Game Debate #64: Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

[Reed Rothchild | 9,547]

 

 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

Never played it. In fact the only Star Wars game that I have played was the 1980s sit down arcade game. 

[Gloves | 11,790]

Fuckin love this game. Prob an 8 or 9 realistically. 

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

I remember playing it briefly when a friend got it way back when, but I'm going to skip officially voting, as I have harsh opinions of every Star Wars game that tries to be or include a flight simulator game which isn't X-Wing, TIE Fighter, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter.  "Flying" on rails is absolute shit, and if you enjoy these types of games and haven't played the old school PC ones...DON'T.  They'll spoil the others for you forever.  You have no idea how disappointed I was when Rebel Assault originally came out and I discovered how much I loathed it within moments of first taking the stick.

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

5 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Fuckin love this game. Prob an 8 or 9 realistically. 

Is it really better than this though?

[Gloves | 11,790]

4 minutes ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

Is it really better than this though?

Honestly? Yeah I think so. 

[MiamiSlice | 3,096]

I remember playing this and thinking "why can't other N64 games look and play this well?"

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

3 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Honestly? Yeah I think so. 

Okay, now I'm intrigued. 

[Sumez | 2,966]

IMO it's much better than the vector arcade game, and it should tick some of the same nerves as well - flying around an X-Wing doing Star Wars missions. There's even a bonus mission (not related to the game's story) recreating the same Death Star trench run.

Though I think video games should be judged mostly in a vacuum, I think some context still helps for this game - This game came out in a time where every new Star Wars game could still be expected to propably be really good, and to top it off, the IP was still mostly still unsullied, with not even the prequels out yet to incite any sort of backlash - instead everyone was just excited to see the movies make a return soon.

In other words, Star Wars was hot stuff. And to top it off, I was a big fan of LucasArts (though it's technically developed by Factor 5) - This was a game I had to get with absolutely no hesitation.

At the end of the day though, this turned out to be a really good game in its own right. If it didn't have the SW franchise, I probably would have never tried it, but I'm glad I did. The gameplay is super fun, and it satisfies the fantasy of being a space pilot running different kinds of missions in an exciting world. I can hardly imagine the game being pulled off any better design-wise, though a 60fps hi-res version would probably do wonders to the game.  

[OptOut | 8,889]

Very good game, loved it a lot back when it first came out. It was massively overshadowed by Rogue Leader on the GameCube tho, that game just took everything great about this one and cranked it to 11! 

[AstralSoul | 502]

This is one of those I thought was fantastic back in the day and tried replaying it a year or two ago and was absolutely not feeling it. I gave it a 6/10, but was probably 8/10 for the year it came out. But 6/10 for today.

[Tanooki | 4,936]

I'm still half out of it too early...I voted on RS2   This is no killer f'ing game, I'd give it a 7.  It's good, fairly good, but it has some damning design oversights that will utterly infuriate the player.  The big elephant, failing a mission and having no idea why time and again because it won't tell you.

[Sumez | 2,966]

I'm surprised people liked the sequel more than the first game. I guess I'm gonna have to replay both in the near future.

[Jeevan | 8,912]

4 minutes ago, Sumez said:

I'm surprised people liked the sequel more than the first game. I guess I'm gonna have to replay both in the near future.

why not all 4?

[Sumez | 2,966]

What's the fourth?

[Jeevan | 8,912]

4 minutes ago, Sumez said:

What's the fourth?

not really 4th, but battle for Naboo on n64

[Sumez | 2,966]

I had no idea that game was related to the Rogue Squadron series, but I can see now that it was made by the same guys (probably).

I can also find a whole bunch of good reasons why I won't play it alongside the others, but I think I can condense most of them into: I don't own it.  

[Nintegageo | 582]

8. Great game!

[mbd39 | 2,024]

10 hours ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

Never played it. In fact the only Star Wars game that I have played was the 1980s sit down arcade game. 

I'm surprised you've never played the Super Star Wars games on SNES.  Also Empire Strikes Back for Atari 2600 and Dark Forces for PC.

 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,105]

Just now, mbd39 said:

I'm surprised you've never played the Super Star Wars games on SNES.  Also Empire Strikes Back for Atari 2600 and Dark Forces for PC.

 

I'm really not sure how I missed out on the SNES games outside of there being a lot of great games during that time period.

[sp1nz | 612]

Never played many flight games but I did beat Rogue Squadron on PC at some relative's house when I was a youngin. I enjoyed it a lot during that playthrough but I have no idea how it would hold up today in its genre or overall. I fondly remember lassoing some walkers in a snow level. Maybe nostalgic 7-8 and realistic 6-7, so I'll just slap it with a 7.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

11 hours ago, OptOut said:

Very good game, loved it a lot back when it first came out. It was massively overshadowed by Rogue Leader on the GameCube tho, that game just took everything great about this one and cranked it to 11! 

Since you were confused by my response...  In all of the early Star Wars PC flight sim games (not sure about the latter ones, as I got out of it for a while and never picked up the latter ones), there aren't any boundaries as to where you can fly.  If you want to fly off in a direction away from the action for a light year, then turn around and try to complete your mission, you're free to.  Every flight-sim-esque Star Wars game I played that was released for consoles (or also released for consoles, in the case of Rebel Assault) basically put you on rails, where you had a limited, pre-defined area that you could exist and fly in, and you'd get turned (or sometimes bounced, if you were going fast enough) back into the "acceptable" area that the programmers had intended for you to go into.

I get that on consoles especially, there's a more limited amount of CPU horsepower and available RAM, but that doesn't stop the horrible feeling of being so suddenly limited that occurs/occured.  Imagine being in a speedboat on the open ocean and told to go intercept and board an ocean liner.  Now imagine the same thing, but confined to your local lake, but with big, photorealistic pictures of more lake extending off from the shore in every direction, but when you try to head into that water to get some more room, you bump onto land, and your boat automatically points back into the relatively small pond you're stuck in.  That's what I'm talking about.

I can't evaluate the game based on its own merits in any sort of truly fair way, even against other games of its type from the same console and time period, simply because I loathe what happened to the gameplay time-wise.  They went from wide open spaces on comparatively underpowered PCs, to relatively high powered consoles which were even more powerful when things were streamlined to run on that platform but pushed certain types of gameplay back into the comparative stone age.  So, I refrain, versus adding a zero (or negative number), simply because this is so far out of my comfort zone that I shouldn't crap on the opinions of others who can groove on this type of gameplay.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,547]

Would flying off into the brown desert and away from all of the Tattoine landmarks really be a positive design though?  Not sure it adds anything to the experience.

[Sumez | 2,966]

It also sounds like an odd thing to judge a game on. Is SMB a worse game because go away from the the set levels and explore the mushroom kingdom at your own leisure?

Rogue Squadron are action games, not simulations.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

3 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Would flying off into the brown desert and away from all of the Tattoine landmarks really be a positive design though?  Not sure it adds anything to the experience.

Depends on whether you're dogfighting intensely or not, how many enemy craft you're trying to fend off, etc.  I know in X-Wing or TIE Fighter I'd start heading into open space to have more room to breathe as soon as I'd have more than one bogey on me, normally to great effect and success, as I didn't have to worry about ending in anyone else's crossfire, getting picked off by capital ships, running into cargo containers, space stations, etc.  Might be a fantastic game, I just can't stand anything that makes you fly on rails.

24 minutes ago, Sumez said:

It also sounds like an odd thing to judge a game on. Is SMB a worse game because go away from the the set levels and explore the mushroom kingdom at your own leisure?

Rogue Squadron are action games, not simulations.

Imagine if Mario 64 came first, where you can run around in 3 dimensions, go whever you want, back and forth across the level, then its sequel, and subsequent releases are in the vein of the original SMB--it's suddenly flat, side scrolling, you can't go backwards once you've advanced the screen, etc.  Same sort of thing going on.  They're both Mario games, they're objectively pretending to be part of the same genre, but they're arguably different.  By the time this game came out, console companies had mostly stopped trying to market their stuff directly as flight sims, but the similar gameplay was still there, turning me off from it completely.  If you put me in the cockpit of an X-Wing or a TIE Fighter and it's not the arcade game (which, heck, the original and ESB kit/sequel were fairly open flight as well), I'm going to expect to be able to fly as high or as wide as I feel I need to to avoid or maneuver around other vessels, and the moment I hit an invisible wall or the screen flashes "RETURN TO MISSION AREA" and starts steering my ship, it's over for me.  Hence why I'm not offering a vote on this one, as it might be a fantastic game, but my personal feelings and preferences when "in a cockpit" automatically ruin it for me because of how the console games are/were made.