Worst Game Ever

What's that you say? Did you just say, "hey, please tell me about the WORST videogame you ever played on the Commodore 64?". I can do that. I can do that because it still BURNS my soul every time i think about this game. You know how love can break your heart into a thousand little pieces and leave you obsessing for days, months, sometimes even years?

Well, Star Wars: the Arcade Game did that to me.

Here's a screen shot that i ripped off from some guy's website. He probably stole it too, just like Star Wars the Arcade Game stole my dignity:


The mere image causes me great consternation & confusion. Why? Read on.

I actually loved the Star Wars arcade game. I wasn't *good* at it - i've never been any good at video games. But there are still ones that i find fun to play, at least for a little while. They had a Star Wars arcade game up at the local Mac's Milk store. I used to go up there with Jeff Meier, Matt Daniels & sometimes possibly my brother. The game cost 50 cents, rather than 25, but this was because it was an EXPERIENCE you were paying for. You weren't just playing a video game. Instead, you climbed into the cockpit of an X-Wing fighter (for real, well, pretend real) and sat surrounded by speakers, cut off from the outside world. It might be my imagination, but i seem to recall having an controller that was like the one they used in the movies. You got to do the whole thing, fight your way towards the Death Star, navigate & blast through the battlefields on its surface, and eventually descend into the trenches to make a hero's run, not unlike those canyons back home. And...if you were worthy, the force was with you & you had enough quarters, you'd fire off a shot that would somehow enter the gap, bend downwards and then BLAMMO.

Like i said, a total experience.

So then, it was almost too much when i discovered that this game existed for the C64. I think it was put out by Atari, but it existed in cartridge form. We had only ever owned 2 cartridge games, both having arrived via Santa. As it turned out, my brother & i had saved up some American money in preparation for our semi-annual trip down to Philadelphia. Usually we spent our money on Star Wars action figures at Kiddie City (they were only $4.50 a piece, much cheaper than in Canada). We still planned to do this, but when we entered a KMart and saw the game behind the counter, we decided to do something else.

The price tag was too high. My memory might be off, but i believe that the price on the game was something in the area of $49. That was a LOT of money back then. I recall that we did not have enough money to buy the game upon first visit. However, as children so often do, we received dribs & drabs of money via generous relatives. 2 dollars here, 2 dollars there eventually added up to ensure that we had enough cash to buy the game before returning to Canada. We went back to KMart and made the purchase.

The downside was that we couldn't actually *play* the game. My cousin had a C64 over in New Jersey, but we weren't going to see him again before heading back to Canada. So we had to wait.

Now, if any children are reading this, i recommend you stop. Not because i'm about to swear or curse (i don't often do that on here) and not because i'm about to say anything adultish. No. I'm going to do worse than this. I am going to tell you that sometimes a thing may seem like it's the coolest thing in the world, and you eventually find out that it's not, and in fact it's worse than that. It's pure and utter rubbish, and your dreams die a little inside.

And you just paid 50 bucks for that to happen.

We got back to Whitby and fired up the game. All started well. Classic scrolling text explaining the plot of the game, familiar line drawn transparent geometrical graphics, fantastic pixelated (?) rendering of John William's anthemic song. I prepare to embark on my mission and i crash. Beginner's bad luck, i figure. I try again. Crash. Crash. Crash. Over and over and over.

Why?

It seems that the game's designers figured it would be more of a challenge to make the controls like those of an airplane. If you pull down, you go up. If you push up, you go down. Now again, this might be imagination, but i think that possibly the left and right controls worked the same way in the game. The fire button didn't seem to work too well either. In other words, the designers likely ported this game over from another system (if that was possible at the time) and spent little to no time refining the interface peripherals (i.e. the joystick). The game handled in such a way that you may as well have been wearing baseball mitts on each hand as you tried to play. It was a disaster. And we paid 50 bucks for it.

I recall taking apart a joystick and preparing to have a go at it with a soldering iron. I figured that i could rewire the joystick so that up was up & down was down. Brilliant idea, except that for all the other games, the joystick would be wrong. Plus my soldering skills were nil, and i could not afford another joystick after buying the game.

I don't know what happened to that cartridge. It probably got lost/given away/sold along with the C64. I can only hope that it got melted down and made into a Darth Vader action figure.

I never blew up the Death Star. The next time i went to Mac's, the game was gone and was replaced with something less glorious.

I still have a dream, though. I'm an adult. This means that i can buy things. One day, if the force is strong with me (still), i'll be in the right place at the right time. Maybe an auction or an estate sale. I will pull out my adult wallet, hand over my adult cash and i will buy an original Star Wars Arcade game.