“Another professional wants to meet you. His name is Anubis. He’s Ra’s greatest warrior!”
- Release Date: December 1994
- Set: Stargate Movie
- Developer: Tantalus Interactive (SNES), Probe Entertainment (Mega Drive)
- Publisher: Acclaim
- Writers: N/A
The home console game based on the Stargate movie was more like what you’d expect for the era: a side scrolling shooting game. The title screen gives a very brief overview of the Stargate sending people to another world. We start with Jack having lost his team and the nuke and being in the desert outside Nagada. I was curious about this, and it turns out this is the name of the main city on Abydos, it’s just never mentioned on screen in the film or the show, but it used a lot here. I wonder if it was used in an early script.
Anyway, the first enemy you face is a giant beetle that shoots out energy. You’ll also encounter some burrowing creatures, annoying flies and other stuff. Each enemy takes quite a lot of explosive rounds to kill, and it’s frankly a pain. The graphics and animation are quite good, but the running and jumping is a mess, and shooting will sometimes “lock” your character to the floor so you can aim, but it seems inconsistent.
The levels play out mostly the same – aimlessly roaming around looking for a bunch of random things. You need to find supplies in the first level (desert/caves), look for some elders in the city of Nagada in the second and then find Kowalski and the rest of the squad in the third level (desert caves again). Amusingly, even though Daniel said that Kowalski was dead and that Kowalski has been knocked out in a cave, Kowalski somehow knows that Daniel has gone missing.
You go through some Egyptian ruins and return to the city, finding the “missing” Daniel, who informs you that Ra’s greatest warrior, Anubis, is trying to find and kill the leader of the rebellions Sha’uri. All of Ra’s soldiers you meet have the ability to teleport, and the boss fight against Anubis is really annoying, constantly warping to places off-screen and needing a ton of grenades and bullets to take down.
After this, you need to save Skaara (more desert and caves) before looking for Sha’uri once again in the city to leave the gate. You’ll meet more of Ra’s warriors that flap around with wings and drop bombs, and this also takes a ton of shots to take down. Skaara (who has teleported to somewhere in the desert) tells you that Ra has kidnapped Daniel, so you enter his facility and rescue him. Daniel was captured while trying to steal a Death Glider, so Jack decides to copy the tactic Daniel tried: stand on a big rock and jump on top of one.
This uses the Mode 7 features as you fly around in “3D” and blow up some other death gliders. It looks neat, but the controls are dreadful. After a brief jaunt, you head into Ra’s facility to steal some weapons, hand them out to the locals then fly to Ra’s pyramid (another Mode 7 section).
Here, you’ll face off against Anubis again (another giant health bar) and encounter four doors. Three will take you back to the start of the level (thankfully you don’t have to fight Anubis again), but because different areas look exactly the same it’s not easy to tell. The fourth will take you to fight Ra, who is wearing a groovy cloak.
After shooting him and throwing grenades at him for ages, you’ll see Ra’s second form (the alien design you see for a brief moment) and fight that, which doesn’t take as many hits but does a lot of damage. Once defeated, and only if you’ve collected 7 hieroglyphs and 7 hieroglyphs that were scattered randomly in previous levels, then he’ll be defeated and his ship will blow up.
Despite the nice animation, it’s a pretty horrible game to play and I really would have preferred a more straightforward run and gun game, with more plentiful enemies that take fewer hits. The game was also released on the Mega Drive, which booted up to mess around and it is mostly the same – similar graphics, the same level layouts and the same gameplay.
The main difference is that the Death Glider sections are not in the Mega Driver version of the game. The first section is replaced by having to return to the city and take care of some traitors, and the second is turned into a short walk through a cave.
