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stemmmm · 9 months ago

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Stem's thoughts on Harvest Moon GBC2

AKA how I ruined a perfectly good game for myself

The first Harvest Moon on the GameBoy was a port of a pretty simple game onto an even simpler console. The limitations involved meant that only the most basic mechanics could reasonably be left in. The farming gameplay loop still existed, but without any superfluous aspects like wandering the forest for forage or speaking to any of the NPCs. The town still existed of course, as you needed to have a place where you could buy more things for your farm. The compromise they made was to turn the whole thing into a menu where you could choose a business and go inside to buy things, but nothing else, which is disappointing but understandable for such a simple game.

The first thing that Harvest Moon GBC 2 does is put you in a conversation with an NPC, and then makes you run around the town– a place that you can actually walk around in, with buildings and people outside –to talk to and meet everyone as you tell them that you’re going to take over the old farm.

To say this game was a relief to play is an understatement. I actually played this one immediately after GB1 because I decided to skip 64, so when I turned on the game and experienced its opening, I was still extremely raw from how awful GB1 felt. The first time I played it, I actually had to stop after day one, I didn’t even get to do any farming yet, because I was reeling so hard from how absurdly different this one was– and how COMPLETE! The excuses I made in my mind for GB1 were a complete and total sham!

The first thing that you see when starting a new file is something of a character creator. It’s a simple menu where you choose your name, your gender, pick a birthday out of any day in one of the four seasons (64 only let you choose a season), and then choose between a cat or dog for a pet. You aren’t told this in the selection, but a cat will bring home random seeds you can plant, and a dog will scare away wild animals, meaning that you can only leave your livestock outside overnight if you have a dog. I like free stuff though, so I chose the cat.

The next thing you’re exposed to is the town and what story there is, but I’ll get into that later. What I’ll instead explain next is your farm, which is a little weird compared to earlier games. In the first area, you have your house, a big open space, and then the usual barn, coop, silo, wood bin, with extra space on the left and bottom of the farm for a sheep pen and hothouse/greenhouse that you can buy in the future. You cannot grow crops in this area. Instead, there’s a different area to the south that hosts a huge, empty field where you’re expected to grow everything. This is also the only place where there’s an outdoor shipping bin, so you have to go all the way down there rather than just to the entrance of your farm if you have forage to ship. To the east of the farming area is a lake where you can catch fish, and a pond where you can save fish you’ve previously caught. The only thing to do with fish is sell them though, so the only reason I can really see for using the pond is if you caught something past 5PM, when anything put in storage will rot before it can be picked up. The lake is connected to a river that runs through the crop fields, and there’s actually a space to put a bridge so you can access the other half of the space for double the planting capacity.

You won’t use any of that space to plant grass though, as all of that is meant to go behind the animal houses. Each one has its own individual field behind it for planting grass, and the game won’t let you buy any animals to go in the corresponding buildings unless a certain amount of grass is growing in the field behind it. It’s pretty awkward to make sure the grass is actually cut, as a player who doesn’t go back there every day, but I see the logic behind it. They want to make people plant grass as an extra way to gatekeep animals beyond just money. It also works pretty tidily with the mechanics they have for putting animals in and out, which is that you get special tools for each of them that automatically sends them in or outside. I didn’t use these things because I didn’t have a dog, so putting my animals outside was equivalent to throwing them to the wolves… literally. And as you may have already theorized, individual items for three different types of animals turns into an inventory disaster because of the way tools work.

In your house is a tool chest that opens a menu when you interact with it. The chest holds up to 20 tools, each with a designated slot, and it has an additional page for all the different types of seeds you can buy. You’re able to carry four different tools or types of seeds on your person at any given time, with the ability to swap between which one is equipped quickly via the START button, or more precisely by opening up the inventory menu via the SELECT button, which is pretty nice in my opinion! It works quickly, and four tools is more than any other game has let you carry so far, but that only means so much when the game has such an excess of tools, while most others only have about six– not including seeds. Navigating the tool chest also becomes something of a pain because there are so many items, so it’s desirable to only keep the absolute necessities on your person.

Included in the excessive amount of tools is an exciting new item: the bug net. See, this game has reincorporated the forest as a foraging area, but it’s a little more than that. While it has the usual seasonal wild plants, a daily-replenishing supply of lumber, and a hot spring, it also has a myriad of insects that wander or fly around in short, predictable loops. It’s no Animal Crossing– the bugs always spawn in the same place and do the same thing for a whole season until the next one, where they’re replaced by a different kind of insect doing the same amount of nothing, but I think that’s appropriate for a game on such a short schedule. Bug catching is less about skill and more about remembering to bring your net with you on days and times that you haven’t gone bug-catching before. The fishing mechanic is similarly simple– it’s less about waiting and more about timing, as the rod will bob in the same pattern every time you cast it, you just have to catch it at the right time. As a result, if you get the timing down, you can always reel it in at the first bob and catch fish extremely quickly. This strategy ended up being my favorite during the time while I was getting started and didn’t have a lot of cash for seeds or animals yet.

But what do you do with these things you catch? You can sell fish but you can’t sell bugs. Instead, both are recorded in collections that you can access at the library in town! The function of the library is to let you access your collections of bugs and fish, view photos that you collected through experiencing events (kind of like what was in 64), and connect to the save files of your friends who have the game to share information and trade items. See, this game took a little inspiration from Pokemon in that while there aren’t separate versions, you only get access to certain things if you’re playing as either a boy or a girl. You get different crops, different bug and fish spawns, and there’s a certain quest that requires making a connection. It’s very cute! But inaccessible if you aren’t playing a physical copy of the game on original hardware, unfortunately.

Other than the library, the town has a carpenter, clinic, church, restaurant, ranch, tool shop, and flower shop. My making a big deal about how the town isn’t a menu this time feels a little disingenuous getting more into it, because while it is a space you can navigate and where people walk around, once you go in a building it’s almost exactly the same– no interior, just a portrait of the shop owner and their wares, but all of this is preceded by an option to talk to them this time around! Not that they have much to say, but it’s still a difference. You get another chance to talk to the shopkeepers and give them gifts (because you can carry items between rooms this time) on Sundays when all the shops are closed, which is another unique feature compared to GB1 where every day was exactly the same.

To the north of the town is a little square with a fountain and bulletin board where everyone who isn’t employed usually wanders about during the business week. At the start of the game, the bulletin board is loaded up with handy tutorials on how to play the game (yet another thing GB1 severely lacked). Later on, it fills up with dates for town festivals like the cherry blossom festival and horse races. The festivals usually aren’t much, shops don't even close for the majority of them, but they give the world a little more life and variety and the horse race gives you the ability to purchase a minigame from the tool shop that you can play anytime you want! There are several minigames which are all unlocked to replay by doing things like going to events or completing certain objectives.

The last new thing in this game is that if you press SELECT twice, instead of giving you the option to turn on Harvest Sprite helpers (no sprites to be found here), you get a more detailed menu with information about your animals, possessions, and then a long FAQ list with information like “weeds are back!” and explanations on how to get sheep or grow flowers inside the hothouse.

The Story

The premise of the story is that there’s an old farm in town that’s going to be replaced by an amusement park. It opens with your character trying to talk the mayor out of agreeing to any deals, saying that you’ll take over the farm to save it. He agrees to give you three years to do the best work you can and then you’re sent on your way. The first thing you have to do is announce the deal to everyone in town, who all happen to already know you… and apparently very well! The town doctor confirms that you grew up in this town, and everyone around is your childhood friend. I’ve never personally seen any farming sim take this angle, and I think it’s pretty fun! The game doesn’t do a ton with it, but it at least has a different vibe. It works well for a game where you do have relationships with these people, but they’re not in a ton of depth and they don’t go anywhere in the end because marriage doesn’t exist here.

This entry is also the first in the series that we see a wholly unique cast (almost). You could argue that 64 does it since technically the folks in town aren’t the same, but they’re awfully damn similar. Everyone here is a new character design unrelated to anyone we’ve seen before. Aside from Mary (librarian) and Ken (carpenter) anyways, who are both the same exact design as their counterparts in 64. While their personalities are similar, there’s nothing to indicate that these are the same characters in any way.

The stories to do with all of these characters mostly aren’t anything too special. There’s twin boys who run the tool shop and their narrative is tied to how you get tool upgrades. Whether you play as a boy or a girl, there are a couple events that indicate certain characters have a crush on your farmer. There’s also a marriage that happens once you make it into year three that puts a tiny change in the town where Rosie, who runs the restaurant is replaced by her sister. Some of these events have to do with little quests where just about all you have to do is go to a certain location when asked, others just occur. As I said before, the story’s all very simple, but it’s just fine like that.

For the most part, necessary events will trigger when the time is right, but other things only happen if you’ve made good friends with everyone by talking on a regular basis and occasionally giving gifts. You’ll know if you’re on the right track when peoples’ dialogue changes, which happens a few times as you become closer. There’s apparently all kinds of little events in the game, but I failed to see a good number of them.

As usual, the easiest way to get on everyone's good sides and progress the story further is by doing well on your farm and either giving people the appropriate harvests as gifts or just upgrading things further. Despite all the changes to your farm layout, the actual things you have to do to work the land and care for animals are the same as ever. It’s pretty simple and quick to get good farming work done, and a decent amount of options afforded to you in terms of how you want to focus your energy– be it crops, animals, fishing, forage, or friendship, so it’s up to you how you want to get to the finish line. While you’re not told the requirements very clearly, the game is pretty low-stakes and just wants you to take your time and enjoy the three whole years it expects you to play.

How I ruined the game for myself

So of course, without a clear goal given to me, I had to look up the endings as soon as possible. Which brings me to my problem with this game: the requirements it has for the best ending are completely absurd. Well, to be accurate, one of the requirements is completely absurd. The best ending in the game requires 70 or more Happiness Points, having 10,000 G or more, have at least 3 of each animal (cow, sheep, and chicken), find 10 Power Berries, and have the third home expansion built, which are all extremely reasonable to do. So reasonable in fact that I handily managed all of those things before the end of year two out of three. The final, problematic requirement is to ship 10,000 or more items. This is a ridiculous amount of items. This is a “fill your entire field to the brim and never let it run empty” amount of items. I knew this from the second I saw it, but… well, it’s three years of gameplay right? And you aren’t told this is what you need anywhere within the game that I saw, so surely the developers thought this would be a reasonable goal for people, right? I had to give it a try, right?

Saying this from the future where I succeeded, I wish I didn’t try at all. I spent the full three years of this game constantly on the grind, filling my fields as completely as I could, and panicking to rush everything to the shipping bin before 5PM hit so I would have more empty land to plant more crops that I would water in the dark of night before going to bed and doing it again. Fun fact, this game doesn’t make you reset until 6AM the next morning and without any real repercussions. I only found this out because I’d stay out all night weeding and watering. There was very little time left to talk to the people in town after that. I did manage to get them all up to their maximum friendships pretty early on, before I had the means to constantly be churning out veggies, so I had every opportunity to catch their events, I just missed them because every day, no matter the season, I was farming.

The funny thing is, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy playing the games this way. That is still true, and I very well could have enjoyed my time much more if it weren’t for the damned horse and its awful AI. See, there may be four inventory slots for tools, but there are none for items. Every individual one has to be plucked and carried to the shipping bin, same as SNES, same as GB1. The saving grace in those two games, and technically this one as well, is that around winter-ish of your first year, a horse will appear on your farm, and when it grows up in a couple seasons, it either already has or you can buy for it a saddle bag which functions as a mobile shipping bin. All you have to do is ride your horse out to where you’re harvesting and while it wanders a bit, it stays put well enough for you to load it up with veggies as you run back and forth to harvest, which speeds up the process dramatically in the vast fields you have to work in these games.

This horse is not like those other horses. This horse will take off in a dead sprint with no warning in any direction it pleases. In my experience, this was usually in the worst possible direction that would put it the farthest away from me. And the timing of it was typically whenever I was about to throw something into the saddlebag. This aggravated the hell out of me not only because it was a huge waste of my limited time, not only because it wasted a ton of crops, but also because it was constant. Nothing I did, no positioning I tried was able to help keep the horse where I needed it, and this was how I was spending 80% of my time in this game, dealing with this horse. I could have been seeing fun events, I could have been peacefully farming at my own pace and leisure, even better this technique easily could have just worked out if the horse didn’t behave so erratically.

But I can’t judge the game on the merit of all the time I spent with the horse alone because that was my own choice to do. The best ending may require 10,000 shipped items, but all it takes to avoid the worst ending is to have more than 10 Happiness Points, more than 2,000G, more than four Power Berries, expand my house, and ship 100 items. With three entire years of game, the only way you fail to achieve that is by basically not playing the game. The vast space between the requirements for the best ending and the worst ending is to get a normal ending that accomplishes exactly the same thing as the best ending does, only the cutscene is different and you get a trophy for the best one. The cutscene barely stands out as anything special, which led to me having no idea what ending I got until I discovered the trophy was a thing I had to search for in my house. That’s it, you still get to keep playing the game either way, not that there’s terribly much else to do regardless of which ending you get, since there’s no special post-ending content.

I’ll still judge it a little bit though

While it makes sense to use your workable area to its fullest extent, having it be a requirement for the good ending to use all of it to the best of your ability for the whole extent of the game is excessive to me, especially since by year 3 it becomes completely unnecessary to try to earn money. I already had everything I was working for, and the requirement being to ship more things rather than better things meant there was no reason to get anything other than what was cheap and quick. No reason to make my animals like me so they’d produce better stuff, no reason to use the maker machines even though they weren’t obtainable until it got to the point where money had no meaning. I hardly bothered with the hothouses because they were both so confusing about what I could plant in each, and so tedious both to unlock and to harvest things since I needed a special tool that would take up a precious inventory space, lest I have to run back and forth between the tool chest. The hothouse might have been more useful if there weren’t winter crops, but there were.

What’s wild about my criticisms is that the game itself has something built in to mitigate everything that I struggled with. There is a tool called the miracle glove that automatically ships your crops the moment that they are harvested. But the only way to get it is via a link connection to a friend’s copy of the game– something near impossible in this day and age because you’d need to somehow find two working copies of this game with two functional GameBoys, and completely impossible if you’re using the magic of the 3DS eShop which doesn’t exist anymore and didn’t have functional multiplayer for most games anyways. That item alone would have solved the biggest problem I had in playing this game, and it was functionally DLC.

Closing thoughts

It took me a really long time to try and get to this review, and I’ve beaten two more games since, which has given me a new perspective. My original nugget for this one was going to focus on how much I hated the horse the whole way through and on how disappointed I was that the game was so hard for such little reward, but I’ve since realized that playing in a way that was no fun for me was my own choice. At any point I could have scaled things down and reprioritized to focus on the details of the game that are more fun like seeing events, but I just clung to that damn horse for 50 hours instead– which by the way, is longer than it’s taken me to beat any other game in this series so far that I’ve recorded my playtime for. The average sits around 25 hours.

If you don’t play like I did, it’s actually a really neat game!It’s not dissimilar to a scaled-down version of 64, with the way it focuses a little more on events and adds features to make the world feel just a touch more alive like the bug and fish collections. It’s not as deep or detailed as 64, but you still get to experience something of a sweet little story with a small set of characters in a game that feels very smooth and fun to play.On the bright side, even with the struggle I went through trying to get the perfect score, it was still a better game than GB1. It says a lot that I’ve found it more appropriate to compare it to 64, a fantastic game, rather than its actual predecessor.

#m.txt #hm posting #harvest moon #story of seasons #harvest moon gbc2 #hm gbc2 #game review #the worst part of these is always getting images together #i think you can see me getting lazier with each entry #by the time we reach the wii games these will be text only

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miloscat · 7 months ago

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[Review] Legend of Kay Anniversary (Wii U)

An unremarkable PS2 action-adventure.

After immersing myself in Avatar media for so long I looked around for any other games set in Asia-inspired fantasy worlds but made by Westerners. This let me knock one off my Wii U backlog, the 2015 remaster of the 2005 PS2 game Legend of Kay. Neon Software, the German studio behind the original game, are known to me for their Amiga Sonic clone Mr. Nutz: Hoppin' Mad, and it's somewhat fitting that their final game before closure was this other furry platformer. Some of the Neon cofounders went on to form Keen Games, which seems to have morphed into a new Kaiko... the original Kaiko being the company that the Mr. Nutz Hoppin' Mad team left to form Neon in the first place! Who knows how long they'll survive now under the aegis of the troubled and layoff-happy Embracer, but it's been four years since their last remaster...

Anyway, this game is a sort of 3D Zelda-like-slash-3D platformer filled with anthropomorphic animal characters, which as a Rare fan sounds up my alley. Comparing it to Starfox Adventures may be a little generous though: this is very much a B-tier PS2 action game, and a graphical revamp for new generation consoles can't magically fix the mediocrity.

To get the plot out of the way: it's extremely Normal. Kay is a "plucky" (read: obnoxious) protagonist, using his martial arts training to fight back against the occupation of his cat village by evil gorillas and rats. He travels his island to settlements of rabbits, frogs, and pandas to free them from oppression. I think it's telling that there are no credits given for story or writing; anything story-related is constantly undermined by overly shallow characterisations, completely functional video game progression (go here to get key to open door to go there etc.), and the most brain-dead "banter". For example, Kay thinks the height of action hero quips is to call a rat "cheese-breath" about a hundred times.

The latter issue is not helped by some misguided voice acting choices. It's a fully voiced game but you'll wish it wasn't with Kay's bland sarcastic schtick and almost every other character uncomfortably presenting as a borderline racist caricature. Mostly it's white people doing faux-"Asian" accents, although apparently crocodiles are Eastern European and frogs are... Jamaican, for some reason? I was glad to find a setting that let me skip any dialogue scene with a quick tap of X, because there's no other way to speed up the tedious exposition and pointless back-and-forth when you meet enemy groups.

There's only a handful of what you might call "puzzles", and the platforming ranges from "not bad" to "OK", serviceable but doesn't excel. The biggest strength and biggest weakness of the game is its combat, which is pretty involved. You can swap between three weapons which have different attributes, you often have to get around enemy blocks so there's a Wind Waker-style roll around move to hit their back, but you can also zip between targets during a combo, or use rolling, crouching, or jump attacks. You can carry up to 5 usable items which sometimes are used to explore but you have to rely on them for combat encounters late in the game when they start throwing waves at you with hordes of armoured enemies. When the difficulty spikes like this, it all just becomes too much and goes from an exercise in creatively using moves to keep your combo up to a struggle to survive (and if you die, you lose any consumables you used in your last attempt, also there's a lives system for some reason??).

I said combat might be the game's strength and it was clearly a focus of the project, but I had the most fun exploring the little worlds. There's lots of goodies to collect, mostly in the form of chests and pots containing money. You quickly end up with more than you'll ever spend but I still liked finding it. The point multiplier mechanic may seem superfluous but when you get accustomed to the flow of the platforming sections, grabbing coloured crystals to keep this combo going to make your fights and coins worth more points becomes addictive. The level design may be nothing special but the zones you traverse have some character to them.

It should be noted that this is a semi-linear game, in that the levels are mostly open to explore with events and sub-dungeons within them, but you progress from one field to the next with no way to go back. This bit me on more than one occasion when I blundered into the story trigger to move on before turning in one of the rare sidequests or going down a side path to find a health extension, making it permanently missable. This frustration prompted me to occasionally consult a Gamefaqs guide with maps during each subsequent chapter. The game does give you a minimap in the corner of the screen but it can't be expanded to a full map so it's less useful than it could be.

Legend of Kay would have felt middling even at release but rereleasing it just makes its deficiencies even more obvious. It's still got some charm for being "of that era" (I was often reminded of The Hobbit's action-adventure game from the same generation, but with fewer instant death pits), so I got some enjoyment from it. And it has some ideas that work, like the acrobatic combat and combo system. While some of the environments look nice there were just as many drab areas, and the repeated character model reuse got old. Oh, and sometimes you ride an animal and it's not fun. On the whole, I can't recommend this one... even if you ignore the cringey cultural stereotypes!!

#legend of kay #legend of kay anniversary #neon software #kaiko #wii u #review

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gamegirlx · 1 year ago

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so is no one gonna talk about how this game's graphics are 7 years older than twilight princess???

this game is called Samba De Amigo and despite not playing it as a child i now wish i did 😔🚑✨✨ (pls watch the cool intro cutscene they have here pls pls)

#samba de amigo #game rants #video game rants #video game #video game review #video game recommendations #nintendo wii #wii games #game recommendations #3D #3d graphics #aesthetic wallpaper

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sleepless-in-starbucks · 8 months ago

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oh yeah and for those of you wondering (no one) i HAVE ordered endless ocean luminous in hard copy, i AM waiting anxiously for its arrival, im TRYING TO HOLD OUT HOPE that i enjoy it more than the reviews claim i will, and i WILL be unreachable when it first arrives

#the cryptid speaks #endless ocean #the reviews so far honestly have mostly jus been reinforcing worries i already had #most primarily about the 'constantly changing' maps #i Did see it has a story so . gripping the desk so hard my fingers bleed . that better be good right it has to be good it must please #the other endless games are wii games for those who dont know so i cant play them when im away from home with my wii #so ill also have to hope this one is good bc what am i going to do if it isnt? play the other games? i WISH

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grinbrothers · 8 days ago

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Pokemon Battle Revolution - Wii Wonders!

Souldin's wonderful review of the Wii game; Pokémon Battle Revolution, premieres at 9PM BST on 18/12/2024!

Welcome to a review of Pokémon Battle Revolution, and it's Pokémon theme park of battles, shopping, and even more battles. Try to best the Colosseum leaders with questionable rental teams or send over your better balanced Pokémon from your Gen 4 DS Pokémon games.

Wii Wonders Season 2 Cover Art by AngelAik0: https://www.deviantart.com/angelaik0/art/Commission-Nanka-872606281 Wii Wonders Story Art by xXxSai: https://www.deviantart.com/starteam2017/art/Commission-for-Sould1n-811636274 Wii Wonders Controls Art by Ang_YUSOX: https://www.deviantart.com/starteam2017/art/Commission-Nanka-811758731 Wii Wonders Gameplay Art by Seasickjelly: https://www.deviantart.com/starteam2017/art/Chibi-Monochrome-Commission-Nanka-831774583 Wii Wonders Conclusion Art by Sakka-sama: https://www.deviantart.com/sakka-sama/art/Com-Nanka-833535376 Nanka and Pikachu artwork by Wishybun: https://wishybun.tumblr.com/ Pikachu Libre Wrestling Nanka by Ourobot_: https://x.com/ourobot_?lang=en-GB Nanka and Piplup by Siczak: https://www.deviantart.com/siczak/art/CM-Spectacular-Performance-854952521 Link to Mystery Gift codes for the game: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Battle_Revolution#Bonus_Pok%C3%A9mon Pokémon Battle Revolution is exclusive to the Nintendo Wii.

Date Made: 20/10/2024 to 12/11/2024 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXCFgLZmjBeMCt-QbSoDhVA Tumblr: http://grinbrothers.tumblr.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/GrinBrothers

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sugarandice3 · 8 months ago

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Okay guys, I need to put y'all on something.

Back in the Wii era, there was a game called "Endless Ocean: Blue World." Y'all I'm telling you this was one of the best games we played on the Wii. It had a compelling story with characters that felt like actual people, complete with flaws and individual motivations. And the gameplay? AMAZING. It could be super chill and relaxing most of the time with intense parts that kept the game compelling. In addition to this, the game had so many side-quests that actually 100% it took a while. Overall, it was way more fun than a diving game had any right to be. Soooo, if you think that sounds fun, well I have news for you.

A NEW ENDLESS OCEAN GAME IS COMING OUT IN MAY

The trailer is horrible, but shows that the game has promise. I'm hoping that as more gets revealed, we'll get to see it really shine. More people need to show excitement for this game so that we can get a quality game that can live up to the rest of the franchise.

youtube

#wii #nintendo switch #endless ocean #endless ocean: blue world #endless ocean: luminous #Youtube #games #gaming #video games #game review

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everygame · 23 days ago

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Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle (Atari 2600)

Developed/Published by: James Wickstead Design Associates / Parker Brothers Released: 12/9/1983 Completed: 19/11/2024 Completion: Blew up the Death Star. A bunch of times.

Well, we’ve reached the end of Parker Brothers run with the Star Wars license for video games, and while it hasn’t exactly been diminishing returns (the unreleased Ewok Adventure was better than Jedi Arena, at least) it hasn’t been exactly edifying. If I want to be completely fair here, they weren’t in the best situation: the video games industry in North America was imploding and they were stuck making games for the creaky hardware that was at the center of it.

You’d hope they’d have made the best of it–and I really do think The Empire Strikes Back is a fully formed piece of work. But if Ewok Adventure was half-baked, we’re talking raw dough here.

In Death Star Battle, you control the Millennium Falcon as it attempts to destroy the Death Star II before it’s fully constructed–first by getting past the Death Star’s shield, and then by, er, shooting bits off it off until you can reach the core and shoot that. And then you do it all again.

It’s a bit weird. There are two screens, which feels… wrong (come on guys, I know memory was at a premium, but rule of three at least) and in both screens you effectively only play in the bottom two-thirds of the screen. On the first screen, the rest is taken up with the shield and the Death Star in the distance, and you have to try and time it to pop through one of the holes (?) that show up in the shield randomly to get to the second screen while avoiding TIE Interceptors and (most dangerously) the shield’s “outermost energy band” which appears and disappears and kills you because… well, it would be too easy to get through the shield otherwise.

Look at that perspective! One nice touch is that you can actually see the Death Star being constructed as you play.

On the second screen the Death Star itself takes up a big chunk of real estate, and it feels like you should be able to move all the way around it–but you can’t. This seems to be because if you could move around it the “death ray” which moves back and forth (hey, a bit like the lasers in Gridrunner!) would have to aim in more than one direction, so you’re still stuck on the bottom two-thirds even if there’s no visual reason why.

Overall this game is simple, but it could be, I don’t know… fine. What stops it reaching the bare minimum is that you have no fine control over the Millennium Falcon at all, as it slides around like Nien Numb is drunk on (checks Wookipedia) "Kowakian Rum" after a night listening to hot jizz [“you couldn’t resist, could you”--Star Wars Ed.] While a touch of inertia isn’t a horrible idea–after all, this is a post-Asteroids space game, we expect a little–this is a game where you need to be able to accurately shoot in all directions to try and pick your way to the Death Star core, and you just… can’t. Instead you end up doing the herky-jerky dancing that represent the very worst kind of control system as you desperately move left a bit and then right a bit overshooting endlessly–and never mind if you want to hold on a diagonal! It’s not so much frustrating–you’d have to care a lot more about this game than I think it’s possible to–but it’s certainly annoying.

To be honest though, if you could move accurately the game would be a piece of piss. The difficulty switches tell the story: the left difficulty switch allows you to set the game so that you either collide with TIE Fighters or not, and the right difficulty switch allows you to set the Death Star’s death ray to either only move to the extent of the Death Star or across the entire screen.

If you set it so that you collide with TIE Fighters, the game is essentially impossible. There’s not enough screen space to avoid them, and you can’t control well enough to anyway! But then this means that the first screen is trivial–you just wait until the first hole in the shield appears and pop through it immediately. And then on the second screen, if you don’t set it so the Death Star’s death ray can reach across the entire screen, you can literally just set the Millennium Falcon up in a corner away from it and shoot your way to the core (well, after the half hour it takes you to get into position.)

It’s actively not possible to get the game settings where it provides an interesting challenge throughout (again, wrestling with controls is not an interesting challenge.) Yet the graphics and sound are (comparatively) decent, with a hyperspace animation and everything, so there's a sense here that the effort on this game was largely expended there.

Considering that, I got a bit interested in who made Death Star Battle, because there’s a dearth of good information on it online–Ewok Adventure is, if anything, better memorialised.

In his interview with Digital Press about Ewok Adventure, Larry Gelberg described that after Parker Brothers signed the rights for Return of the Jedi he and Ray “Raymo” Miller “came up with 3-4 game concepts” after seeing concept art and production stills: “Raymo came up with the Breakout-style Death Star Battle game.”

(It’s interesting that he describes it as “Breakout-style” considering the finished game has little to no relation to breakout other than I suppose the Death Star is destructible. It speaks to how unrefined the final design was.)

Unusually, although Parker Brothers did Ewok Adventure in house, as they did with their earlier Star Wars games, Death Star Battle was in fact outsourced to James Wickstead Design Associates (JWDA) a fascinatingly unhallowed developer who you may only have heard of due to Kevin Bunch’s detailed article for the Video Game History Foundation on the lost Atari 2600 game Tarzan.

As Bunch noted, JWDA already had a relationship with Parker Brothers as toy designers, and so it seemed likely that they’ve have been considered a safe pair of hands for Ray Miller’s concept if the rest of Parker Brothers was at capacity.

Indeed, in an interview with Atari Compendium, JWDA’s Todd Marshall said of Death Star Battle “we had a lot of freedom and leeway to redesign things until the 'client' was happy with it” so it seems likely they were largely left to their own devices.

However, the best piece of information I have to go on, and you’ll never believe this, is original research. It looks like Todd Marshall provided JWDA engineer Henry Will IV’s notebooks to Atari Compendium (which is… interesting, because Henry Will IV is still kicking, so why did he have them?) and while you have to parse some difficult handwriting at points, you can follow the entire development of Death Star Battle from the 1st of February 1983, where Will writes “Discovered that: Parker has asked us to do VCS Star Wars.”

History is made.

He even says “1% royalty & fees - no cap” which is crazy, because I thought only Gen Z said that. He was saying it in 1983!!!

A much more dedicated historian than I might want to pour over the notebooks for more details, though even at a glance just learning that Will was by and large solely responsible for Death Star Battle is something–and he even notes on the 12th of September 1983 that the game is available in “Bradlees” for $31.77 giving us the earliest confirmed release date for the game. Wow! Etc.

Of course, the problem now is that I can put a face to the game–it’s Ray Miller’s concept, sure, but Henry Will IV’s fault. Sorry Henry but this is fucking rubbish.

Will I ever play it again? No thank you.

Final Thought: Look, to be fair to the guy, he had like seven months to make this while working on several other things, and for the Atari 2600 as I said the game honestly looks pretty good, with strong perspective and animation on the Death Star’s shield and pleasingly iconic sprites. But it cries out for a dedicated designer; it manages to have even less of an unified design concept than Ewok Adventure, and above all it makes me wonder why after The Empire Strikes Back Sam Kjellman didn’t design any more Star Wars games–he was good at it!

(Kjellman wouldn’t design another game until… Outback Joey for Sega Genesis??? One of the rarest games on the system, that used a heart rate sensor???)

Anyway, I think discovering that this was a JWDA joint gives some clarity as to why it was published over Ewok Adventure. This has arguably even more horrible controls than Ewok Adventure, but it’s about a more exciting part of the movie and Parker Brothers almost certainly put more money into outsourcing this than on Ewok Adventure in-house, which I suspect made it somewhat easier to throw away what their programmer made. So perhaps less of a punishment for Gelberg’s hubris than he thought, and simply some sunk-cost fallacy at work.

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