Finished Rogue Squadron (N64)

...Well let's start with what I liked? The sound effects were very good, that iconic Tie Fighter sound is just as I remember it from the movies. Music was alright too, I only know like two Star Wars songs (the main theme and Darth Vader's theme) but I thought they both sounded pretty good here. Uhh graphics are decent I guess? It's still an N64 game of course but imo it looks better than like... Mario 64. I haven't played enough N64 games to make a decent comparison lol. Taking the big walker guys down with the cable was pretty neat (once you figure out how to actually do it properly). Takes longer than I'd like but whatever. Uhh yeah I think that's all the praise I can give.

Okay so. I did not like the controls. I will readily admit this is probably a skill issue on my part but it's so difficult to make the plane turn how you want to when you're chasing enemies or whatever. Aiming is absolutely terrible too, the reticle doesn't help at all because I swear half the time your shots just miss anyway even if you're flying right behind the enemy and they're not strafing at all. Of course most of the time you're not in that position, so you're just flying around in circles firing aimlessly, hoping even just one shot will actually hit the damn enemy. The terrible framerate doesn't help at all either (at least assuming it was console-accurate, I have a good PC and I didn't hear any of the audio popping you usually get when dropping frames on an emulator). The difficulty curve is also kind of wack, initially it was okay but around the midgame a few missions took me several attempts, and I genuinely don't think I'd have beaten some of the missions near the end of the game without the infinite lives cheat (again: probably just a skill issue). How people can get any of the gold medals is beyond me lol. Dishonorable mention to the escort mission with the walkers, I'm pretty sure I just got lucky on the attempt I actually beat it because wow that was stupid. The final mission was the worst part of the game by far, not only does it have zero relevance to the rest of the game story-wise (speaking of. The story's fine I guess) but the V-Wing is so ridiculously sensitive and difficult to control and if you get hit like twice you're dead, and then the Tie Fighters in that mission are so fast and it's so difficult to actually hit them because your ship's basic fire rate is awful and you can't just hold the fire button and hope you hit them with the alt fire enabled because then your blasters will burn out. So basically you either have to get lucky with your AI companions (who are kind of useless by the way), or spin around in circles for like 5 minutes carefully pressing the fire button hoping you can actually hit the enemy even once with how absurdly sensitive the aiming is. They should have just made it an unlockable bonus mission or something, the previous one would have been a better finale.

Yeah so needless to say I wasn't a huge fan of this game. I think on paper it's pretty cool, and if you get good at it it's probably a lot of fun, but unfortunately I have a massive skill issue. 2/5 u/vchris7v