Lets face it,some memories are best left forgotten. The same can be said for some of the games produced for the Atari 2600 console. For example, games like Custer's Revenge, Kool Aid Man and Raiders of the Lost Ark are better left hidden behind those discarded memories of parachute pants and breakdancing.
But occasionally a game comes along that you just have to remember. It's one of those games that just festers in your brain like 8 month old milk and wont go away. Star Wars: Raptor Squad-Droid Adventures is one such game. When this was first released by Actionvision in 1983, my friends and I scrambled to our nearest K-Mart to secure a copy. In our adolescence, we let the marketing campaign blind us and bought in to the hype. I mean, come on, when a game screams Action! Adventure! Droids! You are gonna buy into it lock, stock and barrel.

The Droid Adventures Box-80's RULE!

Such was our mistake.

Once we got home and broke out the game we were startled at how bad it really was. Now, granted, this wasn't, say, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial bad, but Good Lord it wasn't good. First off, the graphics are, well, they could have been better. I mean, this was the 2600 system after all, the grandfather of modern gaming consoles, but that didn't excuse the blocky and lifeless graphics that appeared on my brothers small television screen.
Levels were made up of lifeless colored blocks and the henchmen were nothing more than a green pixel mishmash.I mean, come on, at least Pitfall Harry wore different colored PANTS!

Nonetheless, my buddies and I were ready to push this aside. I mean, come on, this was our chance to play a Raptor Squad droid! Visions of Ten-Spot, and other droids kicking butt rolled through our heads as we popped the cartridge into the waiting maw of our Atari system.
The opening was promising enough and the plot was your typical fare: You are a member of Raptor Squad Team 2...the "droids". It seems that all of the members of Raptor Squad Team 1 have been kidnapped by Akelish the Hutt, so it is up to you to wade through screen after screen of Akelish's henchmen to rescue each member of the team.

Rodians! Rodians! Everywhere!

I would like to say at this point that it would have been nice to have actually SEEN Akelish in this game...unfortunately you get nada. The only henchmen outside of the rodians are the twi'leks and they look only slightly better than their green counterparts. Nonetheless when it comes to characters you can choose either Ten-Spot or Two-E, a armorer droid or an R-2 unit, respectively. Both have the ability to shoot (which I found curious as it has never been mentioned in any literature that they have the ability to shoot anything)and move and that about it. Obviously this game was designed with SIMPLICITY in mind.

Title screen for Droid Adventures

After about twenty minutes of gameplay me and my friends identified the most prominent downside of the game. Your character moved SLOW, way too slow. By the time you turned around to shoot at a rodian henchman behind you he had already blasted you into oblivion. The only way to combat this was to "guess" ahead of time when one of the little buggers were going to appear...not an easy task for your standard 11 year old.
Like most side scrollers, such as Pitfall, Droid Adventures had several different levels you had to navigate through, and while all were different they were pretty much the same.The early levels require you to make it through Akelish's warehouse and her rodian and twi'lek guards.The second levels put you in a "Space invaders" type of screen, where you face off against a "Arachnid Droid" who lobs thermal detonators at you from the top of the screen. Again, due to the sluggish nature of the game, you were hitting the reset switch on this game A LOT.

Good luck dodging these bombs

Of course there are other factors that most sane people would find questionable. I'm not sure what the designers at Actionvision was smoking, but some of the things that made it's way into Droid Adventures surprised me.For example, the face of the Raptor Squad member you are trying to rescue appears on the top of the screen next to your timer. This is fine, except that when your timer nears zero, assuming you haven't rescued them, the face turns red, simulating a bloody mask resulting from Akelish's torture. I'm glad my mother didn't know about this or the game would have been tossed into the trash for sure!
Granted, some of this can be overlooked when one realizes that a lot of Asian programmers worked on the title, and sometimes ideologies are just different from one society to another. I guess.
Two hours of playing Star Wars: Raptor Squad-Droid Adventures resulted in the assessment that it was a waste of time and took it's rightful place in the back of my 2600 "shoebox". Occasionally I would roll it out and give it a try, but for the most part it was forgotten.
Flash forward 16 years and you now have a renewed interest in Raptor Squad due to a new game developed for the Playstation. Out of nostalgia I popped the Droid Adventures into the 2600 again the other day and found that the earlier perception of youth maybe caused me to go a little to hard on the game.
As I played it I realized that pre-pubescent motor reflexes perhaps had a lot to due with what I perceived as a sluggish game. The graphics, by comparison weren't too bad and I realized that there was even a faint background score playing throughout the game. In retrospect I think this game suffered from the same problem plaguing Episode 1: The Phantom Menace...too much hype. If you still own this title and haven't played it in forever, I suggest pulling it out and giving it a whirl. It may not be as bad as you remember it.

Update: 1/6/2002
Latest rumor has it that ShardWare, makers of the Star Wars:Raptor Squad video game for the Playstation have secured the rights to develop a game based on the Raptor Squad-Droid Adventures cart. The rumored title is simply Raptor Squad:Team 2. Any other info feel free to e-mail me or Weedman37.
-Schroeder .