A playthrough of Nintendo's 1996 license-based action-adventure game for the Nintendo 64, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire.
Played through on the medium difficulty level.
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was one the best-selling N64 games, and considering when it was released, it's fairly easy to see why.
In 1996, the N64 was badly in need of games - like any Nintendo launch, there wasn't much in the way of new software for the first several months of the system's life. But Shadows of the Empire wasn't just a throwaway stop-gap measure. Oh no. It was an unbelievable show of power for Nintendo's new machine, and it was also the best Star Wars game that the world had ever seen.
Well, alright. The first four levels were. Anybody else remember how exciting the Hoth battles were when this came out? The feeling of flying freely around fully 3D battlefields, the massive explosions, and the true-to-film music and sounds all created an experience that felt brand new and awesome. It was like playing an actual scene from the movie.
That's not to say that the rest of the game wasn't good. It actually was, but it was clear that the first four stages were the best the game had to offer. Most of the rest of the game is made up of third-person shooting and platforming, and it works well, despite the overly-slippery controls that will send you falling to your death fairly often. The levels were huge and wide open, and while this style of design is badly outdated now, back then it was one of the defining game types for the N64. The PS1 and Saturn had 3D platformers games, of course, but the N64's raw power and its analog controller really let it shine when it came to these types of games. Analog movement, a lack of loading seams, and a fairly fluid framerate all make this an extraordinarily impressive game for 1996. Before the N64, the only way to play something similar (and good) was on a $3000 PC, and the choices were still slim even then.
There are a few quirks with its difficulty balancing and its control schemes, but Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was a real achievement that is still widely regarded as an N64 classic.
*Side note: the music in this video is not the original music from the game. Since it used downsampled, looped recordings of actual Star Wars music, a video of this game with the music intact would've sent YouTube's copyright scanner into a panicked meltdown. To prevent this, I recorded some Star Wars midi files through a Sound Blaster AWE32, downsampled and added reverb to the recordings, and mixed them with the game audio. It doesn't sound the same, but I thought that this compromise was far preferable to leaving music out all together.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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