Anyone who tells you that they played Rogue Leader a lot at E3 is lying or did nothing else. On the first day, the first day, I waited in line for thirty minutes to play this game. In my two years at E3, I have never experienced a wait even half as long as that one just to play a game. It was rather funny...people all around in line were spouting random cuss words of wonder while watching the lucky lads in the front play it, and people were actually making friends while waiting in line and talking about the game and the sweet new system it was running on.

But you don't care about all that. You just want to know how the game looks and plays, I know. ~sigh~ :-D

The good news is that Rogue Leader is some sort of sweet, mutated lovechild...a wonderfully impressive mixture of the console-friendly gameplay of the original Rogue Squadron on N64 and the epic stylings and wicked space missions of my favorite PC game of all time, TIE Fighter. Heh, you old-school TF fans are drooling right now. It's true though; while Battle for Naboo's "space" missions were more like planetary missions with planetary control and a black background, Rogue Leader's amazing graphics engine and tighter control just give you an utterly pure sense of awe and total belief that you're flying a bonafide space sortie. I'm referring, of course, to the Star Destroyer mission, whose playable environment was stunningly huge and just teeming with TIEs everywhere.

Not surprisingly, the Bespin (Cloud City) level at E3 was much more reminiscent of the old Rogue Squadron. The control felt very familiar, and dodging buildings was once again a prominent gameplay feature. You also have turrets firing at you from all directions, which generally isn't the case in space unless you're flying right over a Star Destroyer.

The Death Star level was equally awesome. Unfortunately I didn't get to play the surface part of that mission, so I can't say anything about it. The trench run is so straight-forward that it really presents its own, third style of gameplay in addition to the two described above. It reminds me a lot of old-school twitch games...your normal flying skills mean jack in that trench. It's all about being fast and precise. A couple really cool situations presented themselves, and I think I should mention them. First, sometimes enemy ships will creep up behind you, which makes the view zoom out to where they are visible, and they'll fire upon you until you can hit the brakes and get behind them. That happens in all the levels, but the linear nature of the trench run makes them all the more perilous and awesome. Vader and his custom TIE also come in that way, and believe me, he is very hard to evade, especially for all three or four of his attack runs. When you slam on the brakes, there's the very real possibility of backing up into one of the bad guys and exploding, so you have to have really good timing and some degree of luck. The other incredibly sweet thing about the trench run is that you can't really go up out of the trench, for practical reasons. You see, once you get up and into the open, the surface turrents will blow you to smithereens. It's an amazingly cool sequence to watch, since about twenty lasers will converge on you AND the Death Star's surface is full rendered in your view, just like it was in the previous section of that mission.

Rogue Squadron fans will be glad to know that the E3 demo had all the extreme difficulty that we've come to expect and love in Factor 5's games...most players could fly around and experiment with no problem, but if you actually tried completing the mission objectives, it very quickly became clear just how hard this game is.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to hear Rogue Leader much at all. It's pretty much impossible to hear any game out on the floor, and while there was a curtained-off surround sound booth for RL, people were literally sardined in there so bad that there was overspill out onto the general areas of Nintendo's booth, which says to me: "Don't even try it." So I didn't.

Of course you want to hear about the graphics, and yes, they're unprecedented. What's funny (and somewhat disturbing) is that the game looks SO good that I actually found myself distracted, which made for some unnecessary collisions and such. Surely that won't be a problem with practice and desensitization though. ;-D It's true: the framerate is solid as adamantium, and my numerous attempts to break it were totally futile. What impresses me most about Factor 5's awesome visuals in this game is that they use them to enhance the gameplay. Bespin is just PACKED with buildings, and while yes, that looks really great, it also makes you fly very carefully and with anxiety not experienced in the N64 games. Another great example is the targeting computer...F5 has applied some sort of radical cel-shading technique, and it's just so hella cool. Designed especially for space battles where TIE Fighters blend in with the black background, going into the cockpit view and then pressing X will drop down the targeting computer showcased originally in Star Wars, when Luke opted not to use it in favor of the Force. (Though I didn't experience it myself, I heard that if you turn on the targeting mode towards the end of the trench, Obi-Wan's voice will come in telling you to "Use the Force, Luke...") The computer shades everything with a light orange hue, draws a thick, scraggly white outline around all ships and targets, colors the enemy units purple, and makes your immediate objective targets gold. I think friendly units are a different color, didn't check to be sure. It makes TIEs much easier to shoot down, but you lose a lot of the game's graphical splendor and you're forced to be in cockpit view, which makes it easier to lose track of your orientation and fly right into other objects. It's just a fantastic idea that is flawlessly executed and balanced.

Will the rest of the game be like that? I sure hope so, and I didn't see anything at E3 to make me think otherwise. Like some other GameCube games available for play, Rogue Leader doesn't make huge leaps and bounds beyond its predecessors except in graphics, but Factor 5 is obviously incorporating some significant gameplay tweaks and new features, and of course the level of refinement is beyond words. To think that this game will be out at launch just takes my breath away.