MW: So what's up everybody? I don't think that anyone can deny that the Super Star Wars games did something for the game industry... but was that something a shining victory or a smelly, crappy defeat? Mr. Biederman, with his opinion, up first.

MB: I've been a huge Star Wars fan since I first saw the movies at a young age. So when I got my Super Nintendo, one of the purchases I was most excited about was Super Star Wars. Finally, a chance to live out the Star Wars adventure myself! Unfortunately, SSW did not live up to expectations.

Firstly, the game doesn't follow the film's story very closely. While most major events are intact, the nature of them is often changed. As I recall, Luke did not battle his way into the Jawa sandcrawler, nor did he blast womprats from his landspeeder. The entire story has been turned into a gigantic battle, which, while it does probably make for a more interesting game, makes a Star Wars nerd's head spin.

Secondly, the controls are amazingly difficult to use. Using your blaster is ungodly, forcing you to hold down the fire button to aim in any direction but straight. This makes it impossible to battle enemies successfully while running. Also, the jumping is quite inaccurate and alternates from having you underjump to massively overjump, with no apparent rhyme or reason. This results in falling into lots of lava pits (which are somehow contained in the bottom of the sandcrawler).

There are some good aspects to the game, but they are mostly aesthetic. The graphics are fairly strong for a SNES game, and the sound is very true to the series. You'll recognize numerous sounds taken directly from the movie, as well as some "screenshots," which amount to redone stills from the movie.

Overall, Super Star Wars is a disappointing game, and definitely does not live up to its source material. To a Star Wars nerd, this game is probably a good addition to a collection if you're worried about completeness, but to a gamer it's not worth the materials the cartridge is made out of.

Rating: 4/10

MW: Right then. I, as well, am a huge Star Wars fan--but this game and its successors should never have been made. Erratic loops and spirals of plot from the movies are thrown in wherever they seem convenient; these are supplemented by a series of platformer sequences which were all totally made up. Essentially, nothing you play through in the game was actually in the movie. OK, yeah, you get to blow up the Death Star at the end and that's pretty cool, but by and large the rest of the game is really far-fetched and too action-oriented for the spirit of the story.

That wouldn't be so bad if the controls required less than a MENSA membership to figure out. I'm not even going to try to explain how you actually control Luke, Han, Chewie, and the rest, because if I wrote down a brief explanation of the control system on a piece of paper and asked you to read it, your eyes would simply let themselves be struck down, disappearing only to become more powerful in the Force than you could possibly imagine, but also quite dead.

Visually, the game's real pretty, and many of the locations evoke their movie counterparts quite closely. The rendering on the flying scenes is particularly nice in all the Super Star Wars games, and the bosses are always very complex, if poorly animated. However, as has been proven over and over again in the modern era of gaming, upper-end graphics on a system do not equal an upper-end game for that system.

My copy of Super Star Wars and its sequel, Super Empire Strikes Back, are sitting quietly in my collection with note cards taped to them which say something to the effect of "Too damn hard. Never play again." Nice collectors' items, but only really useful as conversation pieces. At the end of the day, the Super Star Wars games were really nothing more than hideous, hard-to-control blotches on gaming history. This game gets three points for prettiness.

Rating: 3/10