snes memories.

here's another cool post from the perfect brainstorm, the week-and-a-half-old tumblr blog i'm relocating here.

originally posted on like january 24 or 25, 2012, it's a list of childhood memories of games i rented for the super nintendo entertainment system.

a writing teacher once told me i wouldn't get very far if i just wrote for myself, and not others. i disagreed with her then, and clearly, i disagree with her now. enjoy:

most people my age grew up with the original nintendo entertainment system, but not me. my first ever gaming console was the super nes. i don't remember when i got it, but it must've been around late 1991, which means i was like 9 and my brother was like 6.

i don't know what knowledge my parents must've had about video games of the day. i have no idea if they thought to get it on their own, or if i was asking for it, or if the guy at the toy store told them it was cool. my official guess is that my dad somehow knew snes was the best one, thus saving me from a childhood wasted on sega genesis.

our parents took us to toys r us to get it. it came with super mario world, and my brother was tasked with choosing a second game. this may shock you, but there was no internet back then, so there was no way to know which games were good or bad. unless you had a video game magazine with the latest game reviews, you were forced to make blind rentals-- or worse, blind buys. and the odds were not in your favor, because most games sucked. jandro ended up picking final fight, based, i'm assuming, on nothing more than the box and the title. this was perhaps the earliest sign that jandro was gifted with a sixth sense about gaming, because that turned out to be a great game.

super nes ensured that the next four years of my life would be a nonstop orgy of adventure. my brother and i had a solid library of games, and we rented games often from the video store.

some memories from my childhood renting games:

- i remember renting mortal kombat for the first time at video pursuit and jandro studying the manual in the car on the way home, so he could familiarize himself with the characters' bios. he probably doesn't remember that, but even today, jandro often delights in sporadically citing in-game historical facts, such as that sub-zero is not a ninja, but a lin kuei.

- one time we rented a tiny toon adventures game and the manual had been defaced with sexually explicit graffiti. like, someone had drawn genitals on buster bunny and written "male prostitute" above it. my mom complained to the blockbuster. i don't remember what they said or did in response. what's kinda fucked up is that i wasn't disturbed at all by the inappropriate imagery; i was mainly offended that someone had disrespected tiny toons, which i considered (both then and now) to be a really funny show.

- the games we rented multiple times without ever purchasing were f-zero and disney's aladdin. i vividly remember one night in particular when we had the aladdin game on the last night of our rental, but i couldn't play it because i had to do my english homework. making the situation ten million times worse was the fact that my brother was able to play it while i was doing my homework in the same room. it was like mildly traumatizing.

- one time, i went to a friend's birthday party. while all the popular kids were socializing and networking, i spent the whole time in the living room playing super smash tv. it was like a running man-esque game show premise where you have to travel through different rooms killing a bunch of guys or something. super hard game, but ultimately more rewarding than hanging out with popular kids in elementary school.

- a game i was always intrigued by was robocop versus the terminator. not for any reason other than the badass molded black plastic box on the shelf at blockbuster. it was perhaps too intimidating, because i never played it. but if that box was any indication, robocop versus the terminator may be the greatest video game of all time.

- i loved paperboy 2, but i never figured out how to play it. like, i never knew which houses i was supposed to deliver to or whatever. it was so hard. recently, someone told me that the color of the house indicated whether the resident was a subscriber or not. i need to play this game again immediately.

- there was an interesting clay aesthetic featured in some snes games. like, there was a game called claymates, where you were like a clay blob, and you could find these little balls of clay, and depending on their color, they would turn you into different clay animals with different abilities that would help you beat the level. i loved that. i think these guys went on to make the clay fighter series, which i guess was a spoof of the whole genre of insane early 90's fighting games, but i think most kids accepted it as a valid entry.

- some other games we inexplicably never bought: zombies ate my neighbors (i have no idea how good this game is, but i seem to recall having a positive experience with it), and krusty's super fun house. you could always count on simpsons-based games to be kinda not great, but weird enough to be worth every penny. perhaps the weirdest premise in a library that also included bart simpson traveling through nightmares and virtual reality worlds, krusty's super fun house starred krusty the clown (see, already it's weird) and the premise was that you had to get rid of an infestation of lemmingesque rodents. i remember this being nothing but fun.

- i never played spindizzy worlds, but i owned a bunch of archie comics that featured all the archie characters playing spindizzy worlds. like, it was just pages of archie and the gang sitting in a living room playing this game. i'm glad i never played it, because no way could the real thing ever compare to this lunacy (edit: it's possible i did play this game, but it was so bad, i completely blocked it out of my memory. maybe i should stop thinking about it).

- my first real taste of any mario game predating super mario world was our rental of super mario all-stars, which was a bundle of all the previous mario games from the nes. i remember looking through the manual with my brother at pizza hut. this might be one of the best memories in my head.

- a couple years ago, my brother put a thing on my computer called an emulator. it's basically like a program that simulates the super nes on your computer. it also has a library of like every super nes game ever made. if 9-year-old me knew i had this, he would be so happy. and if he knew how little i play with it, he would be just horrified.