Luke transforms from a broken and battered Jedi-in-training to a cloaked, sinister-looking master. Lando and Chewie blast off to find a frozen Han Solo and wind up embedded spies in Jabba’s palace. Of the three original films, it’s that gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi that provides the most room for the imagination to run wild. We were well in the midst of a Star Wars media blitz. The Expanded Universe, previously conversation fodder for sci-fi conventioneers and comic-shop junkies, had gone semi-mainstream with Shadows of the Empire, a novelization about the space between Empire and Jedi that received the same kind of promotion reserved for a new film. An updated wave of action figures were hogging allowances. When Yoda Stories hit the shelves of local Babbage’s in March 1997, moviegoers had two months prior been treated to A New Hope: Special Edition, the first installment in a decades-long feud with George Lucas as he futzed with minute (and major) alterations to the original films. Its clearest descendent is the type of game you get Facebook invites to play with from former high school classmates.īut as a kid, this little timewaster stirred my fascination with just how expansive that galaxy could be. The seemingly never-ending permutations of adventures apparently were just variations on 15 levels. It’s a clunky, poorly written cash-in on the series, with bloopy, cartoonish sound effects. Playing it now, in my thirties, I’m questioning whether it was worth the hours I sunk into it on our screaming-fast 133mhz computer. It’s in the same vein of early-90s lightweight PC action titles like Chip’s Challenge, but it has the bonus of giving the player the excuse to run around and bash on Stormtroopers. (Desert planet? Frozen planet? Forest planet? Check, check, check). It spit out randomly created maps of various Star Wars-esque locales. The game was an installment in LucasArts’ stalled “Desktop Adventure” series-low-key, cutesy titles that require about as much investment as your average game of Minesweeper or Solitaire. With an overhead view, players guided a cartoonishly large-headed Luke Skywalker, ordered by Yoda to visit various planets to save his friends, collect piles of robot junk, and swing a lightsaber around. Yoda Stories wasn’t much more than a lightweight diversion for preteens with a propensity to hog time on the family desktop.
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