Exploring The Hidden Gems Of The Super Nintendo Entertainment System
While the first console I technically had in my household was an NES, the Super Nintendo came around when I was finally old enough to really appreciate them. So, the console is a familiar and dear friend. However, I’m more passionate about exploring places that I haven’t been before.
Thankfully, the SNES has a large enough library that I’m still coming across worthwhile titles that I’ve missed. There are over 700 games in the SNES library, and that’s just in North America and excluding Super Famicom exclusives. It’s hard to play all of them, and sometimes you kick over a rock and find something worth eating. I’ve kicked over a lot of rocks, so I’m here to point you at some of the juiciest grubs.
This list is not ranked. I’m just giving recommendations. I’m also only pulling from the North American library, so we’re excluding Super Famicom and PAL-only games. It’s also difficult to define what, exactly, is overlooked. Zombies Ate My Neighbors might be a staple to me, but others may say otherwise. So, take it for what it is. If you haven’t played these games before, consider checking them out.
Demon’s Crest
Demon’s Crest is one of my favorite games on the SNES, but I only found out about it a few years ago while following the Gargoyle’s Quest trail. But while Demon’s Crest retains quite a bit from the previous Gargoyle’s Quest games, it’s in a league of its own.
The Gargoyle’s Quest series is a spin-off of Ghost n’ Ghouls starring one of the most vexing enemies in those games, Red Arremer (or Firebrand). It started out on Game Boy with its sequel on NES, but those games had more of an adorable cartoon style laced with horror. Demon’s Crest is all horror. It looks more similar to Super Castlevania IV than anything else in its own series.
You also get to play as a certifiable badass. You start with most of the skills from the previous games and then build upon that foundation. That doesn’t make the game easy, but it does make the character feel incredibly powerful. It helps that other demons you run into react with either respect or straight-up fear.
S.O.S.
The absolute opposite of a power fantasy, you’d think S.O.S. (Septentrion in Japan) came out in the wake of the film Titanic rather than four years before it. You play as one of a few characters who are on board the luxury liner “Lady Crithania” when it gets caught in a storm and capsized. Your goal is to make it off the ship while saving as many people as possible.
The problem is, the characters you play aren’t action heroes. They’re regular people, so the game controls a lot closer to Prince of Persia than a standard platformer. The characters are slow and cumbersome, and if you fall too far, you might lose consciousness or outright die. The game proceeds on a progressive clock, and as the minutes tick by, the ship begins to roll and tilt, completely changing how you navigate the ship.
It’s not something you’ll complete on your first try; it’s going to take many failures before you figure out the best way to get around. Even then, your next challenge is getting as many of the daft passengers to the exit with you, and they are hardly reliable on their own. This can make S.O.S. very uncomfortable to play. Frustrating even. Especially since the music is like the soundtrack to a panic attack. However, you won’t find anything quite like it, either on the SNES or beyond.
Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen
While Tactics Ogre still loves on through occasional remasters, the classic Ogre Battle style of strategy games hasn’t seen much action in a long time. It all started here on the SNES with Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen.
These games are a strange mix of strategy and RPG. Essentially, you build your party, then send them out to various strategic locations to either attack or defend against the enemies. You work to recruit new, more powerful units into your army while building and upgrading the ones you have. All this is presented against vibrant Mode-7 landscapes with a terrific soundtrack.
The main downside is that it’s extremely easy to cheese your way through most levels. There’s also an extremely obtuse alignment system for characters that is very poorly explained but has a massive impact on what ending you get.
Uniracers
Aside from, say, Super Mario Kart, the SNES isn’t exactly known for its racing games. Uniracers took a pretty distinct direction by being a completely sidescrolling racer. But holding a direction until you reach the finish line would be pretty boring, so it throws in half-loops and half-pipes that force you to adjust your one-wheeled mode of transportation for a safe landing. On top of that, stunts are how you gain speed, so you need to be always flipping and twisting if you want to win.
It’s an intense game, featuring crazy-fast abstract graphics and a pretty kicking soundtrack. There’s two-player split-screen if you want to see who’s better at keeping their wheel under them. I just want to know how my mother set such a record time on the first course. That shouldn’t be possible.
Metal Warriors
I feel like Cybernator/Assault Suits Valken deserves a mention in this list, so there it is. I’ve talked so much about it at this point that I need a breather. Instead, I’ll give it to Metal Warriors, which isn’t a sequel to Cybernator and isn’t even by the same developer, but you’d swear it was. It features the same stompy robot action and careful aiming. It’s a real “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” situation. Only this time, the robots are hot rod red, and you can get out of them.
Metal Warriors comes from many of the devs who worked on Zombies Ate My Neighbors. The two games are in completely different ballparks, but they both feature interesting and detailed art design. There’s also no HUD, which is a unique thing to see in an SNES game.
Unfortunately, this one either didn’t sell well, or just wasn’t marketed very hard by Konami. Cartridges are pretty scarce to come by and command a ridiculously high price. I have high hopes that a port comes to modern consoles.
Shadowrun
Based on the tabletop RPG of the same name, there are actually two versions of Shadowrun: One on the SNES and another on Genesis/Mega Drive. They’re completely different, with the Genesis version sticking closer to the rules of the TTRPG and the SNES taking a page from the novel Never Deal with a Dragon.
You play as Jake Armitage, who kicks out of his own morgue slab to figure out what’s going down in the cyberpunk future of Seattle. Shadowrun’s big hook is that it’s essentially Bladerunner mixed with The Lord of the Rings. So, it’s a grim, corporate-dominated future, but there are also elves, dwarves, magic, and dragons.
What I absolutely love about the SNES Shadowrun is its atmosphere. It doesn’t entirely get the cyberpunk feel across, but it does capture the isolated feeling of walking the streets on a summer night. This is helped through the terrific use of its color palette and an incredible soundtrack by Marshall Parker. It’s worth checking out, even if its mouse interface is pretty cumbersome.
Batman Returns
Batman Returns got a game on many different platforms, and most of them are different. The SNES version is a pretty incredible beat-’em-up by Konami. It’s (mostly) a conveyor belt brawler where you walk the festive streets of Gotham, beating the cotton candy out of clowns. You can pick them up and smash them against the scenery or even each other.
It does a great job of capturing the feel of the movie. It even features the score by Dan Elfman. But it’s the amazing physicality of Batman Returns that makes it worth playing.
Nosferatu
I often forget that Nosferatu was even released in North America. Forget that the name makes it sound like a clone of Castlev
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