Ultimate Guide: Super Star Wars
Luke, Han and Chewie all feature in this bombastic 16-bit romp that pushed the graphics and audio of the Super NES to their absolute limits
We dive deep into what makes this run-and-gun so great with additional insight from director, Peter Ward
“Super was something Star Wars else entirely”
Super Star Wars was – and still is – absolutely gorgeous. The wonderfully animated, bountifully colourful sprites absolutely pop from the screen. It’s stunning. Even now, some 27 years after its release, it can hold its own in a beauty parade of pixel art, with Luke Skywalker’s bouncily animated hair scooping the Pantene special award for volume and lustre.
In 1992, games based on film licences were hardly bastions of quality. Games like Robocop and Batman from Ocean stood out from a generally god-awful crowd of cheap cash-ins on the latest movie’s popularity. But Super Star
Wars was something else entirely. For a start, it was hardly an opportune tie-in with a current film release, seeing as the movie it was based on came out some 15 years previously. Rather, it was clearly a work of love, made by proper fans – fans who wanted to give life to things like womp rats that were only ever mentioned in passing on the big screen.
Peter Ward was the game’s programmer, and elsewhere on these pages he owns up to being a massive Star Wars fan, saying this game is one of his fondest memories. And he worked bona fide miracles squeezing this amount of graphical goodness onto a puny eight-megabit cartridge. In particular, the Mode 7 powered levels – the pseudo-3d Landspeeder romp across Tatooine and the Death Star surface level and Trench Run – were absolutely mind-blowing back in 1992. These kinds of 3D free-roaming affairs were practically unheard of back then, and all in all,
Super Star Wars acts almost as a demonstration reel of the Super NES’S capabilities.
And some of the sprites it threw around were absolutely huge. Aside from the massive bosses, there was the memorable trip inside the Death Star, which saw you ducking TIE fighters as they screamed out of the hangar, literally filling the screen as they hurtled by. And the game not only let you take control of Luke Skywalker, you also got to play as Han Solo and everyone’s furry favourite Chewbacca as the game unfolded. Chewie naturally had access to his enormously powerful bowcaster, while Han could roll and dodge like the sneaky, scurrilous smuggler that he is. But then again, once Luke got his lightsaber a few levels in, he became the natural choice. LIGHTSABERS! They may be the elegant weapons of a Jedi Master, but more importantly, they’re the wish-fulfilment power fantasy of a generation of teenagers.
Super “It’s Star the Wars sound that effects leave of lasting impression” a
Swooshing around a lightsaber is all well and good, but actually getting to the point in Super Star Wars where you can do that is no small matter. Let’s make no bones about it: Super
Star Wars is hard. This game, despite otherwise glowing reviews, was criticised for its extreme difficulty at the time of release, and going back to it now is a shock to the system, mollycoddled as we are with infinite continues and generous restart points. Remember the Sandcrawler level? Yep, that lava will kill you instantly. Oh, and don’t forget the leaps of faith, never quite knowing whether you’d land on solid ground or in a limb-melting pool of lava. And that’s without even mentioning the trials it takes to get into the Sandcrawler itself, with its tiny moving platforms and multitudinous gun emplacements.
But what sweet rewards if you were able to surmount the Jawa threat! Mos Eisley treated us to the fabled cantina, its erstwhile band burbling out the classic cantina theme as Luke cuts a swathe through its patrons. And indeed, now is a good time to reflect on the stunning achievements of Paul Webb, the genius behind the chip tunes and death-throe warbles spurting from your stereo speakers. The fact that he could compress a decent rendition of the classic
Star Wars theme into a tiny SNES cartridge is a miracle in itself, not to mention the various other classic Star Wars scores that pepper the game, from The Imperial March to the aforementioned cantina boogie.
But above all else, it’s the sound effects of
Super Star Wars that leave a lasting impression. Tiny scorpions in the Dune Sea attack with mini nuclear explosions, while despatching a seemingly fragile womp rat is accompanied by a sound like a container falling off a freight lorry. Super Star Wars deserves maximum volume from your TV speakers at all times to do justice to the utterly bombastic sound effects, from the vwmooff of a powered-up blaster to the vrrrrrerrrrrrm of a TIE fighter. Still, perhaps it’s the Jawa’s screeching cry that lasts longest in the memory, the hapless ‘utinni!’ as they’re blasted off-screen, a sound that’s directly sampled from the film.