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History of Star Wars Video Games
Leafel writes "UGO has posted a feature on the history of Star Wars video games, dividing the timeline into 4 categories: The Golden Age (up to 1990), The Silver Age (1991-1996), The Gaming Renaissance (1996-2000),
Modern Age (2001 on). From the article 'December 2004 saw the latest release in a long line of Star Wars related video games. As a sequel to one of 2003's top role playing games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has made a lot of Xbox owners and RPG fans very happy. In honor of KOTOR II's release and in anticipation of May's Revenge of the Sith movie event, we take a look at the long history of interactive Star Wars entertainment, complete with all of its highs and lows.'"
I can understand it not being as good as the original (hard to do) but it sounds like the game lacks a lot of polish and was rushed out the door. Hopefully they get it shined up for the PC release in a few months.
I liked the old game in the arcades. It was quite quality for its time, and shows what you can get if you invest time and money into a video game project.
God spoke to me.
My quickie review from maybe six hours into the game: The characters and voice acting are decent, but so far I just feel like I've been able to look at each new NPC and say "Oh, you're the replacement for Carth" or whatever. The Jedi mentor person at least seems like she might have deeper motivations, but we'll see.
Likewise, the game narrative hasn't improved much. My big gripe with the original KOTOR was that the dark side wasn't all that subtle. I mean, people talk about being seduced by the Dark Side of the Force and you assume it's a slippery slope situation, but in KOTOR 2 it's even worse -- you tend to get presented with three options: "Sappy Good", "Cautious but Good" and "Pwn3D by 7h3 517h!". I was hoping they'd do a better job writing the Dark Side as something sublime and more amoral, but really it just comes off as cackling cartoonishly evil.
Back in KOTOR, things seemed at least somewhat original because no matter what you were covering new ground with a new engine. KOTOR 2 misses that in a big, big way -- many of the missions are like "okay, another 'go collect shit' mission. Great". The game and narrative don't even make a real effort to disguise the obvious mission templates. I keep finding myself playing to try and get it over with rather than enjoying myself and exploring the levels.
The default difficulty level is also disappointing if you've played KOTOR, since if you know your way around the combat system even a little bit the fights are just flat-out easy. Again, this could just be a function of not being too far in the game, but you'd think after five or six hours of play you'd encounter at least a little trouble.
I enjoyed the original KOTOR quite a bit, but the new one is more or less just an expansion pack that I shelled out $60 for. The extent to which this one just feels like quickly retooled version is just terrible -- I'd say that the people involved ought to be ashamed of themselves if I thought that anyone involved with Star Wars these days had any shame to feel.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Those games were excellent... I wish they'd reissue them and update them to work on today's OSes or console systems.
Shelby Foote has met his match.
Are you talking about the vector one where you flew an x-wing? Good times...That's the first arcade game I can remember playing. Oh, to be a kid again.
I made alittle "Yoda" game in Highschool. In honor of the once great Wise Man - or Wise Yoda. Sure, I didnt go through any copy rights issues or have a lawyer, I was only in High School. But hey, every history has some rebels in it.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
My personal favourite was the old Tie Fighter one. It was my first computer game, and looking back the graphics and animations surpassed anything that was out at it's time. I miss the old days, where every different genre was new to me, and it wasn't a remake of something similar.
One of the best things about the original Star Wars was the incredible space battles. We actually *cared* about the fighter pilots in the Death Star trenches even though they appeared briefly (in contrast, it's difficult to care about the entire main cast of the prequels). We actually got a sense of hopelessness as they got shot down one by one (Porkins! Noooo!), and we felt the jubilation as the Millenium Falcon swooped in for the rescue. We felt thrilled seeing all those ships dogfight each other, swarming all over in Return of the Jedi. The first X-Wing game really made you feel like one of the Rebel pilots. The subsequent ones just didn't have that feel. Ah well, nostalgia.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
MMOG, galactic wide conflict. It could be SOOOOO easily written. And it would net over 25 billion dollars over 20 years. I'm writing a transformers MMOG design document. I think the next one I'll write is a galactic wide Xwing/TieFIghter style MMOG.
Thanks for giving me a great idea.
God spoke to me.
Man I feel old. What are they going to say, the 1990-1995 era was pre-historic age? Come on, can we at least get like 20 years before going golden age? A human generation would be nice...
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Star Wars... nothing but Star Wars. Nothing but Star Wars. Dumb dumb dumb dumbbbb.
The only Star Wars games that I really got into (even though Im a fan of the original movies), was Shadows of the Empire on the N64, and Jedi Outcast on the PC. Rouge Squadron on the GC is nice. But for some reason, I tire of the games long before finishing. I would have put Outcast up there with Unreal Tournament, put that stupid leg sweep insta kill move killed my enthusiasm for that. Now maybe it is just my age, and I no longer have the patience for adventure games (since I tend to stick to FPS), but SW games always seem to lack that little extra oomph IMO.
> The Silver Age (1991-1996),
> The Gaming Renaissance (1996-2000),
> Modern Age (2001 on).
The Failure to Suck Age (1977-1990)
The Suck Age (1991-1996)
The Apart From TIE vs. X-Wing, It Pretty Much Sucked Chrome off a Trailer Hitch (1996-2000)
The Sucked Neutron Stars Through A Straw Age (2001-2002)
The KOTOR Age, in which somebody at Lucasarts goofed badly by giving a contract to someone who actually gave a shit about storytelling (KOTOR, 2003)
The Jar Jar Binks Age (Star Wars Galaxies: A Galaxy Milkin' It)
Move along, nothing to see here, indeed! The goggles, they do NOTHING!
You can do better than that, knobgoblin.
My question still stands.
--proc
The command line interface allowed you to move, to shoot photon torpedoes (an 'o' would track across the 10x10 grid as the torpedo moved), call for help, etc.
This was on a Prime 500. The game was, IIRC, written in Fortran and originally written an a PDP (8 or 11?).
Sigh! Those were the days! :)
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Mine was PacMan. My parents lifted me up to the controls and the first thing I tried was to eat a ghost. When my guy made that sad sound and melted, I realized I wasn't supposed to eat the ghosts.
God spoke to me.
My first view of a Star Wars game was not exactly from the Star Wars realm, but rather it was "Star Raiders" for the Atari 2600. I think at that point in time there was huge copyright issues, but Star Raiders had a look and feel like the vector based star-wars game in the arcades (relatively speaking). It had a numeric keypad controller. Sometimes I felt like I was in the gunner room in the Millenium Falcon, shooting tie fighters.
Man, video games back then allowed a lot of room for imagination. Nowadays I find it difficult to find something original.
just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
They missed the vector arcade version of Empire Strikes Back.
I hacked a starwars yoke to my [url=http://ubercade.randomdrivel.com]MAME arcade cabinet[/url] just to play the original vector starwars arcade game.
rampy
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Good to know that we won't go more than a few days without a "history" lesson here on Slashdot. I mean, it had been several days since I read the history of the iPod article. At least this history spans more than a couple of years...
Why don't we have a "Star Wars History Month" anyway? I'd get up and celebrate!
I want to know why there isn't a modern day version of "X-Wing vs TIE Fighter"? Think about it. Imagine setting up 4 squadrons of Rebel ships, and 6 squadrons of Imperial ships, and capital ships on both sides....
Now put in a different person in each ship (multiple people to man guns on capital ships), and use the web.
Who wouldn't want to play that?!?!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Even Speilberg sometimes blows it. "Jurassic Park III", anyone? That effectively went direct to video, although there was some brief, minimal theatrical release. He had the sense to stop at that point.
At some point in the sequel business, it's time to give it up.
Although we'll probably have to endure "Ocean's 13".
I'd love an updated version of X-Wing with state-of-the-art graphics and game-play. What is the closest thing to X-Wing out there today?
Also, I love Call Of Duty. Is there a "Call Of Duty"-type game set in the Star Wars universe?
Sam
Was that a French game based on the Death Star attack?
Chef Rouge! Chef Rouge!
I think part of the problems with games like these is the franchise is now a little stale. The first time I saw the films, I wanted to be an X-wing pilot with all my heart. I read the paperbacks, I payed close attention to the dogfights. When I played X-Wing I was ecstatic - this was a dream come true!
Similarly the first time I read LOTR, I wanted to be one of the Fellowship, and had there been a game around back then, it would have been great. Likewise with Star Trek.
But all of these have been flogged to death, there's no magic left, the initial urge has been fulfilled long ago, and that's why it feels like something is missing.
http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=S&game_ id=9777
Go and see for yourself. I had loads of fun playing that game, but it didn't make the arcade list. Strange. Huge miss.
I wish there'd be a stretch of at least a year before I see another Star Wars game. Frankly, I'm getting sick of LucasArts pasting the Star Wars license on every genre under the sun...it's getting pathetic. Then they go and cancel the other games they had that weren't Star Wars licenses: Full Throttle 2 and Sam and Max 2. I mean Nintendo milks their Mario franchise too, but they still churn out other really great games at the same time!
The seem to have forgotten a PC game from back in '95 or so. It was Yoda stories. It was a desktop adventure game that never really caught on. They made an Indiana Jones game that was nearly identical.
------- Mark
Dumb dumb dumb dumbbbb
more like:
Dumb dumb dumb dom dee dumb dom dee dumb DUMB DUMB DUMB DAM dumb dumb dom dee dom...
It would have been nice to rank them on how bad a lot of the Star Wars games were. The article is carefully crafted in using the Jedi mind trick that most of them are good games and have good game play.
I made aGOOGLE, and Voila! l'escadron rouge, la version française vit !
Another Star Wars game was a text-based X-Wing "flight simulator". You got a description and a grid location, and you responded with how you wanted to set the controls. Problem was, the code had bugs and didn't correctly detect when you won.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Action MMOGs are way more fun than RPG style counterparts...
But since LucasArts already has an RPG thats already doing the space thing, I doubt they'll want to make an action style MMOG.
There is definately a market for an action paced space game, with leveling, and long term goals... I'm probably going to still write the design document for it though.
I have this idea, that if I write quality design documents, that maybe they'll be a boon to my portfolio. Even if the document doesn't get accepted, its helping me out.
God spoke to me.
[snip]
The characters in the grid were a '.' for empty space, a '*' for a star, a 'p' for a planet, an 'E' for the Enterprise, a 'K' for a Klingon, and an 'S' for the dreaded 'Super Commander'
Uh, oh. Woe betide to you, you've confused Star Wars and Star Trek on Slashdot. It was nice knowing you; I'll greet your kin at the funeral.
In all seriousness, I remember that game. It was ported to as many systems as Adventure and Rogue were. I first played it on a Apple II at my (then) local library.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Anyone remember a kid-friendly rinky-dink top-down view game where you played as Luke and went from square screen to square screen picking up things, talking to people, etc?
I forgot the name of the game. Was it Yoda's stories or something? Couldn't find a mention of it in the story. It's amazing just how many games Star Wars has spawned over the decades.
I'm sure UGO got some payback for running the SW Infomercial, but I wonder if Slashdot did as well, or were they just a tool? Lucas doesn't have enough money to slather Star Wars merketing goo all up and down here if they wanted to, you have to go ahead and regurge their press release ink for FREE?
I thought you people were above mainstream news puppetry. At least have them check for lumps while they've got their hand way up there.
The author missed two games. One was the PC version of the board game "Star Wars: Monopoly" (granted, not a LucasArts game). The other was the "desktop game" - "Yoda Stories". "Yoda Stories" was also released to the Game Boy...
yeah, your sister and mom together.
In this era of online-capable = must-have feature, why don't they create an up-to-date version of XvsT ?
I still play the original, even though it is a crash-tastic and bug-ridden experience on a modern OS, it is still fun when it works.
OR is this what the MMORPG star-trek world is moving towards? Might that be the end-all/be-all climax to the ST:Galaxies world?
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Ack I am an idiot....
Please replace every StarTrek reference with Star Wars.
It's easy to see why Star * is easily confused. 99% of all computer releases for both franchises sucked goat.
(Damn, i need to check preview more often)
Like I said, I am an idiot
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Did they just put TIE Fighter (for the PC) in the 'Silver Age'?
...Inconceivable!
Nobody mentions the Star Wars game on the Apple 2?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
In the silver age timeframe, 1993, they didn't mention "Star Wars Chess" for WIN 3.1. ..oh OK "The Software Toolworks Star Wars Chess" (lucasarts lamely made us use that title because they regretted licensing out the rights...grumble....)
http://mobygames.com/game/sheet/p,5/gameId,2033/
It was a damn good 'Battle Chess' beater..52 unique capture animations and shipped on 14 High-Density floppy disks!! Wheeeee
- ExToolworker
Actually, that's a lie. I hate it.
Because it came out after ROTJ.
Star Wars - 1983
ROTJ - 1984
ESB - 1985
KLOV is an awesome site. I remember when it first came online and thought - this is where the web is great. I mean, there were text lists of stuff like this on rec.games.video.arcade.collecting, but something like this blows that away.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Back at the Second West Coast Computer Faire in San Jose (in 1978 if the web is to be trusted) there was a company making a graphics card for S-100 bus CP/M machines. They had a Star Wars game to demo their product.
It was a 2-player head-to-head game. One side the Empire, the other side the Rebel Alliance. Each person had his own CRT and joystick controller. The Empier player had three TIE fighters and the death star that they could shoot from, switchable via buttons on the joystick controller. The Rebel Alliance player had four X-wing fighters.
Obviously, the plot was to either destroy the death star or destroy the rebel base (by blowing up the moon). The players would fly through space and fight each other's fighters and the rebel palyer even had to fly through the trench and try to hit the exhaust port.
It was a really great game for its time. Too bad it required so much special hardware. And the other problem was that it took a while to play especially at a booth at a convention.
Funny, I don't remember the company that made it nor the name of the game.
I never played any of the XWing games, but I played Dark Forces in 1995, and I still have fond memories of that game.
Free Worlds, a Freelancer total conversion. Multiplayer only.
The only 'Doom clone' worth playing at the time.
The only thing even remotely close to Doom. And it took LucasArts to do it, instead of a couple guys working out of some rented office space in Texas.
Yes, they run on XP, but you need to download additional patches and fixes. If you have problems running them, there's still an active community playing these games, creating custom missions and ships: http://www.ehtiecorps.org where you can ask for help.
Goddamn I hate articles like this. They're just fellating Lucasarts. Consider the following three paragraphs:
Amidst all of the new innovations and continuing franchises, LucasArts was also looking to inject the Star Wars mythos into every major gaming genre, leaving us with many ambitious yet underwhelming game titles, starting with 1997's Masters of Teras Kasi.
PC gamers saw Star Wars enter the real-time strategy genre with Rebellion and Force Commander, neither of which saw the success of their closest peers. Each of them seemed to break a little bit too far from the mold and never really seemed to catch on. Underwhelming? Masters of Teras Kasi sucked. Rebellion and Force Commander were steaming piles, some of the worst-reviewed games of the years in which they were released. This kind of pussy-footing continues through the entire article. They're kind to the ungodly awful Rebel Assault games. They barely touch upon the uniformly disappointing slate Episode I games, and focus only on the exception, Racer. They don't mention the massive failure of Rogue Squadron III. The huge disappointments of X-Wing Alliance, Obi-Wan, and Bounty Hunter are barely touched upon, the disastrous launch of Galaxies goes unmentioned, and the worst they can say about this year's Battlefront is that it's "slightly unbalanced." The incredibly poor level design of Jedi Knight II goes unmentioned.
Hey, UGO: Get off your knees, wipe off your face, and show a little dignity. The fact of the matter is, there've been tons of Star Wars licensed titles in the last two decades, and only a dozen or so of these have been any good. Instead of writing some fluff piece advertising the days of yore to generate hype for unreleased product, you had the opportunity to discuss how one of the greatest gaming licenses in history has been consistently squandered on mediocre games.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Lucasfiles.com has a patch that lets you run the Windows 95/98 versions of X-Wing and TIE Fighter under Windows 2000 and XP, which is good news.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I didn't see mention of Star Wars Arcade for the Sega Genesis 32X or Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, the Sega arcade game. The former was pretty forgettable, but I recall seeing someone playing the latter almost every time I saw it in an arcade. May not have been any good, but people were interested in it, if simply because it had a huge 50" screen and Star Wars music.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
KOTOR 2 Review
40 hour games of which, the first 38 hours are great with intriguing plot, interesting characters, nifty quests. Every bit as brilliant as the first, and in many respects outshining the first. The last 2 hours are WTF!!!
BTW the Darkside ending wasn't even finished, the LS ending actually presented you with a choice, though it does not have an effect on the ending sequence.
The best way I can explain the end to people who haven't played. Imagine Empire Strikes back, the scene where Darth Vader tells Luke "I am your father". Well instead of that you get 5 minutes of dialogue hinting that Luke and Vader are somehow related. Followed by Luke falling from the platform, cut to the falcon leaving the planet, roll credits.
Just to give you an idea, [spoiler warning] the Ebon Hawk falls into a pit before your climactic battle, but then after your battle the ship flys away from the planet; and you're left to think WTF happened in between.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
and has about the same gameplay with better graphics and more ships, like the milenium (sp?) falcon, and the ship that boba fett followed Han in after the trash was dumped. I actually still play it on my LAN with a few friends. Well worth the money since I too upgraded from my 386DX to a 486DX in order to play X-Wing and Tie-Fighter, and later rebel assault.
anybody remember the ROTJ arcade game that you had to pilot the M. Falcon through the second deathstar to beat? I only ever saw it one place, but it was pretty good. -t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
I can healthily say that SW, in an untouched-by-Lucas fashion have continued the SW legacy. I've played in several, but my current favorite is Rebellion in the Stars, as it's been highly modified from the original SWR mud that was put out so long ago. Just imagine sitting in the cockpit of a starfighter in the middle of space and putting in the exact vector you want to go. Or engaging in combat, firing your blasters, or lasers, or ion cannons, or torpedos, or missiles, or rockets at your target (each ship is unique in what it carries). Or give orders on the bridge of a capital ship, shouting to your crew to tractor in that escaping smuggler, or to lay waste to that Rebel frigate. So I might have got carried away...but really, what I've just described is a small part of the game. Other classes are there to choose from, my favorite being the slicer class (1337 h4x0rs from outer space ;)
Games like that would probably be best-sellers. Heck, they'd be the "Dark Side of the Moon" of the gaming world.
16 Colour VGA, 1x CD ROM, 386DX33! Played like a charm. Wasted many hours !
That reminds me of the first Star Wars game I ever played. It was a game written in BASIC on a Commodore PET. You were a tie fighter stunningly rendered in alternate keyboard graphics shooting equally stunning X wings that would appear in the way while moving from side to side in a trench with amazingly flat slash and back-slash walls. And I loved it.
I loved it so much it inspired me to learn to program which led me to where I am today. Curse that game.
It's unfortunate how they totally wrote off the Rebel Assault titles. I really enjoyed the variety of missions in those games. In fact, the Speeder Bike level of Rebel Assault 2 is one of the most fun games I've ever played, at least in my opinion.
Obi-Wan gets a cold shoulder in this article, "The former allowed you to play as the title character." I guess that's all they could come up with. The game tends to be dissed by players, as well. I don't get it.
Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of this game. You start out with a full battery of Jedi powers-- I don't want to pay $60 for a game, sit down, and go through the boring part of the characters' lives. My gamer friends tell me about "Jedi Academy" as if I'm supposed to be excited that I can train as a Jedi before I can play. I've never been watching a movie's training montage (gonna need a montage) and thought "wow, all of that grueling, mundane training-- it would be so great if I could go through that!"
Obi-Wan for Xbox had a training section, but it was just to teach you how to play the game-- if you know the controls, you can sit down and your character is already powered-up and able to do everything. This is more useful to me. I'd play Obi-Wan 2, 3, or 4-- but they're not coming.
I'm not an RPG guy. I don't get off on the KOTOR (or FF, etc) "attack, wait 5 seconds, see if it worked, use special item, attack" method. I want more games where you move the thumbstick and the lightsaber either kills the guy or you have to start over again. The strategy and complex plot make up for my distaste for this interface.
Obi-Wan was pretty buggy in some places, (I remember doing Jedi acrobatics halfway through a poorly-rendered wall just to crack up my housemate), and it didn't have half as many levels as I expected at the time, but it offered what I look for in video games-- and it wasn't well-received. It was basically Star Wars Mario Jedi, or Obi-Bandicoot, with platforms and forced paths through most levels. I haven't seen anything like it in the Star Wars games since, starting out at the high level of power and once you learn how to control the character, being challenged by levels and villains instead of game mechanics and building up powers & items. I just want to sit down for a half-hour, and be able to come back and have a little fun next week too.
It's not the games ommitted from the review that bother me so much (like the Japanese NES Star Wars game where Darth Vader turns into a giant scorpion on the first level - I play it just to see that), it's the blatant errors in the article like these.
[Bounty Hunter] finally gave people a chance to take control of a Fett, specifically Attack of the Clones' Jango.
What about Star Wars: Demolition? You can control Boba Fett and blow the crap out of everything. What more does one want to do with a Fett?
Even better, you can play Boba Fett: Gungan Hunter by entering the GUNGANHUNT cheat code in Demolition and playing Hunt-a-Droid where all the droids are replaced by Jar-Jar. The joy of being Boba Fett on a planet full of Jar-Jars who exclaim "How wude!" as they are reduced to a pile of bones just cannot be equalled by other Star Wars games.
Last but not least, [Galaxies] was the first Star Wars game that let you become a Wookiee.
What about Galactic Battlegrounds? Were those Wookies I thought I controlled just William Wallace from Age of Empires 2 in a wookie suit?
If mistakes are made in such important details as these, how can anyone trust the article for making important Star Wars gaming decisions?
I recall playing that old apple ][e text based star wars game where you had to wander around the Death Star trying to deactivate the tractor beam. I had a copy that someone had hacked so that whenever darth vader appeared, he called you a 'faggot'.
It was pretty special.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In the LS male ending, you might have had a choice. LS female doesn't. Plus, your female character, and female character from the first game if you told Atton that person was female... are referred to as "He" numerous times, I'm willing to guess I saw it in over 30, maybe up to 50 different lines of Dialogue. Was really frustrating. There are some things about the game that are awesome, some things that are even better than the first game, but they needed another 2 - 3 months of development time for it to be a complete game.
I remember reading an article where the Lucasarts president said something along the lines of Force Commander being too ahead of the times for anyone to like it yet. So, apparently we should all be playing Force Commander...right....about.....NOW.
During each level you have to fight Darth Vader (the first encounter is inside the sand-crawler). Apparently, Darth Vader is so sneaky with the Force he will transform into a scorpion when you hit him ONCE. There are many other oddities in the game including visiting many planets with pyramids and ice... Screenshots and probably better info (in Spanish though) can be found here http://www.retrones.com/Juegos%20comentados/Star%2 0Wars%20Namco/star_wars_namco.htm
From the The Simpsons" Meet "Star Trek
"Marge vs. the Monorail"
Quimby: And now, I'd like to turn things over to our Grand Marshall, Mr. Leonard Nimoy.
Nimoy: I'd say this vessel could do at least Warp Five. [Crowd laughs.]
Quimby: And let me say, "May the Force Be With You!"
Nimoy: Do you even know who I am?
I agree, he did seem to gloss over many of the low points, missed a few games, and didn't examine the design flaws: but then again, I'm left with the impression that he relied more on game reviews than personal experience: which is reasonable, and to compensate, he should have brought in collaborators. However, I think it was generous to call it "A History" when it's more of an annotated Star Wars Game Chronology.
Also on a personal note: I think Rebellion was one of the most ambitious SW games that didn't get enough support from Lucas Arts. I played it and thought it was great! I connected with its strategic scope: I felt like General Ackbar commanding the rebel fleet in 3D space! The interface was it's downfall as it was very klunky...man, if they would have improved the interface, this would have been a highly rated game!!!
Was one of the greatest games of the 90s.
The way Thrawn finished off that bastard Admiral Zaarin at the end kicked ass.
Plus none of that yankee democracy/do-gooding schmultz you get from the rebel scum on X-wing.
Long Live the Empire!
There was a Battle Chess like DOS game themed with Starwars characters.
It was StarWars Chess.
IIRC I thought this game was a great follow up to Xwing vs Tie Fighter, which was abysmal for single player.
How could they forget this? I think it might predate the games they show on their site (1978?) Flying along a line graphics trench on the Death Star, wow!
Has anyone here actually played Super Star Wars on the SNES? I can't believe UGO gave them a good review. I got the feeling that it was made by the Japanese who never saw the movies.
The game was filled with retarded crap that makes no sense. In one sequence you fly around your landspeeder, shooting blue balls out of your engines at jawas in little floating flying pods that shoot back at you. And you have to get gas for your landspeeder by shooting moisture towers.
But the levels in Jedi Knight were absolutely epic in scope. It remains to date a paragon of excellent level design. Using a comparatively primitive engine, LA did a lot with a little--and it showed on every level. The dialogue and Kyle's wise-cracking comments (cinematics for instance were actually done using real actors) made for a totally abosrbing Star Wars experience, moreover with a completely original plot, not just a rehashed first person shooter with a lightsaber and a brand name stuck on.
One of the earliest games where you actually got to play a Jedi and use a lightsaber, (holy cow! this is so cool, cried out all my SW fan genes) it really embodied the sort of standards LA set for itself with other games like Grim Fandango or X-wing / TIE Fighter or any of the other titles that had previously made the name "Lucasarts" synonymous with quality. Sorry about the rant, but for anyone who thinks JO or, god forbid, JA is the pinnacle of Star Wars FPSing, do yourself a favor and pick up Jedi Knight for $10, it's worth it.
P.S. -- came out during the dark age of the mid nineties. it wasn't all bad.
I'm glad I rented The Clone Wars, because I finished it in like two days, but had to use a cheat to beat one level (only Anakin could race a speeder through that, and my word choices at the time would have made a modern comedian faint).
Then I made the mistake to buy Bounty Hunter on sale. I never even bothered to finish it. Somehow I found the game about as engaging as a porn movie plot.
What's with this formula of every game being identical except a few script lines here and there? A while back there was this flurry of platformers, where there were several worlds, each with several mini-games, and the character had to collect coins or gems to advance. After a few of those, the industry realized they had killed it. Twice. Why not with Star Wars?
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
In the major X-Wing/TIE Fighter threads, nobody seems to remember X-Wing Alliance! Why is that? X-Wing Alliance is still a modern-looking, beautifully done game, with fancy lighting, high-polygon models, etc. But that's not all -- it has a Storyline. And the clincher? You get to do the Death Star 2 assault. If that's not convincing, I don't know what is.
(You're right in that it's a hard game. I still haven't beaten it, but I don't game much anyway. Gotta put that on my list of things to do...)
If you didn't enjoy flying an X-Wing or a Tie Fighter around in the early nineties then just hand in your official Star Wars fan/sucker card right now. You may also be subject to a beating for failing to enjoy X-Wing Alliance and Rogue Leader.
If your favorite Star Wars game is KOTOR then maybe you just don't have what it takes to appreciate the dexterity required for the abovementioned action games.
Am I the only one who loved Tie Fighter? I tried X-Wing but never got warm with it. It was damn hard (back then) but Tie Fighter was exact the right difficulty. Okay you had no shields with the lower models but you could make that up with the speed. It was really fun to be behind a damn X-Wing which had it's shield up but had no chance to escape you... I loved that game! But the best thing about it was the sound. I'm not sure but I think it was my very first soundcard - and everything sounded exactly like in the movies. The music and the wonderful sond of the Tie - even its explosions were great.
It was said multiple times but the days back then were great days when Lucas Arts still made great games. I have to stop now or I start to cry about how the days of Monkey Island, DOTT and Tie Fighter never will come back...
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Well - I guess I'm part of this story, sort of. I wrote the Atari ST, Amiga and IBM PC (VGA) home computer versions of the original Star Wars vector graphics coin-op.
They were released both in Europe and the US. The release must have been around 1990 in the US and the distributor was Broederbund if I remember correctly. A particularly cool part of the job was the invitation to the Skywalker Ranch...
I actually wrote the core of the game in ANSI C, and only the 3D graphics routines and some other stuff was implemented in highly optimized assembly language. This was pretty unusual at the that time, and the usage of C helped a lot to release the game concurrently on three rather different platforms.
Looking back, I have to say that it was both a cool and also a reasonably well paid project - way back in the golden age of computer game programming.
Cheers,
Fritz
but I love you!
i'll burn karma here just to say why? Why? what ever happened to LucasArts? Monkey series, DOTT, Sam n' Max, Full throttle.... Did I ask Why? Why? *sniff* Come back Scumm... There's nothing to forgive!
I'd also like to chime in that an online (32 player or so?) game like Wing Commander (the good ones, Privateer, WC3, WC4) or Xwing / Tie Fighter ONLINE would rock.
I'd love to be like Red Leader defending an attack against a cruiser or something - just so awesome... but specifically with buddies and stuff, god damn it would rock!
Sampling voice clips from the original film and employing cutting edge vector graphics, the game broke boundaries and raised the bar for licensed video games.
It raised the bar for licensed video games...to the place where it remains today. Jeezus fucking christ.