SNES
”Do you play games on your smartphone?” asks interviewer before the two-time gold medalist says his two favorite games are from the ‘90s.
Beloved 16-bit game’s protagonist seemingly makes cameo appearance in the clouds of amazing video.
While you’re waiting for a SNES Classic, take a look at one of the best player’s guides of all time.
Umihara Kawase was released for the Super Famicom (Super NES in the west) in December, 1994, just over two decades ago. It was a popular game that has spawned a number of sequels for a variety of platforms and has won its fair share of fans, including many who loved the original cartridge game. Unfortunately, some cartridge games from the 90s featured a fatal flaw in their storage: the batteries keeping players’ saves alive eventually dies.
While most gamers finally give up and waved goodbye to their progress, lost to the ravages of time, one hardcore fan has refused to lose his save and has simply left his console plugged in and switched on for the last 20 years!
Mario Kart. We don’t know a single person who claims not to like it at least a little bit, and with its 22-year history and eight (11 if you count the arcade iterations) distinct outings to date, pretty much everyone has zipped around at least one of Nintendo’s crazy cartoony tracks at some point in their life.
News site MyNavi Woman recently polled gamers all over Japan about their most memorable Mario Kart experiences, 13 of which we’ve listed after the jump for your reading and reminiscing pleasure. Honestly, we don’t think there’s a single one here that didn’t have us nodding in agreement.
Next year the Super Famicom (SNES) will see its 25th birthday. In human years that will amount to 62 which means it’s time for the beloved console to begin taking stock of the days in front of it and make them count.
One Super Famicom in particular could feel the yellowing of its case and decided to scratch one more thing off its bucket list: climb Mt. Fuji. Acquiring the help of a human male, the Super Famicom set off to scale the iconic mountain and document the journey on Japanese textboard 2-channel.
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Think you know your Nintendo? Our pals over at BuzzFeed have just released one of their famous “BuzzFeed Pop” videos which reveals a whole host of little-known facts about the House of Mario.
Join us after the jump to test your knowledge and find out how much of your life you’re wasting indoors.
If you only started playing video games in the last 10 years, you may not know how good you’ve got it. These days, every system includes a hard drive to save your progress, and with most games offering frequent opportunities to do so or doing it on your behalf, even the worst screw-up isn’t going to lose you more than 15 minutes or so of progress. With dozens of online FAQs and YouTube demonstrations for the most popular titles, there’s no need to waste time getting killed by the same boss over and over again.
But back in the day, things were different. Before every home had multiple Internet-capable devices, gamers were completely on their own whenever they entered a new stage, and death usually meant going all the way back to the beginning of the level, if not the entire game. How did old school gamers deal with this kind of frustration?
In the case of one of our Japanese correspondents by biting the controller.
At 00:00 a.m. on March 1, 1997, a 14-year-old version of this writer- extremely lanky and awkwardly dressed- was standing outside a videogame store alongside his mother and a few slightly bedraggled-looking young men, clutching the pocket-money he’d saved for nearly 18 months, absolutely desperate to give it away.
This was undoubtedly the nerdiest moment of my life, and I’ve never since gone to a midnight launch of a videogame console, despite owning about a dozen since. But when I’d waited more than a year for the UK launch of the Nintendo 64, and, having convinced my infinitely-patient mother to drive me into town in the middle of the night, I was excited. Incredibly excited. Perhaps more excited than a night before Christmas with Santa, Willy Wonka and a dozen sugar-rushing puppies, even.
Back at home, opening my new console on my bedroom floor (it’s called “unboxing” now, and people post painfully long videos of it online…), I was hit by that curious smell of new electronics. But not just any old electronics smell; this was the smell of a new Nintendo 64. Clean, new, professional, yet somehow extremely welcoming…
Up until now, I had thought I was the only one who noticed these things- that videogame consoles, new mobile phones, whatever- had a distinct smell of their own, not just ‘electronics’.
But over at our Japanese site, Mamiya-san has written a great little article about his own experiences with much-loved games console the PC Engine (perhaps known to some as TurboGrafix-16), and, in particular, its own very special smell. Since the machine remains relatively unknown outside of its native Japan, I can’t help but share his experiences with our English-speaking readers. Read More
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