[I've got a bunch of oddities/outtakes that didn't make the final cut of our two-part chat with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed's lead producer Haden Blackman. So I'll be posting them here as the week goes along. Stay tuned. -jones]
Narcisse: I had some trouble with the Death Star area at the end. I finally got through it, but man, was it a tough go.
Blackman: The Death Star is a really tough area. There are two areas that always give me problems in the game. The Death Star and the Skyhook on Kashykk.
Narcisse: Oh yeah. I remember that.
Blackman: It's where you have to go around and pull out all those pins, and you've got the snipers up above and the Purge Troopers roaming around.
Narcisse: What were the big robots called?
Blackman: The Purge Troopers. They're relatives of the Dark Troopers. We actually wanted Dark Troopers [from Dark Forces] in the game, because we think they're cool. But the timeline is a little weird. So we redesigned them. The Purge Troopers are prototypes of the Dark Troopers.
And this doesn't exactly come across in the game... But it's something I talked about during concept sketches. Do you guys remember the movie The Black Hole? I know it's not the world's greatest movie or anything. But when I was a kid I enjoyed that movie alot. One of things that creeped me out is when you find out that the androids are actually people. There's this part of the movie where you see all these robots walking around this space station and you realize that they are lobotomized people. So we kind of said, "What if, literally, these guys [the Purge Troopers] were trapped inside their armor?" So when you kill them [in the game], they have this almost plaintive weird human groan when they die.
