This week in Galactic Hunter Video Theater we're going to look at the biggest source of new footage in the 1990s with Star Wars Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire! This was a PC game which was ported to numerous platforms, including the original Playstation (which is where I played it). You played the disgustingly generically named "Rookie One" through a story which, I must confess, I had completely forgotten before perusing this video again. Like most Star Wars games in the 1990s, you get a ton of musical cues from the films and a story which basically remixed action scenes and space battles from the films with a few new bits and pieces, essentially letting you control a remixed version of the Star Wars trilogy. (As back then, there were only three movies.) Check out over 40 minutes of questionable acting and even worse special effects after the break!

While the game was pretty much a shooter on rails and largely existed for most of us as an excuse to get a CD-ROM drive (or Playstation), the 1995 title served as a reminder that the market was really hungry for more Star Wars in nearly any possible format. While everyone told me I was nuts, I really did enjoy playing through this one a couple of times if for no reason other than it gave me a decent-looking video game that let me try out a bunch of Star Wars vehicles. Of course others have done "play the movie" differently since then, with the various Star Wars LEGO titles letting you do pretty much anything you could possibly want.

A fun side note: if you owned the Playstation port, and had a light gun, you could actually use it to play the third-person shooting sequence where Rookie One kills a bunch of Stormtroopers. (I got a cheap on at Toys R Us and had a delightful time.) If you have a Playstation 3, the original version of the game should be able to run on it but I must confess I have yet to dig out the box of PSOne games in my archives to verify that it does indeed still function properly. It's currently worth about $3.00-$6.50 shipped on eBay, which makes it a great buy if you and a bunch of friends want to get together to plow through an old game on a Saturday night.

If you have a suggestion for a future installment of Galactic Hunter Video Theater, please leave a comment or feel free to email me! See you next mission!