Why the Super Nintendo Entertainment System is the AK-47 for the 90s
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1992)
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1992)
Every army needs its mainstay, that ever-present soldier who you can trust your life to, or that ultra-reliable piece of equipment that will never fail on you. You don’t bring undertakers out there on the battlefield – they’re the type of people who’ll always let you down. And if you had to trust your life to a machine, you’d be absolutely buggered if it was an inkjet printer, wouldn’t you?
Seriously, I really don’t know how printers get away with it; they’ve got a short shelf-life, they’re expensive to run, they never follow instructions and they’ll always let you down when you really can’t afford to be let down.
Any bit of hardware that stands the test of time is worth its weight in gold. If you happen to be a naval commander and you’re reading this, you’ll surely know that you don’t want to bring your fleet into battle against the dreaded USS Constitution - a frigate that’s been afloat since 1797, and had more than its fair share of scrapes through the centuries. Now that’s longevity.
Or what about the AK-47 - invented in 1947, if you didn’t guess already, and there are some year one models that still fire to this day. No point letting yourself be caught out by fancy weaponry that’ll jam on you at the worst possible time - if you’re a freedom fighter leading an insurrection, a Kalashnikov is your only man.
It’s why the Super Nintendo’s appeal will never die - it’s fun, no-nonsense, it’s got mass appeal and it never lets you down. It’s a real Rick Astley like that. I mean it, you can drop it on your wooden floor God knows how many times and it’ll still work for you. In recent years you might have ended up with a DS Lite with broken hinges, or a Switch that suffered JoyCon drift. But believe it or not, Nintendo gear in the old days used to be harder than diamond.
The old consoles sometimes show those battle scars as well. Our own SNES went severely yellow with age. We were certain that the poor old girl got soured by the literal tons of cigarette smoke that used to abound in our house. But surprisingly, tabs had nothing to do with it - sometimes the plastic just oxidises over time, and so our crisis-ridden Super Nintendo gradually went from statesmanlike grey to off-blonde as it approached middle age.
One is able to fix this discoloration by running a bath of methylated spirits, the kind that you might coax seagulls or local feral children into drinking, removing the Super Nintendo’s chassis and then giving it a dip. But why would I want to do that? Not only do I lose out on some genuine, rustic ageing, but I might mess the job up and leave myself without a SNES.
And that, by God, would be an absolute disaster. You see, even to this day, there are no shortage of wonderful games to play on this console - whether that’s replaying my all-time favourite, Secret of Mana, or finding some new bit of plastic gold in the 700-odd library of games.
That’s the United States tally, anyway - naturally, the game count gets a lot lower in Europe, where we have about 170 languages to translate text-heavy games into. And you can imagine that the Japanese market got about 3,000 Super Famicom games, right the way into the new millennium.
The games can get bloody expensive in Europe as well, if you want to stick strictly to PAL rules - you could get yourself European, English text copies of Mega Man X3, Harvest Moon, Soul Blazer, Hagane and Demon’s Crest if you really want to, but that’ll definitely make a dent in the old house deposit.
Or, if you already have a house (perhaps funded by an earlier sale of your childhood NES and other games, at the insistence of your now ex- missus), then it’s the kids’ college funds that are gonna suffer. But listen, never mind anyone else – which investment will give you more return, more enjoyment?
I’m all over retro gaming, as a lot of us are. It’s reflected in the current prices of classic games, after all. But let’s be honest, the original NES barely holds up. The best I could say is that it does have a particular library of games, mostly released by Nintendo themselves, that you could somewhat enjoy nowadays.
That’s true even without those modern conveniences of save states, rewinds, and the game working the first time you insert it without needing to make yourself light-headed by blowing into it. But who, apart from the die-hards, are playing their NES Classics now?
The Super Nintendo is a different story, however - these games hold up, because the graphics and sound reached that benchmark quality where they look and sound timeless. Like Ireland’s cricket team, the SNES has a potential all-time great in every position: for platforming, there’s Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, and I’ll cheat a bit here by including Super Mario All-Stars.
That’s not to forget the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, with some Mega Man X in there for good measure. Mega Man X could also qualify as an action-adventure game, a category which Super Metroid and two Castlevanias also belong to.
Or, if you want to go back to swordplay, try Link to the Past, alongside Illusion of Time and Soul Blazer. JRPGS, don’t even talk to me - three Final Fantasies, Super Mario RPG, and Chrono Trigger at the top of the pile. Or, if you have a bit more flair, try EarthBound, translated Dragon Quest - or some more actiony RPGs in Terranigma, Secret of Mana and Secret of Evermore.
Beat your mates up on many iterations of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct, or have a co-op blast with them on Contra III, Turtles in Time and Final Fight. There are even first-person shooters, for God’s sake, with Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, although I don’t recommend those. Maybe try Starwing for shooting suckers instead, if you can handle the polygons – that’ll also give you your first sneak-peek into the world of 3D.
We could keep going for hours. F-Zero, Super Mario Kart and Top Gear for racing. SimCity, Populous and Pilotwings for simulation. There’s strategy RPGs, puzzle games, shoot’em ups - the lot, Dave. You can play all this and more using one of the really classic joypads, a controller design that’s still being imitated to this day, right up to the PlayStation 5.
You’ll have probably encountered some truly terrible third party SNES controllers as well, although they probably all handle better than the Super Scope. We also had a flight-style SNES joystick in our house, bought for God knows what reason, and all I can say is that if real life plane yokes are as stiff as that joystick, then it’s a wonder they don’t all smash into each other.
Yes, it all comes down to having the proper equipment that you can trust. You can set your watch to the SNES, this absolute icon of the 1990s, and you can pick sixty games from its library almost at random and have bundles of fun with them. No 100 hour quests with pages upon pages of text that just put you to sleep - instead, it’s some of Nintendo’s best ever offerings from the worlds of Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Yoshi, Fire Emblem, Kirby, and old Donkey Kong.
The Super Nintendo is the ancient Toyota that still runs, the beer that’s been around since the Dark Ages. It is the quintessence of classic gaming. And as you’ll soon see from frequent SNES pieces I’ll be writing, it’s got dozens of truly great games, more than enough in its trousers to cement its title as the best console ever made.
18 April 2023