The Greatest Star Wars Game You'll Never Play

If you've ever wanted to command a fleet of Star Destroyers as they bring freedom to the Galaxy by blowing up Rebel fighters, or take the role of an entree-based Rebel Commander and skillfully guide your fleet into yet another trap, this is the video game for you. Except it isn't, because you'll never get to play it.

Arthur Nishimoto's Fleet Commander was developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and runs on a 20-feet wide 16 megapixel LCD multi-touch wall.

The exceedingly kick ass looking multiplayer game, "explores how a real-time interactive strategy game that would typically rely on complex keyboard commands and mouse interactions be transferred into a multi-user, multi-touch environment."

Fleet Commander is able to use all of the Star Wars ships and sounds because it was made for a student project, which means none of us will ever get to play it.

Enjoy.

Via Topless Robot (via Kotaku).

Escape From Kamino

There are three things we love here in the Empire's PR Division: wasting company time on Facebook, Stormtroopers, and "sending other people to a better place".

Thankfully, after months of development, the unfortunate and unexpected demise of several Testtroopers and a minor setback involving a vat of weaponised silken tofu taking over the lab for a few days, our evil R&D team Activision have finally come up with an activity that involves doing all of those things at once: the Escape From Kamino application on Facebook.

Released in conjunction with the ridiculously good-looking-but-completely-unaffordable-on-an-evil-PR-team's-budget Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, Escape from Kamino allows you to control the recently-awakened Starkiller clone as he attempts to do what every audience member wanted to do during Kevin Costner's Waterworld: get the hell off a planet consisting almost entirely of water and wooden actors.

The 16 bit stylised side-scrolling game has the feel of a classic retro Star Wars game (think Super Star Wars on the SNES). There are lots of little nods to classic Star Wars games as well as the Star Wars universe as a whole, and though it's simple to play, it's fun, fast and hard to master.

As an added bonus, if you somehow get bored playing alone, you can kill challenge that annoying guy in the office friend you like to mastery of the Galaxy in 2-player mode. One player takes the role of Starkiller and the other mercilessly hunts him down as Boba Fett.

And a million fanboys just... shivered with excitement.

Check it out: http://apps.facebook.com/escapefromkamino/