My Kingdom for a Quarter
Review by The
Ferrett
Photos and additional Commentary - Dave Phillips
..okay, so it definitely costs more than a
quarter,
but the new STAR WARS TRILOGY Arcade Game from SEGA is bound to have you visiting your
local arcade in no time!
note: you can click on most of the images contained in this review to get larger, high
resolution versions of the images...but not the title image at the left, sorry...and we
apologize in advance for some of the blurring...hey, we took 'em while we were playing,
okay?!
The STAR WARS TRILOGY Arcade Game
Developer: SEGA
Available for play in any decent arcade near you
Listen closely. The following sentence is actually a compliment.
The new Star Wars Trilogy Arcade Game is so chock-full of spine-shaking sub-bass sounds, eye-blistering explosions, movie-quality graphics and general hoo-hah that it won’t be until well after you’ve stepped away from that game that you actually wise up. At which point you will say with bewildered astonishment, "Wait a second! That was just another stupid shooting game!"
And indeed it was. But let us analyze it closer, shall we?
 This random fellow was more than happy to have his picture snapped playing the game...and he even knew about ECHO STATION! |
The Star Wars Trilogy Arcade game is a cabinet-style game. You sit down on a big black bench—lined with subwoofer speakers cranked so loud that your butt ripples and shakes like a parachute in a hurricane while the game is on—and grab onto a pilot-style joystick with two "fire" buttons mounted on it. Ideally, you grab on with both hands. There’s also two large blinking red buttons to either side of the joystick, and a thirty-six inch screen right in front of you.
The screen will fill your life. This is where all the action occurs. You plunk in a dollar (yes, a dollar—I know you old fogeys used to play Ms. Pac-Man for a quarter back in the days, but then again that’s before the dinosaurs had decomposed) and hit the blinking red "Start" button.
Three missions whiz up and smack you in the face. Yavin. Hoth. Endor. Pick one.
 |
I picked Yavin, and the stars swirled around me. The new cut scene showing all the X-Wings unlocking their foils and zooming towards the Death Star popped up — rendered in real-time graphics. (To put it in non-technical terms for the Rookie Camp, real-time graphics means that, as opposed to having this excellent great movie-quality cut-scene like the ones in JEDI KNIGHT: DARK FORCES II and then having it revert back to some crappy old engine, what you see is what you’re getting throughout the rest of the game.) In other words, the graphics are almost as good as the Star Wars movies themselves. Really. They’re just impressive.
And impressive is what you want as you whiz towards the DS in first-person view, using the joystick to center a green crosshair over the TIE fighters screaming in at full speed towards you. (They’re outlined in blue boxes so you’ll know what to aim at.) You don’t have control over where your ship is going, but it dips and dives at a Star Destroyer, has you blast a TIE trailing an X-Wing, and eventually rockets in to skim the surface of the DS. All the while zillions of TIEs are shooting at you and you have to blaze away at them. One of the nicer touches is that it’s entirely possible for you to blow the wing off a TIE and have it careen out of control into your cockpit —assuming you can’t shoot it down first. With every hit, your shield weakens. When the shield finally goes down, the game generously allows you to put in another buck to continue playing. Matter of fact, you’ll pretty much have to to beat the game. If you’re really in trouble, you’re allowed to hit the flashing red buttons once per mission, and your buddies will swoop in and help you out.
So you skim across the DS surface, and if you’ve played the first Star Wars game (back from when Ms. Pac-Man was a quarter), well…it’s exactly the same. Same towers. Same gameplay. Just shoot all the towers you can and avoid fire until you get to Vader and his flanking ship at the end. Fend them off and you’re in the trench with a bunch of TIE fighters, and for the last third of the flight you’re restricted to Photon Torpedoes only. Fortunately, in the interests of gameplay, you have an unlimited supply. And you blow up the Death Star (or not—more on that in a bit). On to Hoth.
Anyone who’s played the first section of the Nintendo 64 Shadows Of The Empire game will know this routine—run around on Hoth, blowing up scout walkers and probe droids, trying to keep the Imperial Walkers from getting to the base. (You can’t, but you can delay them long enough to make an escape.) Eventually you abandon ship and make your way through, um, Echo Station, picking off Imperial Snowtroopers and Wampas along the way. The camera swings and careens to get the maximum enjoyment value out of things—you never just walk around a corner and see a trooper. Instead, the camera whooshes to the right in a dizzying pan just in time to reveal a trooper leveling a blaster right at you. Unlike the other missions, however, there is a bit of strategy involved—Artoo and Threepio periodically wander into the line of fire, and your blaster has an "overheat" level. Fire too often, and you won’t be able to shoot for a good five seconds.
And eventually you leave Echo Station. (No! Not yet! Finish reading the review!) And here’s one of the things that sets this game apart from the regular shooter: The Duel With Boba Fett.