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Retro: Super Nintendo
I have many memories of the computers and consoles of my youth and beyond but none give me that fuzzy feeling more than the Super Nintendo.
I was never a fan of their 8-bit offering in the NES as I was a Sega Master System owner in those days and who wasn’t (who could argue with Alex Kidd in Miracle World)? But in the early 90s I was exposed to what was in my mind was an arcade in your home in the SNES. At that time I was shoving 20 pence pieces into arcade machines like Street Fighter 2 and Final Fight but then a mate of mine managed to get their hands on a Japanese import (known as the Famicon over there) with a copy of Final Fight. As soon as they turned it on it I was simply blown away. The graphics and gameplay looked exactly like its coin operated big brother and played just as well. I think I can say safely that I seriously annoyed my mates parents with my frequent visits to knock the seven shades of shinola out of the Mad Gear Gang.
I was hooked! And in 1992 after saving up all of my wages from my part time job (which was £1.60 an hour back in the day) I bought my own SNES which, joy of joys came bundled with Street Fighter 2 which gave me far more excitement than the magazines that we found in the woods.
That was it. Every minute of every day was spent working my way through my opponents. It was just amazing. We even took our SNES’ to school to plug them into TVs to carry on the combat and if you were really, really clever you knew the key combination to unlock the Championship Edition of the game.
Over time the titles got better and better. Super Mario World, Axelay, Secret of the Mystical Ninja, Super R-Type and then came the big one. You may look back on it now and it may seem dated but one day in 1993 I played Star Fox. It marked a sea change in the way that games would be developed from then on in, a full 3-Dimensional and immersive experience that made your eyes pop out on stalks.
And there was more, so much more. The hunger for games did not match their worldwide release schedules so we were forced to buy adapters to allow us to play US and Japanese games on our systems because for some reason their cartridges were a different shape to the UK ones.
Then there was the controller. It was nothing we had ever seen before. A directional control and 4 fire buttons but the killer was the addition of the shoulder buttons that added even more functionality that really came into their own when playing games like Mario Kart.
Fair enough the games were expensive but the experience was second to none. Fair enough the Sega Megadrive came soon after but with the exception of Sonic the Hedgehog it just couldn’t compare.
Even in 2015 with all of our next gen consoles, to my mind there is nothing compared to what the SNES brought to the table. It really was and always will be the point that home gaming changed for the better.
What are your memories? Hit us up below.
Author
Paul Wright