Rebel Assault (again)

We can all be wrong. "What's that 3DO Kid?" I guess you're saying to yourself already, "3DO Kid? Wrong about a 3DO game?". Satan ice-skate to work this morning did he? Before you all jump on the 3DO Kid is a git anyway bandwagon and start professing that Egg a-la Face actually suits me, let me explain, no it's not a u-turn on Wolfenstein. Wolfenstien is still utterly boring.

You see, it's like this: Wrong is a constant habit of mine. In fact I'm so practiced at being wrong, I'm an expert in u-turns. So, as you can probably guess I suspect, today I'm officially announcing I was wrong about Rebel Assault. Well - sort of wrong. Now - let us not all be wrong, so don't get me wrong, as I still firmly believe that George Lucas was wrong.  He, I firmly believe, actually does enjoy defecating on our dreams, and to some degree Rebel Assault was a County prizing winning deification. It just wasn't as bad as I originally made out.
 
So, I've been playing Rebel Assault properly again today and, yep, you've guessed it - I actually quite enjoyed myself.

So, what is Rebel Assault?

Rebel Assault is a sort of sister game. Sister to the original Star Wars movie. With a bit of Empire Strikes Back welded intio it for good measure. You play the role of a character called "Rookie One", which has a striking similarity to Luke Skywalker, except of cause when you choose to give Rookie One a female voice. It's not Luke, you don't play as Luke, but it could be sort of thing.

There are 15 missions in total. The first three of which are training missions. They are in-line with what you would expect. So, the first is flying a Y-Wing down a trench, there is some variety during this mission where you get the choice to go left or right, once done, the second part of the mission is a top down view and shoot at the targets affair.

Later missions include dodging asteroids, O.K. you're thinking, and yes, Wing Commander may have done it better, but Empire Strikes Back invented it if you follow my drift. So it's a game immitating movies, inmmitating games. I think. Maybe.

The final training mission is a game of follow my leader on planet Kolaador.

Training missions though?  Rebel Assault is very unforgiving, even in 'Normal' mode. Short of Obi Wan actually taking some force and shoving it down your throat, the game is patience shredding to a very spectacular level.

During training, the asteroid section is by far the most difficult. Trying to avoid rock asteroids and shoot ice asteroids is very difficult. Someone, anyone, should have pointed out at the time, you can not shoot right and steer left on one 3DO joy-pad. Not, as is required, at the same time.

Once done with the training, you enter into a some pretty predictable Star Wars style missions. Shoot the Probots, shoot the Tie fighters, blow up the Super Star Destroyer, fly the trench, blow up death star, etc. You are on rails for most of these, which was lamented a great deal about at the time, but in retrospect it isn't the problem.

No, the problem is that Rebel Assault is not very rewarding, in fact the game is positively merciless.

For example; during the shoot the Super Star Destroyer level, you circle round and around and around, until you have destroyed all the gun turrets. Firstly, there are a lot of gun turrets, what makes it worse is that your laser sights snap to a sort of grid. This grid isn't tuned to the targets. Because of this, often what you will find is that your cursors moves left, then snaps right of a target and you never hit it. If you miss the target, so that it passes behind your craft, it will immediately shoot you in the back, depleting your all ready weak shields.

It's an award winning recipe for joypad slamming anger. A dish best served on less rare controllers. Many, many of the levels are very similar. For example, the Shoot the Walker level is just as bad, but includes a need to dodge the Walker, even though you are on rails. More-of:  you cannot steer left and shoot right syndrome.

It's fair to say the graphics are very 1993 PC, and not terribly 1995 3DO. The bulk of the game is sprites overlaid on either pre-rendered Star Wars scenes or over actual Star Wars footage. It's grainy. There are fields of grain, less grainy than the footage in Rebel Assault.

During the cut scenes we encounter another weird decision. The decision to include actual footage from Star Wars, but using a compression technique that meant only moving parts of the scene actually move. It means that when Darth Vader is talking to his, although he didn't know it at the time, soon to be dead Generals, only Darths head moves and everything else is perfectly and absolutely still. It's pretty funny. Weird though? Yes, insomuch that you could rip Star Wars from DVD to MPEG and fit the whole thing into 700Mb very easily and get better quality. Not just 15 or so scenes.

So, at the end of the day, I'm still not saying it's a good game but it is, the above caveates aside, considerably better than I professed in my original covering of it. What I'm saying is, it's not the worst game, in fact it's probably better than Cobra and Pyramid Intruder, which are both games in a similar vein, but Rebel Assault is a mediocre game. The nostalgia, the Star Wars, the tunes? In fairness, it has it in spades.