I've been far from thorough with these articles, reserving some of the sillier Star Wars games for another time. But even with the relatively few games I've shown, you can hopefully get the impression of how LucasArts was approaching the brand in general. Essentially, if any kind of concept was hot at the time in gaming, LucasArts would try to apply Star Wars to it. They would seek out a developer who had experience with that type of game, perhaps learning from the experience of the disastrous internally-developed Masters of Teras Kasi.
What came out the other end was rarely bad and often great, so it's hard to fault the system. One problem, however, is that good developers were rarely available for more than one game. Either they were famous before the Star Wars game and had to get back to their own things, or the Star Wars game catapulted them to a place where they could get by without it. Many great games that deserved sequels sometimes didn’t get them, leaving players wanting more.
One exception to that was the Star Wars: Battlefront series. Not only did the developer of the first game, Pandemic Studios, return for a second kick at the can, the series actually continued on after their departure. Two more games came from Rebellion Developments, and after a number of years, the series was revived by EA DICE, bringing things to a curious full circle. It's not hard to tell, but Battlefront was inspired by EA and DICE's Battlefield 1942, a large-scale multiplayer shooter where players could battle in and out of vehicles, both on land and in the air. That's about as much of a no-brainer for the Star Wars license as anything could be. In Battlefront, players could join either side of the two major conflicts from the films. Each group had a variety of classes players could choose from, and the movies had a lot of great battles and locations the game could pull from.
While players had to content themselves with playing as relative nobodies, the heroes of the movies would make appearances now and then as allies. With a fairly robust single-player mode and lots of multiplayer options, Battlefront proved to be quite satisfying for anyone who wanted to see what it would be like to have boots on the ground during any of the wild battles seen in the films. The game launched alongside the long-awaited first DVD releases of the Original Trilogy, making for a pretty expensive day for fans. Expensive, but entirely pleasant. Battlefront was a big success, and as mentioned, a number of follow-ups came. We'll be looking at one of them near the end of this particular series of articles.
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When Nintendo chose to stick with cartridges for their Nintendo 64 hardware in the face of an industry ready to move to CDs, it left them with a bit of a third-party problem. Namely, most of Nintendo’s strongest supporters from the previous two hardware generations were abandoning ship for the safer waters offered by Sony’s PlayStation. In an effort to combat this problem, Nintendo tried to make the best of the partnerships they could get. The official marketing byline was to call this group of developers the Dream Team, but that was definitely an optimistic read of the situation. Some of the developers had big days ahead of them, some would never amount to much, but not many of them had much name value in 1996. Nintendo did have one very useful partner from a marketing standpoint, however, and they certainly got their mileage out of the fruits of that relationship.
The Nintendo 64 had a famously dry launch period, with the number of titles available at the system’s September 1996 debut countable on one hand with a few fingers to spare. The system would only have eight games on American shelves by Christmas, so Nintendo had to rely heavily on telling people what was coming. Of course, the next problem was that there wasn’t a lot coming, either. Fortunately for Nintendo, Star Wars fever was starting to pick up again. A new trilogy was confirmed to be on the way, and the original trilogy was heading back to theaters with updated special effects and new footage. And Nintendo, clever devils that they were, had an exclusive Star Wars game coming for the Nintendo 64 shortly after launch courtesy of LucasArts. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire would be exclusive to the Nintendo 64 for the foreseeable future, published by Nintendo and incorporated into their marketing to the extent that it even appeared on the console’s box design.
Any Star Wars game was a good thing by this point, but Lucas was determined to make this game part of a major multimedia push including books, toys, comics, an official soundtrack CD, and trading cards. Basically, it was like they were releasing a movie, but with no movie. The video game was one of the most important parts of the project, and LucasArts worked hard to make it worthy of the event. Unfortunately, the pressure of getting it ready in time and some issues arising from the Nintendo 64 hardware meant the game had to be slashed down from its original concept, with nearly half of the planned levels ending up on the cutting room floor. What remained was... okay. Nothing great, but it was exciting to see certain elements of the movies in a 3D action game like this. The game wisely put one of its strongest feet forward, with the opening level re-enacting the Battle of Hoth. In hindsight, it was a pretty clunky take on the famous scene, one that one soon be topped by another Nintendo 64 Star Wars game. But at the time, seeing that scene play out in real 3D for the first time was enough to get the hearts of Star Wars fans pumping.
In general, the vehicle sequences in the game were pretty good, but the on-foot shooting segments that made up the majority of the game suffered from an unreliable camera and spotty controls. The game was also fairly short and offered very little replay value, which wouldn’t be as big of a problem if it weren’t the only new game Nintendo 64 owners would get for almost two months. Still, the game served its purpose in Nintendo’s plans. It sold nearly a million copies in its first year, helped pad out a very thin early period of releases on the fledgling console, and strengthened the relationship between Nintendo and LucasArts. That led to even more exciting and higher quality ventures, one of which we’ll be looking at in the next part of this series. As for Shadows, the game would never get a sequel, but its hero Dash Rendar would go on to haunt the Star Wars Extended Universe for a while after.
There are a lot of active gamers today who are probably too young to remember the 16-bit console wars. They were pretty bitter, let me assure you. But then, SEGA was always a scrappy company, and its fans were certainly, ahem, passionate. If anything, it felt like things between SEGA and Sony were even more heated at times than they had been with Nintendo. So when it was time for SEGA to finally call it a day on hardware manufacturing and move into a new phase as a software third-party, it was a strange feeling for many. I think each of us had our own moment of realization, where it was finally understood that SEGA was done and there would be no more consoles branded with that blue-and-white logo. For a lot of people, that moment came with the first Sonic game released on a Nintendo console. For me, however, it was when Virtua Fighter 4 came not to Dreamcast, but to PlayStation 2.
A great deal of my love for SEGA is tied up not in their Genesis days, but rather their arcade games. It was games like Virtua Fighter 2 and SEGA Rally that decided my console purchase, not Sonic the Hedgehog. I can’t begin to count the hours my friends and I sank into Virtua Fighter 2 on the Saturn, but I can tell you we skipped a lot of afternoon classes in high school to do that. Though I bought a Dreamcast in part for Virtua Fighter 3, it failed to grab me and my friends the same way the previous game had. By the time Virtua Fighter 4 came out on PlayStation 2, my high school friends and I had gone our separate ways in pursuit of our eventual paths in life.
But what time taketh away, it often replenishes. University brought new friends. SEGA, perhaps in an effort to show they had a strong future, were knocking hits out of the park left and right. And in its fourth installment, Virtua Fighter was the absolute best it had ever been. More hours lost, more classes missed, more great times had. The upgraded Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution renewed our vigor, proving to be more than enough entertainment to hold us over for years. Then we all graduated, went our separate ways, and presumably moved on to other games.
When Virtua Fighter 5 came out, there would be no more missed classes, not for me. With an online mode, it was easier than ever for old friends to meet up for battles, but at the very least, I never did. The game was fine, of course, but some things are meant for certain times in one’s life, I think. Sometimes I still load up Virtua Fighter 4 and give the computer a few shots to the head. It’s a warm feeling, looking at those battle records on my old memory card. In a weird sort of way, I think these games are like yearbooks, and maybe more important in that regard than the actual books full of people I don’t know very well. As much as Virtua Fighter games served as a marker for SEGA’s moments in history, perhaps they also do the same for me.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, where the hell is Virtua Fighter 6, SEGA?
Hardware: SEGA Game Gear, SEGA Master System, Nintendo 3DS
Memory can be a tricky thing, but I’m reasonably sure that Dragon Crystal is the first roguelike I ever played. It certainly predates my knowledge of that term, and only in coming back to it years later did I realize exactly what it was. The game is especially familiar if you’ve played any of the releases in Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon series. Strangely enough, Dragon Crystal’s release predates that of the first Mystery Dungeon game by a good two plus years. Now, to be very fair, both games obviously are drawn from the same source, but it is interesting how similar the results are. I feel pretty comfortable calling this game, and its cousin Fatal Labyrinth, one of the earliest examples of the Japanese rogue-like sub-genre. You have to take your character through 30 randomly-generated floors full of monsters, traps, and treasure, seeking the crystal that will end your curse and send you home. Luck plays a major role in how successful you will be, so it’s your job to mitigate random factors as much as you possibly can.
When I was young, I was drawn to this game for a few reasons. First, it was one of the few RPG-like games on the Game Gear. Second, I loved the idea that every game was different from the last. You never knew what items would do each time you started anew, and only experimentation would reveal the secrets of your loot. I loved feeling along the walls searching for passages,too. In short, Dragon Crystal felt like nothing else I had played, and its differences were intoxicating. Of course, with the passage of time, it’s now about as unique as the average side-scrolling platformer, but I think there is still some value in this game. At the time, it was maligned for its brutal difficulty, but with roguelikes becoming a common genre, it’s easy to see how much of that can be chalked up to a lack of experience with the tropes of these kinds of games. Judged by today’s standards, Dragon Crystal is neither so hard as to be unfair nor as easy as to be dull. It’s also extremely easy to come by, as it was one of the handful of games selected to represent the Game Gear on the 3DS Virtual Console service. For a few dollars, it’s the best roguelike bang for your buck available on the system, at least in my nostalgia-laden opinion.
Play It Because: It’s surprisingly hard to put down for a game of its vintage.
Bonus Trivia: As is the case with many Game Gear games, much of the production staff of Dragon Crystal is unknown. The designer behind its Genesis sister title Fatal Labyrinth, however, was Hirokazu Yasuhara, who would go on to design the Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis games, the first game in the Uncharted series, and a number of other major titles. From humble beginnings!
