“Wow, that wasn’t the worst Star Wars game I’ve ever played.”

That was the exact message I sent a friend after I finished “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed”. Of course, playing through that game made me want to do one thing: Dig out the SNES, and play through the original Star Wars platformers again. Which lead to me to thinking about playing Dark Forces. Which lead me to, for some reason, want to dig up Rebel Assault and play through that canyon training sequence again. Which lead me to wanting to inflict the pain of all the other awful Star Wars games I’d played over the years on other people. So, without further ado, join me as I drag myself through twenty years of painful Star Wars videogames that I thought I had drank out of my head!

Just trust me, it’s the Death Star. Or at least the Death Star’s skeleton.

Title: Star Wars

Year: 1983

System: Arcade, Atari 2600

Defining Moment: Grainy Alec Guinness telling me to “use the force”, blowing up the Death Star 900 times.

Summary: The first Star Wars game, a vector-based rail shooter

Commentary: In the beginning, when the trench run hadn’t become a cliche used in every Star Wars videogame ever, we lined up in the arcade to play through the original Star Wars arcade game. One of the earliest instances of the rail shooter, the game consisted of a whopping 3 levels, one of which had you blowing up vector outlines of TIE Fighters, then vector outlines of cannons on the surface of the Death Star, then going on the trench run and (hopefully) blowing up the (vector) death star. When you got to the end of the trench, Alec Guinness would yell at you from inside of a tin can at the end of a hallway to “usf fur farsph”. Or i think that’s what he said. Audio reproduction wasn’t too good back then. Press the button at the right time in one of the earliest quick-time events i can remember, and the Death Star blows up. If you don’t, then instead of Alec, you get James Earl Jones saying “hurbgrah hoop himmle farb!”, and you start over. Actually, you start over either way. There wasn’t much to the game, but damned it it didn’t feel like i was behind the flight yoke of an X-Wing, and getting points for blowing shit up.

Verdict: Play it, if you can find a way to. A lot of beach arcades STILL have this one, and it’s worth your time to seek it out.

Relive the fantastic “Air Hockey” scene from “Star Wars: A New Hope!”

Title: Star Wars: Arena

Year: 1983

System: Atari 2600

Defining Moment: Kicking the tar out of your opponent, and declaring you were a better jedi than him.

Summary: Your blue Jedi and your opponents Jedi bat lasers back and forth at each other.

Commentary: Congratulations, Atari. It took you one full game, and less than a year, to make an incredibly lame cash-in game on the Star Wars franchise. In this game, the seeker ball (from the “Luke whines and trains” scene in episode 4), floats between you and your opponent, and shoots lasers at one of you. Using a paddle wheel controller, you bat the laser back at your opponent to do damage to him and score points. This would evolve the gameplay established in PONG, and inspire such future game concepts as “the final boss fight of every Zelda game since Ocarina”.

Verdict: Go play air hockey and occasionally spit water at your opponent. It’s the same experience. Probably with just as much swearing.

Moments later, I plowed my snowspeeder right into the AT-AT. This did not help the rebel cause.

Title: The Empire Strikes Back

Year: 1983

System: Atari 2600, Intellivision

Defining Moment: The pounding of AT-AT feet. The incessant pounding. That never, ever, stopped.

Summary: Flying your snowspeeder around, Defender-style, blowing up a neverending marching line of AT-ATs.

Commentary: In a re-enactment of the Hoth battle scene, you play as Luke once again, valiantly piloting his snowspeeder (represented here by a roughtly 15-pixel blob) against the advancing AT-AT horde. This game begat one of my earliest childhood traumas, as once the game begins, you hear the pounding of the AT-AT feet advancing. Wha-bump. Wha-bump. Wha-bump. That was the game’s soundtrack. No music, no muffled, drunken Alec Guinness, just the stomping. The endless stomping. The stomping that i would hear in my terrified, 4-year old dreams. The….wait, where was I? Oh, right. So you fly your snowspeeder in a Defender-esque landscape (I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of code was “liberated” from that game for this one) and put as much laser-fire into the AT-ATs as you can. Much like they did in the movie, the AT-ATs will change color as you shoot them, indicating their degree of about-to-blow-up-edness. On occasion, an exhaust port (seriously, what was with the Empire and exhaust ports?) would open on the walker, either under the chin, or on it’s arse, and you could kill it in one shot. These would only appear for several seconds, and their appearances would be shorter and less frequent in subsequent levels. As in most 2600 games, you could never actually win, you just played until you died, at which point the pounding would get faster and faster, until the Hoth base blew up, presumably along with your non-base-defending ass. The player was made to feel this pain by the game flashing the screen in an attempt to induce photosensitive epilepsy.

Verdict: Fun for about 15 minutes, at which point the pounding of the walkers will scar you for life. Play for 14 and quit.

Better whan played drunk.

Title: Return of the Jedi

Year: 1994

System: Arcade

Defining Moment: Taking the bold step of making levels that scrolled bottom-right to top-left, in one of the most annoying ideas ever created.

Summary: Side-scrolling through Return of the Jedi, Zaxxon-style

Commentary: Long before the pod race took a shit directly in every Star Wars fan’s mouth, Return of the Jedi decided to take the bold step of making every part of the movie a fast-paced 3/4 perspective shooter sequence. For the most part, while it didn’t really remind me of the movie at all, and in fact, reminded me more of a fan-made Zaxxon mod that i may or may not have just made up, I’d be remiss if i didn’t mention their novel choice of using a level that scrolled from the lower-right to the upper-left. I said to my teenage self, “self, what in the name of George Motherfucking Lucas made them think people would want to play a level designed this way?” Then, I remembered that this was an arcade game, and was therefore designed specifically to eat as many of your quarters as it possibly could. And eat them it did.

Verdict: Take a nickel. Eat it. Congratulations, you’ve now potentially got nickel poisoning, and have already had more fun than you would have playing this game. Also, you’ve saved twenty cents, which you can put toward your doctor bill. So frankly, you should thank me.

Not pictured: POH-TEE-TEE!!!!

Fun Fact: This game actually included a “whine” button for maximum movie similarity

Remember when Nintendo required companies to have a shitty Mode-7 sequence in every SNES game?

Title: Super Star Wars/Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi

Year: 1992/1993/1994, respectively

System: Super Nintendo

Defining Moment: Realizing, after over 10 years, that these were still the best Star Wars games ever made.

Summary: Side-scrolling, and occasionally Mode-7-ing, platforming romp through the Star Wars movies.

Commentary: This is it. This was the zenith of the Star Wars game franchise. I remember being a little Feez, sitting in front of the teevee playing my Nintendo, wishing that i could pretend to be Luke, blasting things with my blaster and light-sabering things with my lightsaber. This game was the first game that delivered on that simple wish. Spanning across three games, the developers lovingly took every memorable scene from the original trilogy and turned into sheer platforming goodness. Need to go to Tashii station and pick up some power converters? Guess what? That’s level one! Blowing up the death star? You do it twice! Through the three games, you controlled pretty much every memorable Star Wars protagonist as you played through a platform version of their scene. Granted, the different characters didn’t play that differently. Han fired a little faster, Chewie was a little more powerful, and Luke had a lightsaber. That was about it. Or, if you liked, you could just go Ninja-Gaiden jumpslash style with Luke and just arial-buzzsaw your way through every level. Simple, effective, and most of all, the most fun I’ve ever had in the Star Wars universe. Also, every time you shot a Jawa, it screamed “POH TEE TEE!” and rocketed off the screen as fast as the SNES processor could carry it. I’m just throwin’ that out there.

Verdict: Used copies go for about 5 bucks on ebay. GET THEM. Thank me later.

Haaaaaaaammmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Title: Rebel Assault/Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire

Year: 1993/1995

System: PC

Defining Moment: Actually finishing the absurdly hard “training” mission, and realizing the rest of the game sucked.

Summary: A semi-rail shooter/flight game that put you either behind the back of a rebel pilot, or behind the fighter he was piloting.

Commentary: The way I like to remember it, the back of the box read like this: “Step into the incredibly roomy flight-suit of Porkins, ace rebellion pilot! Thrill as you attempt to fly your A-Wing through a canyon, but look out! You’ve dropped your sandwich, and the flight controls are covered in ham! Can you navigate your way through the obstacle course with a ham-covered flightstick?” Seriously, who thought the controls were good enough to let this game out the door? You would constantly have to switch control schemes to have even a remote chance to finish a level. Flying an A-Wing? Better switch to joystick! Behind-the-back rail shooter level? Time to switch to the mouse! Once you switched to the appropriate apparatus, most of the difficulty in the game revolved around you constantly fighting against the completely over-sensitive controls, which would more often than not send your A-Wing screaming into a canyon wall, or have your pilot shooting at a wall 8 feet over a stormtrooper’s head. And when your character has worse aim than a stormtrooper, it’s time to hang it the fuck up.

Verdict: Fuck this game. Seriously, fuck. This. Game.

So that’s it for this first batch, which took us up to the glorious year of 1995. I’m sure I left some out, possibly due to having never played them, possibly due to forgetting them, and possibly due to the fact that they were so awful that my brain refused to even acknowledge playing them in the first place. If i missed one that you absolutely loved or hated that you feel needs my vitriol, feel free to leave it in the comments. At which point, I will use your game choice to evaluate you as a person. Tune in soon for another batch of games that do more to tarnish the legacy of Star Wars than George Lucas himself!