Last week I briefly mentioned that Lucien and I was going to get our retro gaming on.
What I didn’t tell you was that I had already set this plan in motion.
Yeah, I’m evil awesome like that.
Now, I’ve already told you about my own gaming, back in A Revisit To Nostalgia Avenue so I won’t bore you any more with that. But as you might remember, this was back in the good old days of C64
Imagine that, 16 glorious colors on the magical VIC-II with its enormous 320 × 200 pixels.
How amazing was that?
But I can also remember the endless, endless waiting for the Commodore Datasette and its cassettes to load the entire game and despite patience being a virtue I thought I wouldn’t put him through that much waiting—he’s patient enough as it is.
So, because I wasn’t quite sure what to get him I held a quick survey at work and the verdict was pretty conclusive—aside for the general idea that I should get him “all of them”, we’ll look into that later—and thus the decision was made.
He’s getting a Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (also known as the Super NES, SNES or Super Nintendo) is a 16-bit video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in […] 1992 in Europe. In Japan, the system is called the Super Famicom (スーパーファミコン Sūpā Famikon? Wikipedia
The SNES with its 32768 colors displayed in magical 512 × 448 pixels will be a perfect. So, I already bid on and won one from Ebay.
We got it last week.
Which, ironically, is about the same time it was made apparent that I had no idea how to tune a TV any more.
At first, I just plugged the SNES into the TV and then sat there scratching my head as it didn’t work.
Keeping in mind that I consider myself quite intelligent, I can be surprisingly stupid sometimes.
In the end—thanks to helpful tips from Nick—I managed to get the channel tuned in and the SNES was alive once more.
The auction I had bid on came with 10 games as well so, of course, the first thing we did was go through them all to see which ones were actually worth owning and which ones were turds better left unsmelt.
Here’s the games that came with the SNES.
- Bass Masters Classic: Pro Edition
- Cannon Fodder
- FIFA International Soccer
- Jurassic Park
- Killer Instinct
- Pit-Fighter
- Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods
- Starwing (Star Fox in North America)
- Super NES Nintendo Scope 6
- WWF Royal Rumble
So not a complete waste of space—but let’s be honest, some of these are total crap. Like Pit-Fighter. That game sucks so, so much. Words can not begin to describe how much it sucks.
But we’re both enjoying Jurassic Park and Killer Instinct so far. We couldn’t quite figure out how or what to do in Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods and we were both terrible at Starwing.
Now, since I never grew up with this particular console I have no rose-tinted shades of nostalgia by which my perception of reality is filtered.
But it also means I have no idea what games I should get him/us. From one of the launch titles, a racing game called F-Zero, to the final game Frogger and all the 782 titles in between there’s quite a lot to choose from.
“To the internet!”
A quick Google search brought me to Dorkly and their appropriately titled article The Top 25 SNES Games Of All Time, where they had asked readers to vote for their favorite games and with 800,000 votes I would say this is probably a fairly good resource for which games to get. “A great mix of commercial blockbusters, critical darlings, and hardcore-gamer favorites”, according to the writers.
So I’ve started wandering the digital wasteland that is Ebay in search for the treasures listed by Dorkly and actually got F-Zero and Street Fighter II in the mail this morning.
More games are to come.