You weren't born with a lightsaber in your hands. Even a Jedi Knight must practice his skills. Two Jedi are safely tucked away behind deflector shields, while an automatic seeker ball roams the center of a large chamber. You can use the Force to influence the seeker to attack your opponent, and you can deflect the seeker's laser bolts when your opponent does the same to you. And every once in a while, the seeker goes into berzerk mode, firing multiple bolts at both contestants, pummeling their shields until one or both are defenseless. (Parker Brothers, 1983)

Easily the strangest of Parker Bros.' Star Wars-inspired games for the 2600, I have to give Jedi Arena full marks for originality - instead of trying to ape a scene from any of the films in a convoluted game structure, Parker Brothers instead opted to create a completely new scenario, based only loosely on Luke's training scene with the seeker ball in Star Wars. And in a strange way, it works. It was the first video game set in the Star Wars universe that didn't necessarily fit into one of the movies. It was also one of the last Atari 2600 games to use the paddle controllers.

Rating:  Two quarters - worth playing, but could use some more work.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster