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Shadows of The Empire: Video Game! and Wrap Up

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  What the fuck is wrong with his face? I like that it gets Hoth out of the way early. You have to put it in every game from this period. It's interesting how similar (annoying) the tow cable mechanic is to the one in Rogue Squadron a few years later. Overall, not a great game today, but you had less about 10 choices for the holiday season in '96 if you wanted to give your kid a Nintendo Sixty FOUURRRR AAAHHHHH (He's uglier than the droid) So, Shadows of The Empire : 1. Cool idea to do this big transmedia project, especially centered on a book. 2. Almost everything about it was bad! 3. The comic is the definitive version. Ties into the rest of the EU well, focuses on the more interesting parts of the story. It's amazing how much of a difference putting someone actually invested in the universe on it makes.
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The soundtrack is decent.

 Let's whip some llama ass and do this from Archive.org instead of Youtube. https://archive.org/details/StarWarsShadows?webamp=default 1. Main Theme from Star Wars - Leia's Nightmare : Yep, that's the main theme alright. (These speakers suck, I might regret this.) And then a bit of a generic medley afterwards. 2. The Battle of Gall : McNeely does a great job of evoking a John Williams feel here. It opens with some "Droids on Tatooine in ANH ", before transitioning into a bit of droid-army. Kind of impressive since this is three years before  TPM . Not sure about an 8 minute track on a 10 track -- 50 minute album. (More than half the total length comes from this and 2 other tracks.) 3. Imperial City : At this point, besides the movie Imperial March and Emperor themes, there's also all several video game tracks for Coruscant. This sounds like none of them. Besides some vocal sections, there's a string part that's way to upbeat. This is really more of a ...
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Trading Cards Too!

 https://www.tcdb.com/Checklist.cfm/sid/72997/1996-Topps-Star-Wars-Shadows-of-the-Empire The make it sound better written than it is.
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And a toy line!

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  I don't think I had any of the full size figures, but a few of the MicroMachines look familiar. The MicroMachines were really where it was at for me as 90s Star Wars kid. https://www.rebelscum.com/SOTE.asp I would just like to reiterate that it is insane that they put out that absolute pile of slop novel and built this whole merch line around it. Honestly, I always thought of the video game as the "flagship" product. It's the one that focuses on Dash the most, and he's then new character.
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There's also a juvie adaptation?

 It's really more of a clunky abridgement. The raping is gone, of course. But you still get stuff like, "Artoo-Detoo  moved  closer,  extruded an  interface  and  plugged  into  the  other  R2  unit." Which is neither a reasonable use of the word extruded, or junior-novel vocab. Marginally better since it's shorter!
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Shadows of The Empire: The Comic (1996)

 I do remember reading this one. Not sure it was when I was a kid and it was new. Probably back in my 20s? I bought a lot of trades when I worked at Barnes and Noble. Off the bat, it benefits substantially by not being written by Perry. John Wagner gives Boba Fett and the bounty hunters more time to shine and, while keeping a lot of the dialogue, tones down Xizor to normal megalomaniacal bad guy ego levels, instead of making him sound like a douche-bag fortune cookie. He also adds another original character, "Jix" who works for Vader. Having a secondary antagonist to actually interacts with most of the cast helps things considerably.  A lot of the events are adapted from the  Tales of...  series, showing the bounty hunters competing to get Han to Jabba. If the goal was to show more seedy-underbelly-type stuff, framing the story around Fett and the other hunters makes a lot of sense. This is in the period where a lot of the EU authors are trying to rehabilitate Fett i...
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Shadows of The Empire!

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This book is so bad that Blogger is losing my edits. Wookiepedia link: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Shadows_of_the_Empire_(novel) Cover: Summary: Prince Xizor is a super badass and he's going to rape Leia and kill Luke and make the Emperor like him more than Darth Vader. Dash Rendar exists. New Stuff: Prince Xizor (and the Falleen): Lizardish people. Xizor is such a fucking badass. He's like, a 12th degree black belt and as smart as Thrawn. And he's horny and he can roofie you from across the room with his musk. The Black Sun: The always very dangerous (but never very effective) mafia of Star Wars Dash Rendar: Despite having Lando available, we need another scoundrel... Summary:  Prince Xizor is very badass and very horny. He's going to kill Luke, rape Leia, and make the Emperor like him more than Vader! (Spoilers, none of these things happen.) Commentary:  This one was really disappointing. I was vaguely aware of the main plot points from the video games...
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