I lost the will to live Friday. Nothing suicidal, just the atypical malaise of “nothing matters and nothing we do matters” that renders you worthless in terms of ability and productivity. So I redownloaded 2005’s Star Wars: Battlefront II.
To the layman, Battlefront II is ungoogleable because it shares its name with the unfortunate 2017’s spit-in-the-face-to-fans Star Wars: Battlefront II by triple A studio EA. That game marks a turning point in the video game hobby as a whole, so mired with paywalls and lootboxes that EA’s attempted damage control of the community response to the game is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most downvoted comments in Reddit history. Meanwhile, 2005’s Battlefront II stands as an inimitably playable game even in the modern day, capturing that rare feeling shared by Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge or a live symphonic performance of A New Hope, in which you feel like you are actually the hero in a Star Wars story.
I’m getting fat. I can feel it in my stomach, stretching, more skin there than there ought to be. Arteries and veins clogging from layer after layer of grease. Once a day or so, I get pins and needles in my hands or fingers. It could just be carpal tunnel from my office job, but I always think of pre-diabetes. I’m getting married in less than eight months, and I’m worried that I’ll be fatter on my wedding day than I ever have been before.
Star Wars: Battlefront II 2005 isn’t much of a test of skill. At its hardest level of difficulty, the NPC enemies will still get caught on corners, stare at you unmoving while you shoot them in the face, and swarm the map with less strategy than ants. The game is set up in the player’s favor, with award weapons and status boosts being granted along with kill streaks and points achieved so that the game only becomes easier the more you play it. I think that this all lends itself to the feeling of the Force, of the mysticism of Star Wars, where one jedi really is worth a thousand battle droids, and there’s no real question of who will win in a fight when the fight is between the protagonist and a villain. It’s a space western, and everyone knows that the man in the white hat will come forward. This is a feature of playing, not a bug.
It might be the coffee. For the sake of saving money for the wedding (every penny counts, I tell myself), I’ve swapped from using sugar free creamer to whole milk. This saves some money at the cost of a much bitterer, less pleasant experience. After looking at the ingredient labels though, it also seems to come at the cost of more calories. I drink lots of coffee, two to four cups a day. It’s a neurotoxin vice I allow myself to get through the work day. A drug I pay my own money for at the grocery store so I can better produce profits for someone else.
I also suspect the canola oil. I didn’t used to use cooking oil at all, using a teflon pan to make my eggs every morning, but I read that teflon is bad for the environment and poisoning its factory workers in developing nations, so I tried a nonstick that doesn’t use teflon, hoping it’ll lessen the chance I get cancer by half a degree or so. The thing is the damn pan isn’t non-stick, you have to coat the whole surface with cooking oil if you want your omelette or frittata to slide out of the pan. Oil has tons of calories, it’s like ground up seeds squeezed out of all of the strength needed to grow thousands of plants and then packaged in a plastic vat on sale for five dollars. I could just not use the oil and then scrape my eggs off the pan further damaging it’s nonstick qualities, or I could go back to teflon and further poison the environment and myself, or I could try using a cast iron or other kitchen appliance, but every choice seems to have its drawback, physical or ethical.
I booted up Galactic Conquest, a mode in which you take control of a fleet and battle across all of the most famous Star Wars planets in the prequel and sequel trilogies, and I beat the game without losing a single battle in about three hours. By the time I won (and gone on a 1 hour walk in the snow) I had begun to forget that I was supposed to be moping about the cruelty of inequity and the inevitability of senseless bloodshed, and I was instead having fun. An improvement.
I may have beaten the game on its hardest setting in what amounted to a cake walk, but I certainly wasn’t perfect. I was gunned down, blown up by a lucky thermal detonator, or sniped by an assassin droid in the open waters of Kashyyyk. I wanted more from Battlefront, I wanted to invent my own story. What would the war be like through the eyes of a single soldier, living through every battle, conquering the whole galaxy? What would happen if I reset the game every single time that I died, so that there would be a facsimile of a narrative, of a war hero who lived through every single battle in the major Star Wars canon?
I go running two to three times a week, but it’s not enough. I’ve been trying to drop under two hundred pounds for ten years. I’m not obese, I’m physically capable, but I’m in my twenties, what ought to be (what still might be, god forbid) the prime peak of my physicality. If I’m this weak, this sluggardly now, won’t it only get harder and harder as the years go on? If I get to see the years go on?
People say that running makes you feel better, that it expels emotions. They’re lying. Running doesn’t expel emotions, it blows them up exponentially. When I’m angry before my run, I’m fuming during it, and drained afterwards. The dog walkers are the worst. Probably 80% of the dogs you come across while running are well trained, but the other dogs will try and chase you, bark at you, I’ve been bit multiple times. When I’m fuming, and the dog snaps at me, I’ve taken to yelling at the owners. “Train your dog!” the sweaty, overweight, needs-a-haircut man shouts as he huffs past people at 7 MPH. Sometimes I wonder if the dog actually chased me, if it broke off its leash and tried, really tried, to kill me, could it? I think it might depend on if I stretched that morning or not.
It was fun, challenging myself in a decades-old game. I started thinking about the game completely differently. Instead of running out guns blazing trying to capture as many command posts as possible to win battles as quickly as possible, I had to prioritize survival at all costs. Even if we lost all but one control point, and all reinforcements, I found that I could still win the game if I played painstakingly methodically. The enemy AI is stupid, and infantry troops are as squishy as jello, so a good hiding spot and medical droid meant that I could reliably fight my way through most battles. The biggest difference in how I played was how I treated enemy vehicles.
The tanks. Chicken walkers. AT-STs. These behemoths that could kill me in one or two shots had me cowering behind cover as if I were some footsoldier seeing an Oliphaunt for the first time in Return of the King. I had elected to play as a sniper for the entirety of my challenge, which left me with incredible killing potential of infantry but only two measly thermal detonators for vehicles in my spawn kit. Destroying these things was a war of attrition, including daring dashes to pick up ammo boxes out in the open, and lobbing grenades from far away nestled between cover and a gonk droid.
I hope I live to my eighties. I hope I get and stay happily married my whole life. I hope I don’t spend so much of it worrying like I do now every time a sharp pain streaks across my chest of its own accord.
Perma death made Battlefront absolutely riveting, made my eyes stretch wide so I was taking in every inch of the screen, shaking when trying to snipe stormtroopers from their cannon perches on IFT-Ts. It made victory so much sweeter, and roleplayed out the story of this lone sniper fighting through the war.
Star Wars: Battlefront II occasionally goes on sale for only $5 on steam. It’s well worth your money, 5 stars.
