The Video Games that Impacted my Life, Part 2: SNES - Mario, Donkey Kong, Lots of Kirby and a Few Others

This is part 2 in my series of posts where I, a visually impaired female gamer, talk about the video games that played an important part in my life. If you haven't read part 1, I advise you do and get the whole context:

• The Video Games that Impacted my Life, Part 1: NES - Mario, Mickey and Kirby

This time, I'll talk about my second game console. The Super NES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System), also known as Super Nintendo or SNES, which I got by the end of 1997, when I was 9 years old.

Image source: By Evan-Amos [CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons

This console stayed with me until some point in 2002, when I decided to sell all my video games and gather funds to buy a Playstation 2. By that point, the SNES had begun showing its age and having trouble running games. It served me very well, though, and provided me many fond memories, which I write about below.

Super Mario World

The game that came with the console was Super Mario World, where besides his power-ups, Mario could also ride on Yoshi's back. Unlike Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES, the game saved its progress, and the fact that it was easier to deal with enemies by having Yoshi eat them made it a bit easier for me to play. And I even made sure to test whether collecting 100 lives would crash the game like in Mario 3 (which I mentioned on the NES post). And it didn't!

My mother and I didn't manage to beat this game, either, but two of my friends from school helped years later and beat it for us XD. It was a good game, and provided many hours of fun, too. Although it doesn't give me as much nostalgia as Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES.

Video

Here's a link to a video I found on YouTube showing a bit of the gameplay. Video by YouTube user SNESguide1.

Super Mario Kart

My second SNES game was Super Mario Kart, the kart race game where the Mario series' characters can use power-ups and traps to hinder the other competing characters' progress.

My low vision had a lot of trouble with this game. In general, I had to train for hours in time trial mode to memorize the tracks until I got the hang of the levels to be able to beat them in GP mode in an acceptable time. Some of the tracks were especially hard for me to see, and I never managed to clear them no matter what.

Once, in time trial mode, I had the crazy idea of doing the laps backwards. The Lakitu warning me that I was going in the wrong direction kept getting in the way and making it harder for me to see where I was going, and it took me a long time to do the five laps... in the end, the backward laps still counted, though the time it took to finish was really terrible :P .

I enjoyed playing against another human player (family and friends) on the tracks I had managed to get the hang of, or play against the computer in GP mode but also accompanied by another human player. Sometimes, either the traps or my faulty vision would screw me during the GP races, and as this mode didn't allow retrying the stage, I would be totally disoriented and lose the race. As nice as it was to win first place, I was happy as long as either of us human players managed to reach the podium.

Video

Here is a gameplay video, also by SNESguide1.

Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3

I had two Donkey Kong games for the SNES. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest, and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble. Never managed to beat either of them, but they were fun too. The music in both was cool, and the instruments and sound effects were quite unique. I loved the "Simon"-esque minigames in Donkey Kong Country 3, too bad that they couldn't be replayed once cleared...

Videos

Here is a gameplay video of Donkey Kong Country 2, and one for Donkey Kong Country 3, both by SNESguide1.

Kirby Super Star

In April of 1998, I got the game Kirby Super Star. It had some additions I liked a lot. Some of my favorites were the addition of a helper character which could be controlled either by the computer or by player 2, the fact that each ability had various different moves by performing button press combos with the arrows and the Y button, and the fact that pressing L or R caused Kirby to guard and take less damage.

Kirby Super Star contained eight games, of which two were minigames and two had to be unlocked by beating the others. I liked all of them, but:

• I didn't like the third stage in Gourmet Race too much, because I had trouble seeing the spikes at the beginning of the stage. Aside from that, I only wish Gourmet Race had a two-player mode to compete against a human player (with the screen split in two horizontally), and a couple more stages...
• The Great Cave Offensive was a bit long and tiring. It took a lot of time and many tries until we found all the hidden treasures.
• Revenge of Meta Knight was cool, and all the dialogue from Meta Knight's crew reporting how Kirby was advancing through their defenses were a nice touch. I only dreaded the time limits and the scrolling screens...
• Milky Way Wishes was one of my favorites. Rather than swallowing enemies to get their abilities, Kirby had to find the abilities spread throughout the planets, then could switch to any of them any time (similar to Mega Man. I still didn't know the Mega Man games at the time, though it was exactly this similarity that would get me hooked into Mega Man later on the Playstation, but this is a topic for the next post!).

I could play Kirby Super Star relatively well on my own as player 1, but I preferred controlling the helper as player 2 and leaving Kirby to someone else (family or friends). At first, I kept losing track of my helper character's position, but thankfully, whenever it got left behind and disappeared from the edge of the screen, it assumed the form of a star and flew over to Kirby's location, or I could force it to do this by pressing A when I was lost. Eventually, I got the hang of keeping up with player 1 and having my character onscreen most of the time.

We played and replayed this game a lot, and were able to do around 97% of it several times. For 100% it required beating The Arena - a boss rush mode that unlocked after clearing everything else - which was too hard for my mother and me (but a friend cleared it and put the game at 100% once).

Mechanics from this game (like 2-player co-op and different attacks through button press combinations) disappeared and reappeared in later Kirby games, but I didn't enjoy those games as much as Super Star. I also tried Kirby Super Star Ultra - the remake for Nintendo DS - years later, but wasn't able to enjoy it as much, either, mostly because my vision had worsened, the DS screen is small, and I only had one DS and couldn't be player 2. So, the SNES version of Kirby Super Star remains my favorite Kirby game.

In 2000, in fifth grade, I began learning basic English at school (my native language is Brazilian Portuguese). My vocabulary was too limited and, whenever I needed to carry out tasks like write X number of words in English, most of the words I wrote were either basic animals or objects (cat, dog, book, table), and Kirby abilities! (fire, ice, stone...) I'd never have imagined I'd become able to write long texts in English like this post!

Video

Here's a gameplay video, by user Japancommercials4U2.

Kirby's Avalanche

The second Kirby game I had on SNES, which is actually a Puyo Puyo game with Kirby characters and music. It consisted of guiding falling colored balls (called Puyo) and matching four of the same color. Chaining matches would send nuisance pieces to the opponent's field to hinder their game.

I had a lot of fun with this game too, mostly in two-player mode. I played for numerous hours against my mother, my friends from school, my cousins, and whoever else decided to visit us and agreed to play it.

Video

Here's a gameplay video, also by SNESguide1.

Kirby's Dream Land 3

Either in 1999 or 2000 (don't remember exactly), I got my third Kirby game on SNES. Despite having been released after Kirby Super Star, a lot of mechanics from the previous game were gone, and to me it felt like a downgrade. The helper that could be controlled either by the computer or player 2 remained, in the form of a blue blob character named Gooey, but the guard function and the button press combos for performing different moves were gone. Rather, Kirby could ride on the back of his animal friends, and different moves would come out depending on which animal he was with. While I liked Kirby's animal friends, I missed the button combos for different moves and the guard function.

Something unforgettable about this game was how dumb Gooey's A.I. was. Gooey mimicked all of Kirby's movements, except one. Unlike in Kirby Super Star where the helper could have different abilities, Gooey would never ever swallow enemies to gain their abilities when controlled by the CPU. Sometimes the A.I. would only make things worse rather than help player 1. It was frustrating when Kirby lost his ability and Gooey ate the ability star before Kirby could reach it, then spat the star out and threw the ability away. Because of these and other annoying quirks, one of my friends and I would devise a lot of ways (fan fiction style) to poke fun at Gooey and his dumbness.

Video

Here's a gameplay video, by user Japancommercials4U2.

Dragon Ball Z: Super Butouden 2 and 3

In 1999, I began liking Dragon Ball. My first contact with the series wasn't even through the anime, but through the SNES game Dragon Ball Z: Super Butouden 2, which I learned about at a friend's house. I ended up buying the game for myself as well, and found out I could do reasonably well at fighting games. I would practice a lot in hopes of beating my friend, but no matter how hard I tried, I wasn't able to beat him. How frustrating. Kind of like a light version of Vegeta's rivalry with Goku. (my favorite character was Gohan, though :P )

This game had a story mode, which covered the Cell battle and one of the movies. Only once, I managed to trigger an event where Broly appeared and I fought him, after which I got a different ending. Even today I have no idea how I triggered that event. I tried again many times, picked different dialogue choices during story mode, lost some battles to try to enact the events from the anime, but I never saw that event with Broly ever again. The only way I was able to see Broly again was through the code to unlock him and Goku before the title screen (Up, X, Down, B, L, Y, R, A).

Here's a video showing the story mode, by Luis Ortiz.

Later I got the Butouden 3 game as well, and thought it was strange that there didn't seem to be a story mode like the previous one. From the sounds at the sound test, I had thought there was a hidden story mode somewhere, maybe by clearing the tournament with specific characters (since the Buu saga in the anime started with the tournament), but clearing the tournament did nothing. So, there was less fun to be had, and the only new thing in this game was the different roster of fighters. Ah well...

Here's a video showing the characters, by user Raygrow.

Doraemon: Nobita to Yousei no Kuni

Doraemon (the character) is a blue and earless robotic cat that came from the 22nd century to help a hopeless boy named Nobita, who would become the great great grandfather of Doraemon's owner in the 22nd century.

Doraemon is probably the most famous manga and anime franchise in Japan. A Brazilian dub of the anime had aired years ago on the now extinct Rede Manchete channel, but I don't remember any of it, as I had been too little at the time. I only got into really watching the Doraemon anime after 1996, when my mother begun renting VCR anime tapes from a rental shop that specialized in Japanese TV shows. Everything was in Japanese and had no subtitles, and this was when I started picking up the basics of the language.

I eventually became a huge Doraemon fan, and was both happy and surprised when my mother managed to find a Doraemon game for the SNES. Doraemon: Nobita to Yousei no Kuni (Nobita and the Country of Fairies).

The game has some simple RPG-style talking to people in town to open up the stages, and then it becomes a platformer during the stages. We unfortunately didn't manage to clear this game, either.

Here is a gameplay video by YouTube user TGApuleius.

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And this concludes the post about my SNES. Actually, I had played a few more SNES games, but they didn't cause much of an impact on me, and I won't talk about them (this post is already long as it is :P ). Next post will be about the Playstation, and will probably be quite long too.