My parents were nice enough to let me own video game systems when I was younger, but the trick of the matter was that if I wanted a new game, I pretty much had to buy it myself.  Outside of very rarely getting a game at Christmas or my birthday, any time I wanted a game I had to save up birthday money, chore money, allowance, anything really, and choose carefully what I wanted to purchase.  This, as you might imagine, made me pretty choosy when it came to selecting games; if it was going to take weeks and weeks of saving to be able to afford one, I wanted to make damn sure I was going to get my money’s worth out of it.

For some titles, the choice was easy; A Link to the Past or Final Fantasy III were no-brainers, and my spending was richly rewarded.  Others, like Zombies At My Neighbors or Uniracers, were less familiar, but ultimately proved to be wise decisions.

And then there was Lagoon.

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Being born in 1979, I had the good fortune to be growing up during the heyday of Saturday Morning cartoons: The 1980s. Every Saturday brought with it the promise of exciting new adventures, from the early days of He-Man to the latter days of The Pirates of Dark Water.  Lion robots would assemble into giant fighting machines, weather satellites threatened the world, and pizza was consumed in mass quantities by reptilian lifeforms.

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“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!

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