A Star Wars Video Game Retrospective – Episode 2: “Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle” (1983)

Continuing my journey through as many Star Wars Video games as I can get my hands on, we move onto the second game made and distributed by the Parker Brothers for Atari: The rather lengthily titled Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle. In the first part of this series, I repeatedly spoke about how difficult it was for me to judge a game on a platform as old as the Atari 2600, while nothing has changed since then, the more games I can play, the better I can compare and contrast them on these older platforms.

After getting my hands on this one, I think I appreciate Empire Strikes Back a little more, which isn’t to say this game lacks creative ideas…

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A Star Wars Video Game Retrospective – Episode I: “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” (1982)

Seeing has how I recently subjected my readers to an extensive rant regarding my thoughts on a significant swash of the Star Wars fandom, I thought it might be the right time to kick off a series I’ve been intending to write for a long time now. It’s my way of putting some positivity back into the Star Wars franchise by celebrating just how broad and diverse it is. Especially when compared to the handful of movies people seem to think this franchise beings and ends with.

My intention here is to get my hands on and talk about every Star Wars video game I possibly can, and as chronologically as possible. I’m guessing it’s going to be more difficult to do this with some games than others, but I’ll cross those roads as I come to them. I intend to discuss the merits of each game on an individual basis, but not just that, I intend to dig into what the game added to the greater franchise, what other sources it pulled from and how it helped build the Star Wars into the huge multimedia behemoth it is today.

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The Star Wars Fan Backlash is Pathetic

I didn’t really grasp the extent of how bad this problem was until very recently, it’s not that it’s just a recent issue. I know fans of things generally suck as a rule, it’s just, after the release of Solo the buzz around the internet was that maybe we were already burning out on Star Wars. This seems like a ridiculous statement to me personally. I went into that movie with pretty low expectations and ended up enjoying it regardless. Because I’m a fan of the franchise and even if an individual movie isn’t my tastes, there is usually something in there for me to enjoy.

Some Disney executives have contributed this poor performance to something more than simple “burnout”. One thought would be that Solo under performed because a significant number of people were boycotting the franchise, this coming as a result of their distaste of The Last Jedi, which came out last December. I always knew the movie was divisive, but for this to be the reaction of some people who regard themselves as fans is baffling to me.

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