User Reviews

Jedi Arena was the fourth Star Wars game ever made. It was launched to Atari 2600.The rules were simple.Someone shoots a Seeker into his/her opponent, then the opponent reflects the missile with a light saber.Then the game transforms into a tennis game. The game's graphics were simple, but goo for the Atari 2600. The game had a bad sound. The controls were extremely easy(Only uses the joystick and the action button). The game wasn't so cool for 1-p mode, but it was better in a Multiplayer combat Mode. Jedi Arena is a cool game, only good if you have another controller. My scores:

GRAPHICS-8/10 SOUND-4/10 GAMEPLAY-10/10 FUN FACTOR-8/10

My overalls: 7.5/10.

One of the largest icons of the Star Wars franchise is the lightsaber, the weapon held by every epical Jedi. It fascinated most adults and children, but divided the two groups on how they would like to experience it. Toy replicas exist, but our childly ability to pretend already has or will have diminished by adulthood. It was not until 1983 that Parker Brothers, the developer of the marvelous The Empire Strikes Back, allowed the public to start swinging the weapon in video games, meaning anyone could fight like a Jedi ... somewhat. Star Wars: Jedi Arena has us defending ourselves from a training remote and using our lightsabers to aim the ever-moving floating ball towards and fire at our opponents. You read that right; if that did not sound awkward, this game was based on one scene in A New Hope where Luke Skywalker deflects lasers from a hovering remote on board the Millennium Falcon.

In Star Wars: Jedi Arena, two trainees stand face-to-face on opposite vertical sides of the screen. The two are protected by a force field composed of three rows of simple bricks that each can be struck down with a single laser projecting from a training remote that constantly moves side to side in erratic ways. The goal is to win a total of three rounds, each by striking the opponent's rectangle once with a laser bolt. It is an arcade game that is reminiscent of Atari's Warlords, but it is more sophisticated than it probably ought to be. There are two controls: a paddle and a button. The paddle controls how the player character holds their lightsaber, and is used to absorb the remote's lasers. By "absorb", I do mean it; they simply stop dead in their tracks for a split second without bouncing off the blades, *sarcastically* just like the movies. The button is a different story. It instructs the training remote to fire lasers towards one's opponent's side. The paddle is used to control one's lasers' direction, which matches the angle of their lightsaber's blade. One thus has to defend their own rectangle, aim and fire at their opponent's, and always alternate between them.

I must disclaim that I used an Atari emulator called Stella to play the ROM. I used a computer mouse to swing my lightsaber, and I probably could have performed better by using a paddle-like controller or even something as simple as a slider, but as long as I can competently test games, what do I care?

Anyway, it is important to know that Jedi Arena is both a single-player and multiplayer video game, so the second player may be a computer or another human. The second important thing to know are four variations of playing. The first three variations control the training remote's speed from slow to fast, and if played in single-player mode also affect the AI's attack rate and defense dexterity. The fourth is rather interesting; it plays like the "medium" speed setting, except that the remote is invisible, so the human players will have to fire its lasers to know its precise location. The AI has the advantage of always knowing where the remote is, as if the game were played on medium. Quite crafty it is, but another important feature to know is that moving the difficulty switches on the Atari 2600 helps or handicaps the corresponding player's force field, where position B adds a fourth row of bricks to the force field and position A removes it. Being an arcade game, it does add one further element that ascertains that no match lasts forever. Here, the training remote charges up and will charge slightly faster the less it is used, and once it has fully charged up, it will sporadically fire lasers towards the two Jedi in random directions. It is also noteworthy that the player can fire only one laser at a time and that blocking the other's lasers very momentarily disables that player's ability to fire further lasers, so one cannot rapidly fire lasers at the opponent's lightsaber, adding an element of strategy. The computer difficulty is genuine for any arcade game. Easy is fairly easy, but hard is hard enough that while I could not defeat my ridiculously fast and careful opponent, I did manage to win a single round the entire time I tested it, meaning that it is possible to defeat it. "Invisible" is also beatable, as I was able to flawless beat the AI on my second try.

All of this makes Jedi Arena a playable, fast, and potentially promising game, and the introduction of lightsabers ought to hype the expectations. Sadly, the quality goes in a downward spiral from that point on. I think we all can relate to the fact that Atari 2600 has suffered technical limitations by 1983's standards. Since its release in 1977, one can find a handful of games made for newer consoles and computers featuring better technology. They were sharper and more colorful, and we could hear more than just primitive sound effects such as BEEP-BEEPs, DOOT-DOOTs, and sequences thereof. Thus, Jedi Arena probably would have looked a little better on a Commodore 64 or even a PC running on MS-DOS, and while I do not think Atari 2600 was the best system selection because of its dated technology, it is not necessarily Jedi Arena's fault that the graphics do not stand out, now is it? Actually, it is. The technological advances during that year's six-year timespan were only modest, rather than drastic. The graphics look just as good as the year when personal computers almost obliterated the console industry--that's right, the North American console crash of the very same year Jedi Arena was released in. The arena itself is a wide oval whose walls simply lit up whenever the training remote's lasers strike them. On opposite vertical sides of the screen are two generic human sprites in their rectangles defended by three layers of wall bricks that are destroyed by the seeker droid's lasers. While the Star Wars game is considered the first to use lightsabers, the "lightsabers" held by the two humans are more than curious. Anyone can easily make an adult joke out of them, but crass humor is not in the spirit of my writing family-family reviews (besides, I doubt IMDb tolerates that type of reviews anyway). To keep it family-friendly, the lightsabers look like giant phosphorescent bendy straws made specifically for the sarlacc species. The two humans are holding the top part with one hand and turning the main part with the other. There is no way the blade of a real lightsaber could curve outside its straight path. The only thing that I can say looks "remote" from dull is the training ball. Rather yellow than white for a remote, the details drastically different and a little two wide for a true sphere, it does have a lovely appearance of spinning and will spin faster as it charges up. The sound effects are average, and while they are easy to understand and may serve as correspondents to visuals we do not have time to look for (e.g. we know our wall is hit when we hear a low-pitched DOOT sound and theirs with a higher-pitched one), they will simply fly by one's head by tomorrow.

Also, have you seen the gameplay of Jedi Arena? I feel that my feelings against it can never be expressed in fewer than ten thousand words, especially since images of it will suffice, but unfortunately as a critic, I must analyze my feelings about the bizarre nature of the game as concisely as possible. What it is supposed to be I doubt that even Parker Brothers could retrospectively answer. I think the development team became impatient as they were stuck in phase one, trying to figure out what to do with two competing Jedi, each holding a lightsaber, and a floating ball. They probably thought they would find out as they rushed to phase two, but they would be wrong. It comes out apparently being based on Warlords with regards to gameplay, and from there on, it also improvises what to do with the training ball. The result is that the same paddle controllers have the double function of aiming at the opponents. As strange as that sounds, come to think of it, I think those lightsabers are not giant bendy straws after all; they may be pointing devices controlling the remote's weapons. The idea is bland, and the double functions of attacking and defending at the same time do not transition well. And placing two players on two vertical rather than horizontal sides where the top has reversed controls is not a good design choice. It does not truly make the game balanced to switch sides every time a round is completed, especially since the first player (who appears at the bottom of the screen and without reversed controls) is one round ahead of the second in that regard. I do not blame anyone at all for tilting their televisions or monitors sideways to fix that problem. I cannot grab myself into calling the game Star Wars-themed, where the only thing that bears resemblance to the franchise is the few-second introduction music based on the theme song. It is simply branded it so that the scanty rest is left to our imagination.

VERDICT: It is hard to see how Star Wars: Jedi Arena could have turned out for the best. For me, it could have simplified the controls to just the lightsabers, and the ball would simply be firing bouncy lasers towards the opponents. For what Star Wars is recognizable for, a game based on Luke's training remote was rather unexpected. I am not saying that its potential form would be outstanding for a Star Wars game, due to the lack of actual lightsaber combat, but something like that would have made for a fairly remarkable arcade game. We all know how the graphics should have happened. Concerning the redeemable qualities, I can say that it does meet all the criteria for a two-player arcade game: fast, competitive, and above all, functional. It does attempt to play as a quality sports-like game. It is just a bummer that Parker Brothers performed better with The Empire Strikes Back, which did play like a genuine Star Wars game for the Atari 2600. For what good there could be found, I give Star Wars: Jedi Arena 30%.