Star Wars: Bounty Hunter

Gameplay

Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective. Players control Jango Fett, who has access to a wide array of weapons in the game, including his trademark blaster pistols, a flamethrower, poison darts, and jetpack-mounted missiles. They can use Jango's jetpack to fly and reach areas that are otherwise inaccessible, but it quickly runs out of fuel, which recharges automatically when the jetpack is not used; using the flamethrower also burns the jetpack's fuel. Additionally, Jango can use the scanner built into his helmet to identify individuals and see if they have a bounty on their head. He can then capture the individuals in question either dead, or alive, by immobilizing them with his whipcord thrower. When using the scanner, the game switches to a first-person perspective.

In-game, Jango can make use of his acrobatic abilities, somersaulting, and jumping to the side to backflipping to avoid enemies. He automatically targets enemies, and holding a certain button allows Jango to move around an enemy while keeping them targeted. If the player is using Jango's blaster pistols, up to two enemies can be targeted at the same time. There are also many pickups, powerups, and items to help along the way.

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.

Plot

Shortly after the Battle of Naboo, and ten years prior to the outbreak of the Clone Wars, the Sith Lord Darth Sidious orders his apprentice, Darth Tyranus, to eliminate his former pupil-turned-Dark Jedi Komari Vosa before she becomes a threat to Sidious' future plans. Vosa has become the leader of a crime syndicate called the Bando Gora, which grew immensely powerful through its trafficking of addictive "death sticks". Elsewhere, bounty hunter Jango Fett captures gangster Meeko Ghintee following a long pursuit through the Outland Station. After collecting the bounty on Meeko's head, Jango returns to his Toydarian friend Rozatta and is contracted by Tyranus with killing Vosa for 5,000,000 Republic credits.

Jango investigates the Bando Gora's death strick trafficking ring in the hopes of tracking down Vosa. On Coruscant, he captures and interrogates death stick dealer Jervis Gloom, who reveals his source to be a gangster named Groff Haugg. While investigating Haugg's processing plant, Jango runs into his longtime rival, Montross, who is also hunting Vosa and has killed Haugg via carbonite freezing after interrogating him for Vosa's whereabouts. Following a brief fight, Montross leaves to find Vosa, while Jango infiltrates the penthouse of Twi'lek Senator Connus Trell, who is also involved in the trafficking ring. Trell tells Jango to seek the Dug crime lord Sebolto on Malastare before being thrown to his death.

After escaping from a Republic gunship, Jango learns that Sebolto has put a 50,000 credits bounty on the head of his former employee Bendix Fust, who is incarcerated at the asteroid prison Oovo IV. Believing that capturing Fust will allow him to get close to Sebolto, Jango infiltrates the prison but finds that another bounty hunter, Zam Wesell, has beaten him to Fust. The two are forced to work together to escape from Oovo IV with Fust, and stage a riot to create a distraction. After Jango's beloved ship, Jaster's Legacy, is destroyed, he, Wesell, and Fust escape in another vessel, which Jango dubs Slave I. Meanwhile, Montross finds that Haugg gave him a false lead, but hears of the Oovo IV riot and, realizing it was Jango's doing, decides to follow him.

Jango delivers Fust to Sebolto on Malastare, but the crime lord quickly deduces Jango's true intentions and attempts to flee, only to fall to his death down a pipe leading into his death stick factory. Jango enters the factory and finds some Bando Gora members guarding a ship with Huttese markings on it, hinting at the Hutts' involvement in the death stick distribution ring. Montross ambushes Jango again, taunting him over his adoptive father's, Jaster Mereel, death and the disastrous Battle of Galidraan, where Jango's Mandalorian forces were slain by a Jedi ambush. Jango is defeated, but escapes with Wesell's help.

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. 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.

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.

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. In-game cinematics were created by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and marked the first collaboration between LucasArts and ILM. Composer Jeremy Soule wrote music for the game, including both cutscenes and gameplay. The characters Jango Fett and Komari Vosa have their own leitmotifs. Both Temuera Morrison and Leeanna Walsman reprise their roles from Attack of the Clones as Jango Fett and Zam Wesell, respectively.

Reception

Bounty Hunter received mixed reviews on Metacritic. PlayStation Official Magazine complimented the core shooting and production values but criticized its repetitive nature. IGN praised the graphics, sound, length and level designs, but they criticized the implementation of the bounty hunting system. In the end, however, they found the game to be one of the better Star Wars tie-in games. GameSpot was less impressed. They found the technical issues of the game to be too significant, including issues with the camera, clipping, and collision detection. They also criticized the graphics and the overall gameplay, concluding that it has "all the basic ingredients needed" but "falls flat in the execution".