Star Wars: A history of terrible games

SW_Kinect
Quick, name a good Star Wars video game. It’s not hard. Now, name a bad one. That’s a LOT easier.
I’m in the process of putting together my review of Star Wars: Battlefront, a game that I’ve been looking forward to for some time, which means my mind has turned to all things in galaxies far, far away. It seems a lot of folk are like that. Must be a movie coming out soon or something.
In the video game space, Star Wars games play on a strong sense of either nostalgia or hype. Hype when there’s a new movie or cartoon or similar to trade from, and nostalgia when there isn’t, because it seems as though gamers (or at least game developers’ view of gamers) can’t get enough of icy Hoth battles.
Nostalgia can be a powerful force to drive interest in an IP, so as I played, my mind wandered through the past history of Star Wars games. My mind does all kinds of things while I play games, and getting nostalgic is just the start of it.
That’s when it struck me like a lightsaber between the eyes. Star Wars games, viewed as a whole, are a horrible steaming mess of failure.
Quick, name a good Star Wars game. You can probably do that, and maybe even two or three. But five? That gets harder and a lot more subjective, but it really shouldn’t. I mean, there are more than 100 games based on Star Wars.
100 games. That’s a lot of time and effort put into making back what I’m sure would have been a fat pile of cash going into George Lucas’ pockets. You’d think that easily a third of them should be good, but there’s not way that there’s 30 good Star Wars games. Most of them are utter gunk.
They’ve been gunk from a very early stage, too:

I remember playing this as a much younger man. I didn’t have a 2600 as a much younger man, but the friend of mine who did was, I think, faintly embarrassed by the whole thing. There are plenty of classic 2600 titles that were good then and are good now. This isn’t one of them.
Using actual movie footage — that’s got to be a recipe for a good game, right?

No. Not if you can’t make out what it is, and the “game” section is woeful.
From the era where fighting games were everything…

… and this was terrible.
How about Star Wars real time strategy? How could that possibly go wrong?

Oh yeah. This. I reviewed this for APC back in the day, and I had wiped it from my brain with booze. Now I need more booze.
This was an Xbox launch title. I know somebody who imported a US Xbox, got a stepdown converter, and had to choose two games. One was Halo, because of course it was. This was the other. He doesn’t like to talk about that any more.

Actually, the mix of Star Wars and Xbox-specific titles seems to just be a recipe for pain:

True story: I remember being at an event sponsored by Microsoft where they were giving away an Xbox 360. Star Wars Kinect was the bundled game at the time, and the MS representative spent some time talking up how wonderful the 360 was. He finished with the statement “Oh. And it also comes with Star Wars Kinect, but I think the room already knows about that one.”
‘Nuff said.
The kids like that Mario Kart — surely Star Wars Mario Kart will be… oh.

I know! Wipeout! A Star Wars themed… no… wait… it’s coming back to me…

So what would I consider to be “good” in the Star Wars video game canon? Painfully little. I wouldn’t consider the SNES era “Super” games as woeful, although many do. Sure, they’re hard, but in the context of the licensed games of their era (which included such stinkers as Lethal Weapon, The Blues Brothers and (shudder) Home Alone, Super Star Wars (and Empire, and Jedi) are essentially miracles. Arcade game’s OK too, and KOTOR of course. Tie Fighter on the PC as a series, the original Battlefront games, which I’m sure will be referenced heavily in my new Battlefront review, also stand up well. Maybe at a pinch, for what it was at the time, possibly Dark Forces, although it hasn’t aged well.
Then again, while I can moan all I like about the crappy quality of most Star Wars games, it could be worse.
It could be Doctor Who.
Doctor Who has by my reckoning exactly an IP that has one good game — the pinball machine — and then a history of games that never gets beyond mediocrity and often wallows in its own sheer awfulness. Sure, it’s in Lego Dimensions, but then so is just about everything. Even Star Wars has had its tilt at the Lego universe, so it doesn’t count.

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