Return of the Jedi
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 1994
Levels: 1
Author: Alan Caudel
Website: DummyDuck.com
Related games: Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars
Not to be mistaken for Ian S. Frazier's Star Wars (Frazier), Yurik Nestoly's Star Wars (Nestoly), or Alan Caudel's Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
Everyone tries to make a scrolling shooter. For one reason or another, everyone fails. There are many reasons why Game-Maker is ill-suited to the genre -- map dimensions, limitations to control mapping, limitations to scrolling, limitations to monster behavior. There are ways around most of these, but to at once juggle all of the workarounds and still present a playable, entertaining game is the stuff of miracles.
Here, Caudel tries a few things. Inspired by the speeder bike chases from the third (chronological) Star Wars movie, he presents a side-scrolling shooter in the mold of Gradius or Thunder Force. The character moves at a steady clip, even in an idle state -- so there's your scrolling workaround. To allow the character to move and shoot at the same time, he uses momentum. So that sort of deals with one of the control issues. For a moment, everything feels fine. You scroll to the right, you shoot a few things... then it all goes a bit weird.
There are a few problems with Return of the Jedi. One is that seemingly random background objects serve as obstacles. Deadly backgrounds are nothing unusual for a scrolling shooter -- particularly a horizontal one -- but here the backgrounds aren't differentiated enough to make it clear just what is going on. That's a design issue, and fine; it could easily be tweaked and addressed.
Trickier is a fatal control malfunction that presents itself almost randomly. Apparently due to a glitch in the engine's handling of momentum, on occasion the player loses all control of the ship. An errant keystroke will send the character careening in a random direction, with no hope for the player to regain control before it smashes into something. So, that's not too good. It's harder to see an obvious way around this problem, using the material at hand.
Oh well. It's not hard to see why Caudel put this one back on the shelf. Later he would revisit the same idea, but from a different perspective. That worked out... rather more well, actually.
This game was developed the same year Super Return of the Jedi was released for the SNES.
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| (Overview) | Return of the Jedi | Star Wars |
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Story[edit]
N/A
Instructions[edit]
Press up or down to dodge.
Press left to slow down.
Press the space bar to shoot.
Press "\" to fire a super beam.
Press "E" to rock the Ewok.
Avoid obstacles and other riders. Stay on course as long as you can!
Credits[edit]
Game designed by Alan Caudel.
Availability[edit]
This game is not known to have been distributed in any form, prior to its addition to the Archive.
Archive History[edit]
On October 20, 2010, Caudel posted a comment to a YouTube video of Peach the Lobster, under the name dummyduckrulz; following up the conversation, on June 29, 2011 he provided a link to a collection of games recently uncovered by Adam Tyner. This initial archive included:
Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Return of the Jedi (87 kB)
- Game map (35 kB)
