Super Return of the Jedi

I may lose a couple of points on my Geek Score Card, but I’m going to go ahead and admit it, I never really got that into the whole Star Wars series. I watched and enjoyed the movies, but never really felt some great connection to George Lucas.

I suppose, then, that I only played Super Return of the Jedi because it looked cool in my issue of Nintendo Power. It’s more arcadey than some of the Star Wars games that I played on the NES, and it even came with a high score table (which reset itself when you turned the power off, such a buzzkill).

The game itself has you taking the characters from the movie in generic levels reenacting the different scenes of the movie. I’m sure that if I’d have obsessed over the movies more I could spend hours pointing out how the minutiae of the levels differed from the minutiae of the movie, but I won’t bore you. I just assume that liberties were taken to make the game more interesting to play than a straight port of the movie scenes and leave it at that.

I should have known that this game would be exceptionally hard. Lucasarts hard is a special brand of difficulty that I’ve only experienced in Star Wars games. Without fail the games in the Star Wars universe have been mind-bendingly, tortuously, diabolically difficult to progress in, and even tougher to complete. This game is no exception. I don’t really remember how far I got before I gave up on it, mostly because the developers were kind enough to leave in some cheat codes to allow me to play any stage that I wanted. So what I did after a couple of days of making non-progress was to use the codes, see all the stages (and fail at them horribly) and then start on the last stage repeatedly until I finished it. I’ve seen the ending to this game, and that makes me happy.

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