Kyle Katarn, after he ditches the blaster for a more elegant weapon halfway through Jedi Outcast. | Aspyr

Patch bringing it back “in the coming weeks” say developers

I got some distressing news as I was trying out Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast on my PlayStation 4 last night: There’s no inverted y-axis aiming in this game! Also, my original Xbox is dead. But no y-axis?! Seriously, WTF!

Jedi Outcast hit the PlayStation Store (also Nintendo Switch eShop) yesterday for $9.99 and I gobbled it up pronto. But when I started playing, I realized Kyle Katarn wasn’t aiming his rifle the way God intended — and this is an important point because for the first half of the game, Katarn has renounced the Jedi ways and only uses a blaster. I remember playing the hell out of Jedi Outcast on Xbox back in 2004, and no way I would have stuck with some stupid control scheme where up is up and down is down. As if!

So I booted up my Xbox to see if the original copy had this option and, lo and behold, that old workhorse of a console croaked before my eyes. Meh, it was 15 years old at least, and I figured this day would come. Googling some terms to see if I was imagining things, I discovered that not only did Jedi Outcast originally have an inverted aim option, Aspyr for some reason left that out of the port. Peeved players rightly gave them an earful about it, and within a day, Aspyr was promising a title update would patch aim inversion back into the game.

“It should be available on both Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in the coming weeks,” Aspyr said.

Look, I am deadly serious about playing my action games with proper aim. I played the original Dark Forces on a Mac using a FlightStick Pro, and I used its stick hat for inverted aim. So you do not mess with my inverted look, especially in a Star Wars game.

Originally launching in 2002, this is the first appearance of Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast on a PlayStation platform. It came out on Xbox and GameCube then. For some reason, this re-release is avoiding Xbox now — and that’s an inverted look I can’t get behind. It’s only for PS4 and Nintendo Switch, and is $9.99.

As for my original Xbox … well, it sucks that I no longer have something to play Scarface: The World is Yours and Playboy: The Mansion. But at least it can free up some entertainment center space for the PS5 next year.

Source: Polygon