Nerd Mentality

MIA Files - N64 Edition #1

Posted March 18th 2005 by J Edison Thomas.

The great thing about playing a game with some nostalgia to it is that when you boot it up, it throws you right back to where you first played it. So when I play Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire I'm immediately reminded of my first days playing the Nintendo 64. I don't think there's a gaming experience I've ever had that compares to those first few months of 3D gaming on the N64. Graphics were polygonal as hell, sure, but I was riding the wave of a revolution in gaming that likely won't be matched for a long time. Maybe never.

Anyway, I'm not going to jive anyone here; a lot of the reason I love Shadows of the Empire is because of the nostalgia, so I understand that my experience playing it is padded in a way that yours (if you've never touched the game before) could never be. I imagine someone who has never played the game might write a review along the lines of, "Oh cool it's like a Star Wars game, only crappier." Those people, real or imagined, are stupid people. What they would have said if they were capable of more impressive SAT scores is, "Oh cool, it's like a Star Wars game, only not the same cookie-cutter crap I've seen a million times before."

At first it might look like the same. Yes, the first level is you piloting a Snow Speeder to take your part in a very arcade-like version of the Battle of Hoth (which I find far superior to any other incarnation of said Battle). But that's only because the story starts up alongside that of The Empire Strikes Back and kind of runs beside it for awhile before taking its own tangent. You're Dash Rendar, an ally of the usual Star Wars gang that doesn't get mixed up in the Galactic Civil War too much because he has his own garbage to take out. Dash is almost exactly like Han Solo except he's possibly cooler in that he has a beard and doesn't get played like a chump by Boba Fett. His ship even looks a bit like a rip off of the Millennium Falcon. Regardless, he's a very cool guy and this makes it fun to play as him. And as Dash you'll do it all: shooting down TIEs as your robot buddy pilots you into an asteroid field, platforming on a moving hovertrain, and racing and wrecking a randy band of swoopbike ruffians. If you think that kind of thing is "da bomb" then by all means feel free to say so, because that phrase was perfectly acceptable back in 1996.

Most of Shadows plays out a lot like the perfect transition of a typical SNES side-scroller into 3D; you run from the beginning of a level to the end, gunning down Imperials with your trusty blaster, and backtracking now and then to hit a switch or something like that. There are twisting hallways and canyons, so a little exploration is needed in some parts, but all in all it's pretty straightforward--until you get a jet pack and then it's just awesome as hell (until you lose the jet pack and then it kind of sucks for awhile until you get it back).

Basically, Shadows of the Empire doesn't try to be what most Star Wars games go for these days. It's a story you won't find in the movies with an original character who isn't a Jedi. Story and theme-wise, this is much more a game for "Extended Universe" people rather than people who just want to live out the Trilogy as closely as possible. For instance, there are no lightsabers or Darth Vader but there are Black Sun assassins and Boba Fett.

Yeah, Boba Fett. He has a jet pack and you have a jet pack and you fight him. You can find this game used for only $4.99. Nintendo64 as low as $14.99 pre-owned. There are very few reasons why you shouldn't get this game and "being a loser" is the only one I can think of that makes sense.

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