super nintendo

Super Nintendo Essays: Grasping at Nostalgia

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

At some point during the Nintendo 64 era, my house got robbed. All of our gaming stuff was gone. It was a very tough time for my family and I, and our overall safety was probably a bigger concern than my gaming items being taken away. When it came time to move on, my brother and I decided against re-buying our Super Nintendo things, and instead focused what little money we had on re-buying our modern Nintendo 64 stuff.

Almost a decade after first receiving it as a birthday present, my parents got me a used SNES for Christmas. Alongside of it were two controllers, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II, and Super Star Wars. In that moment, it was one of the warmest and fuzziest feelings I’d ever felt. However, it also became a factor in the darkest part of my life to-date.

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Super Nintendo Essays: Second-Hand

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

Despite my disdain for the current $80 price point for new games in Canada, it’s a bargain compared to what I was contending with in the 90s. The additional cost of cartridges, combined with the wonky Canadian dollar, made new titles cost upwards of $100 in the early-to-mid 90s. Above is a screenshot of a Toys R Us flyer that I’m presuming is from the holiday season of 1995, where Mortal Kombat 3 is priced as a new title. Assuming that, the likes of Batman Forever would actually cost $140.92 CAD today.

I would struggle to pay those kinds of prices today. In 1995, when I was an elementary school student who wasn’t even getting an allowance at that point, new games were almost entirely out of the question. Because of this, I got most of my games used and was active in trading games away.

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The Super NES Essays: The Donkey Kong Country Tape

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

In the summer of 1994, I received an unusual package from Nintendo. Just a few months before, they had sent me a copy of Super Mario All-Stars as part of a promo for buying an SNES. This wasn’t a game, though. Inside, was a VHS tape about the upcoming Donkey Kong Country. Though I didn’t know about it before watching the video, I knew that game like the back of my hand long before it was inevitably released later that year.

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The Super Nintendo Essays: Brothers

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

My brother and I are about seven years apart in age. That gap has led to us being in very different stages of our lives up until we both hit adulthood. While this at times made it difficult to connect, video games were always our common ground. That truly began with the Super Nintendo.

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The Super Nintendo Essays: The Original Console War

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

In a world with no internet message boards or YouTube comments to defend your side, the battle between the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis was – and may forever be – the fiercest console war of them all. Unlike modern times where the differences between consoles are minimal at best, these were two wildly different platforms in virtually every way, from console architecture, to controller design, to marketing. Heck, even third party games sharing the same name were oftentimes completely different builds between the two.

I was there for pretty much all of it. And in hindsight, console wars were always dumb.

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The Super Nintendo Essays: Happy Birthday

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

I remember the day when my Super NES hype hit a crescendo. For months, I pestered my parents about my desire to receive an SNES for my birthday. In response, they would usually troll me by saying they were going to get me a TurboGrafx-16 instead. As time went on, the jokes got a bit more intense, and one day, they broke me.

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The Super Nintendo Essays: Playing With Super Power

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The Super Nintendo Essays is a series of posts detailing my history with and passion for the SNES. It had a profound effect on my life as a gamer, and I wanted to share some of my most memorable stories about it with you!

When it comes to my history with video games, you can draw a very specific line on my birthday in 1994. The time before it was the era before I got a Super Nintendo. After that, is the era I still live in now, where owning a Super Nintendo changed my life. That era of gaming, and specifically my time with that console, transformed me into a kid who likes video games into a full-blown gaming enthusiast.

I vividly remember the moment I received that SNES from my parents and many of my gaming experiences after that. However, by that point, the console was almost two years old. What was I doing back then? And why am I struggling so hard to pull those memories of a time before the SNES out of my brain? Follow me as I ramble on in hopes of piecing together my life before owning an SNES.

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Capcom and Iam8bit Collaborate to Release a Collector’s Edition of Street Fighter II on the Super NES

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Haven’t bought more copies of Street Fighter II in my lifetime than I’d like to admit, Capcom is clawing at my wallet yet again. This time, the Super NES version of this classic returns in a playable cartridge. Along with the other goodies that come with the package, this limited release will run you $100.

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5 Great Games Left Off the Super Nintendo Classic

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The Super Nintendo Classic is launching with a bevy of timeless classics. It will be well worth the suggested retail price upon it’s release in September. However, I couldn’t help but notice a few large omissions from this list. Wish the following games could have made it on the console!

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Building My Perfect SNES Classic: Part 10

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Shortly after my hype subsided from the announcement of the NES Classic, my immediate thought was, “What if Nintendo makes an SNES Classic?!” That system has a special spot in my heart for being a critical part of my gaming life as a 90s kid. It also doesn’t hurt that the games on this console are some of the greatest of all-time.

In this 10-part series, I’ll highlight three games that I would like to see in a hypothetical SNES Classic.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

Let’s wrap this up with part 10!

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