Omega Boost

Video game by Polyphony Digital, 1999

"Omega Boost" was a great PlayStation game I played a lot in middle and high school, simply because it was one of those games you could throw in and casually play over and over again. In the game, you fly around in your giant robot spaceship and shoot up other robot spaceships and, for some reason, this never gets old. But the review of this game is besides the point. Here is what I really want to bring to your attention:

THE INTRO SEQUENCE.

The intro to this game is so cheesy awesome I just had to share it. It's hard to get a full idea for the plot from just watching it, but if you had access to the manual that comes with the game you could piece together that a rogue artificial intelligence is trying to go back in time and make itself more powerful. But YOU, key-tossing, giant-robot-flying, COOL GUY, are not going to let that happen. 

Enjoy the hard rock music that doesn't seem to fit the video. Fortunately some more appropriate Static-X appears in the actual game. If you would like your own copy, it's around $20 new, and a measly dollar-or-so used, on Amazon.

Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters

Anthology edited by Kevin J. Anderson, 1996

If you've seen Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back...OK let's be real, you've seen it. Remember that short scene with all of the bounty hunters on Vader's ship? The authors that took part in this anthology had enough from that scene to write pages on these guys. Not only do you learn where each of these villains come from, but their (mostly) futile attempts to catch Han Solo during Episode V are described as well. If you read the whole book, you get five totally different stories, only sharing the aforementioned scene from Episode V in common (and a few other encounters between each other).

I found this book at a hospital on a "free books-shelf" [AWESOME]. What's neat about this collection is you don't have to read the whole book to enjoy it. I did, of course, but each story is great by itself too. If you're not a big Star Wars fan the first "tale", IG-88's "Therefore I Am" by the editor, is an awesome sci-fi story by itself. You don't really need to know anything about the Star Wars universe to get it and it's classic homicidal robot madness. If you ARE a Star Wars fan I would recommend the second story in the anthology, "Payback", Dengar's tale. It includes a fair amount of lore on Han Solo's past as well as other locations during Episode V and was definitely my favorite in the book.

I've seen this book in most bookstores and it's not expensive. It's definitely worth a look for at your local library at least!

Well that is all for today's posts, Space Homies. I hope to bring you more next week.

Until then,

Space Out!
--Liam