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)
