb kids, in retrospect, but there's your endorsement - Lucas Arts, it'll keep dumb kids busy for hours!) From there, the Star Wars franchise followed on the heels of flying games with Jedi-based games and that leads us into their current lineups.

With those elements in place and a history for releasing quality games, I think this might be a better move than actually releasing a movie, juding by the disasters that the first two movies of the new trilogy were. Let's face it, Episode III wasn't much to write home about either, just better than the hogs that came before it.

Open-ended Vader-based combat? Sweeeeeet.

(Photo from indymedia.com)