Gaming World Tour: Yoda Stories

Hi friends, it’s your favorite dumpster diver here, and I… I hate this game. I hate absolutely every single little thing about it, from how it looks like a fangame made by an idiot in 5 minutes, from the fact that it plays like a Tiger Electronics game… it’s just the worst.

But hey, you know your old pal doesn’t deal in baseless conjecture, so I got some pretty cool video evidence for you! Mostly because if I regaled you with tales about how bad this game is without proof you probably wouldn’t believe me.

You probably also won’t believe that this was actually a game that people were expected to buy. Trust me, I don’t believe it either, even with a copy of it sitting on my desk.

Luckily, no, I didn’t actually spend my own money on it, and even if I did I probably wouldn’t admit it.

So, yeah, where were we? Ah, yes, Yoda Stories! I’m going to show you some gameplay of this game, and I’m dead serious, you have to believe me – this footage hasn’t been touched, slowed down or edited in any way. This is how the game is supposed to look and feel. No, this isn’t something I made in 5 minutes in game maker, I swear to god this was a real release.

There’s a slim chance most of the people reading this will actually know what I’m on about, but there were some stupid flash games made in 10 minutes on Cartoon Network’s site released probably only a few years later that looked basically exactly like this.

Yeah, this game is on par with a free flash game some intern slapped together with duct tape and chewing gum. May I remind you that LucasArts actually released this and thought it was acceptable? I know I’m saying that a lot but… I mean, LOOK AT THIS

LOOK AT IT!

Ahem. So, there’s also combat in this game. Maybe the combat will save the game! Yeah… not exactly.

Honestly, the most epic fight scene I’ve ever seen in video games. Name one time any video game has been as tense and action packed as that. I’ll give you time.

So how this works is you mash the space bar to flail the lightsaber around like a complete goon while desperately trying not to get stabbed in the back repeatedly because turning in place is a feat that no human could ever manage.

I mean, I guess you could use the mouse to control the movement, but that’s so miserable of an option that it might as well not even exist. The only fix to this, logically, would be to use the mouse to rotate your character.

Maybe while you’re using your three hands to maneuver the mouse to rotate your character while also moving with the arrow keys and mashing space, you can think about your life and what bad decisions led up to you playing this game.

Apparently this poor trooper has joined me in my existential crisis and is wildly firing at a wall out of pure anger. Or he can just smell me through concrete. Take your pick. Personally, I prefer the first option – it helps my sanity to pretend that someone wasn’t too stupid or lazy to code enemies to not see you through walls in this game people were actually expected to pay for.

This game is just…how is this real?

Oh yeah, the solution to opening the gate I was fiddling with at the beginning of that clip is just lovely. It also features a mechanic that the game didn’t bother to tell you about! See, you can hold shift to drag rocks around and the switch was underneath one of them.

This gives me the perfect opportunity to talk about this game’s excellent, very convenient tutorial system! Basically, you waste an inventory slot carrying around R2-D2 who might tell you something useful about whatever you drop him on.

Or he might just launch into a tirade about something stupid, like 3 ridiculously overwritten paragraphs that boil down to “use the arrow keys to move”.

Which means, if you decide to leave R2 at the start and just get going, you just have to make the assumption that you can push and pull rocks with specifically the right shift key, with no special animation tied to it whatsoever, and you also have to make the assumption that there’s a switch underneath one of these rocks, and the explosives you find lying around everywhere have nothing to do with anything. Explosives are so common in this game that I got some in return for giving a trader a literal pile of garbage.

But, of course you don’t blow up the gate! That would be a logical progression of events and might actually make you feel like you accomplished something, which is something this game is deathly allergic to.

Of course, opening the gate is pointless anyway since the door right behind it is locked. I never did actually manage to find out how to open it since there were no other switches hidden under the nearby rocks. That didn’t stop me from trying to blow it up, obviously.

It didn’t work, of course, because this game is a malicious being that saps all of the fun from everything around it. It’s just running around the same 10 screens trying in vain to find something interesting.

And I never did find that god forsaken key. Speaking of keys, I’m going to go jam some into my eyes to relieve the pressure that built up in my head while I was playing this game.

What, you want a score? I think it’s pretty obvious. Not a single thing about this game was positive in any way, and the fact that people actually paid money for it genuinely offends me.