Game EXP: Star Wars™: Rogue Squadron 3D (PC)

I was initially quite excited to start up Star Wars™: Rogue Squadron 3D after seeing that it was on sale through GOG this last weekend.  I still have the original N64 cartridge, so I was not new to the game at all, but because the fan in my N64 console is wonky, the system will crash games after 15-30 minutes, plus I wanted to have a digital copy of an incredibly fun video game that I spent a lot of time on in my late teens and early 20s that I could hypothetically show our not-yet-born child when they are old enough.  So I plunked down the proverbial $3.49 (although not currently on sale through GOG right now) and installed the game later in the week.  I plugged in my 360 Controller and sat down, ready to relive some childhood nostalgia.

But the controller did not want to work.  Thus began the journey of finding a way to get Star Wars™: Rogue Squadron 3D to play the way I wanted it to play, lest I take GOG on their word and return the game for a refund. 

At first, I tried everything that I could think of to try.  When the game starts, I went into Hardware Configuration, and the game had recognized that I had an Xbox 360 controller connected, but still, when I started the game, the game did not recognize the controller as being connected.  I even went to the Joystick configuration screen and could not get the buttons on the controller mapped to the game.  I then went to GOG's store page for the game and did see some mention of issues that other people had experienced, but there was nothing helpful in the way of forum-style advice or troubleshooting walkthroughs.  So after doing a Google search for "Star Wars Rogue Squadron GOG Controller" I found the forums and found a couple of threads about similar and identical issues; along with the always present, "Awesome, problem fixed! My bad" without any further explanation.  One solution I came across a couple of times, although it being variations on itself, had to do with the compatibility setting, which I had not thought of.  The PC version of the game came out in 1998, so it would make sense to run the game in Compatibility Mode, except some of these posts were suggesting to turn off compatibility, while others suggested running compatibility on with ME/2000 turned on.  And even which program to run in Compatibility Mode was different with some posts suggesting just the shortcut icon "Launch Star Wars - Rogue Squadron 3D", while others the "ROGUE" application, and others the "Rogue Squadron" application.  Eventually, I just ran the launcher and "Rogue Squadron" app in ME/2000 Compatibility Mode, but we will get there soon enough.

It was at this point that the frustration with not being able to get the game to run the way that I had expected it to, that I was seriously considering asking GOG for a refund, but I kept telling myself that with all of the positive reviews on GOG and Steam that there had to be something that I was missing in the set-up process that did not involve downloading a 3rd party controller mod, or going into the config file to make slight alterations.  Yes, I wanted this to be easy and it was turning out to be the complete opposite.

When I did run it in Compatibility Mode with ME/2000 turned on for both the Launcher, I was finally able to move the cursor with the joystick, but things did not quite operate the way I wanted them too, and the opening of the menus was about 1/4 the speed that they normally are, which did not bother me too much.  So I backed out again, did some more troubleshooting another four times, found out that by going to the Joystick Setup under Setting in the in-game menu and clicking Default, that the game would auto-populate the button mapping to something reminiscent of the controller setup for the N64 Controller.  Now I thought I was finally able to use the controller in-game.  But that was not the case.  When the game started with Wedge going with Luke Skywalker to Tatooine to run some drills around Beggar's Canyon, the X-Wing took a very hard banking turn and crashed into the sand dunes.  When I respawned, I found that I needed to constantly be holding the joystick at an odd angle to prevent myself from crashing (again).  So I back out (again) and ran through the Joystick Calibration options.  This is where I found out (not surprisingly) that my 360 Controller has some dead zones, specifically in the upper right and left corners, and that for whatever reason, the left joystick did need some calibrating as by default it had the center point in either the bottom left or bottom right corner.  Once I finally ran through the calibration, booted up the game through ME/2000 Compatibility Mode, I was now able to return to Christmas 1998.

The first thing I noticed upon starting the game being able to use the 360 Controller, was something that I read about in one of the reviews on GOG, that when you use the boost, your ship does accelerate, but faster than the camera resulting in having really bad control over your craft until you inevitably crash.  After the first crash, the camera seemed to operate without any issues, so on my first playthrough the first couple of levels, I would just crash my ship outright to get a hold of the camera.  This technique did not work as well as I wanted it to in the fourth level when everyone is in Speeders which are designed to not crash into the ground.  It was only by accident that I discovered using the Start button on the controller changes the camera angle, allowing you to cycle through different options during the first couple of seconds of the stage until you get back to the default setting of being right behind the engines.  Once I discovered this, it was more-or-less smooth sailing.

It has probably been more than 10 years since I last played Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on the N64, and it is easy to have nostalgia goggles when remembering what games looked at sounded like on a system being played on a 27 and 32-inch CRTV and playing this game now on my 15.6-inch laptop, this is how I remember the game originally looking, even though I know that there were CRTV lines throughout the game.  I know the images were not as clear and crisp as they are on my LED screen, but this is the way I remember blasting over the foggy lakes of Chorax in an A-Wing (this mission was when I started liking the A-Wing) or through the deep canyons of the Jade Moon.  And on Corellia in the Speeders, I immediately recalled how to control the ship while tying a tow cable around the legs of an AT-AT.  Once I got the game up and running, I was perfectly happy with my meager purchase, and I look forward to trying to earn a Gold Medal on all of the levels, all over again.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
This Is What We Were Put Her For


P.S.  Now that the game is operating well, the only gripe I have, is that you cannot fly B-Wings (my favorite of the alphabet ships) in this game, although it is flyable in Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, which has yet to receive a PC port.  Thankfully my GameCube is still operational and I can just head down to the basement if I want to fly around in that beautiful beast of a ship.