Strange & Obscure Star Wars Games

There have been a lot of Star Wars games over the years, but for every Republic Commando or Knights of the Old Republic, there is a:

 

Clone Wars Adventures

While the era of the MMO may have waxed and waned, they were all the rage in a time not too long ago, in a galaxy not too far away…and we promise that’s the last of those we’ll pull on you. Probably.. Star Wars itself has had numerous bites of the MMO apple, but one of the strangest examples was the browser-based Clone Wars Adventures, developed and published by Sony Online Entertainment in 2010, until it was shut down in 2014. Sony Online Entertainment is an arm of Sony primarily concerned with PC-centric MMOs and online titles like EverQuest, EverQuest 2, The Matrix Online, and the mobile game God of War: Betrayal, has a laundry list of now-defunct online games to their name, to the point that their wikipedia page reads a little like the obituary section of a gaming magazine.

Clone Wars Adventures, as the title suggests, takes place between Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Players are dropped into the middle of the ongoing Clone Wars, as chronicled in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon. Players were uniformly fighting on the side of the Jedi, and could interact with characters like Anakin Skywalker and Yoda. Gameplay mostly involved mini-games, with occasional sections against Droids in certain modes. As far as MMOs go, it was competent, if a little sparse. It being a browser based game limited its development potential however, and the war was called off in 2014.

 

Star Wars: Super Bombad Racing

You might hear the words “Star Wars Racing Game” and get excited. You might also hear the words “Star Wars Mario Kart” and get even more excited. Who didn’t love Star Wars Episode I: Racer for the N64? Hell yeah. That’s a game that’s well-remembered, and even got a recent remaster. But we’re not talking about that racing game, we’re talking Super Bombad Racing, released in April 2001. The fact that the word “bad” is in the title feels a little bit like a giveaway.

There’s not much wrong with this game at a glance: Players can race across various maps inspired by Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and choose from eight characters, which isn’t very many, especially when there’s one scene in the film where like eight dudes in a single room try to tell of Qui-Gon Jinn and he just walks it off. Two unlockable characters, Darth Vader and Boba Fett, do shake up the focus on only one movie, but even so you can feel the game straining to squeeze enough juice out of a single movie.

Don’t worry, LucasArts managed it another eighteen times.

If all of this just sounds kind of generic and dull, then you’re right. There isn’t much to set Bombad apart from other racers, or even other Star Wars games, besides the fact that every racer has a tiny body and a giant cartoony head, like some kind of premonition of the Funko Pop Mania that would one day grip all of pop culture and then slowly faded away because who really needs Si from Duck Dynasty as a plastic obelisk in their room?

The racing gameplay is competent but unremarkable, and the Star Wars-ness of it all is mostly skin deep. Still, it is fun to see a giant bobblehead Darth Maul careening all over the track, for a little while at least. Bombad Racing graced the PlayStation 2 only, as its sales were so dismal that development Dreamcast, Windows and Mac ports were all cancelled.

 

Star Wars Galaxies

Somehow, a Star Wars MMO has returned. Though actually, this title predated Clone Wars Adventures, and was a very popular, highly anticipated game in its moment. Sony Online Entertainment’s Star Wars Galaxies, which launched in 2003 and stayed online until 2011, proved a bit more substantial than Clone Wars Adventures did. As you create your character and choose their interstellar career, you might have noticed that, at least at launch, Jedi was not an option.

You could be a brawler or marksman or medic (or 31 other starting jobs) but if you wanted that all-powerful lightsaber, you’d have to wait until a later expansion. The lack of Jedi made the entire Star Wars experience more authentic. In the original films, unless you happened to know Luke Skywalker or be him yourself, odds are you had no idea anyone in the whole galaxy could use the Force. Galaxies aimed for a wider, more wild-west kind of sci-fi, where anything could happen.

Set in between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, Galaxies aimed to give players a prime original trilogy experience, featuring planets from across the series, including Tatooine, Naboo, Endor, and more. You could also encounter characters from across the series, including characters from the prequels. All of this is dubiously canonical now, thanks to Disney jettisoning most of the non-film canon when they bought the franchise, but if you wanted to see what Watto was up to during the original trilogy, Galaxies was there for you.

Players enjoyed the open-ended character creation, the spaceship customization, and the hectic combat. Though Galaxies sadly went offline due to licensing issues in 2011, many dedicated fan emulation projects are in development so that, like the Jedi, the Galaxies players may one day return.

 

Star Wars: Yoda Stories

Yoda, the master of the force, the great sage of the Star Wars pantheon, finally brought to life…in an awkward, clunky point-and-click adventure game where you don’t even play as Yoda.

LucasArts created Star Wars: Yoda Stories in 1997, and it features Luke Skywalker as he navigates small, procedurally-generated puzzles to rescue his friends in short, bite-sized levels. The game is meant to be played in under an hour, which is a neat bit of consideration for fans because if a game isn’t going to be good, it can at least be short. The environments are drab, the puzzles are simple, and beyond the title and some character designs you might have to squint at to recognize, there just isn’t much Star Wars-y about the whole thing. There especially isn’t much Yoda-y about it, which, given the title, is very frustrating.

To be charitable, it is neat that the puzzles are procedurally-generated, meaning you won’t play the exact same thing twice, though the puzzles will likely blend together before too long. You’re also scored on your speed and efficiency, so it’s possible that a speedrun community could have some fun tearing through this thing. But why is it called Yoda Stories? Where is the little green punk?

There’s also a Game Boy Color version of the game, which is worse. It’s actually the lowest-rated Game Boy title IGN ever reviewed, so it’s got a place in the history books for that, if nothing else.

 

Star Wars: Racer Revenge

It’s another Star Wars racing game! And this one is a direct sequel To Star Wars Episode I: Racer that was about 5% as successful.

Racer Revenge takes place 8 years after The Phantom Menace, and has a narrative centering around disgraced podracer Sebulba yearning for revenge against child prodigy podracer Anakin Skywalker. In his defense, if I was a pro athlete and I got shown up by a literal child, I’d probably hold a grudge too. There isn’t actually a whole lot done with this premise, other than an excuse to make another podracing game. Nevermind that Anakin is supposed to be in the middle of his Jedi training at this point – why can’t the kid have a little hobby on the side?

Players can choose from 22 racers, including Anakin and Sebulba of course, and such colorful Star Wars characters as Clegg Holdfast, Aldar Beedo, and Dud Bolt. Unlockable characters include Darth Maul, Darth Vader, and Watto. Unlike its predecessor, Racer Revenge includes a sort of permadeath system, where if you wreck your vehicle, your race is over, so you’ll need to balance your aggression with some defensive driving.

It may be overall pretty similar to the first Racer, but Racer Revenge’s focus on attacking your opponents and its commitment to trying to wring out as much content from the concept of podracing as possible make for a fun time. This game was eventually added to the PS3 digital store in 2015, and even to the PS4 in 2016, so it looks like someone in the Sony offices still remembers this little gem. If Palpatine can return, somehow, then surely Sebulba might still be somewhere in that galaxy, ready for a third lap?

 

Star Wars Episode I: The Gungan Frontier

The best licensed games can make magic out of combining a familiar IP with a beloved principle of gaming. The recent Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor games stitched the Star Wars formula together with Dark Souls-like combat to great if not constantly stuttery success, and KOTOR made hay out of adapting a galaxy far, far away into a stat-based RPG.

So what could go wrong with stapling everyone’s favorite Star Wars race, the Gungans, with the creature creation gameplay of Spore? And did we mention that Lucas Learning, the edutainment arm of George Lucas’ media empire, made this in 1999, 9 years before Spore was released?

Ok, it’s actually taking direct inspiration from the ecosystem-customizing game SimLife, but it’s not like anyone’s talking about SimLife these days.

The culmination of this bizarre experiment was Star Wars Episode I: The Gungan Frontier. Players are tasked with terraforming a desolate moon and introducing living organisms that can thrive in the environments they create. You’ll deal with crises like moonquakes and pollution as you try to stabilize the land, and conduct massive genetic experiments as you mix and match alien species to perfectly tailor this moon for Gungan colonization. Because that’s what brings the kids to Star Wars, isn’t it? The colonization.

Credit where it’s due, the concept of tinkering with the alien lifeforms that make the Star Wars universe so unique is a really good pitch, and for all of its shortcomings, Episode I did bring audiences a lot of flashy, exciting alien creatures. With that in mind, a game about Charles Darwin-ing your way into your own alien menagerie is a solid pitch. The game even won several awards for children’s gaming after its release, though history hasn’t remembered it well. In games, as in life, it’s survival of the fittest, and The Gungan Frontier just couldn’t keep up. If history can somehow redeem Jar Jar, doesn’t a game full of his mates deserve a chance?

 

Angry Birds Star Wars

Sometimes a franchise collision is inevitable. Call it fate, call it market research, call it whatever you want, but when a mobile game gets as ubiquitous and profitable as Angry Birds, other franchises are going to start sniffing around for crossover potential, and Star Wars has never been too terribly precious about protecting their IP. 2012’s Angry Birds Star Wars was developed and published by Rovio Entertainment, the people behind Angry Birds in the first place, which maybe explains why they get top billing in the game’s title, as opposed to “Star Wars Angry Birds.”

If you’ve played Angry Birds before, or seen anyone play it on a tablet in public before, you get the general gist. You slingshot your birds into enemy structures and clear the board as efficiently as possible, moving through increasingly difficult challenges and using the different abilities of each bird. Here, the birds, enemy pigs, and levels have been given a fresh coat of Star Wars paint. You fling avian versions of heroes like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo at enemies on maps that range from Tatooine to the Death Star to Endor. Levels in space also have decreased gravity, giving you an extra wrinkle to think about as you plan your bird bombardment.

Angry Birds Star Wars was likely the most available game on this list at a time, being available on basically everytrhing. Fans hoping for a Switch 2 port shouldn’t hold their breath, though, as the game was discontinued in 2020 and delisted from digital store fronts. Due to the title involving 3rd party licensing with the Star Wars franchise, Rovio employee Steve Porter is on the record saying the game is unlikely to return.

 

Star Wars: Tiny Death Star

We return to the wacky world of phone games for Star Wars: Tiny Death Star, developed by Disney Mobile and NimbleBit in 2013. A spinoff of NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower game, Star Wars: Tiny Death Star tasks you with running your very own, you guessed it, tiny Death Star. You staff various stations and jobs within your miniature murder machine, optimizing operations and generating currency to upgrade your stations. You can do this with in-game Imperial Credits, or Imperial Bu which you have to buy with real human cash. That’s right, this Death Star doesn’t just commit interstellar genocide, it also commits the equally heinous crime of microtransactions.

As far as mobile games where you upgrade a central structure and invite more citizens (here virtual beings called Bitizens, which feels like it would have ramifications for the Star Wars lore) to work in your superstructure go, Tiny Death Star is perfectly serviceable. It’s just hard to get over the fact that you are, you know, trying to run the literal Death Star, the thing that’s so synonymous with evil and wanton destruction. Where’s my Lord of the Rings spinoff, Tiny Mount Doom?

Sadly, any aspiring warmongers will have trouble getting their hands on this game, as it was Delisted by Disney in 2014. It’s now only available on Amazon’s Kid+ program, so your children can have a promising career in war crimes. Children really are the future, aren’t they?

 

Star Wars Math: Jabba’s Game Galaxy

When I say “Jabba the Hutt,” what comes to mind? If you said ‘Arithmetic Edutainment,’ then congratulations! You’re correct in this one single instance, and you’re also not invited to any of my parties. But you’re clearly not alone in your answer, because someone else must have the connection between Star Wars’ infamous gangster slug-man and the fine art of mathematics. The fine people at Lucas Learning, who also brought us The Gungan Frontier, created Star Wars Math: Jabba’s Game Galaxy in 2000 for Mac and PC.

This title also primarily pulls its characters from Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and has players seeking to build spaceships by buying parts from everyone’s favorite space stereotype, Watto. You buy these parts with money earned by playing math-based minigames, including one called Dueling Dice, which is just a simplified version of Blackjack. GASP! Gambling, in our education Star Wars game?! This really is a wretched hive of scum and villainy…and math, don’t forget about the math.

Another standout game is Holochex, which fans will recall as the holographic chess game briefly played in Episode IV: A New Hope. It’s not terribly educational in this iteration, though it can teach you about strategy and planning, which might be more useful in outer space than long division, which the game also does not teach. Holochex is also the rare place in this game where Jabba actually shows up, as he’s surprisingly absent from most of the other games – I guess putting Watto on the box would not have sold quite as well.

 

Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi

Look. We know. Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi, the PlayStation fighting game from 1997, is remembered as a disaster. The fact that the title has two umlauts does not inspire confidence. IGN and Gamespot both gave it a 4 out of 10 when it was released, citing slow, awkward controls and overpowered force abilities that trivialized the mechanics of a one-on-one fighting game. But friends, gamers, countrymen, we come to praise Teras Kasi, not to bury it!

Everyone wants to dogpile on because Masters of Teras Kasi is remembered for somehow bungling the guaranteed hit of a Star Wars version of Tekken. And sure, maybe it’s not as polished or optimized as Tekken, but if you fire up your *ahem* legally acquired copy on your legally acquired console that is not an emulator, you’ll find that Masters of Teras Kasi is fine. Not great, but not a disaster either! The combat is fun, everyone has moves and fighting styles that make sense for them. The concept of “Teras Kasi,” which was made up for the game, is a sort of space martial arts that’s meant to be effective against force users. Kung Fu that beats the force – that’s a cool idea! Arden Lyn, an original character created for the game and the titular Master of Teras Kasi, has gotten some love and attention in the ensuing years, with her backstory getting expanded in official books, so it’s nice that she had at least a few fans who care enough to include her. Mara Jade, from the post-original trilogy Thrawn novels, is here! That’s pretty cool!

It’s exactly what we would have done to make a Star Wars Tekken in 1997, and it’s probably what you would have done too. It’s got its rough edges, but it also has its charm. Playing with friends is still a fun prospect, as the slower pace, if we want to be charitable, and we do, adds a bit of calculation to the fights, and there is just something undeniable about seeing the PlayStation renders of Darth Vader and Boba Fett squaring up. a A remaster that smooths out the friction might not be the worst idea…

The other games on this list are likely forgotten, consigned to the junkyard of gaming history. While Masters of Teras Kasi might be remembered today, it’s remembered as a joke. We hope you can remember it now more faithfully: an imperfect, but intriguing spin on what a Star Wars fighting game could be.

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