These video game posts are severely slowing down my
progress. The Battle for Naboo is a
video game I’m glad to have behind me. This
game was a pain in the butt to get a hold of.
Over the last two months, whatever time I did have to spend on the Star
Wars Chronology Project was spent entirely on acquiring the game and then
playing the game.
The story of my interaction with Battle for Naboo is a
tedious one. I’ll not get in to the boring
minutia but I’ll hit the highlights.
Essentially my awesome gaming laptop (ASUS G74S) couldn’t run
the game because of a conflict between Windows 7 and the game’s 16 bit
installer. I searched the internet for a
solution and came across this website, which I thought provided a fairly in-depth
analysis and solution to what I was experiencing, but its detailed steps didn’t
help my predicament and nothing came of it.
I got the game going for a while on my old Dell, but that laptop crashed
and I was left scratching my head. I
finally headed to www.kijiji.com and bought an old N64 system for 30 bucks
along with the original game from eBay. After
about a month of piddling about I had an old N64 in my bedroom and for a few minutes
a night I’d play my way through the game before bed.
Battle for Naboo was much more
fun that Starfighter, but like that game, it gave me motion sickness something
awful. My motion sickness is so bad I
still have yet to see the end of The Blair Witch Project. I made it to the at 15 minutes of that film,
right before they went to the cabin in the woods, when I ran out of the theatre
about to puke my guts up. The constant camera
movement of that film was so bad I could only watch it looking up from the
floor. Anyway, I digress.
Like my comment about Starfighter, what I most enjoyed about
this game was the feeling of depth it provided, giving us lovers of Star Wars
lore another angle on the occupation of Naboo by the Trade Federation. It seems the Naboo security force put up a
heck of a fight out in the countryside; armed with speeders and Heavy STAPs
they did well routing the light STAP armed battle droids at the beginning of
the game.
The game itself was fairly easy to master – there wasn’t
much too it, a simple first person shooter where you line up your target and
fire.
Besides depth of lore, another aspect of the game I enjoyed were
a few of the ship designs I’d never come across before. The first one I thought cool was the N-X police
cruiser. It’s a simple variation of the
N-1 but it was neat enough. What I
really enjoyed though was the Ostracoda-class gunboat. The mission where I had to commandeer a boat and
head up the Andrevea river to rescue the prisoners in the labour camps made me
feel a little like Marlow from Heart of Darkness, travelling up the Congo river
in search of Kurtz. This mission meshed
well with the larger narrative of the occupation of Naboo because saving the
Naboo from the labour camps gelled well with the earlier video game source I
looked at, Galactic Battlegrounds. In
that game you had to attack a labour camp and rescue the Naboo, and if I
remember correctly, in that game you had to traverse up a river to get to the
camps.
The other two ships I thought neat were Borvo the Hutt’s
large cruiser (who knew a Hutt had a base on Naboo and helped the Naboo
security Force with the resistance? – albeit he did eventually betray Gavyn
Sykes) and the NB-1S Royal Bomber.
This brings me to the last point I want to make about this
game. The idea that the entire premise
of the game is based around Gavyn Sykes is pretty cool. He’s on screen for a couple of seconds in The
Phantom Menace, and is one of the pilots Kenobi frees in the beginning of the
film. The fact that The Battle for Naboo
tracks his story and the story of the Naboo resistance is another nod to the
depth of this universe, in that, as soon as Kenobi released Sykes, he was hours
later flying a Heavy STAP and shooting down battle droids outside of Theed. Most of his Wookieepedia page basically tells
the story of The Battle for Naboo in its entirety.
Although the video games are time consuming, and in this particular
case difficult to get my hands on, I’m glad I went throughout the trouble
because the more I play them the more I appreciate how important the video
games are to the story of Star Wars. Without
a working knowledge of Star Wars video games I feel my PhD in Star Warsology
would be lacking. Again, like I said in
my post on Starfighter, I have a greater sense of accomplishment when I finish
a video game because they are so time consuming.
For my next post I’m going to look at the RPG source “Battle
in the Streets”. Until next time, Happy
New Year and May the Force be with you.
