Even though I was definitely a Sega kid, you know my first console game love was the Nintendo Entertainment System. I have always appreciated Nintendo's dedication to fun (at least up until recently, but I'm hardly going to hold it personally against them for a rot being encouraged on a global scale).

Nintendo ultimately won the console wars, though in no small part due to Sega shooting themselves in the foot constantly. I didn't have an SNES as a kid, but I stumbled onto emulation pretty early (as detailed in yesterday's post) and fell in love with the Super Nintendo.

When the SNES came out in the early 90s, I wasn't very interested. I thought a new Mario game was cool, but aside from that, it just felt like an extension of the NES? The Sega Genesis that I already had just felt cooler in every way.

Someone that lived across the street from me had an SNES though, and we did end up playing quite a bit of Super Mario World, which I have since deemed one of the top platformers of the 90s.

The Super Nintendo boasted several advantages over the Sega Genesis. It could support a brighter, more vivid color palette, and could fake 3D graphics of a sort, most prominently seen in Star Fox (1993). It also possessed a more robust sound chip which many developers used to make legendary tracks like in Final Fantasy 6 (1994) and Plok (1993).

What it did lack, however, was the blast processing of the Sega Genesis. Now, this was definitely an overhyped feature of the Genesis and is barely meaningful, but essentially it allowed the Genesis to make faster paced games with a lot of moving sprites on the screen allowing them to dominate the shooter genre.

That said, the SNES featured many games we might consider Triple A games today, with the Genesis comparatively coming off as more indie or even low budget outside of its biggest games like Sonic or Madden. The aforementioned Final Fantasy 6 is an example of one of the more epic features of the day. Chrono Trigger would probably be one you've heard me sing the praises of if we've ever talked in real life.

I'd like to talk about a few good memories I have of the SNES.

I think I first spotted this in a magazine and it looked metal as hell. Demon's Crest (1994) is a platformer made by Capcom. You may have seen the main character, Firebrand, featured in Marvel vs Capcom 3.

In it, you play a demon traveling the demon world fighting all kinds of cool monsters in order to acquire great power and take back your throne from another demon that usurped you. I'm actually a little amazed it ever got localized considering the political power of parent groups at the time and how much Nintendo kowtowed to them (even removing the blood from Mortal Kombat in order to appease them, which is considered one of Nintendo's few major blunders from the era).

I thought the aesthetic of this game was so fucking awesome. I was really into demons and dark stuff as a kid, and a game where you play a demon just trying to be king of the demons was cool. The graphics are good, the design of everything in the game is enjoyable and fits the theme perfectly.

The music also adds to the aesthetic, featuring cathedralesque organs and giving everything a sorta hallowed feel.

The game also features a ton of secrets and requires you to often backtrack to already completed levels. Secrets are one of my favorite things in games, and it can be argued that more than half this game is hidden behind some exploration and experimentation.

I love strategy games, though I am not terribly good at them. Ogre Battle (1993) is something I saw a friend playing on his computer from his own collection of emulated games. I fell instantly in love with the graphical aesthetic and there's something I love about seeing lots of different icons moving around a map that I find so satisfying.

I went home and instantly got to work looking for it. And I could not find it anywhere. This was before Google came into prominence as the best search engine. I used Excite, personally.

Keep in mind this was also the era of the 56K modem. And Ogre battle was a pretty big game, around a meg and a half. Too big for a floppy disk. A game of this size might take over an hour depending on the connection, and my Dad was not a fan of me hogging the bandwidth when he got home.

Eventually I was able to find it on a fairly obscure website that looked like it would give the computer an actual STD. It was my first time tracking down a hard to find anything. I got pretty good at what I eventually came to call nostalgia hunting.

The game itself is a good example of a strategy game as opposed to how most are actually tactical games. In it you attempt to get to a central city in order to fight the commander while simultaneously fending off their armies, holding your own cities, and leveling up your soldiers.

And this game is also full of secrets. There are hidden things on every map, and it is imperative to explore and listen to the citizens of the cities you liberate in order to find powerful equipment and recruit powerful soldiers for your armies.

There is so much hidden in the game, that it is a wildly different experience between ignoring them or pursuing them.

The artwork and aesthetic of the game is also top notch. It's very similar to Final Fantasy Tactics or Vagrant Story or one of the other semi-obscure JRPGs that would find a niche. Everything looks very delicate, like a painting.

I only finished the game once, where I pursued and found every secret in the game sans one. Unfortunately that one made it so I got one of the worse endings. I keep meaning to go back through it again sometime. I think I have a save for the later PlayStation version.

I'd heard of this one in a couple corners of the internet, always with praises shouted from the most terminally online of the neckbeards. After I moved to Ohio, I had a few months to kill before I started classes at OSU, so I decided to try out some games I'd heard of but never gave a chance to. That's when I dove into Terranigma (1995).

This wasn't released in the US due to the religious aspects of the story. The English version was only released in Europe and is largely subpar. Regardless, it is only a minor detraction from what turned out to be an epic, transformative adventure.

Without spoiling too much, you begin in a far away village living an idyllic life with neither beginning nor end. But soon, you are propelled onto an adventure that explores themes of creation, good and evil, the worth of humanity, all explored through various spiritual lenses.

It is an action adventure, similar to Zelda in many ways, but with a few more RPG elements. As you progress through the game, you can explore the game in order to put certain people in contact with each other and inspire them, adding a great deal of interactivity with the world.

The ending of the game left me in tears. It was one of the most beautiful experiences I have had, and from a console game. There was a bit of time I ranked it above Chrono Trigger, though ultimately I think Chrono Trigger's timeless polish puts it back on top

This game contains multitudes of hope and despair and I would recommend it to anyone.

So obviously these aren't the only SNES games I adore. There's entirely too many to list here. I didn't talk about any of the greats that you can find someone talking about anywhere. And that's to say nothing of the tons of Japanese exclusive titles I spent a lot of time on. I have great memories with those games too, and maybe someday I'll take the time to talk about my memories with them too.