Remember when you first got Jedi Academy and you jumped into the multiplayer and hit up a few servers and had a blast just whaling on dudes with your lightsaber and backflipping all over the place because WOW YOURE A JEDI NOW and you loved it? Remember that day when you finally got to play the swordfighting video game you had been dreaming of all your life? That was a good feeling.

Now you're in your mid thirties, unmarried and childless, with a career that isn't really going anywhere. It's Friday night and, if you were back in your college days, you'd be at a party, drinking cheap beer on the floor of your best friend's furnitureless apartment, maybe feeling up that chubby but cute girl whose been sending you messages on Friendster. But you're not back in college, you're middle-aged and sitting at your computer looking to download a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ video game to play because THIS IS WHAT YOUR LIFE HAS LED TO: FILLING YOUR MINUTES WITH DISTRACTIONS TO PAD OUT THE HOURS BETWEEN THE TIMES YOU GET TO SLEEP.

So you download Blade Symphony, thinking that you'll get to relive the awesomeness that you felt when you first became a Jedi in Star Wars: Jedi Warrior Jedi Academy. And you know what? You do relive that awesomeness.

For fifteen or twenty minutes, anyway. Then it dawns on you why first/third person swordfighting games always devolve into these super-serious multiplayer servers with very strict rules and Bushido codes where the admins kick anybody who doesn't stick to 1v1s. That reason is because only 15 year olds enjoy playing on a server where it's a free for all and everybody just runs around whaling on everybody else, and you can only be fifteen for so long. Eventually you have to either quit the game and play something more engaging, or you have to join one of these tryhard swordfighter servers to breathe fresh life into the game.

I give this game a thumbs up because for those first fifteen minutes I didn't feel like a middle-aged man playing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ video games on a Friday night in my tiny loft apartment.