 It's time once again for that game, God on the Cover of Nintendo Power. This time around it's Stargate, based off the movie of the same name, not to be confused with any of the TV series that came later. And it's a 2D, side-scrolling action-platformer that's similar to the Super Star Wars series in a lot of different ways. Everything from how the game looks, how the controls feel, the weapon, the level design, the enemy design, it's an easy comparison to make. There's even a couple of those Mode 7 vehicle stages here. But Stargate has some other stuff going on that helps it stand out. Real quickly though, in case you haven't seen the movie, I'll go over the story to start out here. Back in 1920, Professor Indie- I mean, Professor Langford heads out on an archaeological expedition and discovers an enormous ring made out of some kind of alien alloy. Years later it falls into the hands of the American military, and archaeologist Daniel Jackson, played by James Spader, is called upon to decipher what the heck this thing is. The hieroglyphics tell him that it's actually a device used to travel to another world. So this being the American military, their response, of course, is to send an armed unit through, led by Colonel Jack O'Neill, played by Kurt Russell. You come to find out this new dimension is ruled by Ra, who's enslaved an entire race of people who toil away in quartz mines, digging up minerals to power the machinery, which gives Ra eternal life. And things go on from there. It's a good movie, and the game actually does a good job following the story accurately. And they do include the twist involving the Kurt Russell character, and work that into the game as well, which I found kinda interesting. Anyway, you run to the right and shoot everything that moves as you might expect, and the sprite animation here is pretty good, as you can hang from ledges while still firing at enemies and tossing grenades. Your default weapon is a machine gun with unlimited ammo, but you can also pick up a rapid fire upgrade, a spread gun, and up to three ammo strength upgrades. You can hold the A button to run, and there's also two different kinds of grenades you can toss using the X button, and you'll be using those a lot since they're a lot more powerful than the gun. What's kind of a bummer here is that your machine gun is tethered to a heat meter, so you have to make sure that you don't overheat your weapon, or else you'll be stuck there taking damage like a dumbass. There are at least coolant packs you can find to help manage this, but still, it'd be nice to be able to just shoot at will, especially since so many enemies require seemingly like 20 bullets in them to be destroyed. Eesh. The controls are fine, but they are a little awkward in some respects. For instance, if you want to crouch and shoot, and you'll be doing that a lot, you'll have to press down slightly before you fire your weapon. If you press both at the same time like you intuitively would, you just stand there like an idiot. Also, when you're standing still, if you start shooting, you can't start moving again until you stop shooting. It's kind of goofy. Those aren't game-breaking flaws or anything, but they do give the controls an odd feel. Like I said earlier, this looks like a Super Star Wars clone, but where it differs is in these little side areas you can enter, explore, find various items, and run into other characters. The thing is, there are tons of these extra rooms, and you better explore all of them because you might miss something that could prevent you from progressing with the game since most levels are mission-based, where you gotta find either items or people. In fact, the game requires you to collect seven each of two different items in order to get the game's proper endings, so you gotta make sure you explore every nook and cranny. What's nice is that sometimes after completing a mission, you'll have a choice of where to go next. Overall, the game stays linear, but I thought this was a nice touch. But the thing is, all this stuff results in making Stargate a really long game, way too long in my opinion. Sure, there are a couple glider levels that help change things up a bit, same as the speeder levels in Star Wars, but they really aren't all that interesting. Also similar to Super Star Wars is the difficulty. This game is really hard. I will say Stargate is more forgiving, but still, this game will test your patience, especially the boss fights, the Anubis guards are brutal. There's 12 total levels here, but only 8 different areas, so you do revisit a few places. There is a password system here as well, which is helpful since this game is seemingly endless, but it's one of those games where the passwords are symbols instead of letters. So if you're gonna play this one on original hardware, take a picture of the screen with your phone, don't try and write these down, you'll just hate yourself later. So yeah, Stargate is occasionally fun. It does a great job of following the movie and the structure of exploring caves and rooms is something a little different. It's just that the game is so long and the difficulty can be absolutely brutal. The easy comparison is to Super Star Wars, but really any of those three games are a lot more polished than this game. I should note, however, that there is a Sega Genesis version of this game as well, and the controls are a little less wonky in that edition, but it's almost the exact same game, only without the Mode 7 shooter stages. So if the controls of the Super Nintendo Edition don't agree with you, you might want to try that version. But I don't want to be too hard on Stargate, just because it's not as good as the Super Star Wars games doesn't mean it's bad. It's a decent playthrough if you enjoy exploration games where you shoot at a lot of stuff, kind of like Phantom 2040, and that's a good game. It is an overly long playthrough that drags at times, but Stargate does have its good qualities. And I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.