Back To The Battlegrounds

Through an endeavor of emulation, I’ve managed to get Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds running on a Mac. The little hiccups of wanting to play a game that you own the Windows edition of on Steam when you exist in a Mac-based environment. But I got it working! And I, once again, revisited an old Star Wars game.

Galactic Battlegrounds is a real-time strategy game, it uses the same engine as Age of Empires to let you command an army of your Star Wars faction of choice. It doesn’t do too much different from Age of Empires — if you’ve played that game the basics are the same and the Star Wars set dressing doesn’t get too elaborate. It’s not like the later RTS game Empire At War which truly feels like a galaxy-spanning battlefield with asymmetric faction design that makes playing as the Empire and Rebellion very different experiences. No, Battleground is fairly standard as far as RTS games go: decent enough, unremarkable, and probably not too significant in the history of video games, be they Star Wars or otherwise.

And yet Battlegrounds holds a very special place in my heart. Naturally part of it is because it’s, well, Star Wars and any game where I get to field a legion of AT-ATs speaks to me. It’s also a game I played a lot of when I was thirteen. My brother and I used to spend hours connected by a LAN in pitched battle, our Imperial and Rebel forces fending off whichever factions we’d decided to fight that date. I don’t know if we were ever truly good at the game, we only ever got good enough to be able to take on Moderate difficulty opponents with any consistency, but it was fun. Fun enough that when we were in college we’d occasionally take over a couple machines in a computer lab and, running a multiplayer game over the school network, the Galactic Empire and Rebel Alliance once again joined forces.

I played another game this morning, on my own. Even though it’s been years since I last played, I still remember on instinct which building has which unit and even which research routes are viable — and which icons refer to what I want. I won with a strategy I’ve been using for twenty years, albeit augmented with a more aggressive approach to territory control. It’s remarkable how much of the game feels like muscle memory, how instinctive it all is even if I’ve grown a little slower in strategizing due to hundreds of hours sunk into the turn-based Civilization VI. All the same, after all these years, I may not remember what the quadratic equation is for, but I still know exactly how to prep a squad of AT-ATs to wipe out an enemy base.

Maybe this time I’ll get good enough to take on a Hard. Maybe even a Very Hard.