51. Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne - PC
52. Starflight - PC
53. Skies of Arcadia - Dreamcast
54. Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000 - PC
55. Super Star Wars - SNES
I was in the zone tonight on this one. Super Star Wars is a game I used to rent as a kid, and I remember beating it with save states on my PC in high school, but this is the first time I beat it free and clear on my SNES. It feels good, but man, there's some nasty design choices in this game.
The weirdest thing about the game is the jump physics. All jumps are to a fixed height and if you are holding down the jump button when your feet touch a surface you immediately jump again. This goes against basically every instinct you have, and a few times it's gotten me into trouble. The other annoying thing is a couple of levels have a perspective applied to the surfaces, which makes it harder to figure out where the edge of a platform is. There's a slight delay between hitting jump and jumping, so I found myself falling off the edges of platforms due to missed timing. Most of the time this wasn't too bad, but there's a section at the end of the Sandcrawler where if you fall you hit instant death lava. And the respawn point in the Sandcrawler is incredibly difficult to recover from, so if you die there it's essentially a reset, as the game has no password system.
That's something to mention; the game has a system of powerups for your gun. Luke starts with the weakest gun, while Chewie and Han have the first powerup. There are three more levels beyond that, and each weapon has different properties. It can actually be more useful to stick with the seeker (3rd level) at times because of the utility, though the plasma (5th level) ends up having enough raw damage and a wide enough shot to overcome the homing. Luke also gets access to a lightsaber (midway through), which is a high damage weapon but you will take a lot of damage in the meantime. It's good for recovering from a death, though I found that Chewie's base shot combined with Chewie's huge health was enough to get me through until I could get power ups.
This game also loves to use Mode 7. There are two sections of riding around the landspeeder and then a section attacking turrets and TIEs on the Death Star at the end. All of these parts are terrible. The first two consist of moving forward, waiting for a Jawa on the horizon, stop moving forward, and shoot them. If you're moving forward while firing you shoot the ground. After killing a requisite number of Jawas you then just have to head to the structure in the background. The X-Wing part involves needing to kill a number of turrets and TIEs, but you have no time to react so you're better off just mashing left and right furiously while holding down fire. This Mode 7 stuff comes back in the rest of the series, unfortunately.
Interestingly the most dangerous hazards you run into are stage hazards. Spiked pits, exploding bombs, shrapnel from destroyed robots, they all do a lot of damage. By comparison the actual enemies don't do much damage AND they all drop hearts to keep you topped off. The biggest danger enemies can present is pushing you into the stage hazards, with the Death Star Docking Bay being the most notable example (a pit every so often that you barely have enough room to jump over and certain sections have random stormtroopers who drop in from above).
I beat Super Return of the Jedi when I was younger, so now I just have Empire on my list to finish.
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