The List: Super Nintendo Entertainment System

I wrote this many years ago, thought I'd update slightly and post here:

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES, is my favourite console. I played far more games in the next gen, and I acknowledge current consoles are graphically amazing, but it’s the SNES that represents my childhood. These are my ten most memorable SNES games, in a particular order. Alphabetical order!

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest

The first Donkey Kong game was pretty special but this one took it to another level. The graphics kicked up another notch, the gameplay was a bit tricker, and there was some decent kid humour in the cut scenes. The game also had massive re-playability – in a time long before achievements, I spent hours and probably days trying to find the last few DK coins. Looking back, this may be the greatest SNES game of all. A third title followed by by that point the next gen was on its way and the series had lost its lustre.

F-Zero

F-Zero was one of the earliest titles for SNES. This is evident from some of its limitations – single player only, and just four cars and fifteen same-ish tracks. However, what it lacks in flexibility it more than makes up with its gameplay and graphics. In the early 1990s, this game blew your mind. It’s a futuristic racer, with top speeds reaching 300mph, and it feels pretty fast. It was certainly faster than any racing game before and many for years after.

NBA Jam Tournament Edition

More famous as an arcade game, I was a poor kid without many dollar coins, so I instead spent my time mastering the console version. It’s a very faithful reproduction, great multiplayer fun, and for me represents all that was good about the inexplicable early 90s basketball explosion in Australia before the sport returned to relative obscurity. People still get references like “boomshakalaka!” and “he’s on fire!” I think my preferred team was the Utah Jazz - Stockton and Malone!

Plok

This was a weird game and I’ve never come across anyone else whose played it (unless they borrowed it from me back in the day). Looking back, I think it was average but that didn’t stop me playing it often. You play as the strange red man and fire your limbs at enemies while collecting flowers. At the end of each level you run a flag up a flagpole, but it’s never your flag but something "hilarious" like dirty jocks. I don’t think I ever finished it.

Super Bomberman

I had a friend with one of those adaptors so you could play Bomberman with five players. That was epic and we played this for may years after SNES had been superseded by N64 and Playstation.

Super International Cricket

Great game. Took nearly a decade for any cricket game to surpass it for gameplay. I played it so much I can still recall all the names in the Australian team, and who they were supposed to be had the game been licensed. I can still remember my highest innings of 840 vs Sri Lanka, including a top score of 320 by J Halliday. I played this so much I broke the L button on my controller from holding it down too much for lofted shots. No mean feat, as SNES controllers were really durable, capable of surviving throws and being crushed and almost anything else.

Super Mario Kart

I remember when I first played Mario Kart on the Wii. Compared to the original, it was 3D and the graphics had improved massively. The tracks undulated with hills and slopes and there were more of them. And the wheel was a nice gimmick. Yet the gameplay was still virtually the same. I think that’s a fair measure of how good the original Mario Kart was.

Super Mario World

The most enduring game character of all time is Mario, and this might be the most enduring Mario game of all. Starring Mario and his brother Luigi, and introducing their dinosaur companion Yoshi, it sold an amazing 20 million copies worldwide to be the most successful SNES game ever. Although it’s a traditional 2D side-scrolling platformer, there is some flexibility in how you approach the levels, plus a stack of hidden secrets that give it an extremely high level of re-playability. It had a sequel that was graphically beautiful (for the time) but suffered from being too easy and childish.

Super Metroid

This game broke me. I remember getting really far into it, totally engrossed, then getting stuck at a point where I couldn’t work out how to move forwards or how to go back and find a new path. I stopped playing in disgust and shame. Brilliant game to that point.

Tetris and Dr. Mario

Tetris is a timeless classic, but I mention this two-game catridge because my mum spent many hours while I was at school mastering these two puzzle games, Yoshi’s Cookie, and to a lesser degree Mario Bros. and Super Mario World. She played the shit out of Dr. Mario especially and was a little upset when I moved onto the Sony Playstation.