Games: Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (N64), Part 7

Resuming, at long last, my runthrough of the 1996 Nintendo 64 game on easy level, losing no lives and picking up all Extra Lives and Challenge Points.

This is the level where I really, really wish this game had save points.  It took quite a while for me to make this video, since I kept eating it and having to go back to the beginning.  (Not the whole seventeen months since I posted the last installment, mind you, just "a while."  In fact, I made the video before my sabbatical.)



Notes:

(I thought about making these annotations in the video, but as far as I can tell, the viewer can't avoid annotations, whereas you can choose not to read this.)

Slight YouTube milestone: This is my first video over 15 minutes.  Back when I started this, the limit was 10.  Then they upgraded it to 15.  Then they removed it altogether.

0:53 Ahem.  It's more difficult than it looks.  Honestly.

2:51 Yes, I can shoot Imperials from half a mile away, but the automatic targeting gets stymied by things that are right in front of me. The last Probe Droid, back at 2:31, was also full manual targeting.

4:07 This is about the point where I almost always sing "Mooooon Riiiiver." Why here, and not on any of the other umpty-grazillionth repetitions of this music in this level, I don't know.

5:03 That thing up on the path is a Sand Wampa. It came from one of the caves that I passed by. (There was nothing but a 20 Health in there.)

6:02 Here's another of those automatic targeting things. It won't hit the far Imperial, because there's a closer one, even though he's out of sight behind a corner.

8:12 I remember the first time I played this level. For some reason, I had enormous difficulty just getting on the floating platform, getting off at the other side, and going through the doors before they closed.

9:33 Damn targeting. There's another Stormtrooper in that lower alcove, you see (or rather, don't yet).

9:53 The part where the image dims and comes back isn't part of the game.  This video was originally in two parts, but since I don't have limits on YouTube now, I decided to combine them.  The problem is, the fade out on the first and the fade in on the second overlap, and I erased the original tape.

10:44 But where will I ever find a jetpack?

10:50 (Bela Lugosi) How fortunate! That simplifies everything! (/Bela Lugosi)

11:40 You can, of course, also jump for the Challenge Point. But since you can only get the Extra Life with the jetpack, why not make it easy?

13:53 Does this look difficult? Good, because it is freakin' crazy-ass difficult. It was the last part of this level that I could execute successfully. If I hadn't quickly turned the jetpack on and off a couple of times as I was coming down, I wouldn't have survived the last fall. This was the point while taping this where I began to hope I was going to make it through the whole level this time without dying.