With the Super Nintendo Classic Mini now available, Set the Tape‘s Retro gaming guru Matt Lambourne talks us through his top six games from the 21 strong list of classic SNES titles. The remaining titles are some of the finest games, not only of the 16-bit era, but perhaps of all time.
Let’s get straight to it!
6. Super Metroid (1994)
A game so big and complex that it has an entire genre named after it. Super Metroid resurrects classic Nintendo heroine Samus Aran for a brand new adventure on the planet Zebes. Samus is dispatched to rescue an infant Metroid which has been stolen by a band of Space Pirates.
Samus has a range of basic abilities including running, jumping, crouching and 8-way direction fire and will acquire numerous skills and powerups throughout the game. As you progress through it will become apparent that there are many areas of the game world that are not immediately accessible, and will require you to revisit when you have acquired the requisite skillset. This is where the phrase ‘Metroidvania’ was coined, requiring the player to retrace their steps to discover new areas of exploration when your character has appropriately levelled-up, and is a trait shared between Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night just a couple of years later.
Throughout the game you will encounter battles with many of the band of Space Pirates ending in one of gaming’s most dramatic and emotionally charged endings, depending on how quickly you can finish the game. The SNES Classic Mini is a great opportunity to revisit Super Metroid, or perhaps even play it for the first time, as it has become one of the Super Nintendo’s most expensive and sought after games in the second hand market, and treasured amongst Retro Gaming collectors.
Super Metroid will forever be revered as one of the best and most atmospheric games of the 16-bit era and is more than worthy of its place in the top six of our rundown.
5. Super Mario Kart (1992)
Cast your memory back to 1992. The Super Nintendo was riding high, with such classics as A Link to the Past, Super Mario World and Street Fighter II. I doubt many gamers thought what they needed next was a light-hearted racing game with a cast of Nintendo mascots.
Super Mario Kart was the game that nobody was asking for, but we all could not get enough once sampled. Arriving in time for Christmas 1992, Mario Kart was the perfect blend of casual racing action, combined with vehicular warfare in the most gentle and unthreatening of ways. It was perfect for youngsters and mature gamers alike, and people were already so invested in the character lineup and knew who their favourite would be before even trying the game!
It is a simple premise: Nintendo characters racing in Go-Karts on courses that are loosely associated to existing Nintendo games, particularly the Super Mario Bros series. Fuse this with a 2-player split screen mode, and a dedicated battle mode which removes the racing entirely and squares players off in a comedic deathmatch, and you’re onto a golden formula for a classic game!
Throughout both modes you collect powerups by driving over ‘?’ tiles on the track and you are randomly assigned a weapon. These themselves have become iconic over the years, from the mischievous banana peel, the somewhat overpowered lightning bolt that shrinks all other racers on the course, and the dreaded red-homing turtle shell.
The legitimacy of the racing element suffers slightly due to the now renowned rubber banding affect, in which the game allows the CPU controlled racers to maintain the pace with the leading pack no matter how well you race, but it hardly detracts from the immense fun-factor that Super Mario Kart produces. One of the best racing games ever, the starting point of one of the most loved game series in history and an exceptional 2-player experience in your SNES Mini lineup.
4. Secret of Mana (1993)
Never has a cover art for a game shown so little, but said so much. Secret of Mana attained almost mythical status in the early 90’s, particularly in the PAL region where such games were rarely popular or bestsellers. A game loved by hardened fans of the genre but took those first steps in smashing the inaccessibility of the J-RPG, that Final Fantasy VII eventually took full advantage of.
To fully understand Secret of Mana‘s place in SNES history, we must understand how it came to be, and its story is one of the most poignant in all of gaming. The game was originally intended to be a launch title for Nintendo’s ill-fated CD-ROM add-on, which eventually resulted in Sony going solo and launching the PlayStation on their own. The game’s code was written by legendary programmer Nasir Gebelli, an Iranian coder who moved to the United States as a teenager and became a god in the Apple II gaming scene.
After the early 80’s game crash, Nasir disconnected from the industry for several years before finding himself at SquareSoft in its embryonic stages. Square was struggling and had lost its programming team due to fear of closure. Nasir was brought in to finish a little known project which was believed to be Square’s last role of the dice and they had little money to pay him. As such, Nasir took a royalties deal over direct payment and single-handed coded the original Final Fantasy for NES. It was a surprise superhit, as were its two NES based sequels, also coded by Nasir.
Nasir went on blackout for a few years after, having worked hard to establish a foothold for Square, but returned to work on the Secret of Mana project, originally conceived for CD-ROM. With the game partially complete, it had to be massively downsized and redesigned for a cartridge format, another massive challenge that Nasir was able to complete for Square.
So now to the game. You control one of three heroes (or all 3 if you are Multitapped, or just the two on SNES Classic Mini) who are set on preventing an evil empire from conquering the world using their flying super fortress and draining the world of Mana, its natural energy source that keeps the planet alive.
The game is action-orientated, much akin to A Link to the Past, rather than a traditional Square RPG, something which again allowed it to be more palatable for Western audiences at a time whereby few J-RPGS were even being released into the PAL market. Just remember that with all of the development issues experienced on the development of Secret of Mana, it was a large contributing factor in seeing Square move away from Nintendo and favour a CD based console, eventually concentrating their new games exclusively to PlayStation, largely changing the history of gaming forever, with Nasir Gebelli retiring from the video game industry on his royalties earned from his 4 SquareSoft masterpiece RPGs, never to be heard from again.
With beautiful story-telling, satisfying real-time combat, a soundtrack for the ages and an art style that will live long in the memory, Secret of Mana is the definitive Super Nintendo action-RPG and would be my personal recommendation for the first RPG on the SNES Mini that you should dedicate your time to. It’s very grindy, but very much worth your while.
An epic title in every single sense.
3. Earthbound (1995)
Another classic RPG that arrived too late into the SNES lifecycle for many of its original adopters to have played, nor was it ever released in the PAL region. Known as MOTHER 2 in Japan, Earthbound begins with you as Ness, a young boy who finds a Meteorite that has bought an evil alien to Earth. You are tasked with assembling a band of children who must collect melodies which are the only hope of defeating the alien.
It sounds whacky, and that’s because it is. Earthbound is a game that had almost no chance of success in the West, it was marketed in bizarre fashion and even its visuals looked barely 16-bit, so it was a hard sell to anyone casting their eyes on it in magazines of the age. It sold incredibly poorly in the US and only modestly better in Japan, making it one of the harder to come across titles in the SNES library as so few were produced, resulting in the US version being incredibly expensive to obtain.
But revisionist history has been kind. Players looking deep into the SNES back catalogue discovered it, championed it and now it is widely regarded as one of the SNES’s very best and most unusual games. It’s definitely not a game made to appeal to the masses, and that is what makes it so special, it’s a true labour of love.
Once you overcome the basic visuals and realise they are a style choice rather than a limitation, and you embrace the game for it all of its quirks, you begin to unravel the hidden gem within. Given that this will be a first time play-through for many gamers in Europe, and even in the States due to its scarcity, Earthbound is almost a brand new game amongst a tried and tested familiar line-up of games and as such deserve its high placing on our rundown.
Be prepared for one of the most goofy, but ultimately emotional gaming experiences of your 16-bit life.
2. Super Castlevania IV (1991)
The greatest horror-themed game series, ever.
The greatest 16-bit soundtrack, ever.
The best Castlevania game, ever.
Yeah, I said it. I know I’ve just scorned all the Symphony of the Night fans out there, and that’s OK, I love it too. But Super Castlevania IV is really where it’s at, and here is why.
Konami had longed established Castlevania as one of gaming’s most treasured and genre-pushing game series. From its roots on the NES and MSX home computer, its venture onto the Gameboy, it was only right that the Super Nintendo would receive a Castlevania that was worthy of its new powerhouse console, and my word did Konami deliver!
Super Castlevania IV is actually a remake of the original NES Castlevania, brought up to standard for the 16-bit generation, with a wild stroke of paint and a triumphant gothic soundtrack that has never been bettered, it provided some of the finest steps into 16-bit gaming, with the system’s first few steps.
Level design remains faithful to the classic games, and you’ll still be whipping candles for hearts to power your special weapons, and smashing walls in hope of finding hidden turkey for your health points (yeah, very healthy!), so whilst being familiar it is oh so fresh. But boss battles on are a grander scale, with a cacophony of atmospheric ambience and hard-hitting soundtrack that is one of the most unique in all of gaming.
It has some very new features that are unique to Super Castlevania IV, including the ability for our hero, Simon, to whip in any direction and he can even ‘loose whip‘ in a spinning effect. It might not sound like much, but the ability to whip multi-directionally, rather than just forward, makes this game much more beginner friendly than a traditional Castlevania game, and might just be the difference in you getting so many levels in before calling it a day, or staying the course and finishing the fight with the dreaded Dracula himself.
For me, Super Castlevania IV is the first game that I will play through in full when my Super Nintendo Mini arrives and I will be sure to complete it. It is a perfect example of how to take a classic premise and update it for a modern setting. The mode 7 touches, such as the spinning room stage, just make the game feel so much more advanced as it taps into all the tricks available to the new technology in the SNES. It is a perfect showcase for the console and the absolute best of the linear style of Castlevania games.
The fanboys were still call Symphony of the Night the best of the lot, and that’s fine, but SNES owners will be right at home in the remake of the game that started it all.
1. Super Mario World (1991)
Imagine looking forward to the impending release of the Super Nintendo back in the early 90’s and then getting your console home and firing up Super Mario World for the first time, truly one of gaming’s finest moments for any old-school gamer.
Extracting Mario out of his normal comfort zone of the Mushroom Kingdom and leaving him to fend for himself in Dinosaur Land, you must use every trick in the book (as well as a few new ones) to defeat Bowser in one gaming’s greatest adventures. The game is immediately accessible to anyone who has played a classic Mario game but provides plenty of new things to learn, such as the new Flying-Feather powerup which allows Mario to take to the skies for the first time, something that you will find yourself doing all too often when first getting hold of the game.
You’ll also be quickly introduced to Yoshi, your new Green Dinosaur companion who has a penchant for eating everything in sight, but luckily it is to your advantage. The stages are immensely colorful and varied and a joy to race along at high speed, forcing you to use every ounce of your platforming skill to negotiate. Then you have the task of finding and completing all 96 stages on top of defeating Bowser, so it provides a huge amount of replay value as you attempt to unlock all of the blocks and alternative routes through stages.
It truly is a gaming masterpiece and, in the eyes of this reviewer, only second to Mario 64 as the greatest platforming game of all-time. I’m sure plenty will disagree and say Super Mario World is the finest example of a pure platformer ever made, and I have no quarrel with that.
It’s gaming simplicity that makes this so special. It’s imaginative, incredible fun and hugely heartwarming to play. And due to its 16-bit visuals, it will never age… Super Mario World is 100% as playable today as it was in 1991, and always will be.
We hope you have enjoyed our round-up of the SNES Classic Mini games. Perhaps you have an alternative view on the best games here, what would have made your number 1? We’d love to know via the comments below, or hit us up on Twitter @SetTheTape #StayRetro !