Year 7, 2000 ~ Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo (N64)

One of my earliest memories is watching the original Star Wars trilogy with my dad on the couch. We watched them early in the morning on weekends. I couldn't have been older than 4. These were the old VHS tapes with the interviews between George Lucas and Leonard Maltin at the start, no new edits, no new effects or scenes. He got the hooks in me early, I fell in love with that series like so many others did. He would later take me to see the original theatrical release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It's the first movie I remember going to see in the theater, a little two-screen place behind a McDonalds in my old neighborhood. That McDonalds is still there but that theater sure isn't.

We always had Star Wars stuff at home. Dad would buy the updated rereleases whenever they came out. At one point we owned each movie on DVD in both full screen and wide screen editions. But one thing we couldn't have at home was videogames, at least on console. This was actually on me to a certain degree. I mentioned in my post about Capcom's Aladdin that we had a Super Nintendo. My parents took it away because I got really worked up playing, of all things, Super Star Wars ("it's like poetry, it rhymes"). We were allowed to have computer games and Game Boys, but we lost the Super Nintendo.

However, my parents did let us rent a Nintendo 64 for a week every summer. If you ever did this, maybe you remember the huge black plastic briefcase with the N64 logo on the front. It had such a good texture, sometimes I'd stim contentedly against the plastic grain. But I could never seem to repack the N64 as well as it had been packed there. Sometimes we'd get it from Blockbuster, other times from a regional rental store called Jumbo Video. I think for a while the old two-screen theater had been converted to a Jumbo Video. But occasionally we'd go with our third option, Rogers Video.

Rogers Video is such a strange thing to me. To my knowledge there was no, like, Shaw Video or Bell Aliant Video. I can't imagine a lot of other cable companies with their own video rental stores. But it's relevant to this story because one summer, when my dad took me to rent the N64 and the games, he took me to the Rogers Video up by his workplace. I can't remember if Rogers was just getting rid of old stock or if they just had the game for sale, but when we were picking the games out I saw Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo. For some reason Dad didn't rent it, he bought it. I thought it was so strange because we didn't own a Nintendo 64. We couldn't play it, it didn't make sense to me. It gave me false hope that he was also going to buy us a console too. But I was still excited to finally own what felt to me like a real videogame.

When we got home Dad opened a closet by our front door. On the top shelf there were all our scarves and gloves for winter. He said we'd just store it up there when we weren't using it. By the next time we rented an N64 he'd already forgotten that cartridge was up there. I had to remind him he'd bought it for us and stowed it there.

I realize I'm talking more about renting the game than the game itself. Here's the thing: I don't actually have much to say about this game. It's a spin-off of Star Wars Rogue Squadron, easily one of the best Star Wars games ever made. There's no doubt Battle for Naboo has a lot of the same quality. It's a prequel to the prequel, detailing the invasion of Naboo and their subsequent resistance efforts while the rest of the movie happens on Tatooine and Coruscant. While the spectacular aerial combat returns from Rogue Squadron, there are also ground missions in speeders and boats, as well as garages which let you transition from ground to aerial combat mid-mission. But while in Rogue Squadron you get to play as Luke Skywalker, in Battle for Naboo you're just Some Guy, new on the job with the Royal Security Forces. With the exception of this one detail, this game actually does a lot of work to make you invested in what's happening on Naboo, something the movie probably should have done.

But here's the dirt... I didn't actually finish this game. I gave myself the stipulation of having only one week to beat this game, like having a week of rental time. I didn't think I'd need it, but at a certain point the game got so hard that I couldn't get past it. I tried lowering the difficulty, I tried cheat codes, no matter what I tried I just couldn't do it. Grats to Factor 5, I love what you make, but it's too hard.

Other games I've loved from 2000:

Mario Party 2 (N64), Pokémon Stadium (N64), The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (N64), Banjo-Tooie (N64)

Year 6, 1999 ~ Disney's Villains' Revenge (PC)

 

Remember One Saturday Morning? I have to believe that's not really a thing anymore, like there are dedicated channels for cartoons now instead of a weekend block on ABC or whatever. Or idk maybe the kids don't watch anything except streaming apps or YouTube or TikTok. I don't know, I'm not a parent, I don't know what the kids are up to. But when I was growing up in the 90s we had Fox Kids and Snit Station and One Saturday Morning. I feel so disgustingly back-in-my-day right now.

Anyway, One Saturday Morning aired on ABC in the 90s. For a while this was what I watched in the hours before gymnastics or soccer practice. I loved Recess. This was also an era when commercials were kinda interesting to watch, and there would of course be ads for Disney videogames because ABC was owned by Disney. This is where I actually found out that all the little minigames Timon & Pumba games I was getting individually were actually one big game, Timon & Pumba's Jungle Games. There were also ads for this strange game, Disney's Villains' Revenge.

Everything about this game exists in an uncanny valley of clashing aesthetics. The game opens in the middle of the night. You look around a room in first-person, in an almost photo-realistic looking 3D environment. You hear a voice asking you to find a light switch. If you've seen the character before, you'll know his voice before you find the light. When you find the light, you see that it was Jiminy Cricket talking to you. Jiminy is not rendered in 90s photo-realistic CG, but appears to have been drawn into the scene like transitional 2D animation. It appears as though the character has been lifted straight out of the Disney Pinocchio. But if you don't know what you're looking for, you're just kind of looking for, you're just left to look around this dark, creepy bedroom, with a voice yelling "Hey, over here!" over and over.

Jiminy points you to a weird book on a desk in your room, a book containing all the stories of classic Disney movies. He starts reading them to you, but gets bored, and starts writing new endings. This, apparently, causes the stories to come alive, where all the villains win, and turn their worlds into evil twisted fucked up hell dimensions. Dumbo's Ringmaster runs a circus out of a giant clown head like he's soft cosplaying KarnEvil, staffing his performance with gremlin energy clown freaks, performing to an audience of awful people who just like humiliating the tiny flying elephant. The Evil Queen from Snow White is stuck in witch mode and she turned Snow White's cottage and put her to sleep with a stronger apple, and erased(???) Prince Charming or whoever it was who could wake her up. The Queen of Hearts actually fucking cut Alice's head off and hid the head in a maze, which CALLS TO YOU SO YOU CAN GUIDE HER HEADLESS BODY INTO THE MAZE, WHILE THE PLAYING CARD KNIGHTS AND CHESHIRE CAT ALL TRY TO TAKE YOUR ASS OUT. And Peter Pan grew old and started using a sword instead of a dagger. You gotta help Jiminy fix this mess!

THAT'S RIGHT BAYBEE IT'S ACTIVITY CENTRE KINGDOM HEARTS.

You sword fight with Captain Hook so geriatric Peter Pan can take a breather, and yes, it's very unsettling to see Captain Hook swipe at you with a rapier in first-person. This is a quick time event game and it sucks. Like I said, Alice is trapped in a Wonderland garden maze and it's really fucking weird and disturbing to run around a 3D screensaver maze where you gotta take out the walking playing cards before they take your ass out. It's a quick time event game and it sucks. You gotta make a potion to reverse the knock-out apple Snow White ate, and it's heavily implied that you're on an invisible timer, so you gotta figure out the clues in the witch's drug den to make the wake-up juice. This one's pretty good! You gotta get Dumbo's magic feather back by making a rube goldberg device out of the circus freaks and their acts to take it back from its keeper. This one is okay! AND THEN, FINAL BOSS, YOU PLAY FIRST-PERSON BREAKOUT AND IT'S RIDICULOUSLY HARD. And then you make it to the end of the game, where it just actually becomes an activity centre with themed minigames.

I wanted this game so badly when I saw the ads for it on One Saturday Morning. But then once I got it, I saw just how strange and uncanny the first-person perspective was. This was the first time I felt like a game was weirdly threatening me, which I don't think the developers intended. But I see this game as a precursor to Doki Doki Literature Club or Slay the Princess, games that adopt a first-person perspective with second-person narration that give you a sense of blurred boundaries between software and hardware.

But this game also game with a bonus disc: fucking Nightmare Ned. This mediocre minigame collection with wildly menacing CG was how I ended up with a copy of one of the most disturbing games I've ever played. Not gonna lie though, I'm not upset about that. While there isn't much to say about the actual game part of the game with Villains' Revenge, the aesthetics of this game and the unforced uncanny dread of it all made it fun to navigate for an evening. Plus I've already gushed about Nightmare Ned, genuine work of art that it is.

Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1999:

Super Smash Bros. (N64), Mario Party (N64), Pokémon Snap (N64), Pokémon Stadium (N64), Sonic Adventure (SDC)

Year 5, 1998 ~ The Game of Life (PC)

Go to college, or start a career? This is the first real choice you make when you play The Game of Life. It seems so straightforward when you're playing. This first moment determines your starting job and salary, what job spaces give you a free pass from paying a fee, whether your opponents have to pay the bank back or give money to you, and how much money you make when you pass a Pay Day space. It's completely random if you choose the career path. The game auto-selects your job and salary, and you have fewer spaces to travel before you reach the end. But if you go to college, the game gives you three random options for your job and salary once you finish college. So why would anyone just start a career when college gives you such a big leg up? Well sir, that would be because, even in life's digital board game, you enter the workforce in student debt.

The 1998 Game of Life for PC and PlayStation is yet another favorite cereal box game, courtesy of General Mills and Hasbro. While this game came out the year my baby brother was born, we definitely played this strange time capsule of a game for years after that. We were a board game family, my parents making sure we had a regular board game night for a while. While my parents weren't interested in playing board games on the computer, my brothers and I would definitely play them. Or at least we played The Game of Life. We played this cereal box CD-Rom so much our parents bought a physical copy for us all to play together, but I mostly remember playing the physical version with my brothers when I was in high school. I don't remember why but we went on a spree of playing it with my brother Aidan's friends when I was in Grade 11.

If you've never seen the '98 PC version of the game, god, there is absolutely nothing like its terrifying 3D models and plinky-plonky musical pastiche. When I call this game a time capsule I don't just mean of its time, but also its bizarre callbacks to decades past. The '98 Game of Life recreates the sound and touchstones of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even envisions an idea of what the millennial decade would sound like. These are the most sanitized ideas of these decades, of course, not meant to invoke the breadth of experience but just the most poppy and bright ideas.

This extends into how it represents the spaces you can land on too. Obviously the spaces from the hard copy physical boardgame are recreated for the videogame, but it's the way the game dramatizes these spaces that make it so unique. It would be one thing to just represent the board as a kind of living, sprawling landscape as it does. But the '98 game goes further by using cutscenes to act out the spaces. Sometimes these are just narrated comic-style panels, not unlike the cartoon Whammies from the gameshow Press Your Luck, but there are also CG animated cutscenes using terribly outdated 3D models, and this is where the real character of this game lies. They are so superbly goofy that you really need to see them for yourself. They turn moments like, for example, your house flooding and needing to buy a new one into just a silly little thing that happens to your character instead of a genuine tragedy your family lives through. Your greatest triumphs, your big decisions, your losses and your gains, all so much uncanny slapstick.

These moments of comic relief are funny as a kid, but as adults they actually make it easier to laugh at them as they happen to you. This game isn't just outdated in its aesthetic, but in its ideology. Queerness doesn't exist in this version, but marriage, buying a house, and retiring are all necessary stops you make along the way. They serve a mechanical function, but they feel unrealistic by most conceivable metric. My dad retired years ago technically but his pension simply doesn't pay the bills. It doesn't seem likely my brothers and I will ever own a house as our parents did. And marriage... look, if I play this game again and I have to watch the man I'm assigned Milhouse his eyebrows at me for the millionth time, I will actually slap his stupid face through the screen. I haven't played any of the updated videogames versions of The Game of Life, but if I can't share domestic partnership with at least one other woman I simply won't be interested enough to purchase them.

And just to turn back to that first option that kicks off the game, well, if I had any selection of jobs available after finishing my BA in English, I probably wouldn't have done my Master's in English. And if there were any choice of careers after finishing my MA, well I probably wouldn't have signed up to go get my PhD. But hey, somehow I'm not in debt, which is nice, just the crushing poverty of being a career student with no other prospects. But I'm a published author which is nice! Life's little games and gambles and such. Four years from now I'll be Dr. Kitts, with tidy total sum of academic funding over $100,000 so far.

Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1998:

Banjo-Kazooie (N64), F-Zero X (N64), Grim Fandango (PC), Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (PS), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64), Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (N64)