Star Wars

This year marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most important game consoles ever released...the Nintendo GameBoy. 

It may not have looked liked much, but this little gray beast with monochrome graphics stuck around for 14 years, outlasting the NES, SNES and N64.  Hell, the GameCube came out before Nintendo stopped making these things. They came out with all sorts of iterations, including the smaller and better lit GameBoy Pocket and the GameBoy Color, which, you guessed it, played games in color.  There were also about eleventy billion accessories, maybe three of which were actually useful.

I wanted to review a GameBoy game in honor of the milestone, but most of mine have been lost to the ages.  The GameBoy was great to take on the road with you, but the small cartridges were easy to lose in all sorts of places.  I didn’t want to play any of the obvious ones, so, Star Wars it is.

This is a straight up port of the NES Star Wars title, for better or for worse.  And unfortunately, its mostly for worse.  The game is poorly laid out and confusing, the enemies are unbelievably unbalanced and the controls are slippery beyond all belief.  It’s a shame too, because the presentation here is great.  The game starts with the iconic Star Wars intro, with the logo and scrolling text leading into the Imperial Star Destroyer attacking Princess Leia’s transport ship.  You get some background about Luke and his uncle buying the droids and then the game goes immediately off the rails.

Look, games like this don’t need to follow the movie exactly, it would be nearly impossible.  But your first mission is finding R2D2 inside the Jawa Sandcrawler?  When did that happen?  And you have to find Obi-Wan Kenobi inside a cave?  Why?  You could have just had a “sands of Tatooine” level where you made your way to Obi-Wan’s house just like, you know, the actual movie.  That way it wouldn’t be so jarring in other places where the game takes more liberties, like the bar scene.  Iconic as it was, it wouldn’t have made for a great video game level so making something up there makes sense.  This is a common theme throughout this entire nightmare.

The game starts up with a brief hint from C-3P0, who mentions that R2 has been taken by Jawas.  Then, it drops you in your landspeeder in the middle of the desert.  That’s it.  You don’t even get the hint if you don’t watch the intro, so its entirely possible you will have no idea what’s going on.  Once you do find R2, your next hint is simply “find Obi-Wan to get your lightsaber.”  It doesn’t give you any idea of where he might be.  We already established you are in a semi-open world, so he could be in any one of the many caves that are spread all around.  You can also enter Mos Eisley, and since we’ve already established this game could have less to do with the movie, he could be there too.  Having seen the movie a trillion times, I kind of figured that wouldn’t be the case, but imagine if you had never seen Star Wars before.  That would probably be the first place you would go.

But the biggest problem here is the hit detection.  It is damn near impossible to kill anything besides the birds and bugs with Luke’s blaster, so you need to use your lightsaber to take out stronger enemies.  Unfortunately, you have no idea whether or not you are going to hit your opponent, even if you stand as close to them as possible.  If you miss, even once, you are most likely going to die because there is no on-hit invincibility and the enemies will drain your health almost instantly.  It’s just one flaw, but in this case it is completely game-breaking.  

That’s really all there is to say.  It’s a well made game with some interesting ideas completely destroyed by one glaring flaw.  Even hardcore Star Wars fans should stay away, especially considering the NES version is pretty much identical and isn’t as finicky with hit detection.  Even there, it isn’t great.  You are better off sticking with the Super Star Wars games.  They are difficult to an insane degree, but its because of their design rather than a gameplay flaw.

2/10

BONUS FEATURE:

Seriously, we’re supposed to be CELEBRATING the GameBoy, we can’t do that with a lousy game.  As a little aside, here are a few GameBoy games you should go out of your way to play.

Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow and Gold/Silver/Crystal - Start with the obvious.  If you have been living in a cave for the last 20 years, you might not realize Pokémon is kind of a big deal.  Despite all the hype and media attention, these truly are great games.  The Gold/Silver/Crystal titles have a little more to do, but the originals are brilliant in their simplicity.  

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins - A lot of GameBoy titles are simply ports of NES or SNES games.  That’s fine, but SML2 is a completely new adventure that you couldn’t play anywhere else.  It’s got great level design and offers a huge, expansive world.

Final Fantasy Adventure - Not actually a Final Fantasy game, this is the first title in the “Secret of Mana” trilogy.  Square changed the name so it would be more recognizable in the west.  It’s an awesome action RPG that holds up fairly well.

Final Fantasy Legend 1-3 - Once again, these games aren’t part of Final Fantasy lore, they take place in the SaGa universe.  Still, they are strong RPGs that offer plenty of depth without running too long.  The second is probably the best, but all are worth a playthrough. 

Dragon Warrior Monsters - It’s a mixture of Dragon Warrior and Pokémon.  What’s not to like?

Metal Gear Solid - This has no business being as good as it is.  The fact that the even tried this is crazy, and yet it works.  There’s tons of unique content and the gameplay is top notch.

Mega Man 5 - All the other Mega Man titles on the GameBoy are essentially ports, but this is its own adventure.  You travel the galaxy battling the eight star droids rather than the traditional robot masters.  The addictive Mega Man gameplay is still here though.

The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening - I will start by saying that this game is MASSIVELY overrated.  Overrated doesn’t mean bad though, its still a quality title and a nice diversion for fans of the Zelda franchise or top down action games in general.