Mission 11: The Imperial Mask
Reliving the Classics is a series where I replay a game from my childhood and recap the experience level by level. Be sure to catch up on previous entries in the blog!
I am back!! It has been a minute, but I am back continuing the epic adventure of Kyle Katarn’s struggle against the Empire. While others are playing the new Star War’s outlaws on the newest consoles in 10K or whatever, I am playing a DOS game from the 1990s that is extremely pixelated.
If you do not recall last mission, we stole a navigation disc back from Jabba the Hutt that may give us the location of the secret Dark Trooper plant. Even though its back in our hands its useless unless it is decrypted. The only way to do that is to infiltrate the Imperial City itself, sneak into an Imperial Security Bureau building, and use the Imperial systems to get the data I need. Sounds easy enough, right?
Back in the day before they started calling it Coruscant it was called the Imperial City or Imperial Centre. The game does reference “Coruscant” in the missing briefing, but its still early on where the term Imperial City was still used in Star Wars lore. Coruscant was the capital of the Republic and then the Empire. It is one large sprawling metropolis that covers the planet’s surface. The top is typically where the affluent and powerful live. The poor dwell on the crime ridden lower levels of the plant.
This mission follows the similar formula of getting inserted by Jans and you have to blast your way into the complex. It is another frustrating one, trying to figure out which way is which. The map is sort of helpful, but its so primitive. It is just a bunch of neon green lines making up a topographic view of the level. It is still extremely easy to get lost or come back to the same spots two, three, four times. This level only has 1 early model Dark Trooper that I bested pretty quickly as you pick-up an assault canon shortly before. It takes forever to get where you need to be. There is another puzzle where you need to open an outer layer of doors, then an inner layer, but switch to the inner doors closes the outer doors and you get stuck. After 20 minutes I was running to YouTube, no joke, it had me losing my mind. When you finally decrypt the nav card and grab the data disk guess who decided to mess up your day? Friggin' Boba Fett. This guy comes flying in with his jet pack and starts shooting you up. I returned fire, panicked, and ran off an edge to my death. At this point I only had 1 more life left and I literally said, “If I die here now I will lose my s**t”. Luckily, I was the faster gunslinger, and I downed that bounty hunter scum. Just in time for Jan to return with the Crow and get me the heck out of there.
I honestly think once I finish this go through of Dark Forces, I will never play it again. I have definitely been babied by the games of present and the easy difficulties that are available. Video games back then were sink or swim and right now I am barely treading water.
I hope you enjoyed another Reliving the Classics blog post. Thank you for the support and stay safe out there gamers.
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