I love Nintendo systems, and Super Nintendo is my favorite of all the systems. Although the console doesn't play all of my favorite games, many of my all-time favorites are SNES games.
So, you couldn't buy every SNES game on the market. Well, maybe you could, but I couldn't. I could reliably add 2-4 games to my collection every year. Because I couldn't get every game, and because trading a game with a friend meant never getting my original game back, renting was the thing.
Do you remember video rental stores? They're pretty much dead at this point. Streaming services permanently hit eject on the video rental business. I loved video rental stores. I could walk to a couple of them from my house within five minutes or bike there in about a minute and a half. And there, taking up one long row, were games, games, and more games. I didn't play every game that came out, probably not even half.
But I studied them all, reading over the description of every game and memorizing the images on the front cover. I'd typically spend an hour browsing games before selecting one or two to rent for a dollar a piece, a dollar, one measly dollar. If I didn't have a buck, I'd scratch around under soda machines, in parking lots, and outside the windows of drive-thrus to collect enough change to rent a game for the weekend. You'd be surprised what you can find if you look.
Do you remember video rental stores? They're pretty much dead at this point. Streaming services permanently hit eject on the video rental business. I loved video rental stores. I could walk to a couple of them from my house within five minutes or bike there in about a minute and a half. And there, taking up one long row, were games, games, and more games. I didn't play every game that came out, probably not even half.
But I studied them all, reading over the description of every game and memorizing the images on the front cover. I'd typically spend an hour browsing games before selecting one or two to rent for a dollar a piece, a dollar, one measly dollar. If I didn't have a buck, I'd scratch around under soda machines, in parking lots, and outside the windows of drive-thrus to collect enough change to rent a game for the weekend. You'd be surprised what you can find if you look.
Let me list out some amazing games for the console and then we'll talk about them:
Super Mario Kart
Earthbound
Super Mario World
Sim City
Out of This World
F-Zero
Top Gear 3000
Chrono Trigger
Star Fox
Super Mario RPG
Final Fantasy VI
EARTHBOUND
Honestly, I still pull up music from EarthBound and Chrono Trigger when I need to hijack my brain into believing I'm having video game type fun when I must work on something. I wrote a lot of my dissertation to those video game soundtracks.
You should take a break from this long enough to queue up Chrono Trigger's Memories of Green. This extended version is hypnotic, soothing, meditative. The same could be said of Fourside's theme in EarthBound.
And EarthBound was fun! The writers stocked the game with endless jokes and social commentary. Okay, smile and say "fuzzy pickles!"
SUPER MARIO KART
I played games on the Super Nintendo a ton. I played Super Mario Kart like a job, sending in my times to an SMK World Record website, yup the one operated by Sami Cetin. I'm still in the top 100, but when I was really going after it in 2000, I crept into the top 10 and made it as high as 6th place, earning 2 world records in the process. That was before guys figured out that they could mod their controls by taking out the D-Pad (direction pad) and filing stuff down to make it easier to trigger the super boost. I got SMK in 1992, the year it came out and ten years later was more obsessed about it than ever. I sometimes consider filing a D-Pad down and seeing if I could climb the ranks. If I drop out of the top 100, I'm definitely doing so.
Oh, and I hate getting turned into a small racer.
SIM CITY
Did you know about the rail hack for Sim City? Notice in the picture above that the rails do not connect. The train is actually stuck in the lower right portion of the picture, just bouncing back and forth on two strips of rail. I like to imagine that these R and C-Tops have openings in the builds that the trains go right through, but it's really a "feature" of the programming. It's a good think pro Sim City players aren't hired for real city planning. Can you imagine? "Uh yeah, we can raise land values by peppering in train tracks higgledy-piggledy, you know?" I confess that I'm not a hacker type. I never would have thought to try placing unconnected rails here and there. But this is a reason why SNES and gaming, in general, is awesome. It's a good place to test your critical thinking skills. I used to really get tense about games. I was scared to try something out of the ordinary. I discovered around college, at the same time I was learning how to get outside myself and talk to people that I would have before been intimidated by, I also learned how to take more risks in video games, trying out techniques I hadn't tried, clicking on random stuff to see what results I could get. In short, life is its own video game. Try stuff.
OUT OF THIS WORLD
I found out a few years after its initial release that I could play this game on my PC. I bought a game pack celebrating ten years of Interplay's games because I saw Out of This World listed on the box. Man, that game pack. It had Castles II, which I never liked as much as Castles I. It had Tass Times at Tonetown, The Bard's Tale, Waste Land, and Dragon Wars! I promise to write about those games at a later date. Though it was nice to get a PC copy of OoTW, I always preferred it on the SNES. The responsiveness of a video game controller makes it easier. I know you can order video game controllers for the PC, but I can never get them to work for some reason. I've spent hours trying. I download drivers. I read the message boards. I plug the controller into different ports. I really try! The console system is for people like me that need plug 'n play rather than plug 'n plug 'n plug and never play. But yeah, the game. I don't know if I can think of a better video game moment then when the friend guy pats the hero on the shoulder and says, "My tuba." I use that phrase with my friends even now when I want to be included on something.
Ready for more Rapid Transmissions?
Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars
Aliens: The Military-Industrial Complex, Masculinity, and Body Horror
Ready for more Rapid Transmissions?
Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars
Aliens: The Military-Industrial Complex, Masculinity, and Body Horror