Star Wars

The Good
Star Wars looks and sounds about as close to the 1977 film as a 8-bit Nintendo NES game could. The game's graphics, sound and music and storyline are well done and the standard platforming is broken up with some adventure quest elements and rides in some familiar vehicles and space ships.

The Bad
Star Wars is a frustratingly difficult game, which may cause many gamers to quickly lose interest.

Part of the problem is the game play mechanics, which seem a bit rough around the edges, especially for a game that often requires precious movements to avoid death. For example, the characters often slip and slide, which can making successfully jumping onto platform difficult.

While the adventure elements are a nice touch, having to map out an 8-bit desert terrain, for example, while also dodging enemies on your land speeder gets stale fast. Granted, it is likely hard, if not impossible, to make desert landscape particularly interesting within the hardware limitations of the old Nintendo.

However, the ability to explore worlds and the sequences that attempt to break up the standard platforming format with vehicles should be a lot of fun, especially to Star Wars fans. Yet, they are often more annoying them anything else.

Once you get inside the proper locations, you need to locate a familiar person or item, while also making tricky jumps and killing an assortment of Star Wars villains (i.e. Stormtroopers, Jawas and sand people).

While being able to switch between Luke, Han and Leia during game play is nice, all of the characters die remarkably easily and, unless Obi-Wan is located, their are no extra lives. Even then, the game has to be completed in one setting or else you get to start all over again.

Locating R2-DT and C3PO does not make them playable characters, but they can give you some advice or even access to a map. Chewbacca is, oddly enough, excluded from the game

Last, but not least, the game does not really have the traditional sort of bosses one might expect to see a platforming game.

Nice little Intermission sequences pop up when you locate a person or character or move onto the next level, but sometimes you may find yourself wanting bosses.

Heck, Darth Vader is basically reduced to mocking the player in game over sequences.

The Bottom Line
Star Wars looks and sounds about as close to the 1977 film as was possible for the Nintendo NES. Sometimes it may seem like, in comparison to the graphics and sound, not enough time was put into the game's control mechanics or smoothing out the action and adventure gaming elements.