li63sfm@sdcc7.UUCP (stephen lau) (04/16/85)
**** The force is with you young Skywalker....
but you are not a Jedi yet.... ****
The last of the Star Wars trilogy games from Atari has finally
arrived. The Empire Strikes Back has now come out in coin-op form.
It uses the same format as the Star Wars game does with its line
graphics. In fact, it seems as though in some parts all they did was
change a few things to make them look different. You start off with
4 shields and unlike Star Wars, once you use them , you never get
them back. Instead of regenerating shields, you try to earn letters
to spell the word JEDI. You earn them by destroying a designated
number of objects duiring one phase. Once you spell JEDI, an
invisible shield encases your ship which protects you from all types
of fire but not from collisions. It last for no more then half a
minute and once it wears out, you're right back where you started
with no letters and the enemy even madder. The music is right from
the soundtrack and they have added a whole slew of voices from Luke
to C3PO calculating the odds of navigating an asteroid field. The
game is a definite challange and I have yet to discover whether or
not there is a limit on the numbers of levels. I have gotten as far
as the 15th level but I'm sure there are a lot more.
Like the other Star Wars games, this one has different phases, 4 to
be exact. In the first phase, you take on the task of destroying the
hundreds of probes that the empire has launched on Hoth to locate
the rebel base. You must destroy the probes using your snowspeeder
before they get a chance to send 4 messages to the empire. You can
either shoot the probes before they send their messages or shoot the
messages down in mid flight before they go off the top of the
screen. It is a losing battle, since there are literally hundreds of
them running around. In the second phase, the Empire sends down
walkers to destroy the rebel power generator. You must, in your
snowspeeder, destroy the walkers by either shooting their gunports
or by shooting one of your four grappling hooks at their legs. The
walkers are huge and you get a bonus for flying thru their legs.
This also is a losing battle since the damage on the generator is
cumulative and only stops for a few seconds everytime you destroy a
walker. You never see the generator, but an indicator at the top of
the screen marks the damage.
Once the generator is destroyed, its
time to leave Hoth in the Milleneum Falcon and battle the TIE
fighters, much the same as in Star Wars. These TIE fighters, however
fire quicker and move faster then their counterparts in Star Wars.
In the fourth phase, you escape the TIEs and find yourself in the
midst of an asteroid field in which you must navigate the Falcon
thru. The asteroids are indestructible so firing on them does nothing.
If you make it through everything, you get a 2500 bonus and it starts
all over again.
The game has some flaws such as in the beginning when you
choose the level you want to start at, it displays a white disk that
looks more like a Certs then it does the planet Hoth and at the end
when it shows Darth Vader and his mouth grating is off line with the
rest of his face, but all in all it is a good game.
** Remember, the force will be with you...always **