Star Wars

Remember when it was cool to like Star Wars? Boba Fett was basically the most awesome thing you or any of your friends had ever seen, fake sword fights were replaced by fake lightsaber fights, you could have a bunch of action figures without being called a nerd, and as you matured you could even reflect publicly on the directorial prowess of Irvin Kershner without anyone so much as batting an eye.

What happened? Where did it all go wrong? Some people like to take Jar Jar Binks and make a scapegoat out of him (which I admit brings him closer to a recognizable species than the movies), but I want to argue here that the damage was being done before the prequel trilogy. Before even the Special Editions and their inexcusable omission of the Ewok celebration song. No, for Star Wars to remain cool, it had to be cool to a new generation of people. And you know what's not cool? Bad video games.

Star Wars on the Game Boy opens with what you'd expect: the big title logo and a midi synth of John Williams' iconic theme. Then it goes nuts and flings you from a landspeeder into a cave before you even realize that the game's begun. And just like that, you take control of Luke Skywalker and have to roam the deserts of Tatooine to find the missing R2-D2. Along the way you encounter one of the aliens from M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, who calls himself "Obi-Wan Kenobi." Come on guys! Really? Really?! I was at such a loss here I really debated turning off the game and calling it quits. They only sucked me in more because Obi-Wan gives you your lightsaber, which is too promising to leave alone.

Wait, you know what? Why do you find him in the bottom of some bug-infested cave? There aren't even sandpeople about, though it wouldn't really matter if there were, since in this game all they do is pace back and forth harmlessly while you shoot them. They're incapable of changing heights too, just like every other non-flying enemy in the game. Just stand on a nearby ledge and fire away. Actually, while I'm on the subject, why are there caves anywhere here? I feel like there was enough going on in Star Wars that they could have just developed gameplay out of crap that actually happened in the film without having to generate a bunch of caves and requiring you to explore them all.

The Mos Eisley section is ridiculous. You just go through town slaughtering everything you see. Yeah, that's how you lay low. And the whole time you're trying to collect shields for the Millennium Falcon, or in other words a ship you don't even know exists. And you know what? If you collect every possible shield before you board the Falcon, you'll still be two away from max. You have to redo whole areas if you want full shielding. And considering the totally unacceptable number of blind jumps in the caves (most of them going into spikes), you'd rather just not bother and make do with less shielding.

And hey, that works out nicely, because when you actually get into the Falcon, you have to navigate the asteroid field, or as I like to think of it, Neo-Alderaan. It's supposed to be a game of reaction and your shielding is supposed to be important, but guess what? You can just tell the ship to fly straight down and you will never get hit. It becomes impossible for an asteroid to make contact with the ship, and after a minute or so of cheesing the system, you'll arrive at the Death Star without so much as a scratch. It's a joke. Also a joke: the vehicles share health with the humans. This means if you're riding around in a landspeeder and it takes a few hits, Luke will get out of the landspeeder nearly dead. And vice versa.

The enemies are all equally stupid, though they manage to attain their stupidity in different ways. Womp rats die in one hit but are too short to shoot with a blaster, even if you duck. And they come out of little throbbing nests, which is just nasty. I already talked about the sandpeople. You get these dudes at right, who launch blades out of their guts. Beats me. The Jawas in Mos Eisley come out of nowhere. They literally rain from the sky. And they love to hit you with chain-knockback wherein every hit sets you back in their path for another hit until you die. Lovely. There are also a bunch of Mandalorians wandering about with seeker blasters, because that's just like the movie. The Death Star is full of droids, all of which happen to be totally invincible. You just have to avoid them. And I'm not even talking interrogation droids, or even protocol droids. Nothing so sensible. Trash droids, them's the ones who will take your life.

And speaking of the Death Star, I was under the impression it would be a big facility with plenty to do and see. Instead it's just a maze of elevators. First you have to navigate the big elevator maze to find the tractor beam controls and disable them (which you do by jumping off ladders and firing at it while turrets shoot at you...have they no respect for the source material?), but you'll quickly hit a dead end while you're trying. You'll have gone through every elevator and reached nothing new, while there are several platforms that you can just walk off into the nothingness. And naturally, you'll die if you do, except for one. That one lands you where you need to go. So to be clear, the game forces you to take a leap off a cliff in order to proceed, and if you don't leap correctly or from the right cliff, you'll die. Even if you choose the correct one you'll take a bunch of fall damage. Learn to design a game properly.

After the tractor beam you navigate a second maze of elevators to find Leia and eventually escape. When you do you get to fight a bunch of TIE fighters, and let me tell you, this is one of the most welcome sights of the game. Maybe because it's the only part of the game they didn't appear to screw up. Nevermind that the Falcon's guns are apparently just twin cannons that fire Kix cereal. Shooting TIEs is a merciful break from everything else. Of course, once you clean them out it shows you manning an X-Wing on Yavin and then you get to go fight more. And of course, that fight is bugged. One TIE is indestructible because it flies in a pattern such that your shots can't hit it. You have to keep shooting down its missiles (I thought they had green lasers?) and just stay alive. It's so simple, yet so poorly done. Get used to it.

One of the ways the game tries to market itself as cool is that Han Solo and Princess Leia are playable. As Luke you can go into the Mos Eisley cantina and recruit Han, and/or rescue Leia from torture and death at the hands of the Empire in the Death Star. Let me emphasize that both of these guys are optional. You can choose to let Leia die; you can leave Han on Mos Eisley and hijack his ship; heck, you can even refuse to talk to alien Obi-Wan and go through the game with no lightsaber. But in the former two cases you wouldn't be missing much. Han has a stronger blaster than Luke so there are times he's useful, but Leia is all-around worthless. She's got a weak blaster and no other beneficial qualities. And here's the kicker: if Luke dies, you lose a life and get to keep going. If Han or Leia dies, they're dead. You lose a life still, but they are permanently deceased. You can talk to Obi-Wan if you got him to join you and he'll use the Force to resurrect one of them (what?!), but he can only do that a few times the whole game. So you'll never even use Han or Leia for fear of losing them.

Of course, there's a bug to exploit there as well. Han and Leia can't use the lightsaber for obvious reasons, but if you go to the menu and select Luke with lightsaber, then change characters to one of the others, pressing attack will cause them to morph into Luke, swing the saber, and morph back into themselves. In many ways this is preferable to using Luke, because while you risk killing Han or Leia, you don't have to watch Luke do his little pimp walk constantly. Yeah, don't ask me why, but for whatever reason they animated Luke walking with a pimp limp. Who knows. Besides, the extra life display is blacked out half the time anyhow so you'll never actually be aware of how many more lives you've got till you die. Might as well live on the edge, right?

One of the strange mechanics throughout the game is air tunnels. You'll see this column of up arrows, clearly marked. Jumping into it launches you up along the "air current" to higher ground. Sometimes instead of higher ground it's just ceiling spikes, because this game wants you to despise your life. And speaking of heights, this game has probably the weirdest and dumbest glitch I've encountered to date. There are ladders in the game for ascending heights in normal fashions. Well, if you fall off a ladder you can grab back on before hitting the ground. Pretty routine. However, if you do this and climb back up, stepping off the ladder will kill you (even on level ground that isn't a "fall"). The game I guess calculates fall damage as you're falling, and when you grab the ladder it doesn't reset that number. So the moment you touch ground afterward, no matter what, you explode. And it's not like I sat there experimenting with the game to discover this glitch - you'll probably die at least twice from it in the course of normal play. How does that get through testing?

The game ends, naturally, with the Death Star trench run. The trench is huge, only defended by a few turrets and the odd wandering TIE fighter, and features an exhaust port roughly three times the size of your X-Wing in diameter. Who needs to use the Force when it takes up the whole screen? In fact, the game's other "boss encounter" is also ridiculously easy. It's the garbage monster in the Death Star, but it's a two second fight, if that. See, when the level begins you hit attack, because by that point in the game you've realized that they love putting crap right in front of you with no warning. So pressing the button causes Luke to swing his saber (or Han/Leia to transform into Luke and do likewise). And the garbage monster will just run its head into the lightsaber and kill itself. Seriously. One hit, it does the work for you, level's over. Unbelievable.

"So," you might be wondering, "does this game have any positives?" Yes, it does. It's got a sweet 8-bit remix of the cantina theme. And that's about it. Even the menu is ugly and pointless. You can select characters there, but you can also talk to Obi-Wan, C-3PO, and R2-D2. Obi-Wan just says "May the Force be with you," C-3PO just tells you it's not his fault and don't deactivate him, and R2-D2 gets you a narration stating "This is R2-D2." Derrrrr. Don't touch this game. Because it's Star Wars, you'll think about it. And because there is a bit of variety in the different levels, you'll think about it. And because if you picked it up as a kid not knowing any better you'd probably like it a little, you'll think about it.

But don't. Don't think about it. Move along. Move along.

Bottom Line: 7/20