To quote what I assume is Stargate, I have a bad feeling about this.
Back in 1994, a sci-fi franchise was born with the release of Stargate, a movie that I haven’t seen but I assume is about some sort of gate to the stars – like a map to movie stars’ homes, only more so. I was definitely unaware that this was brainchild of Dean Devlin and Noah Emmerich, the folks who would give us Independence Day a couple of years later. Has Independence Day been a part of the Stargate Cinematic Universe this whole time? Let me know.
As for its video game adaptation, you play as Kurt Russell, in his indelible role as Joey Stargate, the guy in charge of the Stargates or something (again, I haven’t seen the movie). In each level, you are tasked with finding five boxes or rescuing five soldiers or given a similar fetch quest. I assume this closely follows the movie, which also consists largely of fetch quests.
First, the positive – in terms of graphics, this is one of the most impressive SNES games I’ve come across. Particularly with the player character, the sprites and animations are almost shockingly good, and everything looks quite nice when in motion. Nice work, Stargate graphics people. You’re the best.
Oh, and that’s the last of the positives. As with a lot of games of the era, I feel like Stargate prioritized looking good on its own box, in magazine screenshots, and so on. It knocked that part out of the park, but the rest is, well, very rough. In particular, Stargate suffers from serious control problems. For a game where you need to move around and shoot a lot, Stargate makes it profoundly difficult to do both of those things at once, leading to things like getting barfed on by an alien until you die. It’s really quite maddening. In some situations, the safest way to deal with an enemy is to hang from a ledge and shoot at them from a distance or from above. This assumes, of course, that you’re in a place where you can even do that.
Speaking of hanging from a ledge, getting into just the right spot so you can do that is often rage-inducing. Some platforms are just high enough that you need to jump up and grab onto them, and God help you if you want to do this right with any consistency. In some situations, you can end up falling a pretty big distance if you screw this up as well.
If I could compare this game’s controls to anything, it would probably be the Wild Wacky Action Bike, a fake product that appeared on an episode of South Park:
I feel like I did get used to the game’s controls after a while, but the number of situations made needlessly deadly as a result of said controls made the experience fairly miserable. Couple in the fact that the levels are quite repetitive and questionably designed and you’ve got yourself a real dud of a game. At least this game looks good while being a dud, I suppose. Plus, its visual aesthetic answers that ever-important question, “What if the Aladdin game had guns?”:
The Stargate franchise expanded considerably after this film, in ways that I understand aren’t super closely related to the film itself. There were a few other games based on the franchise, including the team-based shooter Stargate: Resistance and a pretty cool pinball table. There was an MMORPG in the works for a few years, but that never made it to release. There’s also a 1981 arcade game known as Star Gate that has nothing to do with any of this (though it was a sequel to Defender, which a much better game than StarGate).
Next week’s game is not only a game I adored in my childhood, it’s something we’ve yet to have in the Retro Roulette Cinematic Universe – it’s a PC game. See you then!