Thank You, Mario! But Our Princess Is In Another Castle!

Eighteen things I miss about SNES 16-bit video games:

1. Not getting lost in a maze of 3-D graphics where you can never quite figure out where you are.

…

Well, okay, I never really absorbed the map in Legend of Zelda, either, but at least I could always look where I wanted to with a minimum of fuss.

2. Knowing it’s time to go to sleep when the computer beats you at Tetris.

3. Firing red shells at your siblings, friends, and cousins in Super Mario Kart Battle mode, and laughing when they run over the question box and get nothing but a green shell or, worse, a cheap banana peel (ahahahaha!).

4. Watching your third baseman run toward the line drive in Super Bases Loaded, only to turn around right before he nabs the ball because another player has suddenly become the one in play.

5. Getting into screaming matches with your cousins because one of them set the Godzilla-monster disaster loose on the other’s Sim City.

6. Mashing the buttons randomly while playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time and finding it makes very little difference in your game play, except when the part comes where you have to throw bad guys at the “camera” and you have no idea how you’ve been doing that.

7. Swearing at Super Ghouls and Ghosts because the game is so darned impossible. Your guy is nearly impossible to control; there are a million enemies, many hidden, and they all take multiple hits to die; one hit, and you lose all your armour; two hits, and you die; the background of various levels shifts, and the only way to learn where to be is to die when you move to the wrong place; one level freakin’ turns quarter turns clockwise every few minutes; oh, and did I mention you can’t save?

Actually, I think my favourite part of this game was watching our video-game whiz family friend (who  recently won a trophy in a Guitar Hero tournament… again, ahahahahaha) slog his way to the final level, have the system turned off because someone else wanted to watch TV, slog his way to the final level again, only to be told by the princess that she’d lost her bracelet somewhere in the first few levels, and his character would have to play them again, except there’d be more monsters.

8. Learning from Sim City that the best way to run a city is to allow your citizens no form of transportation but light rail while constructing a giant parking lot of road on a distant island to get your special gift without raising pollution levels.

9. Having to painstakingly type in your answer on Jeopardy, get it counted wrong because of a spelling error, and then having to watch the computer player slowly “enter” his/her answer and get it right. Also, the extremely pixellated Alex Trebek announcing, “The answer is…”

10. Accidentally laying a bomb in Bomberman battle mode that traps you in a dead end and having to watch in agony as your avatar gets blown up. Then having to watch the computer players and/or your friend blow each other up.

11. Referring to the Bomberman battle mode power-ups as “bomb-kicky” and “bomb-throwy”.

12. Not playing an RPG like Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda for a really long time, deciding to go back to a saved game, and forgetting what the heck your characters were supposed to be doing.

13. Trying to decipher the crackly sound bites spoken by characters as actual words, especially when the game’s creators clearly decided to give up and pull a Polkaroo: characters make the same random non-word noises that the other characters can conveniently decipher as the situation requires. *cough*Starfox (*static static* *bobba-du-bebbum* = “Bogey on my six!)

14. Accidentally getting trapped in a dinosaur-eating plant or a pit in Super Mario World II: Yoshi’s Island and having to endure Baby Mario’s ear-jarring “Waaa! Waaa! Waaa!” while there’s nothing you can frickin’ do about it… arrrg.

15. “Taming” enemies in Earthbound… by hitting them repeatedly with Ness’s baseball bat in front of a psychedelic shimmery rainbow background.

16. Holding a barrel above your head in Donkey Kong to kill an enemy about to jump on you but dying anyways because somehow the enemy managed to get you at the same time that you broke the barrel on it.

17. Writing down the “passwords” you got at the end of every level instead of saving. Or, as time went on, saying “Screw it!” and looking them up on Internet cheat sites.

18. Waiting and waiting and waiting for that four-by-one line block to fall in Tetris, and finally plugging up the gap because you can’t wait any longer, only for it to be the next piece…