They should've been the first missions in the game! The only thing that drove me insane about Rogue Squadron is that its two best levels-and surely a reason to buy the game for most people-were the Death Star trench run and the Battle of Hoth, both of which were hidden bonuses that had to be arduously unlocked by collecting gold medals. It's a really easy game to get to grips with in terms of the way each Rebel craft moves, and it was nice counter-programming to the X-Wing series if you weren't always in the mood for a sim experience. Rogue Squadron, I suspect, was created to emulate Nintendo's brilliant Star Fox 64, with planets represented as little hubs and most completable in the space of about ten minutes. That’s partly because of the level of fan service employed in setting some levels in familiar locations (or some you heard in passing, like Kessel) or having the Millennium Falcon turn up halfway through a mission, but also because it’s so simple an arcade shooter that it's aged pretty well. I only ever played it on PC, and for someone watching the Star Wars Special Edition VHSs every day in 1999, Rogue Squadron blew me away. In the late '90s I was obsessed with Star Wars games-I think I still have a PC Gamer demo disc containing only Star Wars game demos that I played again and again for about two years-and Rogue Squadron is weirdly one of those titles considered an N64 game before a PC game, even though it came to PC first in North America.

It’s still a brilliant shooter, featuring every Rebel spaceship with their own differences in sound design and feel (except the poor old B-Wing). When Rogue Squadron landed on GOG, I played through over half of it in one night.

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