Star Wars: Flight of the Falcon

Sometimes after playing a particularly bad game I take a sick pleasure in discovering the company that developed it has went out of business. Pocket Studios did nothing but contribute to the glut of terrible licensed games for the Game Boy Advance. As it turns out, Star Wars: Flight of the Falcon  was the studio's final game. I think the main problem with this game is that the developers failed to realize there is a difference between what the GBA hardware can do and what it can do well.

 

One thing the GBA can't do well is 3D. I don't know. It's hard to say how much 3D rendering is actually going on in this game, as much of it seems like it could be Space Harrier-style trickery. Whatever the case, the game runs poorly. There really isn't an easy explanation for this considering it isn't a port of a game from a more powerful console or anything like that. Flight of the Falcon runs at an annoyingly sluggish pace.

 

 

Picking out the enemies in the stars is somewhat difficult, and this is exacerbated by the Millennium Falcon's tiny reticle. The combination of the slow controls and the hard to see enemies makes this feel like playing a pixel-hunting adventure game with a shitty trackpad. In case you couldn't guess, for a space shooting game that is supposed to be exciting, this is bad. Star Fox this game is not.

 

Scoring the license to make a Star Wars game is pretty much guaranteed sales, whether the game is worthless or not. I don't have any particular love for the franchise, but a lot of people do. I theorize that if some scientist invented a working lightsaber and murdered a bunch of people with it, he wouldn't be convicted because the jury would find him too awesome. Whatever. Nevermind the franchise, this game sucks.