Super Star Wars is a (primarily) run and gun action game for the Super Nintendo. I had a friend who had this one as a kid, and when combined with how much I loved Star Wars, this one has some pretty serious nostalgic attachment for me. It's really, really, brutally difficult, though, so I've never beaten it until Memorial Day weekend, when I finally just sat down, devoted two hours to chewing through it, and pushed past the points that had given me trouble in the past.
Super Star Wars follows the essential plot of the first Star Wars movie, although it adds in several levels to tack some action on, a necessity for making a video game adaptation of a movie that has surprisingly few action sequences. You mean you don't remember Luke shooting his way through hordes of Stormtroopers into and out of, the Mos Eisley Cantina? Me either.
The game also has several genres in it, and utilizes Mode 7 to accomplish this. There are two dull levels which have you piloting a sand speeder on your way to or from somewhere. These levels are at least colorful and a bit thrilling at first, but it soon becomes clear that you just shoot in a straight line to win, which cuts some of the excitement out. There's also a final level in which you pilot an X-Wing that takes the basic sand speeder approach and puts you in an impossibly grotesque grey palatte that immediately offends. You then are put in a rail shooter in the trench of the death star that's slightly more fun and less hideous.
The game controls similar to Contra, but the controls are pretty slippery and unsure. The jumping mechanics are pretty messy, with an optional higher jump that you can trigger by holding up, but this doesn't always trigger exactly the way you want it. It feels like a less severe version of the spinning jump from Super Metroid, which is even more difficult to trigger on command.
The game's visuals are fine, I guess. There are noticeable Star Wars characters and properties, and they look like the visions brought to the screen, mostly. There are some pretty impressively huge bosses that have some nice sprite detailing to them as well.
The music is the clear high point of the game, but they get a low amount of points for this. It's just the John Williams songs from the movies expressed in 16-bit chiptune. Low degree of difficulty, but it's still fantastic music nicely arranged.
The difficulty of this game is completely ludicrous, and not in a "Nintendo hard" way. Nintendo hard at least pretends that there is a pattern that you can learn and avoid, given enough iteration. This game makes it literally impossible to dodge hardly anything due to the high speed of the projectiles, your clunky maneuverability, and your large sprite size. The game fortunately (?) compensates by having nearly every enemy you kill drop loads of items to refill your health bar, delightfully portrayed as an ever lengthening lightsaber. I'm not a fan of counterbalancing bad design choices with more bad design choices, but at least the health drops make this one playable.
Due to the generous health drops, your only real danger will come at the bosses, which are really dangerous. Since you can't dodge anything, your only real strategy is to jump straight up and down while holding the fire button, and hope that you accidentally dodge enough shots to win on some of the tougher boss battles. And if you die, you'll start right before the boss with no powerups, so you'd better beat these bad boys the first time.
This game is a total mess. I enjoyed portions of it and found it a relatively empty-headed way to spend an afternoon, but really can't recommend it to anyone other than nostalgic thrill-seekers such as myself, or diehard Star Wars fans wanting to experience every bizarre nook and cranny of the extended Star Wars media universe. Star Wars has some of the very best film-game adaptations of any franchise, but this one just doesn't cut it. Go play Contra for the genre, or X-Wing or Rogue Squadron for some Star Wars shooting action instead-you'll thank me. I'll give it a 5.0/10.
Up next on what I'm playing is one of three games I'm working on as TVs become available and children aren't around. I'll tease the one I think will be completed next...
-TRO
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