I’ll never forget the night my brother and I put every penny we had towards the SNES. The whole family huddled around the basement while my dad struggled to hook such a beautiful piece of modern art to our old school cabinet T.V. (Yes we were still rockin that beast!) Even though both my parents and sister didn’t care much for video games at all, there is no denying the smiles that infectiously filled the room as Mario burst on the screen in bright vibrant colour. This is something we had never seen in our environment before. It was as if some advanced alien technology was dropped into my world, and even though we only had the few Mario games that came included with the package, that didn’t stop the feeling that we now had our own personal arcade breathing within that simple grey box with the purple switches.
1. NHLPA ’93
My brother and I were hooked on this game. We spent the majority of our time in the summer playing hockey in the driveway anyway, but now we could play as our favorite teams, bring checking into play without getting gouged on the stucco of the neighbours house, and even throw off the gloves in epic fights. It wasn’t long before frustrations started setting in, and so together we forged the sacred rules which when broken, granted punishment of crippling controller blows to the knee of the guilty party. The punishment was a silent, yet obvious agreement considering we were holding blunt objects on cords. No wraparounds was a big one with good reason, every shot on net that was made after coming from behind the goalie was the cheapest way to score. The goalie was too slow, and couldn’t recover from being in the corner of the post causing an empty net goal every time. It’s hard to say why the game felt so exciting, the players were so slow it probably took a full one or two minutes to reach the other side of the ice. That might be an exaggeration, but I can assure you it’s not much of one if it is.
2.NHL ’95
It’s unforgettable how fast and refined this game was after being conditioned to the ways of ’93. The first time we played, it felt like we were skating so fast that we’d have trouble stopping before slamming ourselves into the boards. The knee cracking also returned, with a new game came new rules. If you scored on net after skating an L pattern in front of the goalie, you had better be prepared for knee splitting controller smashes. This game easily ate up the majority of the time I spent with my brother while we were growing up.
3. Super Street Fighter 2
I loved Mortal Kombat, but the mechanics were wooden in comparison to the speed and action of Street Fighter. After playing Street Fighter 2 Turbo for a few years, I was totally geeked to find a new refurbished model sitting on store shelves complete with new characters, arenas, faster gameplay, and better graphics. This remains one of the best fighters I’ve played to date. I’ll always remember being a cheap dick one day for a joke while fighting my neighbour. I can’t remember who he was, but I was Blanka, and here’s how it went down for the easiest K.O. in my life. I delivered a jaw crushing upper cut, and as he was sailing through the air I crouched into the electrified attack. I continued following his burned up barely breathing character, bouncing him across the arena off his own electrocution. I’ll never forget the look of pure hatred in his eyes as round two ended the exact same way, it was priceless!
4.Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball
Ken Griffey Jr. was the only real person who the game had license to use. All the characters came in three body types; the super skinny crackhead, average sized tough guy, and my favourite the juiced up steroid junky. I have never played a baseball game since that comes close to the ridiculous mechanics and addictive fun of this one. Other modes included a home run derby, and a setting to change all the players names to whatever you wanted. They must have had the intention of helping you keep up to date rosters or something, seems like a waste of time to me, but I guess anyone who takes they’re time to do that needs something to do while they’re not getting laid.
5.Mutant Chronicles: Doom Troopers
I never owned this one, although I did search everywhere in the city for a copy after the rental was returned. This game was a Hell on earth side scroller shoot em’ up that borrowed a lot from Contra, but with a slightly toned down difficulty making it a more fun experience. I hope this gets re-released as DLC one day, the game was truly ahead of it’s time. The enemies wouldn’t go down without first being dismembered making for gore soaked good times.
6.The Incredible Hulk
The game centred around smashing robots, lizard men, and fighting various Marvel Comics villains on a quest to stop the Leader’s plan for world domination. While the game was an amazing amount of fun, the most anticlimactic final boss in history is the thing that will always stick with me. It was a hard fight getting to the swollen head ‘leader’, you had to shrink down and fight him from the inside, fighting through cellular mutations to an epic battle with his brain bashing away at the cerebral cortex. It was more than disappointing to see his final reign in the last level extinguished by a single uppercut.
7. Zombies Ate My Neighbours
Nothing says classic like the huge helping of B movie inspired chills and thrills that were served up in Zombies Ate My Neighbours! Enemies include an expansive array of movie inspired villains; Chucky dolls, pod people, ghosts, giant Them ants, blobs, and Gill-men to name a few. The whole object of the game was to save all the civilians from being used as monster meat, this was a B movie fan’s love letter to the genre from beginning to end. The levels were made of the destroyed environments from all ends of the genre from regular cities to laboratories, and ancient ruins.
8. Jurassic Park
Remember when video games didn’t have save features? I remember playing another great movie based game Batman Returns, trying to play as flawlessly as possible till the end so you could have as many continues as possible on the last level, because when that screen said game over, it meant game over, fuck you, and welcome back to level 1. Well Jurassic Park was no different, except of course it’s length! One day my brother decided we’d outsmart the un-killable beast, we got up at around 5:00 in the a.m. in hopes of starting the game early enough to put an entire day into beating the bastard. We passed the controller back and forth stunning, and killing dinosaurs all day long. The game was very uniquely built, played at an angled overhead view while outside that switched to a FPS view when 
entering the parks many, many buildings. The game was both tense and difficult, giving off a cold claustrophobic feeling when exploring the interiors of the parks many abandoned buildings, tunnels, and sub levels. Lush exteriors expanded beyond sight from the limitations of the screen’s size making you an easy target for the dinosaurs roaming the grounds. Hours passed while we terminated what felt like thousands of dinosaurs hungry for they’re next meal. Every kill was a challenge in some way with the minuscule amount of ammo the game provided. All day we played; battling raptors, collecting keys, turning power switches on and off, dodging rampaging herds, and outrunning Tyrannosaurs. We were nearing the end of the game (we think) when we got side swiped by a Dilophosaurs spit attack. Considering how many objectives we had completed that day I will always wonder how close we were to escaping the nightmare!
Even with all the great games I played on Nintendo 64, I still can’t help regretting selling my SNES along with it’s library of 30+ games. Some developers have really lost touch with making games as fun as they are difficult. I mean really, who doesn’t miss the days of fast paced side scroller action?
Stay Graveside for part 4:N64 WOW, it looks so real!!!
