I write this with a heavy heart.

I never played battlefront 1, so having that as part of the collection was nothing but a plus for me but if it had anything wrong with it compared to the original I wouldn't know. 1 is very basic. Its story mode is very barebones, its just a bot match with a slide, a character telling you your mission and maybe movie footage before it. Before I installed the update the movie cutscenes that were really low quality, maybe 360p at best. The update fixed it but the videos were choppy a lot of the time. That same update REMOVED the option to invert the Y axis and also corrupted my saves in both titles. In BF1 I was about 3 story mission in and 2 I just booted to check the menu since I wanted to play while it downloaded. Aspyr you are something else.

Battlefront 2 is one of my favorite and most played ps2 games and I'm happy that I seemed to reacclimate well. Also it has the real menu unlike that awful, lazy concept art that the originl pc version has which I checked last week. The movie cutscenes are also still here unlike in the pc version which again, I check last week, and wern't as choppy as in 1. So as for as I'm concerned this is a better version in that regard natively. Battlefront 2 also seemed like it had more work put into it when it came to the texture upscaling cuz it blew 1 out of the water but it has that issue where using a scope to zoom is still 4:3. Its not all sunshine and rainbows though. Just like Battlefront 1 there is no ability to invert aim despite it being in the older versions which I put in my ps2 to check. Some of the cutscenes cut off early despite me not pressing a button and the last cutscene on hoth didn't even have sound. Also the post mission 501st journals did not exist so I missed out on one of my favorite ones for post Felucia. Some of the heroes voice lines when you are able to play as them are cut off, usually the sith's "what is your bidding" is cut off. Right before I sat down to finish writing this I had the sound die on the main menu as well. I tested it after and its reproducible after leaving instant action. Aspyr might be some of the most inept devs I've ever seen. No wonder you were kicked off the kotor remake and couldnt get the restored content dlc for the switch port of kotor 2 dsepite it being part of your marketing campaign if you can't do something as simple as keep fucking cutscenes in games. They're also too stupid to compress cuz the game was 25gb, and there was zero reason they should have been. Not as bad as on pc where there game is 50.

One of the reasons I was interested in this collection was because it has the content from the xbox release I never had cuz I was a ps2 boy. Kit Fisto and Assaj Ventress were in Renegade Squadron so I got to play them there but never in BF2 proper. Kit was cool with his force ball but I found his moveset to be unwieldy and Ventress had this dual saber connected with a chain with throwing stars. I remember seeing claims that these versions of the characters were a stolen mod and I'd believe it. They don't even have voice lines. The maps were just maps from battlefront 1, I thought they were gonna be wholly new. Assault on all maps ended up being what I thought, force pushing people into pits. Assault on every map is still cool don't get me wrong but I was always sure there was a reason it was only on Mos Eisley.

I had no intention of playing the multiplayer initially as I couldn't give less of a shit about it but with all the complaints about it so I went to see for myself. I booted it up at 9 am on a Thursday and saw several full 64 player matches and many others with 50+. I counted 30 dedicated aspyr server choices among the player created matches. Tried 2 of the 64 player, my internet is comcast bad so it was pretty laggy even wired but hits were registering as I was getting kills and respawning worked. A 30 player lobby had less lag but still there. Whenever someone says something is unplayable, we should all know by now that they don't know what the word means.

This should have been a slam dunk, and EASY slam dunk. Battlefront 2 is still VERY fun to me and the new stuff, new to me damnit, freshened up a game I had over 100 hours in back in the day. However its just all around sloppy in presentation and every mistake the game makes reeks of not caring. Make no mistake, I'll be booting this one up for some splitscreen fun every now and again, but with how stacked the beginning of this year has been and how it WILL be later on, there are better things I can spend my time on like getting a dlc character ready for shadow of the erdtree. I would hope these issues get fixed but as far as I'm concerned its too little to late. You're a joke and a liar aspyr, you deserve the star wars license as much as EA does. Which is not at all.

Damn I despise aspyr. How do you fuck it up so bad?