We seem to be made to suffer. It’s our lot in life…
Game #5: Super Star Wars
Format: SNES
My Copy is: Unboxed, PAL, and a touch yellow.
Super Star Wars was, back in its day, one of the Super Nintendo’s “must have” titles. My chronology, culled as it is from my own faulty brain, suggests it was the next “big” SNES title after Street Fighter II, a game I bought a SNES just to play.
I recall well that the Japanese version came out during the brief six-week period when I was in the UK back in 1992, and I still recall wandering into the Warren St home of CEX (which was, at the time, a single store rather than a chain) and watching someone trade in a stack of SNES and Megadrive titles — at least twenty of them — in return for a single Japanese copy and converter to play it on. This was big stuff that people would pay big bucks for.
Naturally, it didn’t hurt that it was said to be a good Star Wars game, either. Those were (and are) exceptionally rare. But more than fifteen years on (way to make yourself feel old, Kidman), how does the Star Wars Experience stack up? Is it still, in a simple quote, Super?
Ten Minutes Later:
Blimey. I didn’t get very far with that. I had dimly remembered that SSW was mildly hard. Mildly hard is an optimistic outlook — this game is tough and hard and often quite unfair in places to boot. My ten minute run barely saw me… well, Luke, but as has been established by precedent, I am Luc’s father — anyway, I only just got into the Sandcrawler, at which point the automated Jawa machinery made very short work of my remaining lives. It marks the first instance, by the way, where a ten minute game review only just gave me enough lives to actually survive the ten minute span.
Other random thoughts from my ten minute review:
“I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home…”
No, Luke, apparently you used to blast them with a laser. Hundreds of the little green blighters, in an endless stream. You may have also suffered a blow to the head, what with you not remembering taking on (and defeating) the so-called-mighty-Sarlacc in your youth. I reckon the Sarlacc’s just got a really good PR team on its side, and Boba Fett was paid to take a dive.
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”
How valuable are droids, exactly? Because Luke trashes a TON of machinery, just on the outside of the Sandcrawler, trying to get in. If I were the Jawas, I’d just grunt “Houtini” at him in an annoyed tone. OK, they do this anyway, but in this specific case, the context is more like “Just take the stupid droids and stop blowing up our home, suspiciously Aryan-looking boy”.
“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany…”
And you can’t make it there in ten minutes, either.
Ten Minute Game Verdict: A keeper. It’s nicely tough, although some of that is unfair tough, to be sure. But it’s a good Star Wars game, and I’m still trying to erase Force Commander from my brain….