At the end of summer in ’91 Nintendo came out with the Super NES. It had new games featuring many of the original character from the original NES. I think it was around October or November that year I decided I wanted to give it a try. I sold of my Genesis to help cover the costs. It came with Super Mario World which is considered to be one of the best mario games of all time. It took me a good month to get thru that game. I also purchased Final Fight which was another game that took me some time to complete. The challenge was back and I loved it.
The Super Nintendo also had a few things that were better than the Genesis. The main thing being the number of colors that could be displayed at one time. The Genesis could only display 64 colors on the screen while the Super Nintendo could display 256. This made the SNES games look a lot more richer looking and games that were ported to both systems it was obvious when comparing side by side which one looked better.
Most of my friends at this time were Genesis fans and couldn’t believe I had switched to the SNES. It worked out great though because when we got together we could bring our systems over and have the best of both worlds. Sometimes we would even trade systems for the weekends. They were all envious though when Street Fighter 2 was announced that it was only coming out to the Super NES and not the Genesis. I pre-ordered my copy months in advance. Street Fighter 2 was the game in the arcades. I remember there always being a line to play and people pumping quarters into those machines like crazy. It is said that this game is what put Nintendo in the lead during the 16-bit era and helped sell many consoles. About 6 months after release it was finally announced that the Champion Edition of Street Fighter 2 was coming to the Genesis. This version allowed players to be the boss character of the game. While it did have those new features the graphics and sound still looked better on the SNES version of the game. The opposite happened though with Mortal Kombat. MK was released for many systems at the same time. The problem though was Nintendo of America had strict rules when it came to violence in Video Games. They forced Akklaim to remove the blood from the game and chance some of the fatality moves so they were less violet. Sega on the other hand allowed those things to stay intact from the arcade version. So even though the graphics and sound are not as good as the Super Nintendo version the Sega version is a closer representation to its arcade counterpart. Nintendo however changed their mind after the outcry from fans and allowed the sequels to stay intact. It was at this time too that the Video Game rating system came about, so parents now had an idea of the content contained in a game. The Super Nintendo was a great system My ten favorites for this system would be
- Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
- Super Castlevaina 4
- Super Mario World
- Final Fight
- Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
- Final Fantasy 2
- Super Star Wars Trilogy
- F-Zero
- Super Metroid
- Killer Instinct
Some of the main commercials I remember are the Pepsi contest,
Super Mario World, Zelda, and Street Fighter 2
