You're right, I forgot about those -- you did have to re-enable the dismemberment via the console in Jedi Academy, but man was that awesome slicing and dicing through them. And yeah, it was cool that you could just walk into things and burn them with the lightsaber.

Newer Star Wars games have turned lightsabers into glorified baseball bats. And dismemberment is no longer allowed due to a Disney mandate about no longer being able to dismember humanoid characters in Star Wars video games using lightsabers.