The SNES games that I owned and played back in the 90's

When I was a kid living back in the 90's I was so proud to have my own room, my own color tv and my own super nintendo with my own library of games. Recently I've dusted off my old snes and looked at my own games again and thought it would be interesting to talk briefly about my snes experience back in the 90's.

Back then you couldn't just go download the rom and play it on your flashcart or emulator if you wanted to play a new snes game. My family didn't have the internet nor a personal computer. Games were either bought used, new, rented or borrowed. I know that the full library of snes games in the usa is around 700+ games and when I think about my small library that I had growing up I really didn't get to experience what the snes was all about as I only played around 5% of the total games for the system.

What's interesting about living in a time with only physical cartridges is that almost nobody at the time could afford to collect the entire library of games for the system and as a result people only played a portion of the games out of the whole library thus making everyone's console experience unique.

For example I never played Chrono Trigger, Yoshi's Island, Harvest Moon, Super Metroid or Mario RPG on the snes back in the 90's. It was only much later in my life that I actually went back to revisited the snes to seek out important games and to experience them for the first time.

So I thought I would compile a list of the games that I owned and played. Here was the list of games that I owned:

1) Mortal Kombat 1 (got it on launch, was disappointed that there was no blood)
2) Zombies Ate My Neighbors (actually cried when I got it as an easter present because I didn't ask for it and didn't know if it was any good or not)
3) Street Fighter 2
4) Street Fighter 2 Turbo (when I first saw this at the rental store before I owned it I hid the rental box in the store so no other person could rent it but me because I knew the hiding spot lol how funny kids minds are)
5) Donkey Kong Country (when I first saw it at my friends house I told my mother that I HAD to have it asap)
6) Donkey Kong Country 2 (one of the best christmas presents I ever asked for)
7) Doom (saw it at my friend Mike's house and was blown away, first time I ever saw doom was on an snes)
8) NBA Jam (got it as an easter present from my grandparent)
9) Zelda 3 (got it I believe used and first saw it at a friends house)
10) Mario Paint
11) Super Mario World
12) Super Mario Kart
13) Jurassic Park (apparently this was around when the first movie came out)
14) The Lion King ( I hate that stupid double jump stage while riding the ostridge)

And that was my entire collection. What's odd is that still today I can remember pretty accurately which games that I got to play that I didn't own. These were either at a friends house or rented at a video game store. The games that I remember playing were:

1) Clay Fighter
2) Earthworm Jim
3) Joe and Mac
4) King of the Monsters
5) Krusty's Fun House
6) Madden Football (Played it at my friends house)
7) Mario is Missing (with lots of disappointment)
8) NHL Hockey (played it at friends house)
9) Out of this World (friends house)
10) Pocky and Rocky ( my friend adam let me borrow it for a few months)
11) Primal Rage
12) Bevius and Butthead ( one of my friends parents wouldn't let him play the game because they felt it was inappropriate lol)
13) Sim City (all I did was destroy the cities with bowser)
14) Maximum Carnage
15) Super Double Dragon (friends house)
16) Super Punch Out (my friend let me borrow it)
17) TMNT tournament fighter (played it at a blockbuster tournament and had no idea what i was doing)
18) TMNT Turtles in Time (played it at a party)
19) Wayne's World (sucks)
20) WF Raw wrestling (had a blast playing this all night with friends)
21) Mortal Kombat 2,3 (I almost tried to swap out my own MK1 with MK2 at the rental store while returning the game to basically steal MK2, but changed my mind at the last second)
22) Ken Griffy Jr. Baseball
23) Bill Lam's Combat Basketball

But now that I have a sd2snes I am trying to go back and play some of the games that I still haven't had a chance to play. For example it was only last year that I first played Chrono Trigger. Anyway, just wanted to share this. If anyone else wants to post their list go ahead.

Thanks for reading.

Not many people mention DKC3. Is it because it's a disappointing game or was it overshadowed by the N64?

What I find fascinating was that I remember seeing Yoshi's Island being played to completion at a friend's house. That was a particularly long Mario game (no warps). I can't imagine how we sat through it in one sitting! (maybe it was over the course of more than one day? I don't know.) I at least remembered the beginning, the donut lifts, the frog boss, and the ending.

Of course, years later I played it (the GBA version at least).

Ken Griffy Jr. baseball wouldn't have been the same without Tim Follin's rocking background music.

The latter, I believe. IMO it's not quite as good as DKC2, but since I haven't played the whole thing my opinion isn't really fully formed. Also I was too hyped for Mario 64 at the time to give it my full attention - and I wasn't the only one...

DKC3 is the second-best of the series, in my opinion. It's much more polished than DKC1, but has a tendency to rely on short-lived gameplay gimmicks. I definitely enjoy it regardless.

But yeah, you know it was overshadowed big time when there are obvious references to SM64 in the game itself...

Yeah it's because of the late release. I myself only had DKC1 and only played 2 and 3 on emulators much later. I thought: DKC < DKC2 < DKC3 but I haven't played 2 and 3 nearly as much as I played the first one.
Everyone seemed to be blown away by DKC when it came out (some gaming magazine gave it a very rare full score) but later everyone realized that, while it was a very good platform game, it was basically an inferior SMW clone.


Yoshi's Island saves automatically after each level so you might have taken breaks. I played that game to death (as with all main-series Mario games before it), but I couldn't get 100 pts on all worlds including the special levels until many years later. I think this is one of the absolute best games for Snes.

Living in Europe means we almost got no RPGs becasue Nintendo of Europe (Germany) wasn't interested in them for some reason. I had to play FFIV, FFVI, Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger on emulators much later. That was also when I discovered the excellent Fire Emblem series, although I didn't understand any Japanese at all back then so I ended up throwing away all my equipment. Haha

Super Metroid, I played this game from start to finish for the first time only about a year ago. I could never get into this game before (earlier I always stoped playing after getting the grappling beam) but now I realize why people think so highly of this game.