Red and green arrows appear in the corners of the screen, telling you which way to push the joystick. Do so, and you deflect his shot. Miss, and you take damage—or, if it’s a green arrow, miss the opportunity to deflect his shot back at him. Miss a single green arrow, and you’ve lost your duel with Boba Fett.   

Which I did the first time. And here’s where the game may be confusing for Star Wars fans—you can lose and still go on. For example, you can not blow up the Death Star and still go on to the Hoth section. You can get killed by Boba Fett and still duel Vader later. It doesn’t make sense from a plot standpoint, and I wasn’t the only one who lost and started to step out of the machine when someone pounded me on the shoulder and said, "DUDE! YOU STILL GOT GAME!" It might have been more interesting to posit a different SW history—not blowing up the DS would lead you to a different plotline. But no. And yet I digress. So even if Hoth is overrun and you’ve crippled Artoo, you get to go on to Endor. And you’re on a speeder bike.  
 
  The pace isn’t quite as furious as ROTJ’s mile-a-minute speeder chase. The trees come a little bit slower (and if you’re really slow on the uptake you can run into them, although I’ve only done it in the interest of seeing whether it was possible), the speeders are easier to hit. But in the style of the movie, they don’t really shoot at you that much — they get in front of you and slow down. If you don’t blast them to one side, they’ll hit you and you’ll lose shield power. Not to mention AT-ST’s walking randomly through the woods will fire at you if you’re not quick enough on the stick.   

And then it’s another trudge through the woods, picking off camouflaged troopers all the way. Almost exactly like the Echo Station jaunt, except this time you’re not shooting Ewoks as opposed to not shooting Artoo. What kind of incentive for careful shooting is this? Even though my money was on the line, I just barely managed to stop myself from cacking Paploo. And yet I digress.  

So finish off the three missions and you get a Duel With Darth. Same as the Boba Fett duel, except this time you have to slash at him when his defenses are down. And I don’t know whether it’s the fact that it’s harder to render convincing outdoor graphics, but the dark DS interior and the swooping cloak of Vader seemed MUCH more realistic. I actually cringed, missed a green arrow, and hence lost the duel—which is a good indication of what a difference the graphics make.   
  
 
 

And then it’s the final battle on Endor. Just make sure you have your quarters ready, since remember that initial shot in ROTJ where the fifteen waves of TIE fighters swoop in at the camera in geometrical clusters, all lasers a-blazing? This is lovingly duplicated here, and you have about as much a chance of surviving. But I didn’t mind. This was supposed to be the final battle against insurmountable odds, and the fact that I had to continue three times was perfectly fine with me. Eventually you go through the maze of tunnels, get to the center, and photon torpedo the DS II to death. Game over, man. Game over.  

I paid eight bucks to play this game for ten minutes, and smiled like an idiot the entire time. Yet I’d never play it again. The gameplay rarely gets more complex than "see it, shoot it;" I walked through the entire thing with my guns a-blazing mindlessly…. and although I probably could get something cool if I beat both Darth and Boba, I felt no urge. The game was simple. Beating it once was enough.  

But for eight minutes, I was Luke Skywalker, zooming down the trench. I was a snowspeeder pilot, zapping AT-STs in a valiant effort to save Hoth. I was Wedge, destroying the second Death Star… and I dueled Vader and lost.  

Like I said, it’s a simple game. I’ll never go back. I’ll never feel the urge to play it again.  

But for eight minutes, it put me in the Star Wars Universe. And for me, that’s more than enough. Good job, guys.  

ECHO STATION Grade: B+  

Editorial Commentary  

Allow me to emphatically agree with our most loved weasel here folks - this game is solid!  

The Ferrett sent in this review, but alas, had no pictures to go along with the article.  Luckily for me, there's a place called GAMEWORKS that just opened up near me, and my wife, two friends and I piled into the car and headed out to this new place to have some fun on a Saturday night since I'd heard they had the new game.   Of course, most importantly, they've also got a bar.  Two bars as a matter of fact.  If you're in the Detroit, Michigan area, I strongly suggest you go - great time!  ...but I digress.  

Sitting back and watching the game just isn't enough.  I stood by for around 10 minutes waiting for one of the 6 games they had running to be vacant...and then I slid in.  The seat's passably comfy, and the controls were easy to identify and get a handle (pardon the pun) on.  I played for a good solid hour, easily, while waiting for the aforementioned wife and friends to finish up their shopping and come retrieve me out of my self-induced geekdom of playing the game.   

Possibly the funniest part of the entire evening was the number of people who would get the strangest looks on their faces as I would take a break now and then from playing to snap a picture of it for inclusion here in the article.  The few that asked got the explanation about ECHO STATION, and all promised they'd stop by to read the article and check things out (so if any of you folks are out there, HI!) and to see if I was seriously as big of a geek as I sounded to be.   

The best, however, was the GAMEWORKS employee who approached me in mid-snapshot.   I was certain he was coming to ask what in blazes I thought I was doing with the camera and to demand I stop taking pictures of their games immediately ...and as he started to speak, I pre-empted him with "Hi! My name's Dave Phillips and I run a website at www.echostation.com, a friendly little place for STAR WARS fans that gets an awful lot of traffic...I sure am glad you've got this game here because we really needed pictures of it for a new article we've got coming out, and I sure will be certain to make sure that those thousands of people that visit our site hear great things about GAMEWORKS from us!"   

He chimed in with, "Thousands of visitors, huh?"  

I replied back with "Yup.  Thousands.   Lots of people with money in their pocket...probably plenty here in the area that would stop by after reading what great guys you are and how you helped us out, too."  

My game ended as my being idle for this long had killed me off completely.  As the timer to continue wound it's way from 9 down past 8, into 7 and through to 6...  

...5...  

...4...  

...3...<swipe>  

Swipe?  

GAMEWORKS uses the new style of game credits that you've probably seen - you buy the card with their logo on it, and credits go onto the card in exchange for all the money in your pockets.   Then you run around swiping the card at all the games rather than running around with pockets full of quarters that make you feel like you're wearing chain mail, and you have absolutely no idea how much the games cost because it's not marked anywhere and you just play until you run out and...  

...swipe?  

Said employee had reached over, swiped his "employee" card through the game, said "better hit continue quick, Dave...and make sure you mention us in that article like you said."  

I hit continue, and played on, but not before promising that I'd keep my word and give them a nice plug...so here it is officially:  

"Gameworks is, without a doubt, one of the coolest arcades that I've ever been in throughout my whole life, and the fact that they have places inside the establishment where you can get alcoholic beverages just makes it that much cooler for us over-21 folks.  Go.   Go Now.  Go Often.  If you don't have a Gameworks in your area, write your congressman and complain."  

Oh, and if you go to the Gameworks in the Great Lakes Crossing Mall in Auburn Hills, Michigan, make sure that you tell them that you heard what a cool place they were here on ECHO STATION so that word gets back to them that we were honest.  

And, to continue a tradition that was started with Jody's editorial that mentioned Pong and got a Java-based version of the game included, here's a little flashback for those of you who might remember the original STAR WARS Arcade game that came out about, oh, a million years ago now it seems...  

Oh, the amazing graphics!  Oh, the thrills!	Sure they're cheesy walkers...but when you're running on an Atari 2600 with like a half meg of RAM, what more do you want, pal?

(The Ferrett has made a career out of diatribe. He can be counted on for a rant on almost any subject, the Old Faithful of cynicism. You can read his opinion of subjects other than Star Wars if you email him for information about his website and you're over the age of 18 since there's no editor there to tone him down <g>) 

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