Retro Gaming Australia

LucasArts Archives Volume 1 is a budget package which features three of the company’s best adventure games on CD-ROM: Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which really made it one of the best deals of all time. As a bit of a sweetener, the company threw in a 3 level demo of Rebel Assault, and a CD filled with demos of various other LucasArts games.

Hot on the heels of the Monkey Island HD remakes, LucasArts Singapore started work on a similarly styled remake of the developer’s popular adventure game Day of the Tentacle.

Although never officially greenlit, the project was pretty far along – some say as much as 80% complete. However, LucasArts executives didn’t get behind the project, with one source saying to Kotaku that “he company’s higher-ups had no interest in continuing to make what they called “legacy” titles like this one.”

Another for the long list of LucasArts failures.

Source: Kotaku

Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures is to the Indiana Jones trilogy as Super Star Wars et al are to the Star Wars Trilogy, packing the popular LucasFilm movies into a series of pretty challenging platforming levels. A Mega Drive version was planned for release in late 1995, but was cancelled despite being completed.

Konami and LucasArts had a brief partnership in the 16-bit days which yielded a few decent games. Most people know of Zombies Ate My Neighbours, but Metal Warriors was overlooked by audiences at the time – their loss. It’s a lot like Cybernator – another great SNES mech-based action-platformer published by Konami, although the games have nothing to do with each other.

Day of the Tentacle is one of the finest games from the golden age of adventure games, and a painful reminder of how LucasArts was once a developer and publisher that did more than just coast off the Star Wars license.

Star Wars: Rebel Assault II – The Hidden Empire featured what was the first live action Star Wars footage shot in over 12 years when it was first released. The game features a decent storyline set in a post-Return of the Jedi era, but, like its predecessor, doesn’t really have much in the way of gameplay.

Stop the zombie apocalypse with a water pistol.

Zombies Ate My Neighbours (or just Zombies here) was a collaboration between LucasArts and Konami. It was one of LucasArts’ earliest console specific efforts, mixing up classic horror tropes with LucasArts trademark comedy stylings. It’s a bit long in the tooth and quite unforgiving, but worth playing.

Factor 5, masters of GameCube secret voodoo magic.

Star Wars: Rogue Leader was one of the first Star Wars games that could really match the scale of the battles which happened in the movies thanks to the increased power of the sixth generation of console hardware. In fact, despite being released in 2001, it still puts many Wii games, which run on similar but more powerful hardware, to shame.

Occasionally, you still get a good Star Wars game.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was the first RPG based in the Star Wars universe. Set thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin, Knights of the Old Republic gave us an insight into what went on between the Sith and the Jedi when they were at their height. Of course, it seems very little changed in terms of technology in those 3000+ years.

Who said that they all had to be good?

Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi is the infamous Star Wars fighting game, and arguably the best example of the point in time when Star Wars games took a turn for the worst. Apparently Teras Kasi is Finnish for steel hand.