Rebel Assault Published: 1993 Hot on the heels of the successful X-Wing came LucasArts' less sophisticated, more graphically intensive Star Wars action shooter, featuring an original story in which the anonymous rebel pilot Rookie One takes out the empire pretty much on his own. Rebel Assault was designed to take advantage of the up-and-coming CD-ROM format and its immense storage capacity, with continuous full-motion video featuring dramatic fly-bys of star destroyers and AT-ATs. Because it relied upon its video and audio presentation, Rebel Assault would not have been feasible on floppy disk. Ironically, this selling point was also the source of Rebel Assault's most heated criticism. click to enlarge It isn't a stretch to say that history hasn't been kind to Rebel Assault. Like most rail shooters, the game took a lot of heat for restricting the player to a particular path, even though it did try to offer multiple routes and other variations to help numb the sense of confinement. Rebel Assault was also decidedly less plausible than X-Wing before it, with the player single-handedly eliminating star destroyers and their swarms of TIE fighters. Technical issues with video and audio skipping as well as the grainy presentation of the full-motion video all worked against this highly anticipated game. click to enlarge Beyond such concerns, every level in Rebel Assault played pretty much alike, with the player simply blasting away at the various targets of opportunity while continuously dodging enemy fire and obstacles. The action was difficult and repetitive to say the least. Fortunately, all the levels looked different. From a Tatooine canyon to a deep-space asteroid field to the frozen caverns of Hoth, Rebel Assault offered many of Star Wars' most popular vistas together with a digitized John Williams music score to make for a game that, if nothing else, looked and sounded remarkable for its time. Next: TIE Fighter