It is safe to say that “Super Star Wars” came out for the SNES at the perfect time during my youth. It was 1992, so I was about 12 years old. My friends and I were just starting to discover our love of the Star Wars films. We had all watched the movies growing up, but had not yet gone into that phase where we were obsessing over them.

One of us rented “Super Star Wars” and we were all hooked. We started delving more and more into the universe, picking up the expanded universe novels, which at the time were just starting to get off the ground. By the time “Super Return of the Jedi” came out in 1994, we were full fledged Star Wars nerds.

So how does “Super Star Wars” stack up now?

The game does a decent job of at least loosely following the plot of the movie to more of a degree than most movie tie-in games of the era do. You start as Luke, but once you get to the Cantina and recruit Han and Chewbacca, you are able to choose whichever of the three of them you want at the start of each level.

Luke starts with the weakest blaster, but also has his lightsaber (once you have found Ben Kenobi). Han and Chewie both start with the second blaster, making them the better choices once the option is there. Throughout the levels, you can gain power ups to your blaster, collect lightsabers which increase your total health, and grab miscellaneous item like shields, more time and point multipliers.

With a few changes, this game would hold up a lot better than it does. While the platforming works fine in most levels, there are a few spots where it is needlessly frustrating. The level most people give up on in this game is the sandcrawler. It is a vertical platforming stage where a missed jump can make you have to start the whole climb over again. If there had been more checkpoints or a little tighter controls on the jumps, it would have avoided a lot of frustration.

The second example is the assault on the Death Star where, as you progress in the level, Tie-Fighters endlessly spawn and fly at high speeds toward your character. While fighting the normal enemies, you have to constantly try to get to higher ground so that you can jump over them. To say it was “kind of silly” seems like an understatement.

The other major problem I had with the game was the endlessly spawning enemies. Even if you take the time to fight off all the guys on the screen, it immediately re-spawns all of them and fills the entire place back up again within seconds. Some breathing room would have made the game go a lot smoother. The crazy trade-off is that, while the enemies are constantly barraging you, they each drop a small heart that gives you a slight amount of health. The number of enemies you are fighting combined with the fact that they all drop health just makes it even stranger to have them instantly re-spawn.

They had to get pretty creative with the bosses on many of the levels. Since the only real big baddies in the first Star Wars movie are Darth Vader, whom Luke never fights, and the Death Star, which you fight in your ship, they pulled bosses from other sources. The Cantina boss is my favorite example of this. Here you fight one of the monsters from the crazy 3-D Holo-Chess game Chewie was playing against R2 in the movie. No, it doesn’t make sense, but it is a nice nod to the source material.

There are a few flight levels in the game to mix things up. These all use the Mode 7 technology, in which 3-D space is simulated with sprites. Some of them have you in Luke’s landspeeder, shooting Jawas on mini-bikes for some reason.

The last two levels are your approach on the Death Star, the first part of which you shoot a set number of Tie-Fighters and gun towers. The second part is the famous trench battle. Here you have to focus your attention on the explosions (I guess these represent torpedoes) being shot at you as you make your approach on the vent. The controls in all of these sections are pretty hard to get used to. I remember not being a fan of them even when I used to play this game back in the 90′s.

I don’t want this review to sound too negative. Sure, the game has it’s flaws, but it does have it’s good points too.

The sprite work is well done throughout most of the game, particularly in the side-scrolling levels. In the Mode 7 flight levels, things can get a little muddled together and hard to tell what is going on. The chiptune versions of the familiar Star Wars songs are surprisingly well done, as are the sound effects.

Now for the secret to enjoying this game to the full: The glory that is the Debug Mode. A, A, A, A, X, B, B, B, B, Y, X, X, X, X, A, Y, Y, Y, Y, B, Start. Sure, it’s not as snappy as the Konomi Code, but it does the trick.

This allows you to set the level you want to play, the number of lives you have, which character you are, and which blaster you start with. You can even skip a level if you really get stuck. With the code in place and the game set to easy, much of the frustration normally present is lifted, leaving you to enjoy 16-bit nostalgic Star Wars bliss.

If playing the game this way is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Tags: A New Hope, Debug Mode, licensed games, Lucasarts, platformer, Sculptured Software, SNES, Star Wars, Super Star Wars

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.