-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
DF Retro : Star Wars Shadows of the Empire.
- Thread starter Corleth the Fey
- Start date
Wait do people actually like this game? I feel like it doesn't hold up at all and was pretty mediocre when it first came out (outside of a few levels). It definitely didn't lack ambition but I think other retro star wars games stuck the landing way better. The novel was also pretty meh. Not the worst but not the best of the old EU. Another great DF Retro though.
was this added super recently? I remember searching for this a few mo the ago
John comments it. It's not necessarily a masterpiece, but it was the first game to use the template of the current AAA experience, a linear cinematic experience.
To be honest Star Wars has so many interesting games to revisit. Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, Factor 5 games...I'd love to see those someday, specially Rogue Squadron with the MossysFX library.
This was a great watch for me earlier today.
I remember when my Pop just bought an N64 and this game and gave it to my sister and me randomly one day and I freaking loved this game. I played it so much, but I'm not actually sure if I ever beat it.
I think I beat it like... years later with cheats, but I'm not sure if I ever did legitimately.
I still played the hell out of it. I wouldn't play it today though, lol. I still have it and my n64, but if I'm gonna play an n64 Star Wars game again it's going to be Rogue Squadron.
I remember when my Pop just bought an N64 and this game and gave it to my sister and me randomly one day and I freaking loved this game. I played it so much, but I'm not actually sure if I ever beat it.
I think I beat it like... years later with cheats, but I'm not sure if I ever did legitimately.
I still played the hell out of it. I wouldn't play it today though, lol. I still have it and my n64, but if I'm gonna play an n64 Star Wars game again it's going to be Rogue Squadron.
Amazing job on the video as always. Such good memories. I remember getting the VHS preview of Shadows in a Nintendo Power and watching in awe as the ATAT was brought down. Seemed impossible.
Also If I had to take a shot every time Jon says "Of Course" I would have been long dead and pickled by the end of the video
Also If I had to take a shot every time Jon says "Of Course" I would have been long dead and pickled by the end of the video
Great video. It basically summed up both my hype for the N64 game as well as my frustrations with PC gaming in the 90s. Despite the craziness of constantly worrying about how to get games to run, I still kind of miss the wild west feel of it all.
It has fairly significant gameplay problems but also an interesting set of strengths.
The biggest is the star wars atmosphere, which is just pitch perfect. The scale is tremendous (the Boba Fett boss arena is extremely impressive, especially when you decide to leave it), and it has the right look when it comes to putting bits and pieces of technology into enormous, naturalistic environments. I love the moments when spaceships take off and fly overhead; in most other games it would seem like window dressing, but here it's vital to creating an authentic star wars feeling.
Level design is very well done. Challenge points are cleverly hidden and help compensate for the gameplay flaws with clever (and sometimes devious) bits of exploration. The train level is the standout of the game (in terms of level design), but they all have a ton of interesting gimmicks. Echo Base has its prison cells (with wampas!), giant turbines, and collapsing floor; in Gall Spaceport you'll jetpack across huge canyons, ride transport platforms, and avoid huge spinning blades. There's obviously a ton of variety baked in because of the major gameplay changes happening level by level, but the game is also constantly switching gears inside the levels themselves.
It's got a couple of very interesting gameplay mechanics. The jetpack is the big one. It's a perfect fit for 3D and works very well with the level design and enormous environments. Even more interesting is the idea of ramming your opponents in the swoop bike race to blow them up. Very clunky, but also really creative. My personal favorite are the seeker missiles which broadcast their path as they home in on the target.
It also has several multi-stage boss fights that take place in complex environments, which I think has to be pretty unusual for those days.
It's a hindered experience to be sure, but I think its atmosphere, level design, and creative concepts more than make up for the shooting and platforming.
Awesome video. I remember the opening Hoth level blowing my mind as a kid. The rest of the game was brutally difficult at the time, but it was an experience.
This is now one of my favorite DF videos. I remember buying shadows of the empire PC in 97 and enjoying the game. Little did I know I lucked out because I had a system with a Voodoo Banshee in it, and the game ran pretty well. Thanks for the reminder of how crazy PC gaming was back then.
There's something about that fuzzy N64 look that gives me so much nostalgia. Playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye on a little 14" CRT TV with my now wife's flatmates. Playing SOTE and Zelda on my own. Great times.
N64 had great star wars games - this, pod racer, and the rogue squadron games were all excellent.
Whilst I'd have no choice but to replay games for 6 months back then, I remember this game giving me crushing headaches. Love hate relationship, I was determined to finish it, as I used my allowance on it, but boy did it punish me physically. It was an fun game, one that I'd never want to revisit.
Yea and combined with the fact that it had amazing visuals at the time(and sound design ripped straight from the movies).
I did a playthrough again after the Force Awakens trailer debuted four and a half years ago and was able to finish the game no problem.
You're correct but apparently nostalgia has no bounds at this point.
This game was not good. Nobody thought it was good at the time, it was just a launch title with a really cool early level that was the best representation of a famous Star Wars battle yet made. People just played the Hoth snowspeeder part over and over again. All the on foot stuff is complete shit, the swoop bike stuff is terrible, and the Outrider stuff is like a discount version of Rogue Squadron. There's nothing this game does that other SW games haven't done better.
I bought it on GOG years ago. But I find it unplayable with the default controls and could never map it properly to my Xbox controller. I'm waiting for it to go on sale on Steam and plan on picking up again. Someone uploaded a guide to cap the game's fps and a controller layout you can download and use.
STAR WARS™ Shadows of the Empire™
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... As Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliancewww.gog.com
£1.69 in the gog winter sale
iirc it's capped to 60fps and is more difficult because of that, because of logic being linked to frame rate as John mentions in the vid. You may need to cap it at 30fps if you have trouble
The platform I experienced this on back in the day was... ink and paper :-) . I read the book, but never played the game despite having an N64. I remember thinking that the book wasn't great compared to other Star Wars expanded universe books I was reading (Timothy Zahn's books, etc.). Dash Rendar was pretty obviously store-brand Han Solo, to the point where it was lampshaded in the book itself, and the villain of the story was all kinds of gross (trying to seduce Leia with pheromones, Kilgrave-style).
The video was great, particularly seeing the variation amongst the early PC GPUs. I remember dealing with issues like that frequently, as I had a Sony laptop with an early ATI chip that couldn't properly handle most alpha transparency effects. For many games (like FF8 on PC) I actually got a more consistent experience with software rendering than with trying to use the GPU.
The video was great, particularly seeing the variation amongst the early PC GPUs. I remember dealing with issues like that frequently, as I had a Sony laptop with an early ATI chip that couldn't properly handle most alpha transparency effects. For many games (like FF8 on PC) I actually got a more consistent experience with software rendering than with trying to use the GPU.
I think it's the version mostly used for speed running the game because the higher frame rate will literally make parts of the game take less time. So I imagine it must work well enough for the casual player.
It's is great. I bought the N64 version at launch knowing the reviews weren't hot.
that Hoth level was great at the time.
The game hasn't aged well, either. Or maybe it has and it was extra mediocre before.
In any event, I grabbed this on Steam as soon as it was available and I forgot how bad late 90s pc control functions and support was. So glad for Xinput.
that Hoth level was great at the time.
The game hasn't aged well, either. Or maybe it has and it was extra mediocre before.
In any event, I grabbed this on Steam as soon as it was available and I forgot how bad late 90s pc control functions and support was. So glad for Xinput.
The Alex/John "friend/colleague" arc has been some of the best drama this show has ever given us. Little bit weird to have a filler episode right in the middle; I can't wait for the next episode that moves the story forward.
Great work from John as always. I've always been curious about this game but was never able to play it back in the day.
Great work from John as always. I've always been curious about this game but was never able to play it back in the day.
Yes I liked it. Warts and all. Would I want to play it today? No. But I always hoped we'd see a greatly improved sequel that built upon what worked: The gameplay and scenario variety, the adventurous tone of the story and of course the soundtrack.
Also considering it was a launch game, the ambitions were quite enormous for a 3rd party that had to work off speculations and approximations of the final hardware for quite some time.
Yeah, being pc gamer (from ~1994) i found that this game aged pretty badly (unlike Dark Forces series, which i replayed recently), typical clunky console experience. But i played it only in 2018 for a first time.
I finished Steam version with Dualshock 4 controller, even managed to setup aim gyro lol. Controls was serviceable (maybe apart from very first level, too twitchy)
Capping fps to 30 fixed most of issues, also dgvoodoo can help with higher resolutions and text size.
Here is my screenshots
Yeah I feel this was always the consensus, even on launch. People cared about Mario 64 and Pilotwings, not this.
Great video! Flawed but technically impressive titles are a great fit for DF Retro, makes for very interesting analysis. Also good lord does the PC graphics card section put into perspective how much easier we have it today on that front D:
Special props must go to the developer's extensive efforts to optimise the PAL version, very much far from a guarantee at the time:
Special props must go to the developer's extensive efforts to optimise the PAL version, very much far from a guarantee at the time:
NTSC to PAL Conversion said:
Well, it's just the same as the original PC version with modern wrappers around it. I ran out of time for that, though, but it might have been interesting.
OP
OP
Great Post Jazzem, very informative - especially for a Pal region gamer like myself.
I don't think anyone in this thread is claiming that SotE was better than Mario 64 or Pilotwings, but there wasn't much else to play at launch and it was Star Wars. We had wait three whole days for Turok! (and splash out the close to 100 pounds to get it + required memory card)
I don't think anyone in this thread is claiming that SotE was better than Mario 64 or Pilotwings, but there wasn't much else to play at launch and it was Star Wars. We had wait three whole days for Turok! (and splash out the close to 100 pounds to get it + required memory card)
Another great video as always Dark1x ! Glad to see DF Retro return, and I love how in-depth these comparisons went.
This shows better image quality than a lot of games today!
Banding is such a distraction for me, and it still seems to be a problem for a lot of games despite the high precision buffers they're using now.
It's like they don't bother with good practices such as dithering at all, and assume the high precision will take care of it - which is not how things work.
I do feel that the video paints an overly negative impression of what PC gaming was like in the '90s though.
Things didn't seem that complicated at all - the Voodoo2 was the card to get. You only had to decide whether you wanted the extra 4MB for higher resolutions/SLI.
I didn't know anyone who was into PC gaming with a 3D accelerator other than a Voodoo2 at that time.
You have to remember that the Voodoo2 launched at $200, and a huge amount of competition at the time pushed those prices even lower.
Everyone seemed to want in on 3D accelerator production. You had companies like Creative Labs who were mostly known for their sound cards producing them, and mine was a Trust-branded card - a European company mostly known for producing budget PC accessories like keyboards and mice.
That's only ~$300 today after inflation, for the fastest card at the time by a large margin - a far cry from NVIDIA's $1200+ RTX 2080 Ti cards.
I'm not saying that it didn't happen, but I only recall people ever choosing other non-Voodoo cards for their 2D performance up until the Riva TNT2 / GeForce 256.
And your system is a little over-specced for the time period.
If I recall correctly, what I had at the time was:
The Voodoo2 was added after the fact to play 3D games, and I remember having to upgrade to 32 MB of RAM for Final Fantasy VII the next year.
I completely understand why you might not have a system that kind of spec (I'd probably want something even faster - I think there are some late P3/early P4s which still work well for Windows 98 gaming) but I suspect you wouldn't have had so many issues with the game running faster than it should on a P166 compared to a 733MHz PIII!
I never actually bought Shadows of the Empire, but I do remember playing the Hoth level demo quite a few times with this Gravis gamepad.
This shows better image quality than a lot of games today!
Banding is such a distraction for me, and it still seems to be a problem for a lot of games despite the high precision buffers they're using now.
It's like they don't bother with good practices such as dithering at all, and assume the high precision will take care of it - which is not how things work.
I do feel that the video paints an overly negative impression of what PC gaming was like in the '90s though.
Things didn't seem that complicated at all - the Voodoo2 was the card to get. You only had to decide whether you wanted the extra 4MB for higher resolutions/SLI.
I didn't know anyone who was into PC gaming with a 3D accelerator other than a Voodoo2 at that time.
You have to remember that the Voodoo2 launched at $200, and a huge amount of competition at the time pushed those prices even lower.
Everyone seemed to want in on 3D accelerator production. You had companies like Creative Labs who were mostly known for their sound cards producing them, and mine was a Trust-branded card - a European company mostly known for producing budget PC accessories like keyboards and mice.
That's only ~$300 today after inflation, for the fastest card at the time by a large margin - a far cry from NVIDIA's $1200+ RTX 2080 Ti cards.
I'm not saying that it didn't happen, but I only recall people ever choosing other non-Voodoo cards for their 2D performance up until the Riva TNT2 / GeForce 256.
And your system is a little over-specced for the time period.
If I recall correctly, what I had at the time was:
- Pentium 166 MMX
- 16 MB RAM
- 400 MB HDD (which I think was soon upgraded to something like 2–4 GB)
- S3 Virge DX
- Voodoo2
The Voodoo2 was added after the fact to play 3D games, and I remember having to upgrade to 32 MB of RAM for Final Fantasy VII the next year.
I completely understand why you might not have a system that kind of spec (I'd probably want something even faster - I think there are some late P3/early P4s which still work well for Windows 98 gaming) but I suspect you wouldn't have had so many issues with the game running faster than it should on a P166 compared to a 733MHz PIII!
I never actually bought Shadows of the Empire, but I do remember playing the Hoth level demo quite a few times with this Gravis gamepad.
Yeah, the slight over spec is likely the issue. I guess the good thing is that it lets the cards run free without much of a CPU bottleneck.Another great video as always Dark1x ! Glad to see DF Retro return, and I love how in-depth these comparisons went.
This shows better image quality than a lot of games today!
Banding is such a distraction for me, and it still seems to be a problem for a lot of games despite the high precision buffers they're using now.
It's like they don't bother with good practices such as dithering at all, and assume the high precision will take care of it - which is not how things work.
I do feel that the video paints an overly negative impression of what PC gaming was like in the '90s though.
Things didn't seem that complicated at all - the Voodoo2 was the card to get. You only had to decide whether you wanted the extra 4MB for higher resolutions/SLI.
I didn't know anyone who was into PC gaming with a 3D accelerator other than a Voodoo2 at that time.
You have to remember that the Voodoo2 launched at $200, and a huge amount of competition at the time pushed those prices even lower.
Everyone seemed to want in on 3D accelerator production. You had companies like Creative Labs who were mostly known for their sound cards producing them, and mine was a Trust-branded card - a European company mostly known for producing budget PC accessories like keyboards and mice.
That's only ~$300 today after inflation, for the fastest card at the time by a large margin - a far cry from NVIDIA's $1200+ RTX 2080 Ti cards.
I'm not saying that it didn't happen, but I only recall people ever choosing other non-Voodoo cards for their 2D performance up until the Riva TNT2 / GeForce 256.
And your system is a little over-specced for the time period.
If I recall correctly, what I had at the time was:
I'm not sure what it had for a sound card, but it was soon replaced with a Sound Blaster Live! 1024.
- Pentium 166 MMX
- 16 MB RAM
- 400 MB HDD (which I think was soon upgraded to something like 2–4 GB)
- S3 Virge DX
- Voodoo2
The Voodoo2 was added after the fact to play 3D games, and I remember having to upgrade to 32 MB of RAM for Final Fantasy VII the next year.
I completely understand why you might not have a system that kind of spec (I'd probably want something even faster - I think there are some late P3/early P4s which still work well for Windows 98 gaming) but I suspect you wouldn't have had so many issues with the game running faster than it should on a P166 compared to a 733MHz PIII!
I never actually bought Shadows of the Empire, but I do remember playing the Hoth level demo quite a few times with this Gravis gamepad.
You're right about the Voodoo - if you had it, you were golden. I fumbled around back then -had a Matrox Mystique first, which wasn't good, then a PowerVR card (due to low price). Eventually saved up for a Voodoo and then Voodoo 2 and was set.
So, yeah, Voodoo was key and amazing. Took awhile for the competition to catch up!
Good video, really enjoyed it! Really great to see all of the debug options being used and a nice demonstration of how it ran on various PC GPUs...
... that being said, I was really disappointed to not see the Voodoo 1 here. I get that you only have access to so many GPUs, but the Voodoo 2 wasn't contemporary at all when the game came out. Voodoo 2 didn't launch until February 1998; a whole 5-6 months after the PC version came out and over 1.5 years after the N64 itself had launched. Voodoo 2 was also the absolute highest end of the highest end card available at the time; so not really representitive of what the PC experience was like circa 1997 (or even 1998 for most people); not to mention that the Pentium 3 didn't launch until 1999; so again, not truly representitive of the 1997 experience. I had a Matrox Mystique at the time, so there's no way I could've ever had really played SOTE to any decent extent lol!
But I get that its really hard to really, truly recreate the 1997 PC experience these days. You did a good job with the video overall though! Thoroughly enjoyable watch :D
... that being said, I was really disappointed to not see the Voodoo 1 here. I get that you only have access to so many GPUs, but the Voodoo 2 wasn't contemporary at all when the game came out. Voodoo 2 didn't launch until February 1998; a whole 5-6 months after the PC version came out and over 1.5 years after the N64 itself had launched. Voodoo 2 was also the absolute highest end of the highest end card available at the time; so not really representitive of what the PC experience was like circa 1997 (or even 1998 for most people); not to mention that the Pentium 3 didn't launch until 1999; so again, not truly representitive of the 1997 experience. I had a Matrox Mystique at the time, so there's no way I could've ever had really played SOTE to any decent extent lol!
But I get that its really hard to really, truly recreate the 1997 PC experience these days. You did a good job with the video overall though! Thoroughly enjoyable watch :D
I have a Voodoo 1 (it's filmed in the video) but, alas, the drivers between Voodoo 1 and 2 are super finicky. Whenever I switch the two, I end up with hours of problems. It's very annoying and I just didn't want to go through that again since I was already tight on time. :-(
so happy df retro is back
i hope he can keep justifying making new ones going forward. its some of my favorite stuff on youtube
i hope he can keep justifying making new ones going forward. its some of my favorite stuff on youtube
