I've been replaying through Republic Commando, and I'd like to raise a continuity issue that, has so far, gone unadressed.

The first couple of levels in the game are set on Geonosis, right at the offset of the Clone Wars. Delta Squad are tasked to eliminate Sun Fac, destroy a droid factory, take out a large anti-air emplacement and scuttle an escaping core ship. We follow RC-1138 right from being dropped in the Arena of Justice to being picked up from the side of an exploding Lucrehawk core. Great stuff.

This is, a few months earlier, in Karen Traviss' (brilliant) novel Hard Contact, we had the following scene in the introduction, told from the point of view of Darman, RC-1136:

We flatten ourselves against the cavern walls. It's all white light and painful noise and flying dust for a fraction of a second. When we can see again, the doors are blown inward, ripped apart, billowing smoke. "Delta Squad - clear to enter. Take take take.

"I thought you'd never ask." Delta Squad hits the ground and they're straight in, firing, while we stand back and cover their six.

To sweeten the pot, in the game RC-1138 is told "As you know, 36's squad has been compromised". Thing is, in the book, Delta Squad have just rushed past Darman's Theta Squad and into the Geonosian caverns when Taler, Vin and Jay go down. In the game, the Deltas are alone in the command spire, and haven't made any contact with the Thetas as of yet.

Ah, isn't continuity fun?

I know mistakes are often made, after all, the creators are only human, and it'd be wrong for us to expect them to get every little detail wrong. Accepted.

But it still needs to be fixed.

Although it's implied that, after destroying the core ship and nabbing the Separatist fleet launch codes, Delta Squad are returning to the RAS Prosecutor, it's entirely possible that they were redeployed into the battle (after all, it happens at the end of the game, so it wouldn't be unprecidented). There's really no way for us to fit it in "between the scenes" of the game itself, and seeing as the game begins with RC-1138 landing on Geonosis, it can't have already happened.

So how do we get around the "36's squad has been compromised" line? Either it's a different 36 (there are another 99 RC-##36s, at least), or Theta Squad have simply been help up somewhere, and aren't as much dead as they are unable to get to the droid factory.

Well, until we see something official on the matter - and I wouldn't hold my breath - this fix works, if nothing else.