Super Mario Kart (1992)
i love SMK for entirely different reasons than the other SNES games i've mentioned -- sheer replayability. there wasn't exactly a huge wealth of goodies to unlock in this game, you could basically get better and better as you went along unlocking courses and modes. once you get everything open and unlocked, the game is awesome to play with friends. all the modes were fun to play with others -- whether it was a match race, GP with the whole field or battle mode.
historically, this is probably the game i played the most with my friend kevin and my sister. while it's plenty of fun to race, we spent the most time by far simply battling. the object was basicallly pretty simple, pop your opponents 3 balloons with items and win. my sister and i, in an effort to make the game more of a 'pure' sport, would make each other burn our red shells off so we couldn't knock each other out with the one homing weapon available. we quickly fell in love with a particular arena and basically wrote off all the others. the same thing happened with characters, we just got used to playing those that we were the best with and didn't even consider the others.it's a funny thing when you play a game so much that you don't even really utilize all the features of the game. once you were good enough, you would just play at the 150cc level because anything lower was just painfully slow. like i said, you fall in love with certain modes and characters and that becomes the entire game to you, cuz that's what you like. you end up getting to the point where you ask your friend if you want to play, and you can turn on the game and choose all the settings without so much as a word. it becomes automatic, and yet remains entirely competitive. SMK would go on to produce a great series of games for the next decade plus, which i'll discuss further down the road.
Star Fox (1993)
i've never really had much interest in flight simulators, or any type of flying games, so buying star fox and betting on liking it was a bit of a gamble. it's a bit difficult to explain what i liked so much about the game, but it was a nice change to like a flying shooter. it was quite unlike a game like Super Mario Kart in that it worked extremely well as a pure single player game.
looking back, the overly polygonal graphics don't look so great, but at the time they were a big change. to have all the objects on screen look more 3D than they had in the past felt like a big upgrade from more cartoony mario games. i remember the game being relatively short, but going through and beating andross was always satisfying. i liked that you could take different routes through different planets and asteroid belts to make it to the final boss, with varying levels of difficulty. it was cool that you were part of a team, yet you had to take on stage bosses by yourself. something about your teammates constantly bugging you at least gave you a bit of company in such a single player type game.the original star fox might not be entirely unforgettable, but it was responsible for launching yet another solid series of games on the later nintendo consoles. i recently bought Star Fox Command for the DS based on the nostalgia i had for the original star fox. hopefully another version will be produced for the wii to keep the franchise going.
Donkey Kong Country (1994)
i think Donkey Kong Country sort of came out of nowhere for me. honestly, i've kinda always hated the donkey kong character. he was never really used much by nintendo and just never had much good-guy appeal. so i was surprised that my sister and i latched onto this game so quickly.
it was basically the same concept as Super Mario World, for the most part. what really set it apart was how you traveled throughout a level, such as shooting through barrels, riding in mine trains, etc. released at a time not too far from when the playstation would hit the streets, the graphics looked far better than any of the initial SNES games had. the enemies were somewhat forgettable, but the music was fantastic. it was cool that you could play as donkey kong or diddy kong, since each character had slightly different abilities.
the game was pure platformer, but it brought a lot of great ideas to change up the genre a bit. after the first game, we gladly bought the next couple sequels in the series and enjoyed those as well. it would be nice to see nintendo try to continue the series on future platforms, such as the wii and DS. hopefully this game could be a hit. we'll see.next time i'll delve into the playstation era.
--j
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