OMG Nintendo

Super Star Wars is an odd relic, in its way, of a time before the Star Wars Expanded Universe had, well, expanded. The Star Wars license has been showing up on any flat surface that can hold it since the original film's release, of course, but the Star Wars video game franchise hadn't truly exploded yet when Super Star Wars came out in 1992.

It's an action-platformer, like most licensed games of the era, with a heavy emphasis on shooting. It'd be amazingly difficult if not for how frequently you can grab life pick-ups, which appear every time you defeat an enemy, and even then, the boss fights are tricky. It's fast-moving, takes heavy liberties with the Star Wars story (see above screenshot), and was well-received at the time of its release. I remember playing it as a kid, and seem to remember not being able to clear the cantina level.

Super Star Wars has aged relatively well compared to a lot of 16-bit games, and I think that owes largely to its smooth and responsive play control. You can fire in nine directions and run very quickly, and while enemies don't come onscreen so much as fly at you hellbent on destruction, you're equipped to handle them. It's oddly generic, honestly - you could put almost any characters into this game, as long as those characters had access to guns - but it's a good licensed game. Even seventeen years later, that still sets it apart from the pack.