Star Wars (Beam Software, 1991, NES) playthrough

A long, long time ago, in a land far, far away Star Wars was still good and had a promising future ahead. Let's think back on that time, and play the og Star Wars on the NES this week. My thoughts: This is a surprisingly fun and varied game once you get into it. It definitely starts with the worst part of the game, that honestly made me want to drop the game. After all jumping around in caves, shooting worms and mice is not exactly what I want from a game based on A New Hope. But after the confusing cave-crawling section it picks up and becomes more what I expected from the game. The side-scrolling sections are quite fun and the controls feel… decent. Given I've been playing SNES games, several years older and more fine tuned for platforming so maybe it's only natural that I feel the controls in this one aren't quite up to that bar. But as far as NES games go, the controls are fine, nothing exceptionally praise worthy, but nothing really to complain about either. The cockpit shooting sections are also quite enjoyable, though I think they drag on a bit too long, especially the last one where you are in the cockpit of an X-Wing. It was quite the headache. It's a bit of a shame they didn't do more with the top-down shooting stuff, but considering the context I can't really complain. Music is unfortunately the weakest part of the game and sounds nothing like Star Wars most of the time. Though, the Mos Eisley remix that plays after you leave the bar is quite fun. Overall, a long time go, if you only had a NES, and were starving for some Star Wars, this was probably the best you could get (unless you lived in Japan, and got your hands on that Japanese Star Wars game, which was also surprisingly fun), and at the very least this is lore-accurate. So on that scale, I would give the game a… 7/10, it's still a ways off from the golden standard of Star Wars games.