Video Games, Movies, Comics, & Pop Culture

The Super Nintendo is definitely my favorite system. I enjoyed the NES, but Super Nintendo is where things really took off for me.Similar to the NES, I saved up the money to buy the system myself. I remember purchasing it in Houston, TX when we were visiting family.

Buying just the system, I started with Super Mario World and was blown away. Granted, in my last post I did mention Super Mario Bros 3 introduced more new concepts that Super Mario World iterated on, but it did that so darn well. Flying moved from a raccoon tail to a yellow cape, but now able to glide along and even dive bomb with it. The big addition so many, including me, loved was Yoshi. I also really liked the music, which had some nice variety to it.

Super Nintendo also had some great beat ’em up games. While NES had Double Dragon, River City Ransom, and Battletoads, plus TMNT2 and 3, the SNES continued these with Super Double Dragon from Technos, Battletoads & Double Dragon and Battletoads in Battlemaniacs from Rare. The Super Nintendo also brought us Final Fight from Capcom.

Looking back, though, all my favorite SNES beat-em-ups have comic book origins. Of course, the first an foremost that has to be noted is TMNT IV: Turtles in Time from Konami. The game has smooth animations and great music and felt like the original arcade game had finally come to consoles (at the time, I didn’t realize there was a Turtles in Time arcade game). Just like many NES titles, it was a lot of fun with friends. We played the game fully through more than once, each as our favorite turtle.

The next I particularly liked was Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage from Software Creations & Acclaim, which was really hard. Perhaps not the best game (okay, it’s definitely not the best game, even for a beat ’em up), I still liked it. Playing as Spidey or Venom and playing through the story from the comics crossover was a awesome and the first time I felt a game started to capture the feel of being Spider-Man to some extent (previous titles didn’t do it for me). It would have been cool to have more of the characters playable instead of cameos for special attacks, but I still liked the game and there are certainly other comic book games that fared much worse.

Next would be what I feel is one of the best beat-em-ups and one of the best X-Men games for its time, X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse from Capcom. You played as Beast, Cyclops, Gambit, Psylocke, and Wolverine, each with their own stages, with basic beat ’em up levels, but some moves used more Street Fighter style controls to execute. The animations were fluid, the controls were responsive, and the story was fairly well done. Capcom took the gameplay of this game and went forward to be use it in another fun game late in the SNES lifecycle, Marvel Super Heroes in War of the Gems. Wolverine returned for this one, but instead of X-Men, you had Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Hulk.

I also really liked Capcom’s Street Fighter II on the SNES, despite being horrible at it in the arcades. Street Fighter II Turbo and Super Street Fighter II were also favorites to play. I was never particularly good on the console either, but still enjoyed playing the world tour at least. At the time, the big fighting game rivalry was Street Fighter and Midway Games’ Mortal Kombat. I never cared for Mortal Kombat, though. I preferred holding back to block more than having a block button and I thought Mortal Kombat was ridiculous with the blood spatter. A single punch seemed to send a liter of blood flying from your opponent. However, like many, I did find the fatalities ridiculously amusing just because of how over the top they were.

Continuing the exploration into genres I never got into on NES, we come to Nintendo’s new first party IP, Star Fox. I never played any sort of flight simulator or flight combat except perhaps a brief attempt at NES’ Top Gun that failed miserably. I think it’s safe to say Nintendo Power had a lot to do with drawing me into this one. I was 12 years old at the time and still on the tail end of TMNT-mania and had liked the space adventure of Bucky O’Hare (the NES game is an underrated gem – too bad I sold my copy and it skyrocketed in price since), so the Nintendo Power comic presented a good story basis to get excited for the game. I played Star Fox multiple times to explore each path. The Nintendo Power comic turned out to have little connection to the game’s story, but that didn’t matter. I still loved the game.

Just look at those cutting edge graphics that blew our minds:

Still continuing the exploration of genres I hadn’t tried with NES, I also loved another new one from Nintendo: F-Zero, despite never really caring to try racing games. The music went a long way for me and the health of your car being depleted and restored during the races added something fun. The other racing game I liked from Nintendo on SNES would be Super Mario Kart, particularly the four player battle matches. I still don’t think any of the sequels have matched the fun of the original simple balloon busting battle matches.

And now we come to the real meat of my love for Super Nintendo. Roleplaying Games. Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy II (really IV) was my first Final Fantasy game and I believe the first roleplaying game I played other than a little of of Quest for Glory on PC. While I agree other entries may be objectively better, I still put this one as my favorite. I was completely engrossed with the story as Cecil gained and lost allies, fought monsters, and went through dungeons from dark knight to becoming a paladin. The combat of controlling the party, each character with their own class of skills and abilities, magic, and Rydia’s summons were all so great. I played through the game twice shortly after one another and was eager for more games like it.

Then it was Final Fantasy III (really VI). My friend recalls I was skeptical of it since it wasn’t a sequel to Cecil’s party. At the time I didn’t realize it was actually the sixth in the series with each being a new story. I quickly warmed up to it, though, and was once again fully immersed in the story. Overall, I do still feel like the cast could have been trimmed back a bit and that story driven games can easily suffer from “here’s a dozen characters…choose four” as you need certain characters in certain places to get more of their backstory or see their personalities come out and their character growth as certain events unfold. Still, I loved Final Fantasy III and never got rid of my original copy, the box, manual, or map.

Opening credits scene is near obligatory when talking about Final Fantasy VI

And finally there’s the winner of most “Best SNES RPG” lists as well as many “favorite SNES game” lists: Chrono Trigger, also from Squaresoft. I loved this game as well. So many great tracks on the soundtrack and a different take on combat from the other RPGs I had played. Chrono Trigger nailed almost everything for me. Characters were interesting, music was great, animations pushed the capabilities of the SNES, especially with facial expressions. Then on top of all that, it turned out to have multiple ways to beat the game for variations on the ending. This is another I’ve kept complete in box all these years.

A few honorable mentions for me with the SNES RPG line up would be ActRaiser from Enix, Breath of Fire from Capcom (but published in the US by Squaresoft), Illusion of Gaia by Quintet and published by Enix & Nintendo, and definitely the Lufia games by Neverland. Squaresoft also really hit a home run for me with Secret of Mana, which has one of my favorite pieces of music on the SNES.

Mega Man took a huge leap from NES to SNES with Mega Man X from Capcom, another favorite of mine. I only played the first, but have since picked up the second, which two of my friends feel is the best in the series. Eventually I’ll play it and someday find a copy of Mega Man X3 as well.

Similarly, I only played the first Donkey Kong Country. I’ve since gotten all three and am also told by friends the second is once again the best banana in the bunch, so someday I’ll have to get through all of them too. Donkey Kong Country was so cool because of how unique and impressive the graphics style was at the time. It was also just a fantastic platformer.

To wrap up this post, though not my favorite game on the system, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past introduced me to the Zelda franchise and is among my top games of all time. The charm of sprite based games holds up to time better than early polygon games.

One last honorable mention would have to be The Lion King from Virgin Interactive. One of my favorite animated Disney films, I got the game and was amazed at how smooth the animations were. I was also amazed, but not pleased, by how hard some of the later levels were. It also had some pretty good music adaptations from the movie that were impressive for the time.

Next I’ll talk about my memorable games from the other side of the console war: Sega.