Welcome back to my trip down electronic memory lane. If you’re playing along at home, you’ll recall the first instalment was all about my early origins of gaming: the NES, the Power Glove, the dropped (and subsequently busted) Game Boy. In today’s column, we enter the 90’s and the system so sweet they called it Super.
SNES (1991)
Christmas morning I awoke to a long rectangular box under the tree from my mom. As I tore off the wrapping paper, I fell victim to the same impulse I had when I received my NES, the one that caused me to express myself musically as a form of appreciation. I strongly recall staring intently at the box in my hands, and drumming madly on the system as if it were a pair of bongo drums.
Shortly after plugging in the system and being in awe at the parallax scrolling put into place in the background of Super Mario World, I had to abandon the sweet system. By some cruel twist of fate (or karmic retribution for a childhood habit of “collecting” snails in Ziploc bags and leaving them between the couch cushions to become a crunchy pancake of gastropod giblets), the parental-power-that-be decided that rather than let me actually continue to enjoy this 16 bit bundle of joy, I should instead accompany my Uncle to his construction site. One look at my virginally soft, pudgy, callus-free hands will let any observer know that nails, wood siding and hammers (unless used to “take apart” clothing irons) were not included in any of the playtime activities of my youth. I can’t recall how long I spent wandering the piles of construction detritus. I do remember that to pass the time I picked up little pieces of wood and tried to saw them in half with the fish scaler tool on my Swiss Army Knife. Scintillating.
While not a strong start to the relationship between me and the last great cartridge-based system, the SNES marks the last time I was really, truly into video games. Not until Halo 2 on the Xbox did I again spend so much time with a console’s library of games. My three most notable SNES time-sinks were Mortal Kombat 2, Mario Paint and Final Fantasy III.
If asked what the best Final Fantasy game of someone’s youth was, the overwhelming majority would lift their Buster Swords and shout “Final Fantasy VII!” The rest of us would admire their well-gelled hair, laugh at their over-use of zippers and belts, and remember Final Fantasy III for the SNES as the best Final Fantasy ever.
The worst Final Fantasy for the SNES was Mystic Quest. It was essentially designed for dumb people to not feel stupid or challenged, and had it not had Final Fantasy attached to its title, would not have been ever bought and played. Since a sucker is born every minute, I bought it before reading any reviews in a print publication. Let’s take a moment and respect that in 1992, there was no Kotaku, IGN or Metacritic.
In those days games cost $120 and no matter how bad it was, I needed to love it to make the price tag worth it. Since I wasn’t completely in love with the game, and the price tag was so high, I let a friend borrow Mystic Quest so he could give it a go. I was only 20 hours in, but when I received the game back, he had deleted all of my progress. Being the 10-year-old nerd that I was, I’d kept track of where I was in the game, what weapons I had and what my statistics were, and wouldn’t let him off the hook until he took the game back and played my save game to the exact spot I’d been at.
Speaking of “save game” spots, many mornings I was late for school, as those spots were rare on these classic Square programmed titles. From time to time I may have left the system on all day, just waiting for my sweaty palms to come back and level my character up again.
In elementary school one project was to create a presentation on a specific subject. I don’t recall how I ended up with the topic of bloodhounds, but what better an animal to make a video presentation on? After many laborious hours of work, hand animating every frame, I had a two minute digital short film. In front of a class of children, on a 26” CRT TV, a spliced together VHS tape featured a 16bit pixel-art bloodhound dog chasing 16bit pixel-art African slaves, set to the score of Super Mario Bros. While it didn’t hold a candle to anything Gualtiero Jacopetti put to celluloid, it was impressive nonetheless.
It’s a little known fact that at a certain point in the history of the Super NES, Sony, Philips and Nintendo were collaborating on a CD-ROM add-on to expand the life of this console. It wasn’t a shocking team-up considering Sony had designed the sound processor for Nintendo’s 16bit console. These talks eventually fell apart, and Philips went on to create the CD-i, a CD player that could play games. Sony, as we all know, went on to create the first PlayStation branded system, forever changing the video game console landscape. More on them in a few weeks…
But next week, it’s all about Nintendo 64 and that beautiful SOB GoldenEye.
– The Jolly Gamesman
not bad, im stoked for the n64 next week tho, i didnt really know much of thisone.