Super Nintendo

The Super Nintendo was always one of my favorite gaming consoles. As the leader of the pack during the days of the first 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, the Japan based company had to keep the ball rolling when the world was ready for 16-bit systems. Their follow up to the hit NES, the Super Nintendo, was everything you could’ve expected from the game makers and more.

What made the Super Nintendo such a good system to have was hands down its selection of games. Super Nintendo games dominated the 16-bit video game market, and were only rivaled in number and quality by the Sega Genesis games. Although at times it was hard to say who was the leader of the market during this period, anyone who owned both systems (like me) very likely played their Super Nintendo the most.

The one Super Nintendo game I can remember everyone owning, and everyone playing for hours on end was ‘Street Fighter II’. This was definitely the most popular console game during the time, and the Sega Genesis never really produced any single game that was nearly as popular. To this day, I still play Street Fighter II now and then, though perhaps not with the same obsession I had when it first came out.

For a few years there, Street Fighter II looked as though it was going to become an Olympic sport; everyone was playing it, and it was some kind of testimony to your greatness if you were very good at it.

There were a wide variety of other very good Super Nintendo games as well, and I still play a lot of them once in awhile. One other Super Nintendo game that always made an impression on me was called ‘Shadow Run’. This was a very innovative and unusual Action/RPG style game that took some serious risks, and I think was probably a bit ahead of its time. I’m just now beginning to see games similar to Shadow Run becoming more popular.

That was another thing I loved about Super Nintendo games, they were very often original and well thought out, unlike so much of the formulaic junk that comes out for consoles today.

Of course, the Sega Genesis made some great games as well, and was a good rival for the Super Nintendo. However, my Sega Genesis broke several years ago, and I don’t really miss it all that much. If my Super Nintendo broke, I’d be devastated!