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lieselstarwarsgamesYoda told Luke to go after his friends. I’m sorry, I just can’t get over that. Yoda told Luke to go after his friends. What next, will Yoda be telling Luke that yes, there’s totally still good in Vader and they should try to save him from the dark side?
Well, I’ve still got to finish this game, so let’s go back to the insanity. Luke flies over to Bespin and he’s immediately greeted by enemy cloud cars, some of which are orange because why not?
Basically, you fly around and shoot the enemy ships and TIE Fighters. You can fly behind the clouds, which is kind of cool, but, ah, I have a question. Since Vader wants to turn Luke to the dark side, why is he sending the TIEs out to shoot him? Seems that shooting Luke down would be counterproductive to Vader’s plan.
Anyway, after you get all the ships, Luke lands on Bespin and I have no fucking idea what he’s wearing now, so make up your own joke here.
Seriously, they replicated Luke’s snowsuit from the movie pretty well in the Hoth levels, so what’s with these weird getups now? Anyway, the music’s still dropping in and out, but that’s to be expected by now. After killing a couple of probe droids, you run into Lando, who’s white.
Not just white, but like VAMPIRE white. My God, did they run out of brown pixels or something? This game just keeps getting weirder.
Lando doesn’t bother introducing himself and just says R2 can shut down the laser beams for a short time. Wow, R2 actually gets to do something! Just up ahead are some laser gates, which R2 lets you pass through – by getting himself electrocuted in the process. Yup, the little droid hurts himself so Luke can go through.
Of course Cloud City is crawling with stormtroopers because why wouldn’t it be? Shortly after this, Leia contacts Luke via . . . the Force? Or did she leave a message in R2? I don’t know, the point is that there are bounty hunters everywhere.
After some more R2 electrocution, you get attacked by a bounty hunter that I assume is Zukkus. He does lethal somersaults that can kill you instantly, depending on your health level, so the boosted lightsaber is a must.
Get caught in his somersault and you’re pretty much dead, so the best strategy is to jump over him while he’s shooting at you, let him somersault in the other direction, then lightsaber him when he’s somersaulting back, repeat. With the lightsaber boost it doesn’t take long to kill him.
After killing him, R2 electrocutes himself for you some more and you run into another bounty hunter who does gymnastics at you. I’m not sure who this guy is, but after you kill him, he’s got a clone to fight after a conveyor belt. Oh, you know what’s funny? If Luke dies on the conveyor belt, the belt carries his corpse on its merry way.
After fighting THREE of these guys and going through a maze of conveyor belts, you can fight and steal another AT-ST walker. It can walk through laser gates and kill bounty hunters like nothing, so you feel like a badass as you go back through the maze to go through the laser gates R2 wouldn’t go through earlier, where you can get a new Force power. Of course, then you have to go all the way back the other way.
After some more exploring the maze, you get to fight Boba Fett, which is tedious. Even with the lightsaber boost, it takes forever for him to go flying away – and that’s if you survive to the end of the fight.
When Boba goes flying off, you run after him and see his ship take off. Leia tells you that Boba has Han and to go after him . . . wait, go after him? What do you mean go after him? For that matter, in the movie Boba took off and . . . OH SHIT, they’re about to REALLY screw with canon, aren’t they?
Oh fuck me. Just FUCK ME. Yes, Luke takes off in his X-Wing to go after Boba. You’ve got another flying level where you shoot at Slave 1 . . . which has frozen Han on it. Um, tell me, Luke, isn’t trying to shoot down Boba’s ship kind of counterproductive to saving Han when Han’s STILL ON THE SHIP?
Also, Boba’s ship sounds like birds tweeting when it shoots at you . . . for some reason. I’ve given up trying to apply reason to this game. This battle’s also FRUSTRATING AS HELL. It only takes a few hits from Slave 1 for the X-Wing to blow up and it’s nearly impossible to get a clear shot without taking damage yourself.
With an INSANE amount of patience, you eventually blow up Boba’s ship (with Han on it? I mean, we don’t see Luke actually rescuing Han, so did Luke just kill his best friend?) and return to Cloud City because, yeah, that’s how things went in canon, we all remember that from the movie, right?
Oh wait, take a step and Han thanks you and says Leia’s in trouble. So . . . Luke not only rescued Han, but he also woke Han up from carbonite . . . by blowing up Boba’s ship with Han on it?? Or was Han never frozen in this version of events – with how much they’ve fucked canon up, it wouldn’t surprise me if they skipped the whole carbon-freezing thing.
And why is Leia in trouble? Aren’t she and Lando and Chewie escaping in the Falcon? Oh fuck it, there’s no telling what’s going on now.
Maybe the game developers made the game so difficult on purpose so no one would see how they’re butchering canon. Well, they didn’t count on people eventually inventing save states.
Anyway, back to Cloud City. Only a little more of this game to go, people! More conveyor belts, more bounty hunters, more gears, more stormtroopers, more music dropping out after five seconds, it’s business as usual. There’s a super-irritating spot where you’ve got to fight a whole bunch of bounty hunters in a row – the best course of action is to do your best to jump over them and run away, then when you’ve got the space to do it, levitate over them.
Eventually you run into . . . another Zukkus, except this one’s turquoise, so maybe it’s Zukkus’s brother or something, who knows?
Kill him and you find Leia, who also looks like a vampire. Maybe there’s a vampiric curse going around Bespin, it wouldn’t surprise me at this point.
Leia warns you that Vader’s here and oh boy, I can’t wait to see how they butcher the “I am your father” scene.
Luke and Vader both draw red lightsabers (just go with it) and we hear Vader’s voice saying “The Force is with you, young Skywalker,” which I’ll admit is pretty damn cool. After that we get a cool 8-bit rendition of the Imperial March which lasts a full TEN seconds before it drops out instead of five! WOW!
I think this game is getting to me.
Anyway, plow through some Ugnaughts and stormtroopers to get to Vader and WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK??
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Vader is using a blaster. DARTH VADER is using a blaster. Let me repeat that – DARTH FUCKING VADER IS USING A FUCKING BLASTER!!
I got nothing. Seriously. I think my brain just shut down from the madness that is the NES Empire Strikes Back game.
Oh, and that’s not all. Sometimes he swaps out the blaster for a lightsaber . . . which is BLUE.
Apparently Vader and Luke thought it would be fun to switch lightsabers. O-kay, there’s a spot on the left-hand side of the screen where Vader can’t hurt you, so the battle’s real simple. After the battle, Vader vanishes while saying “Impressive,” so was he Force-projecting himself or did he just leave? I can’t tell what’s what anymore.
Explore the facility some more and you’ll run into Vader again. Second verse, same as the first. Again you can move to the far left and lightsaber him from there, and again he disappears when you beat him. Then you get to fight him a THIRD time and AGAIN you can just jump over him to the left where he can’t touch you.
This is the last level, right? What, after making us fight through all the grind of the previous levels, the game developers decided to reward us by making the last level super-easy? I’m not complaining, but that seems a bit backwards to me.
Vader disappears yet again, so you go through a few more Ugnaughts and stormtroopers, then you encounter Vader again on a mess of pillars.
Well, this time around Vader jumps from pillar to pillar in an extremely simple pattern. This battle’s a bit harder than the previous three, but there’s a certain pillar that he never lands on. Time your jumps right from this pillar and you can kick his ass, then he disappears again, blah blah blah.
After going through some more of the facility, you run into another one of those annoying bounty hunters – who puts up more of a fight than Vader does. Seriously. At one point Yoda interrupts you and tells you to use the Force, which is a cue to start levitating.
Then you fight Vader AGAIN and he’ll use that trusty BLASTER. After the fight, he tells you to join the dark side. Okay, so this is where Luke learns his parentage, right?
Wait, that’s all he says before disappearing AGAIN? The FUCK?
Okay, you run to the right and you run into Vader YET AGAIN (how is he teleporting all over the place?) and hear his actual voice say “The Force is with you, young Skywalker.” Okay, this HAS to be the final boss fight, so we’re going to get something EPIC, right?
Right?
This time around, he makes stuff fly around with the Force while he’s attacking you, but that’s the only thing that’s different. Oh, and there’s no safe spot where he can’t attack you either. Use the lightsaber booster and jump around a lot and then . . . wait, WHAT???
Luke . . . defeated . . .Vader . . .
Luke . . . defeated . . . Vader . . .
LUKE FUCKING DEFEATED VADER???
So . . . no parentage reveal? No hand amputation? The FUCK??
By the way, that’s the ending screen. The only thing after that is a wall of text talking about how the Emperor will strike again and the Rebels will continue their fight and blah blah blah it will soon be time for the Return of the Jedi.
Which is a lie – they never made a Return of the Jedi NES game. I mean, why would they? Luke already rescued Han, so there’s no need to go to Jabba’s palace, and he already (gag) bested Vader, so there’s no need to face him again in order to become a Jedi. Hell, since Vader never revealed that he was Luke’s father, now Luke will feel no need to redeem him. The whole thing’s been fucked up beyond saving.
I have a theory about this, though. This game came out in 1992, when the Super Nintendo had already been out for several months. The first Super Star Wars game would be released later in the year, so I have a feeling that JVC Digital Studios wanted to concentrate on the hot new console instead of the NES, so that’s why the ESB NES game ends . . . the way it does, so there wouldn’t be as much pressure to release another Star Wars game for the NES. That’s just a theory, though.
So, what do I think of this game? Well . . . it’s weird. Weird and hard, and I don’t feel the satisfaction that I felt after I beat the original NES Star Wars game, which was much more fun than this one. It really does feel like the ESB game developers either didn’t see the movie or completely missed the point of it. I get it, you change things when you adapt something to a different medium, but the original NES Star Wars game managed to keep the flavor and most of the plot points of the movie, while the ESB game just . . . ignores canon for no apparent reason. Plus, in the original game you could play as all three of the heroes, while here you can just play as Luke, which means you miss a good chunk of the plot. Even if you ignore how this game is based on a beloved movie, if you strip the game of its Star Wars-ness, you’re left with a rather average difficult platformer, and the music, blech. Why the HELL does the music keep dropping out?
The voice samples are cool, though.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
So what’s next? Well, I could go to the next console generation and replay the Super Star Wars games, but there’s actually another NES Star Wars game to try out, though it was never released in America. You thought this game was weird? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Yes, I’m trying the JAPANESE Star Wars game.
Well, I’ve still got to finish this game, so let’s go back to the insanity. Luke flies over to Bespin and he’s immediately greeted by enemy cloud cars, some of which are orange because why not?
Basically, you fly around and shoot the enemy ships and TIE Fighters. You can fly behind the clouds, which is kind of cool, but, ah, I have a question. Since Vader wants to turn Luke to the dark side, why is he sending the TIEs out to shoot him? Seems that shooting Luke down would be counterproductive to Vader’s plan.
Anyway, after you get all the ships, Luke lands on Bespin and I have no fucking idea what he’s wearing now, so make up your own joke here.
Seriously, they replicated Luke’s snowsuit from the movie pretty well in the Hoth levels, so what’s with these weird getups now? Anyway, the music’s still dropping in and out, but that’s to be expected by now. After killing a couple of probe droids, you run into Lando, who’s white.
Not just white, but like VAMPIRE white. My God, did they run out of brown pixels or something? This game just keeps getting weirder.
Lando doesn’t bother introducing himself and just says R2 can shut down the laser beams for a short time. Wow, R2 actually gets to do something! Just up ahead are some laser gates, which R2 lets you pass through – by getting himself electrocuted in the process. Yup, the little droid hurts himself so Luke can go through.
Of course Cloud City is crawling with stormtroopers because why wouldn’t it be? Shortly after this, Leia contacts Luke via . . . the Force? Or did she leave a message in R2? I don’t know, the point is that there are bounty hunters everywhere.
After some more R2 electrocution, you get attacked by a bounty hunter that I assume is Zukkus. He does lethal somersaults that can kill you instantly, depending on your health level, so the boosted lightsaber is a must.
Get caught in his somersault and you’re pretty much dead, so the best strategy is to jump over him while he’s shooting at you, let him somersault in the other direction, then lightsaber him when he’s somersaulting back, repeat. With the lightsaber boost it doesn’t take long to kill him.
After killing him, R2 electrocutes himself for you some more and you run into another bounty hunter who does gymnastics at you. I’m not sure who this guy is, but after you kill him, he’s got a clone to fight after a conveyor belt. Oh, you know what’s funny? If Luke dies on the conveyor belt, the belt carries his corpse on its merry way.
After fighting THREE of these guys and going through a maze of conveyor belts, you can fight and steal another AT-ST walker. It can walk through laser gates and kill bounty hunters like nothing, so you feel like a badass as you go back through the maze to go through the laser gates R2 wouldn’t go through earlier, where you can get a new Force power. Of course, then you have to go all the way back the other way.
After some more exploring the maze, you get to fight Boba Fett, which is tedious. Even with the lightsaber boost, it takes forever for him to go flying away – and that’s if you survive to the end of the fight.
When Boba goes flying off, you run after him and see his ship take off. Leia tells you that Boba has Han and to go after him . . . wait, go after him? What do you mean go after him? For that matter, in the movie Boba took off and . . . OH SHIT, they’re about to REALLY screw with canon, aren’t they?
Oh fuck me. Just FUCK ME. Yes, Luke takes off in his X-Wing to go after Boba. You’ve got another flying level where you shoot at Slave 1 . . . which has frozen Han on it. Um, tell me, Luke, isn’t trying to shoot down Boba’s ship kind of counterproductive to saving Han when Han’s STILL ON THE SHIP?
Also, Boba’s ship sounds like birds tweeting when it shoots at you . . . for some reason. I’ve given up trying to apply reason to this game. This battle’s also FRUSTRATING AS HELL. It only takes a few hits from Slave 1 for the X-Wing to blow up and it’s nearly impossible to get a clear shot without taking damage yourself.
With an INSANE amount of patience, you eventually blow up Boba’s ship (with Han on it? I mean, we don’t see Luke actually rescuing Han, so did Luke just kill his best friend?) and return to Cloud City because, yeah, that’s how things went in canon, we all remember that from the movie, right?
Oh wait, take a step and Han thanks you and says Leia’s in trouble. So . . . Luke not only rescued Han, but he also woke Han up from carbonite . . . by blowing up Boba’s ship with Han on it?? Or was Han never frozen in this version of events – with how much they’ve fucked canon up, it wouldn’t surprise me if they skipped the whole carbon-freezing thing.
And why is Leia in trouble? Aren’t she and Lando and Chewie escaping in the Falcon? Oh fuck it, there’s no telling what’s going on now.
Maybe the game developers made the game so difficult on purpose so no one would see how they’re butchering canon. Well, they didn’t count on people eventually inventing save states.
Anyway, back to Cloud City. Only a little more of this game to go, people! More conveyor belts, more bounty hunters, more gears, more stormtroopers, more music dropping out after five seconds, it’s business as usual. There’s a super-irritating spot where you’ve got to fight a whole bunch of bounty hunters in a row – the best course of action is to do your best to jump over them and run away, then when you’ve got the space to do it, levitate over them.
Eventually you run into . . . another Zukkus, except this one’s turquoise, so maybe it’s Zukkus’s brother or something, who knows?
Kill him and you find Leia, who also looks like a vampire. Maybe there’s a vampiric curse going around Bespin, it wouldn’t surprise me at this point.
Leia warns you that Vader’s here and oh boy, I can’t wait to see how they butcher the “I am your father” scene.
Luke and Vader both draw red lightsabers (just go with it) and we hear Vader’s voice saying “The Force is with you, young Skywalker,” which I’ll admit is pretty damn cool. After that we get a cool 8-bit rendition of the Imperial March which lasts a full TEN seconds before it drops out instead of five! WOW!
I think this game is getting to me.
Anyway, plow through some Ugnaughts and stormtroopers to get to Vader and WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK??
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Vader is using a blaster. DARTH VADER is using a blaster. Let me repeat that – DARTH FUCKING VADER IS USING A FUCKING BLASTER!!
I got nothing. Seriously. I think my brain just shut down from the madness that is the NES Empire Strikes Back game.
Oh, and that’s not all. Sometimes he swaps out the blaster for a lightsaber . . . which is BLUE.
Apparently Vader and Luke thought it would be fun to switch lightsabers. O-kay, there’s a spot on the left-hand side of the screen where Vader can’t hurt you, so the battle’s real simple. After the battle, Vader vanishes while saying “Impressive,” so was he Force-projecting himself or did he just leave? I can’t tell what’s what anymore.
Explore the facility some more and you’ll run into Vader again. Second verse, same as the first. Again you can move to the far left and lightsaber him from there, and again he disappears when you beat him. Then you get to fight him a THIRD time and AGAIN you can just jump over him to the left where he can’t touch you.
This is the last level, right? What, after making us fight through all the grind of the previous levels, the game developers decided to reward us by making the last level super-easy? I’m not complaining, but that seems a bit backwards to me.
Vader disappears yet again, so you go through a few more Ugnaughts and stormtroopers, then you encounter Vader again on a mess of pillars.
Well, this time around Vader jumps from pillar to pillar in an extremely simple pattern. This battle’s a bit harder than the previous three, but there’s a certain pillar that he never lands on. Time your jumps right from this pillar and you can kick his ass, then he disappears again, blah blah blah.
After going through some more of the facility, you run into another one of those annoying bounty hunters – who puts up more of a fight than Vader does. Seriously. At one point Yoda interrupts you and tells you to use the Force, which is a cue to start levitating.
Then you fight Vader AGAIN and he’ll use that trusty BLASTER. After the fight, he tells you to join the dark side. Okay, so this is where Luke learns his parentage, right?
Wait, that’s all he says before disappearing AGAIN? The FUCK?
Okay, you run to the right and you run into Vader YET AGAIN (how is he teleporting all over the place?) and hear his actual voice say “The Force is with you, young Skywalker.” Okay, this HAS to be the final boss fight, so we’re going to get something EPIC, right?
Right?
This time around, he makes stuff fly around with the Force while he’s attacking you, but that’s the only thing that’s different. Oh, and there’s no safe spot where he can’t attack you either. Use the lightsaber booster and jump around a lot and then . . . wait, WHAT???
Luke . . . defeated . . .Vader . . .
Luke . . . defeated . . . Vader . . .
LUKE FUCKING DEFEATED VADER???
So . . . no parentage reveal? No hand amputation? The FUCK??
By the way, that’s the ending screen. The only thing after that is a wall of text talking about how the Emperor will strike again and the Rebels will continue their fight and blah blah blah it will soon be time for the Return of the Jedi.
Which is a lie – they never made a Return of the Jedi NES game. I mean, why would they? Luke already rescued Han, so there’s no need to go to Jabba’s palace, and he already (gag) bested Vader, so there’s no need to face him again in order to become a Jedi. Hell, since Vader never revealed that he was Luke’s father, now Luke will feel no need to redeem him. The whole thing’s been fucked up beyond saving.
I have a theory about this, though. This game came out in 1992, when the Super Nintendo had already been out for several months. The first Super Star Wars game would be released later in the year, so I have a feeling that JVC Digital Studios wanted to concentrate on the hot new console instead of the NES, so that’s why the ESB NES game ends . . . the way it does, so there wouldn’t be as much pressure to release another Star Wars game for the NES. That’s just a theory, though.
So, what do I think of this game? Well . . . it’s weird. Weird and hard, and I don’t feel the satisfaction that I felt after I beat the original NES Star Wars game, which was much more fun than this one. It really does feel like the ESB game developers either didn’t see the movie or completely missed the point of it. I get it, you change things when you adapt something to a different medium, but the original NES Star Wars game managed to keep the flavor and most of the plot points of the movie, while the ESB game just . . . ignores canon for no apparent reason. Plus, in the original game you could play as all three of the heroes, while here you can just play as Luke, which means you miss a good chunk of the plot. Even if you ignore how this game is based on a beloved movie, if you strip the game of its Star Wars-ness, you’re left with a rather average difficult platformer, and the music, blech. Why the HELL does the music keep dropping out?
The voice samples are cool, though.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
So what’s next? Well, I could go to the next console generation and replay the Super Star Wars games, but there’s actually another NES Star Wars game to try out, though it was never released in America. You thought this game was weird? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Yes, I’m trying the JAPANESE Star Wars game.
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Date: 2020-09-03 11:00 pm (UTC)