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Some Treasures From The Super Nintendo Era

SobControllers / Flickr / Creative Commons

I keep a bunch of old game consoles hooked up at home to play some of my classic games, and most often recently I’ve found myself reaching for my Super Nintendo.

Yoshi’s Island is actually a prequel to all of the other Mario games. You play the game as a family of little green dinosaurs called "Yoshis," taking baby Mario home after a botched kidnapping. If you get hit by something in the game, Mario falls off your back and starts crying, and you have to get him back before the kidnappers take him away again.

Each level has a very specific mission or puzzle. One may have you learn to throw Yoshi’s eggs at an angle, or have you track down a key to unlock a door, and then all these lessons get used at the end of the world to help you defeat that world’s boss.

Yoshi’s Island is the most beautiful Super Nintendo game ever produced. Everything looks like a hand-drawn storybook made with felt-tipped pens and crayons, and everything in the game is in cheerful, bright colors.

Donkey Kong Country, on the other hand, looks like a much newer game than it is. At the time of its release in 1994, it was unlike anything else on the market. The graphics had been rendered in 3D on a powerful computer, and then saved to a format the Super Nintendo could use. The result was a slick looking game, but with some seriously great platforming controls, too.

The game has a very slow and deliberate pace, with plenty of secret rooms and bonus levels to find. There are tons of medals, statues and, of course, bananas to collect. The game even lets you know what percentage of its secrets you’ve unlocked, which is fun until you’re at the end of the game with 99 percent and no idea where that last 1 percent is.

But I’ll keep digging until I find it.

Samuel McConnell is a games enthusiast who has been playing games in one form or another since 1991. He was born in northern Maine but quickly transplanted to Wichita.