Growing up, I remember regular trips to places like Outer Limits up at the Scottsdale Pavillions to enjoy a variety of arcade games (as well as the occasional laser tag, mini golf, or go karting). This was, of course, before it turned into a Fiddlesticks (which I still visited and had many a high school friends who worked there) and then later closed its doors all together (an early sign of the times and the collateral damage to the oncoming Playstation/X-Box console wars). With that in mind, I figured before diving into the Super Nintendo for the brunt of this piece, perhaps now is as good a time as any to slip some of my favorite Arcade Cabinets. Back in the days before something like Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 or this little thing called the internet changed multi-player gaming forever, the arcade was the best play to go hang out with some friends and enjoy gaming together. Or if we wanted to divide and conquer, we could go our separate ways and enjoy games like Top Skater (that skateboarding one with the footboard and handrails, classics like Pac-Man and Asteroids, or on-the-rails shooters like the Star Wars Trilogy, Area 51, and Time Crisis. But screw the Dance Dance Revolution games. If I wanted to dance, I'd dance instead of spend my time coming up with elaborate moves to coincide with the button pattern of jumping around on those pads.
- The Simpsons - The Simpsons was one of the first television shows I remember really enjoying. Over the years, I've discovered that many iconic pop culture moments live in my head in their Simpson-ized form because I saw them on the show before I knew the references they were making. Case in point: I knew "Who shot Mr. Burns?" years before I ever heard about the iconic "Who shot J.R.?" storyline from Dallas. Anyway, my love for the show reached new levels when The Simpson arcade game came out. Hanging out with some friends, playing as Bart, Lisa, Homer, and Marge through a fun action beat 'em up (with weird mini games like a button mashing race to inflate a balloon faster than your friends) was a great time and did a great job capturing the humor and spirit of the early years of the show. I remember thinking, "When I'm rich, I'm going to buy this arcade game." I'm not rich yet, but I am able to enjoy it anytime I want since it was released to the Playstation Network a couple years back.
- Shootout - Every summer, my grandmother and aunt would cram me and my sister into my grandmother's car next to a giant cooler of food and take us to up to a guest ranch between Springerville and Greer for a week. We were up there in the ranch's waning years: early on, there would occasionally be another few families but the last few years of our trip, it was typically just us. We'd go fishing at their little pond, play hours upon hours of card and board games, and have their Rec Room all to ourselves. This Rec Room included a pool table, ping pong table, pinball machine, jukebox, and Shootout - a shooter where you basically played as a private detective shooting the bad guys with tommy guns and trying not to shoot innocents. My soundtrack for this game (and many games of pool and ping pong - really those weeks as a whole) thanks to that jukebox consisted of songs like "Mmmbop" by Hanson, "Addam's Groove" by MC Hammer, and "She Bop" by Cyndi Lauper (waaaaay before we knew what that song was about).
- Michael Jackson's Moonwalker - As weird as it was to fight bad guys by breaking out into the dance or saving Bubbles the chimp to turn into Robot Michael Jackson, the game was just fun. Plus, you had Michael Jackson music playing in the background.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - this was probably my favorite of the arcade beat 'em ups back in the day. Playing as the heroes in their half-shells with friends was just all-around fun and also worked as a great subtle indicator about what role you filled within your group of friends: Leonardo meant you were the leader of the group, Raphael was the serious one, Michelangelo was the party dude, and Donatello was the smart one/nerd. That or you just liked their respective weapons.
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| From left to right: Me and my friends Bryan and Luke. That purple joystick in front of me suggests I was playing as Donatello. And that I'm not using it suggests I had dies and was out of quarters. |
Alright, now on to this post's main event: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Many of my favorite games of all time were on this system and I still have one hooked up in my house to play (the only reason my original Nintendo isn't hooked up is because I don't have any TVs old enough to work with its original adapters and I have never bothered to get the cables to hook it up to the modern era - although I'm guessing that's pretty much why something like Radio Shack even still exists). I still have upwards of 50 games that I'll occasionally boot up from time to time when I'm feeling nostalgic. Here are 10 of my favorites, in no particular order, save the ending.
- Pilotwings - I come from a family of pilots. My parents have flown (and my father inspects and maintains planes up at Deer Valley airport). My grandparents on my mom's side of the family flew. My grandfather still flies his Mooney aircraft out of that same airport occasionally. He taught me to fly it for my 10th birthday. I never went ahead and got my license but I enjoyed logging some hours with him in my youth. A game like Pilotwings was a great unifying game for my family to play - mostly my dad and I, but my mom and sister would watch us take turns flying through rings, parachuting onto platforms (or missing and splashing into the water) or jetpacking around the 16-bit maps.
- Super Mario Kart - Another game my family could enjoy together. My dad enjoys his NASCAR racing so a game that blending racing with the Mario characters was a fun fit for us to play. And I showed no mercy with those shells in the battle modes.
- Actraiser - This was a great game that enjoyable mixed two vastly different genres: city-building and action platforming. You played as a god who was working to rebuild the world and every so often, you'd have to come down to the planet in your hero form and fight some baddies. Sadly, the sequel failed to recapture this magic and the only other games I can think of that came close were the Dark Cloud games for the PS2.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Eagle-eyed readers may have gotten through my write-ups on Nintendo and the Game Boy and thought, "no Legend of Zelda games?! Blasphemer!!!" The Nintendo games were fine, as was A Link's Awakening on the Game Boy, but none of them really created any kind of lasting memories save the music. That changed with A Link to the Past on SNES. More heresy: I prefer this one to Ocarina of Time. It just feels too much like a retread of this one with its "collect three things, now collect seven things, now fight Ganon" gameplay but with newer graphics. And in my opinion, the 2D design of games like this still holds up while the 3D look of something like Ocarina of Time has not aged particularly well.
- Harvest Moon - I was introduced to the Harvest Moon series at my friend Luke's house (from the TMNT pic above). The basic premise of these games was that you inherit your grandfather's run-down farm and have three years to fix it up, make it profitable, and build relationships with the people in the nearby town. And that experience became greatly addictive and a lot of fun. Constantly trying to harvest as many crops as possible, upgrading the power of my tools, raising cows and chickens, and wooing one of the village girls made for a surprisingly enjoyable game.
That's a mighty fine turnip. Though I'm a little disappointed by all
those weeds on the right and bottom-left. Take pride in your work man! - Secret of Evermore - The Super Nintendo was the system that cemented my love of Role Playing Games so the last five games I'm featuring are of that ilk. This one was a quirky, somewhat overlooked game on the system but I had a great time with it. You and your dog get sucked into a series of fantasy world that takes you through prehistoric, Egyptian-esque, medieval, and futuristic settings. In each world your dog changes breed to match the setting and you gain new powers. Like many of my favorite RPGs of this era, the game was made by Squaresoft. And this game in particular was very tongue-in-cheek, playing with the RPG tropes and having characters going so far as to point out that they were just characters in a video game.
- Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars - When Nintendo gave Squaresoft their Mario brand for an RPG, I was pretty sure I was in for a treat and I was not disappointed. This was the game that brought Mario, Princess Toadstool, and Bowser together to fight a common enemy. Sure, they'd been go-karting together for a few years at this point but this was the first time I can remember them really teaming up. When I dug out my SNES and revisited some games a couple years back, this was the first one I fell back into. The spirit of this game has continued on in the Paper Mario games among some others but this first one still lives with me fondly.
- Earthbound - The only non-Squaresoft game of these RPGs, Earthbound was soooo out that that I'm sure I didn't even realize how funny half the game is when I was playing it when it first came out. It's another one that I've grown to appreciate far more with time as I've grown up. I've never met someone who has played this game and didn't love it. There are a ton of great characters, a fun story, and great gameplay. Growing up, I loved the off-beat style of the game. In the first city alone you fight wild animals, a gang, and a bunch of corrupt cops trying to stop you from continuing on in your journey. Later, you're battling hippies and UFOs, zombies and a pile of puke. It was really one of the craziest games I've ever played. Now that I'm wiser to the game industry, I can truly appreciate how it took all of the elements of the great Japanese RPG games and through a masterful coat of Americana paint all over it. I'm still sad we in North America never got the games in the series that came before or after it.
- Final Fantasy II (IV) - As I touched on in my first video game post. I think I've purchased Final Fantasy IV (or as it was originally released in America , II) on every system it has been released on with the exception of a mobile device like my cell phone - I just haven't heard good things about those versions of the games. FFII was one of the earliest games I remember playing where I was blown away by the story of the game. I don't read nearly as many books as I could but I always point out that playing through a Final Fantasy game (or other story-driven games) is probably the equivalent to reading through a couple hundred-page novel. And I loved that this particular story gave you incredible stakes. There's love, betrayal, redemption, and sacrifice. About half of the characters that join your party throughout the course of the game sacrifice themselves to save the other team members or buy you time to escape an impossible situation. My biggest gripe with this game is that this aspect of it is really only emphasized in early versions of the game like this original SNES version. Many of the later re-releases rewrite history by having the characters sacrifice themselves but still turn out happy and healthy later in the game - which, for my money, really waters down the story.
- Final Fantasy III (VI) - Also touched on in that first post: my favorite game of all time. This one took pretty much everything I loved about FFII and made it bigger and better. You don't lose nearly as many of your party members though. Well, actually you can. As I've mentioned before, halfway through this game, the bad guys wins and basically destroys the world, forcing you to regather your team from across the post-apocalyptic World of Ruin. I suppose if you chose to, you could skip finding them and try to fight through the final tower with a bare bones team and the credits would role with all of the characters you didn't find lost to the world. But I always loved these characters too much to do that. The next game in the series, Final Fantasy VII is at the top of a lot of people's lists because it brought Final Fantasy to new graphical heights with the Playstation and don't get me wrong, it's a great game that I'll highlight when I get there, but the characters, story, and overall experience of this one blew me away and keep me coming back time and again.
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| My favorite game of all time. I just wish it didn't have the whole numbering confusion of III vs VI because the Japanese FF II, III, and V weren't originally released stateside. |
As always, feel free to chime in or let me know about some of your favorite games of the Arcade or SNES eras. Until next time.
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