Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is an SNES-exclusive sequel to Ghouls 'n Ghosts, itself a sequel to Ghosts 'n Goblins . Like its predecessors, its claim to fame (or infamy) is being ridiculously hard. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts follows the formula of Ghosts 'n Goblins to a tee. You control a knight named Arthur who must rescue Princess Guinevere by battling endless hordes of monsters and demons: Zombies, Ghosts, Weredogs, Bats, Red Arremers, and even Mimics (the D&D monster that disguises itself as a treasure chest). He picks up various weapons along the way but can only hold one at a time. Some of them (especially the torch) are worse than the throwing spears he begins with. Three new weapons are the crossbow, scythe, and tri-blade. The crossbow is good because it shoots two arrows at once, at about 45 and 30 degree angles upward. I avoid the scythe because Arthur can throw only one at a time and the ability to arc it downward by holding ↓ does not compensate for this. The ...

It's been three decades since Final Fantasy II arrived on the Super NES. What we didn't know at the time was that we were getting a slimmed-down version of the Japanese Final Fantasy IV. It's a tragedy that II and III got skipped here, but the reason was valid at the time. Final Fantasy didn't make it to the U.S. until 1990, three years after its Japanese release. A complete prototype translation of II was made for the NES, but Square Soft decided a Super Nintendo sequel in 1991 made more financial sense. Every major NES hit was getting a Super sequel at that time. Had II been released here, it probably would've been slammed for looking dated and being hard-as-nails. No one in America was disappointed when we instead got Final Fantasy IV (disguised as II) on Super Nintendo in 1991! One of the game's strengths is the wide cast of rotating characters. Instead of rolling up a custom party at the beginning à la Dungeons & Dragons, you experience all the classes...

Thirty years ago this month Nintendo released Super Tennis. The word "super" indicates nothing more than that it's a Super NES game, the replacement for the original Tennis on the NES. It blows that dinosaur out of the water. Super Tennis has three main draws: realistic tennis simulation, a Circuit mode, and gameplay options. The game achieves a surprisingly intricate level of tennis simulation by mapping each of the four main buttons to a different type of stroke, depending whether you're near or far from the net. When your player is near the base line (the back boundary of the court), A is slice (slow with low bounce), B is flat (normal), X is top spin (fast with high bounce), and Y is lob (slow with high bounce). When you're near the net, A is light volley, B is strong volley, and X and Y are still top spin and lob, respectively. However, if you hit the ball with A or B before it bounces, you instead do a drop shot, which is a light hit that gets the ball just...

Thirty years ago Final Fight came out on the Super Nintendo. The game itself is older, being a port of a 1989 arcade hit. Although originally developed by Capcom as a sequel to Street Fighter, the name was changed since it's a "beat-'em-up," whereas Street Fighter was a fighting game (player v. player). I've never played the arcade version, but I played one of the sequels on the SNES. It couldn't have been the original, which is one-player only. This is by far the game's biggest flaw. Beat-'em-ups aren't very fun by yourself; the whole point is to team up with a friend to take down all the enemies or die trying. Lack of a two-player option on console games was a common problem back then: Double Dragon  was also one-player on NES. Final Fight's biggest draw, I suppose, is you can choose from two characters, a huge lumberjack-type named Haggar, or a slimmer guy named Cody. Each has a slightly different move set. The arcade game had a third charac...

I consider the "golden age" of NES games to have been inaugurated at the end of 1986 with top-notch third-party titles like Gradius and Castlevania . But it didn't fully emerge until Nintendo put out a trio of its own stellar games in the summer of 1987: Kid Icarus, Metroid , and The Legend of Zelda . If Kid Icarus doesn't seem great, it's only because it lives in its sisters' shadows. Except for Super Mario Bros. , none of the NES's earliest games were especially great or intricate. Duck Hunt was probably the second best, and it's extremely basic. But that changed with Kid Icarus. Like Super Mario Bros. before it, here was a platformer with multiple worlds. Although it had less than half as many stages as that game (thirteen compared to 32), they were longer and introduced a novel element: vertical scrolling. The game lacked the ability to scroll vertically and horizontally at once, so moving off-screen on vertical levels causes you to appear on the ...