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kpop-dungeon-dark · 2 years

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REQUEST # 10 (Mafia!Sehun x Reader)

•TRIGGER WARNING•

Disclaimer: This piece is purely a work of fiction and does not represent Oh Sehun in any way nor do I condone or encourage these actions in real life. This is nothing but mere fiction and fantasy. Both characters are of age. Contains dark themes, browse at your own risk.

Request: "Mayy you please please please write a Sehun/Lay/Chanyeol/Kai (or really just any member, cuz in such a whore for Exo🥵🥵) of a Virgin, with mutual masturbation, praise kink and cumplay??💘💘 I don’t really have too many specifics since I know it’ll be amazing anyway so just go crazy and write what you want!! It can be non con, dub con, or whatever you feel like doing!!❤️☺️☺️💖💖💗💗💓💓"

Warning(s): Dubcon, corruption kink, age gap, praise kink, breath play, power play, cum play, degradation, humiliation, choking, dumfication, mutual masturbation, breeding kink, toy riding, spanking praise kink.

Sehun wasn't really planning on what this had escalated into when he'd exited his room to come face-to-face with Y/n who was exiting hers. The girl was his boss, Mafioso Kim Junmyeon's bratty babysister who had just graduated highschool and was back to live with them for a while in the mansion located in the premises of the headquarters of the Mafia group, EXO.

He couldn't pinpoint just when he'd stepped in her direction before restraining the brat in his crushing hold before dragging her back inside his room roughly.

Maybe it was how one of her fluffy pink socks pooled around an ankle, or how her soft and luscious hair decorated her pretty face, or how the caterpillar stuffie dangled from her grip, it could also be the oversized football jersey she wore through which you could only make the outlines of her curves and bumps. Or maybe it was the bratty scowl that had made it's way on her face whilst a huff left her, pretty eyes rolling at the sight of him since she considered and treated all the men below her brother as mere 'pet dogs', out of which Sehun was apparently the worst because he was the youngest and fairly new.

"What- what are you-" Y/n's breaths were heavy as she glared up at him from her position against Sehun's bedroom door whilst he hurriedly did the topmost latch, other hand firmly holding her in place by her throat. "S- Stop! You pet dog! How dare you!" The insults just made the adrenaline pump even harder through his veins.

It was no news that the girl needed to be put in her place. And Sehun was more than happy to volunteer.

"Tsk." Clicking his tongue in distaste, the man ripped her underwear off with ease, tackling her against the door when she tried to struggle. He didn't hit the gym for hours everyday for nothing. "You talk too much" Y/n's eyes widened when he shoved her moist underwear in her mouth, plugging her mouth to muffle and restrict any and all sounds.

"Isn't that all better now?" Gathering both her hands that were weakly hitting his hard arms in one of his, the male pinned them above her head against the door, smirking down at the sight. "Mmm~" admiring his handiwork, he pushed the rather large caterpillar stuffie that she'd dropped away from them with a slight kick. "Aren't you all pretty when that filthy mouth of yours isn't running off?" His free hand felt up her pretty face, stroking her cheeks and lips before travelling down to her neck, his dick getting hard at how perfectly it fit his grip.

Y/n felt overpowered and embarrassed. After all that she had done and said to the men below Junmyeon, here she was, trapped under one of them all helpless and pathetic with her underwear stuffed in her mouth as she could do nothing but let him grope her all over. She could only stand there while he squeezed her boobs, biting at the clothed nipples while praising her for being so soft before creeping his hand under her shirt and feeling her soft stomach.

"Hmmm… should I fuck it full of my babies? Make you all nice and round all for me, huh baby?" The way her eyes widened as she shook her head vigorously made him cackle almost. He'd never felt so powerful before. "Why, you don't like it?" Y/n was scowling again as she shook her head, inaudibly trying to threaten him again.

"Really, now?" Raising a perfectly shaped eyebrow, the older lowered his hand down her stomach and between her legs, causing a shaky exhale to escape her nose. "Your body is telling me otherwise, though" the corners of his lips curled into a nasty smirk when he toyed with her pussy lips and flesh, her fluids hugging his slender fingers with ease. "I mean, isn't that why pathetic brats like you act out in the first place?" He was relentless with his words. "So they can be fucked into their little places at their owners' feet?"

Y/n's scowl had softened now, furrowed eyebrows raising as her eyes tried to close, hips slowly swaying and grinding against Sehun's fingers despite the sheer embarrassment burning her cheeks a bright crimson.

Letting go of her hands, Sehun slowly finger fucked her with his occupied hand, shoving and teasing her virgin entrance as his free hand gripped her shirt and swiftly pulled it up and over her head, causing the girl to gasp and try to cover her breasts.

"Hands above your head!" The man scolded, beating her to it and spanking one of her breasts in a punishing manner using the back of his hand. "Don't make me repeat myself" Y/n pouted as she did as she was told, sweat breaking out on her temples when his hand violated her virgin walls. "Isn't that so much better now?" Pinching her nipples, Sehun bit and sucked at them.

The girl involuntarily moaned, tipping her head back as her stomach filled with knots, toes curling and pussy clenching in defense, hips starting to fuck her pussy against his finger harder to chase her relief only to be left disappointed when he removed the finger with a plop.

"Nnnnnghhhh!" She whined in protest, pussy trying to reach for his fingers again as she arched her back.

The man chuckled. "More? Does this dirty little baby want more?" Y/n desperately nodded, breathing heavily against the makeshift underwear gag. "Want me to fuck you dumb with my cock? Make you feel real good?" Letting out muffled whines, the girl tried to say 'yes' and nodded even faster, heart thumping against her ribcage.

"Hmmm" pulling away, Sehun crossed his arms over his chest and shrugged. "But how do I know you'll be any good at it? What if you can't make me feel good?" Shaking her head in desperation, Y/n pulled the gag out herself.

"N- No! No! I will be! Please! Please~!" Even though she was humiliated and embarrassed because she was standing stark naked and all fucked out in front of her brother's mere worker, the burn in her pussy and stomach was too unbearable. "Please! I'll try my best!" Even though she'd never even done it before, the girl said whatever that would get him to do what he was doing again.

"Hmmm" grabbing the gag from her hand, Sehun shoved it back in her mouth past her drool covered lips, deciding he liked her best without her her demanding mouth. "But I need a demo now, don't I? To see if you're worthy of my cock?" A smirk made it's way on his face as he nodded towards the discarded stuffie.

"Why don't you fuck yourself on Mr. Locks like you would on me and I'll see if you deserve more pleasure just yet?" When her eyebrows furrowed in confusion, the male rolled his eyes and instructed her to get on the bed with the toy beneath her.

"Now ride it" Y/n's cheeks burnt an even darker shade of red as her eyes widened at the order, head lowering in embarrasment when she realised just what kind of a position she really was in. "Come on, I don't have all day!" Her legs were spread apart with Mr. Locks between them as she sat on top of him, pussy resting against his soft fur. "It's this or nothing. Because I don't fuck unworthy little sluts who won't even be worth the fuck."

Just when Sehun thought Y/n was going to chicken out because he wasn't a stranger to her pride, the girl looked up with lust clouded eyes, placing her palms flat against the mattress to position herself better before she slowly started to rock her hips, shuddering in pleasure.

The man bit his lip, surprised but pleased as his hand slowly crept to his bulge. Fuck. He didn't expect her to actually obey since she acted so mighty and innocent in front of everyone all the time. Sehun had only said that so she would either beg him to help or try to defy him so he could manhandle her into taking him deep and hard.

"Fuck…" The man whispered to himself, watching the sight in front him as he neared the girl, continuing to rub himself as his other hand undid his fly and pushed his boxers out of the way, loving how her innocent eyes wandered to his cock and widened at the sight, hips moving even faster now as sweat dripped down her forehead.

"Good girl… such a good girl…" Sehun praised the obedience, starting to jerk himself off as his other hand removed her gag, Y/n taking him by surprise when she leaned forward and kissed his tip in a hazy frustration, unable to form coherent or rational thoughts anymore. "Fuck, Y/n…" Sehun cursed at the gesture, the warm and wet kiss making his insides burn. "Look what you do to me" one hand ran up and down his hard and wet shaft while the other one reached for her throat, slightly squeezing it to restrict her breathing.

"T- Thank you… thank you… f- feels so good…" The girl cried out, shaking as she felt herself getting close, feeling tiny and powerless. "S- So small… feel so small" she whispered, looking up at him with dilated pupils when he allowed her to breathe, sucking in shaky breaths.

The sight and words made Sehun's head spin. "Aren't you?" He growled almost, cursing when she tried to help and since he was already jerking himself off, started to rub the base of his balls which was his sensitive spot. "Look at yourself, naked and submissive under me, getting fucked by a toy because I said so… all to convince me that you're good enough for my cock. Tsk. So desperate and disgusting" he snickered, restricting her air once again. "Cum. Be a good toy and cum for me~" Y/n cried out and arched her back as her thighs started to shake uncontrollably, a violent orgasm ripping through her as she moaned and thanked him the best she could, rubbing herself against the caterpillar stuffie senseless.

"Fuck… such a good girl… so obedient and pretty… fuck~" Sehun started cumming harder than ever, letting go of her throat as her lips were starting to turn purple. "So fucking good" aiming for her face and mouth, he emptied his load all over her, slapping her ass repeatedly as he went, breaths heavy.

"Look at you" the man spoke once he'd calmed down a bit, squeezing and pinching her tits before cupping her face which was covered in his cum, droplets of it dripping down her chin and down her neck. "Such a pretty little baby I've here…" Sehun praised, admiring his handiwork before spreading the streaks of his load all over her face, scooping some and feeding it to her as the girl struggled to catch her breath, looking up at him submissively while sucking on his fingers, subconsciously swirling her tongue around them.

"Th- thank yoo~" Y/n whimpered, biting her lip when he unplugged her mouth, reaching for her pussy now while still rubbing his cum in her face, his thumb pushing the tiny droplets in her nose and making her cough them out.

"Good. That's how you should be; on your knees and underneath me, thanking me for everything I give you by kissing my feet." Putting his fingers that were coated in her cum Sehun sucked at them, humming and nodding. "Tastes like my cum dump." Before he stepped away and pulled his shirt over his head, revealing his sculpted body heavily covered in tattoos.

"What?" Y/n felt dumb when he looked up at her while kicking his shoes off and getting rid of his clothes. The girl blushed and dumbly bit her lip, still in the same position as she didn't know what to do. Sehun shook his head upon her silent shrug and stood back up to his full stature.

"Well, get on your back and spread those pretty legs. You did good. I've decided to keep you" still unsure whether it was her just hormones or if she was actually liked Sehun treating her so small and dumb, Y/n complied and excitedly spread her legs, her mouth watering at the sight of his body that was much bigger than hers.

The older smirked as he approached her, pushing the toy off his bed before crawling on top of the younger. "Want me to fuck this virgin little pussy dirty and full of my cum?"

"Yes, please~" the girl admitted, placing her hands above her head again.

Rational thoughts could come later. Right now, this hurt and burnt too good.

Girl I agree. Nobody does it like the exos 🤧🥵🥺

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daleisgreat · 4 years

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35 Years of NES - Flashback Special!

It took me 12 minutes to set up this shot of what encapsulates my NES fandom! Please sit down and listen for awhile as I recount my life and times as a NES kid! This October in a couple months will mark the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America so that means it is time for another flashback special where I recount my personal history with the NES. This is the 11th platform that has gotten the flashback special treatment from me in the little over a year I have been doing them and if you want to get caught up with the rest make sure to check out the links at the bottom of this entry! Furthermore, if you are looking for a more traditional anniversary piece chronologically highlighting the history of the system and its top games I have you covered there too. At the bottom of this article I have embedded old podcasts of mine I recently uploaded to YouTube from my personal archives where we highlight the system as a whole on its 25th anniversary ten years ago. I additionally have podcasts from my history of RPG and comic book videogame series highlighting the NES entries from those genres that are all featured at the bottom of this article to keep that NES anniversary train rolling for the rest of the year! Being Introduced to the Power

I will never forget the first impression the NES made on me because it was the first time I ever witnessed and played a videogame! It was the Christmas shopping season of 1988 and I just got home from Kindergarten class to see my older sister playing some electronic contraption that was absolutely foreign to me. My eyes soon gazed upon the TV where a crudely pixelated man in red overalls was running and jumping across the screen to the catchiest of background music jingles that will always stick with me. She soon enough passed along the NES’s vintage rectangular controller to me and within minutes I was hooked as I sunk my teeth into my first videogame, Super Mario Bros.. Our family got the ‘Power Set’ which had the 3-in-1 cart featuring Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet along with the Power Pad and Zapper accessories. I was too little to figure out how to operate the Power Pad at the time and rarely played World Class Track Meet, but the family did get a decent amount of playtime in Duck Hunt and groveled over how we could never shoot that damn dog! We always kept coming back to Super Mario Bros though. I had no idea what I was doing as a five-year-old at that time, but I knew I had to give it my all to get Mario to jump to the top (and over???) of the flagpole at the end of most levels. Eventually I stumbled my way accidentally jumping into hidden blocks that contained SECRETS like extra lives, bonus coin blocks and vines that lead to bonus coin rooms and warp zones! Much like today how I have to explore every nook and cranny in the latest open world sandbox game, Super Mario Bros. planted the seeds for that gaming mindset in me to jump around and explore everything to find whatever secrets Nintendo had in store for good ‘ol Mario.

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The minus world was the ultimate secret in videogames for so many years that it was the #1 secret of the top 100 secrets in the 100th issue of Nintendo Power. It took me about a couple years of trying over and over and taking advantage of all the warp zones and extra live secrets I could, but the original Super Mario Bros. was the first game I ever finished. When I thought I discovered all the secrets in the original Super Mario Bros. a friend or cousin would power it on and showed me all new secrets and tips that blew me away. First it was getting to time a jump just right on a koopa troopa coming down the block stairs so Mario would repeatedly jump on them to get near-infinite lives. Then they showed me the hidden warp zones….and then there was the day after much repeated attempts that my cousin showed me the much talked about ‘minus world’ in the game that perplexed me so much that I lambasted him with questions about said level’s eye-opening odd level design. ‘Why did the level never end? Why is this magical force sucking Mario through the bricks, cousin….IS MARIO A GHOST!?!?’ That tripped me out as a Kindergartner, but not as much as the most sinister-looking baddie in the game, the dastardly Hammer Bros!!!! No I am not talking about the adorably-huggable hammer bros. from Super Mario Bros. 3, I am talking about the spiky-squiggly-shaped monsters that chucked super-sharp-metal-thingies at Mario!!! The original Hammer Bros. petrified five-year-old Dale!!! Just see for yourself below…

Encountering the Hammer Bros. for the first time in a night level only amplified the terror they unleashed! I was terrified of them, but what was especially terrifying was how Nintendo gave them a paint of cuteness by their look in Super Mario Bros. 3 as you can see above on their right. You can almost look walk right up and give them a hug! Bring back the sinister OG hammer bro Nintendo! As much as I loved the original Super Mario Bros., I never got to put a lot of playtime into its sequels. I think they were always rented out at the local video store. I do recall watching my cousin finishing Super Mario Bros. 2 and watching in awe the quality of the ending ‘dream’ cinematic that stirs controversies to this day! I never played much original NES Super Mario Bros. 3 either until I got Super Mario All-Stars where I later played a ton of both of those games, but that is a story for another day. The Joy of Renting and Garage Sale-ing

Speaking of renting though, it was how I played almost all my NES games for the first couple years our family had the NES. I was too young to realize games could be purchased at the store and thought games could only be rented at the video store….at least that is what I think my mom caused me to believe anyways. Looking back I loved those early NES years perusing the local video store and only going by misleading box art on what to rent. There are four specific renting memories stood out from those years around the end of the 1980s. One is playing a ton of the first CastleVania and being perplexed at why the heart pickups did not restore health, second is perishing repeatedly in the original Mega Man right from the start which got me to swore off the franchise for a few decades (more on that later). Another time I freaked out at the video store receiving my copy of Tengen’s RBI Baseball and discovering how their black cartridges differed than the standard NES gray carts, but only to have the video clerk assure me they would work on the NES. Finally, my favorite rental memory was getting gleeful goosebumps as a result of the mesmerizing beats of what is my single favorite NES theme, yes I am talking about the ‘Moon Theme’ of Duck Tales. A theme so powerful it still gives me the shivers to this day.

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Behold the single best NES stage music of all time!! Now listen to it for ten hours straight!!!! I mentioned in previous flashback specials how I grew up with divorced parents. I would visit my dad on the weekends and he would usually be a system a generation behind because he was big on garage sales and people were getting rid of their old systems typically when the next system was hitting. So when the NES was the primary system, I would play Atari 2600 at my dad’s on the weekends. Around the time SNES launched in 1991 was when my dad finally got a NES, and he would have another regular NES game or two every several weeks he found at another garage sale. I recall the first four games he got with his NES: Days of Thunder, Gauntlet II, Ikari Warriors and 10-Yard Fight!

My dad bought whatever he thought was a deal at the time of those garage sales, and the quality of games he brought back varied greatly. His garage sale bargain was how I first played classic hits like the original Legend of Zelda and Maniac Mansion. I was seriously into both of those games even though I struggled to make progress in Zelda because all I had was the packed in map to guide me in the pre-Internet and strategy guide days. I made my own dungeon maps in Zelda, and loved trying to figure out the way to get past its increasingly trickier dungeons and puzzles, but eventually got stuck after the third dungeon and could not deduce the pattern in its version of the ‘Lost Woods’ for the life of me. Maniac Mansion was the first adventure game I was exposed to and was instantly hooked, even with the clunky and censored NES port I was resilient in attempting to figure my way around the lighthearted obstacles of the mansion and trying to hide from its alien residents. Reflecting back on my fandom for Maniac Mansion, it got me confident that if I was aware of the PC gaming scene of the late 80s/early 90s instead of the NES scene that I would see myself being head over heels for the countless adventure games from Sierra and Lucas Arts at the time. There were other times however my dad would come back from a garage sale with not-so-desirable titles like XEXYX, Dash Galaxy and Rocket Ranger, but sometimes his picks were a surprise. I somehow got locked into the addictive nature of the stock market game of Wall Street Kid and played far more of that than I had any right to. My dad eventually got the four player adaptor for the NES and the family tried to do the unthinkable one day and dedicate an afternoon to finishing Gauntlet II. We loved that game, but never had time to finish it in a session because the levels just kept never ending and we presumed it had to end by level 100. So one of my favorite NES memories is when the family gathered determined to finish level 100…which we did, but our bravery was for naught when we were all stunned to see that was not the end of the game. I believe we got to around level 130-ish before we eventually threw up our arms and powered off the NES. How the hell were we suppose to know back then that the levels procedurally generated!?!

Gauntlet II and Ikari Warriors were two of the four games that came with the NES my dad purchased at a garage sale and thus we invested countless hours in both, yet both titles we failed at finishing! My dad, brother and I played far too much Ikari Warriors together. I know it is a sloppily designed game with a lot of glitches and other hiccups, but the setting and atmosphere of Ikari Warriors rode the coattails of the infectious Rambo-hype of the 80s. Ikari Warriors on the NES felt like more of a faithful videogame adaptation of that film than the actual Rambo NES games itself. Ikari Warriors was the next best thing by chucking grenades and wreaking havoc with a tank, especially with a second player in co-op! That game burned through lives to the point of where I expected there to be a cheat code to get more lives because it would hang at the game over screen for a good 10 seconds so eventually I mashed buttons until I memorized that ‘A,B,B,A’ unlocked three more lives! I was super proud of being able to figure out a cheat code on my own! The levels in Ikari Warriors went on forever though, and regardless of having near-infinite lives with that code, we would eventually get bored and/or confused at that awkward fourth stage with the bizarre piping the warriors would get hung up on. Over the years the odd gameplay quirks of Ikari Warriors I look back at fondly I came to discover that everyone else detested as one of the worst NES titles, which I feel is a bit much. If my words cannot do it justice, then James Rolfe captured the highs and lows of Ikari Warriors perfectly in an episode of Angry Videogame Nerd I highly recommend giving a watch by clicking or pressing here. Playing with a Different Sort of Power

Over the years I came to find out that the mega popular Nintendo Power magazine was the go-to source for NES fandom of that era. I am an outlier in this case as I was not aware of the magazine until well into the 16-bit era. I chalk this up to never buying games brand new at the time where most new games on Nintendo platforms came bundled with Nintendo Power subscription inserts which I did not become keen to until getting new GameBoy games in 1993. So where was I to get all my latest NES coverage in the late 80s and early 90s before the Internet and then completely oblivious to the videogame magazine market? Through super cheesy, early 90s videogame-themed TV shows! There was not an official Nintendo Power show, but there was an awesome game show on weekday mornings for a couple years in the early 90s called Video Power that showcased kids playing the latest NES games in various challenges. Nickelodeon had a videogame TV show too, which was another game show called Nick Arcade. They had kids answering trivia and competing in various arcade game and virtual reality-esque challenges. The magazine GamePro also endorsed a TV show at the time and it featured more traditional game coverage and I recall it having an over-the-top host showcasing the latest secrets and tips. If you are not familiar with these shows, they are fun to look back on as they capture the goofy ‘extreme kids’ nature that dominated the early 90s. James Rolfe once again does a nice breakdown video of Nick Arcade and Video Power I will embed below or you can click or press here to check it out. These three shows and the latest gossip with classmates and friends were the only ways I got my news about the latest NES games back then.

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Nick Arcade and Video Power are dissected in the above video and those TV game shows were how I was initially glued into the latest NES games as a kid. NES ‘Rights of Passage’ For those that grew up with the NES, I bet you have a good idea where this is going. Anyone that owned the traditional rectangular NES with the flip cover of doom will know that model of the NES was notorious for only powering up games about half the time. Recess-rumors lead us all to believe that blowing into the cartridges made them work better, and while it usually did I still remember my dad buying cleaning kits at the store and insisting using it to clean the games instead of blowing into them…but I like many other NES-kids were super impatient and instead went with the blowing/jiggling the NES-cartridge ever so gently into place….and sometimes wiggling the cartridge up and down several times before firmly locking the cartridge into place and powering on the system. That was the way I convinced myself to get NES games to power on their first try with a 60% success rate! For younger readers here who are doubting me, I am not kidding. This was a thing….seriously! Click or press here for proof where the GameSpot crew of 2005 detail their near identical NES-troubleshooting demonstrations in their excellent video on the NES!

As the header above alludes to, that was one of several ‘rights of passage’ for all NES-kids of the era. The so-bad-its good animated show, Captain N the Game Master likely was part of your Saturday morning cartoon lineup (yes, I have the DVD set, be on the lookout for a review…eventually). Another one was ‘NES-thumb.’ I love Nintendo’s directional-pad, but on the NES longer play sessions with button-mashy-prone games would result in it leaving a scouring imprint on the thumb for hours! I feel safe to say a majority of NES-kids encountered an awful LJN-published game based off one of their personal favorite licensed properties of the 80s. For me it was the atrocious X-Men title, its agonizingly bad Back to the Future game and most of their WWF games. As much as I loved the Ikari Warriors code described above, the most popular code spread across several NES games was the ‘Konami’ code. Ask any then game player 35+ and they likely would be able to subconsciously spout it off to you instantaneously! John Cena turned the code into his best t-shirt design! Calling Nintendo’s long distance-fee heavy hotline for the latest tips from Nintendo’s endorsed gameplay counselors was another thing that got kids to surprise their parents with $100+ phone bills. The last big hurrah for NES-kids was going to see The Wizard at the end of 1989 to see a few precious minutes of Super Mario Bros. 3 gameplay a couple months before its release! I could go on about The Wizard forever, but that was why I covered it here on my blog last week instead so if you want to know all about the Nintendo adver-film, then click or press here for my entry on it! 8-Bit Sports Fun for Everyone! Talking to other core gamers and listening to many gaming podcasts over the years one irk-ing trend is of most ardent game players shaming sports game fans. I understand why the main EA Sports and 2K Sports games are sim-focused experiences that are not for everyone, but they continue to sell well and have their dedicated fanbase. Back in the 8-bit and most of the 16-bit generation, sports games were simpler pick-up-and-play affairs that worked for almost anyone, especially on the NES with its simpler graphics and only having two primary action buttons. The first sports game I got into on NES was Double Dribble which blew me away with its ‘cinematic’ dunks. Nintendo’s Ice Hockey was a huge favorite of mine and it featured fast, scoring heavy action, and had fights, overtime and shootouts all crammed into a NES cartridge. I thought it was the best hockey game on the NES, and then I discovered the more brutal and up close fights in Konami’s Blades of Steel! There were a deluge of baseball games on the NES and the two I got into the most were the original RBI Baseball and BaseWars. RBI Baseball had the illusion of realistic baseball, but simple enough for anyone to grasp. It had a twee-art style, happy-go-lucky background music to nod along with and was one of the first baseball games to feature real MLB players. BaseWars frigging ruled! Futuristic teams of robots duked it out on the diamond and would engage in battles when attempting a tag out!

For pigskin NES classics, the first one I got into was 10-Yard Fight! It had rather….particular…controls for a launch-era NES football game, but I eventually adapted to it. I know now that Tecmo Bowl and especially its sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl were the cream of the crop of NES football games, but I never got a chance to play them until many years after the fact (and I was still blown away by my friend’s first play he picked against me which was scrambling to the back of his endzone and unleashing a 100-yard touchdown pass!). My own personal top pick is NES Play Action Football, a gridiron game that will forever have a place in my heart! I have everlasting memories of my dad teaming up with me to take on the computer. The passing controls in this game are garbage so we only did running plays, but the players ran absurdly slow…and that was even when factoring in there was a turbo speed button! My dad and I however learned to own that ridiculous control scheme! I would hand off the ball to him and then I would take control of the linemen and block defenders for him as he ever-so-gradually-inched-his-way-across-the-field. I am not embellishing by saying it took a good two whole minutes to traverse about 80 yards. It was completely asinine, but I felt a huge sense of accomplishment with every first down and touchdown my dad and I accomplished with our teamwork! That covers the four major American sports, but there was also a lot of representation from the ESPN Ocho tier of sports games. I loved me some Super Dodge Ball and loved going through its world cup mode. Its adorable oversized character graphics carried over into Nintendo’s soccer game, Nintendo World Cup. Nintendo also delivered two excellent golf titles on the system with the self-titled Golf during the black box launch era of the NES, and a more fleshed out version of that game with a career mode and three courses in NES Open Tournament Golf. Konami’s pair of International Track & Field titles were excellent arcade conversions. Finally, I would be remiss if I was not to give Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out a little love here. I ate up the puzzle pattern boxing gameplay with its distinctive roster of foes for the affable Little Mac. I wish I was not awful at it as I could only get to Bald Bull before my inferior skills met their match.

I invested countless hours into marginally satisfactory NES wrestling games. The cream of the crud pictured above is Wrestlemania Challenge and Tecmo World Wrestling. The wrestling nut in me begrudgingly admits there is not a five star grappler on the NES. All the WWF games range from middling to atrocious. WWF Wrestlemania Challenge I would say was marginally solid because it had functinal enough gameplay, a decent roster with wrestlers not seen in many other games at that time like Rick Rude & Andre the Giant, featured finishing moves and best of all one of the few wrestling games that played AWESOME chiptune renditions of the wrestler's theme music throughout gameplay! Avoid Tag Team Wrestling and M.U.S.C.L.E. at all costs, both of those abysmal wrestling games make all the LJN WWF games seem competently made. Pro Wrestling is good for a launch era game, but it is very limiting all things considered. I had a lot of fun with WCW Wrestling back then, but its unique controls have not aged well. I would have to give Tecmo World Wrestling the nod as my favorite NES wrasslin’ game because of solid controls, Tecmo’s trademark cinematics and its goofy announcer providing nonstop text play-by-play on the bottom of the screen that constantly had my attention.

Some of my favorite driving NES games seen above are Micro Machines on the left and Super Off Road on the right. A Micro Machines game with the same style of core racing mechanics has appeared in almost every console generation since! Super Off Road is probably my favorite four player NES game. Driving and motorsports were another favorite of mine, and the NES was loaded with them! My two favorites were Super Off-Road and Super Sprint. The former because it was a pretty faithful conversion of the arcade game and had four player support my family and friends clocked many hours with. Super Sprint had a similar overhead view of the whole track, but felt like it had more realistic handling, yet still contained many increasingly tough obstacles to overcome. In a strange twist, I later found a couple years ago the developers of Super Off-Road made a F1 style of that game that is also four player compatible in Indy Heat, but it also features pit stops where you can ram over the pit crew! Excitebike was an early childhood rental favorite as I loved going over the ramps and wiping out and randomly assembling a mish-mash of parts of a course in the track editor. I was bummed the NES never got the excellent OutRun from the arcades so I had to suffice with Square’s take on the checkpoint-based driving game, Rad Racer and its sequel a couple years later which were almost, but not quite on par with Sega’s flagship arcade driving game. RC Pro-AM and Micro Machines I am a huge fan of both racing games that feature an overhead camera that locks on and follows the car from a birds-eye view unlike the average behind the car camera perspectives that dominated that era. Collecting for the NES As the 1990s wore on a local video store selling its excess stock and a local game store called Tiger Play were my go to spots for a few years for used videogames. I will never forget lucking into a $2 copy of Tengen’s Tetris at the video store. Eventually eBay opened the floodgates to track down a lot of the NES games I rambled on about above. A regional annual retro game convention, The Midwest Gaming Classic, I attended several times over the past 15 years also attributed to many of my NES games. One year I was ecstatic to get a fan translation of the original Mother game that Nintendo would later officially release on the WiiU as Earthbound Beginnings. I was also ecstatic to get a fan mod updated rosters version of Tecmo Super Bowl. I eventually got a NES-clone system towards the end of 2000s that handled NES games exponentially better than the original Nintendo system and also allowed the ability to play Japanese Famicom games. At MGC I would buy one or two random cheap Famicom games a year to make use of the Famicom slot. I only wound up with several Famicom games, with highlights being Baseball, Tetris and Mighty Final Fight.

The last trip I made out to MGC in 2018 I went in with the goal to finish off my Power Pad game collection and hunt down the last three Power Pad compatible games I did not own to officially have all eight or nine Power Pad games. After perusing the many vendors there I was able to track down the much treasured copies of Athletic World, Eggsplode/Street Cop and Dance Aerobics down, along with a bonus homebrew NES cornhole/bag toss game, Tailgate Party, that also took advantage of the Power Pad. A couple years ago YouTube creator, Pat Contri released his exhaustive Ultimate Nintendo Guide to the NES Library coffee table book/tome that reviewed every single NES game. I read it over the course of a year via a few pages a night before bed. It naturally turned me onto several games I either long forgotten about or completely went over my head and I wound up tracking them down online. That book got me wound up on a NES four player game kick and I have about a dozen four player NES games right now. One night a couple years ago I did a four player NES party night and managed to have a fair amount of fun with some friends going at it in Super Off-Road, Gauntlet II and Super Jeopardy. Right now my preferred way to play NES cartridges is via the Retron 5 system. I know that clone system is a little polarizing because of its emulation software it uses, but I love its performance at playing NES games and other cartridge based systems on my HDTV without the fuzzy graphics and lag that happens when plugging in old composite/RCA cables that came with the NES. I also love that it allows save states and the equivalent of Game Genie cheat codes. A couple years ago I finally got around to playing through SNK’s action-RPG, Crystalis and I would be lying if I said I did not take advantage of save states and a couple of the cheats. Official Nintendo NES Preservation Nintendo has been doing their part, for better and worse, at keeping the NES catalog alive digitally going back to the launch of the Wii in 2006. I picked up several NES games digitally for the Wii at $5 apiece for the Wii’s Virtual Console. I did the exact same thing a few years later for the WiiU and 3DS. The Virtual Console was a handy feature I took advantage of somewhat, but I think it far benefitted younger gamers who were being introduced to those classics for the first time. Nintendo spawned the mini-console craze a few years ago with them debuting the NES Classic, which packed 30 first and third party NES games into a pint sized version of a plug-and-play NES. It featured a solid lineup of games across all genres and was a great bargain considering strong library of games. The emulation quality was leagues better compared to the Virtual Console and the NES Classic feature better implementation of save states and now the ability to rewind gameplay. I brought the NES Classic over to family gatherings and it was a hit all night long.

The NES Classic and NES Channel on the Switch are my two top legitimate recommended ways to digitally dive into the NES library! The best part about the NES Classic was how easy it was to mod and upload your own games to. I know the various RetroPi’s and Mister devices have been capable of this for awhile, but there is something special about the NES Classic’s interface that makes it the preferred way for me to re-experience these NES gems. For a little last minute prep for this article, I loaded up Nintendo’s latest way to experience NES games via the NES Channel on the Switch. Right now it has a little over 50 unique NES (and a small selection of Famicom) games available to play in North America. I dabbled with a few different game for a little over an hour, and finished off my session by playing through the first several stages of Super Mario Bros. again. Nintendo once again stepped up their emulation efforts here by having even better functioning save states and rewind features and now the ability to do online two player. I got my nephew to play with me online and it worked surprisingly well…..other than my fifth grade nephew initially being a little crabby at the graphics being ‘old’ at least. I do not hear many people touting this feature that much and I think it is awesome that Nintendo made this back catalog online and all things considered is part of a great value for $25 a year for Nintendo’s online Switch service.

If those two options do not interest you than there are a ton of other NES games that got re-released as part of collections on many systems over the years. On the current gen alone I would recommend the first Mega Man Legacy Collection that collects the first eight Mega Man games, of which the first six are the NES games. That was how I first experienced Mega Man 2 after the aforementioned boycotting of the brand. Yes, it was after decades of reading testimonials on how Mega Man 2 is one of the all-time greats for the NES I finally played it off that collection a few years ago and loved it. It also allows save states thank goodness, or else I would never be able to conquer that final gauntlet leading up to Dr. Wily! Other recommended collections would include the digital collections Konami released last year rounding up the early entries of the CastleVania and Contra games, both of which have all their NES installments. I highly suggest getting Capcom’s Disney Afternoon Collection that has six of the best licensed NES platformers such as both Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers games. SNK released an excellent 40th anniversary collection last year too which includes several of their NES games including my beloved Ikari Warriors and its two lesser sequels. The Double Dragon and Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle gathers the Double Dragon trilogy, and a ton of Technos favorites like River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball and nearly a dozen others that until now were exclusive in Japan. For younger readers not familiar with the NES library, these are all recommended ways to legit first experience a healthy chunk of some of the best games of the NES library! The Power Lives On…. I cannot believe it has already been nearly 35 years since the NES first launched in North America. Since it is the system of my childhood, I will always be super nostalgic about it. The NES introduced me to the world of videogames and I have been hooked ever since. My favorite game for it would have to be the original Super Mario Bros., with podium finishes going to The Legend of Zelda and yes, the dastardly Ikari Warriors. Whenever I go into a retro game shop or convention I almost instinctively find myself glomming towards the NES section in hopes of finding some long neglected title to have in my collection even though I constantly remind myself I have every game I want for it. Many thanks for making it through this beast of a read and indulging my lifetime of NES memories and I hope I have either introduced you to some new NES factoids and games here or at least had a fun trip down memory lane with me. If you want to indulge me in more NES retrospectives, but in audio form this time, I have embedded a few podcasts I recently un-vaulted from my archives below.

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Here is the all-encompassing retrospective I did on the NES for its 25th anniversary 10 years ago.

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And here is where we do a deep dive on all the comic book videogames on the NES.

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To wrap it up, here is podcast deep dive on all the RPG games on the NES.

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

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You have not lived the late 80s/early 90s NES fervor without watching a whole episode of Video Power. I present this episode above for your consumption!

Wait a Second, Did I Forget Some Games? Bonus Overtime!!!! I know, I know…I have rambled on forever so that is why I officially concluded this flashback just above. However, if you are somehow, someway still scrolling down and find yourself here I have a few more NES favorites and memories I would love to share so they do not remain on the cutting room floor. First off, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trilogy on the NES I have to get some reflections on! That first game….what a mess of a platformer it turned out to be. I did love its theme music though! TMNT fever was ubiquitous during the NES generation and I was an ardent fan of the shelled heroes like almost all kids my age so I forced myself to put way too much time into it than I should have. Several years ago I revisited it and finally finished it, well after the help of Game Genie cheat codes that is. Even with the cheats that swimming level remains a tumultuous effort to persevere through.

TMNT II: The Arcade Game is exponentially better and is a pretty decent port of the first arcade game. While the graphics are dialed back significantly to run on the NES, that did not stop my friend Matt and I revisiting and romping through this and its sequel several times over the years. TMNT III: The Manhatten Project is a NES exclusive, and featured the same arcade brawling engine as its predecessor, but this one has colorful beach levels with foot soldiers that toss sand at the turtles!! Yes, I have played the NES version of TMNT Tournament Figheters and I will give props to Konami for mustering everything they could out of the NES graphically by late 1993 and making it the only proper 2D fighter on the NES, but it simply does not measure up to its vastly superior SNES counterpart. There are some first party Nintendo games I held off from touching on in the main feature because I have had only minimal experience with them. It is totally on me! There was one more renting memory I refrained from above, and that is dealing with Metroid. Bottom line, it spooked me too much around age six or seven to progress far into it and I remember being irate at going back a screen to see enemies I eliminated moments earlier had respawned again. I need to correct this and revisit it someday. Kirby’s Adventure I briefly played on the NES Classic to briefly try it out before moving on to different games and I never got around getting back to it. That is another NES regret I must rectify as I have played through and enjoyed past Kirby games before! Nintendo’s official licensed version of Tetris is a good playing and looking version of the classic puzzler, but it lacked one key thing the Tengen version had and that is multiplayer! My dad and I played a ton of competitive and co-op multiplayer of Tengen’s Tetris. The Tengen version also had the more Russian-flavored art style that made the visuals pop more. The co-op mode was surprisingly addictive teaming up with my dad to clear a wider, single drop box. I was surprised no other Tetris revisited this idea until it was announced days ago for the upcoming deluxe version of Tetris Effect on Xbox Series X.

Nintendo's Tetris is on the left, Tengen's Tetris is on the right. I love the unique aesthetics and music in both of them, but Tengen's version had an excellent 2-player VS. and co-op modes that made it highly sought after, especially after Nintendo got it banned from stores! The only traditional RPG I put a lot of time into on the NES was the first Dragon Warrior. I rented it, and borrowed it another time from a friend later on and enjoyed the early parts of the game before I ventured out under-leveled and was too young to grasp the concept of grinding to level up in order to properly square off against the tougher foes. I eventually got much farther into it when it was re-released on GameBoy Color. Wait a second, does Zelda II: The Adventure of Link count as an RPG? I have heard for years people argue whether the Zelda series is considered a true RPG and I have always been on the side of classifying them in the action-adventure genre, but Zelda II is incredibly different from all other entries in the series and has leveling up and experience points involved so I would make an exception that Zelda II be considered an RPG. Unfortunately, it was another one that was too brutal for me in my childhood and I never got that far in it. I want to finally wrap this beast up by applauding the preservation market for unearthing several prototypes and lost games that were finished, but never released. Some of the more famous examples of this are Capcom’s California Raisins, a NES version of SimCity and last year the UWC Wrestling title that was canned at the final minute before resurfacing with noticeable roster and gameplay changes as WCW Wrestling. I also want to commend the smaller publisher and indie game scene for finding the resources to release new games on actual physical NES cartridges. They may be unlicensed, but it nevertheless puts a smile on my face to see new NES games being released today! Okay, with that I am finished for real this time! Many thanks again for spending an afternoon powering through this!

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You heard my favorite NES background music earlier with the Duck Tales' 'Moon Theme.' Now behold the worst NES music...no 1942 does not qualify. I am talking about this grinding, ear screeching exuse for music that is the general background stage music for Back to the Future. You are Still Here!? Even after all these videos and links and over 6000 words of my babbling of NES nostalgia? I guess then I have one more story to share since you made it this far. This one is not a moment I am proud of. Sometimes being a NES kid brings out a…..darkness among rival NES kids. I was spending an afternoon at a cousins playing NES games all day. The same one who showed me the Super Mario Bros. 2 ending. The same one who we decided to put on hockey gloves to mimic the fights in Blades of Steel, though thinking back in hindsight I think we got our mimicking of the hockey fight in reverse and we should have had gloves off.

My cousing introduced me to some of my favorite NES sports games like Double Dribble and Blades of Steel. And as you are about to see, it brought out the worst in us! Anyways, this day he was showing me Double Dribble and we played it all afternoon. It impressed the hell out of me by having the national anthem opening and its cinematic dunks! Towards the end of the day we were playing other games when my mom arrived to pick me up. As I was getting ready to leave and my cousin was distracted playing a different game my NES-darkness overtook me and I thought I could ‘borrow’ my cousin’s copy of Double Dribble without asking him. I think I slid another game in Double Dribble’s place where it was on the carpet and I was super slick by flipping it upside down so he would not see the label. Yeah, I only made it out about halfway to my mom’s car outside when he came barreling out and we play-wrestled on the ground for a brief moment until I forked over that copy of Double Dribble. I must have been around eight or nine at the time and one dumb kid to try and pull that off……I should have went for his copy of Super Mario Bros. 2 instead! I am kidding of course, kids do not be like dumb NES-kid Dale and mess with your friend’s games! Extremely not cool, hugging out with a heartfelt apology, now that is cool, no wait, it is emphatically…..Totally Rad!

#videogames #nes #nintendo #mario #zelda #ikari warriors #wall street kid #play action football #power pad #captain n the game master #zapper #nintendo power #video power #nick arcade #mega man

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linenprofit05 · 3 years

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fantasy soccer: Allen, Wilson precise Week 4 quarterback rankings

MIAMI, Sept. 29 (UPI) -- Josh Allen and Russell Wilson precise my Week 4 fable soccer quarterback rankings for 2021. Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady and Justin Herbert circular out my suitable 5 alternatives for Week 4. Aaron Rodgers, Joe Burrow, Kyler Murray, Dak Prescott and Matthew Stafford additionally land in my suitable 10. Kirk Cousins, Sam Darnold and Taylor Heinicke are among the many quarterbacks i would accept as true with starting this week if you are vulnerable on the position. here are some of my favorite avid gamers during this week's desirable 20 quarterback rankings: true SHELF Josh Allen of the Buffalo expenses became the right delusion football quarterback in Week three and ranks seventh this season in myth facets. Allen torched the Washington football team for 358 yards and 4 scores throughout the air and ran for yet another landing ultimate Sunday. seek Allen to reside hot in Week 4, when the expenses battle the Houston Texans. The Texans allowed the thirteenth-most delusion elements to quarterbacks via three weeks. Allen is a close lock for at least three complete scores during this matchup Sunday in Orchard Park, N.Y. he is my precise quarterback choice. Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks is my No. 2 alternative. The Seahawks face the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday in Santa Clara, Calif. Wilson threw six landing passes through the first two weeks of the season, however discovered the conclusion zone just once in Week three. seek the Seahawks superstar to leap again in opposition t the 49ers, who allowed the sixth-most fable elements to quarterbacks through the first three weeks. I are expecting Wilson to throw for at least 250 yards and three rankings during this NFC West division matchup. SNEAKY plays Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow is my No. 7 alternative. He ranks backyard the correct 10 this season in myth points per video game amongst quarterbacks, however threw as a minimum two scores in each of his first three starts of 2021. seek Burrow to up his yardage total and throw as a minimum three touchdown passes this week, when the Bengals host the Jacksonville Jaguars on Thursday in Cincinnati. The Jaguars allowed a typical of 311.6 passing yards per online game to their first three opponents. Burrow may still readily reach that quantity in a Bengals victory. Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins is my No. 12 choice for Week 4. Cousins averaged 306 passing yards and a pair of.6 passing touchdowns per video game over his last three starts. He also may still find success in opposition t the Cleveland Browns on Sunday in Minneapolis. The Browns swarmed rookie quarterback Justin Fields closing week in a win over the Chicago Bears, however the Vikings offense should be a lot more prolific. Cousins will also be used as a QB1 streamer in leagues with at least 14 teams if you are desperate for production on the place. LONGSHOTS Carolina Panthers quarterback Sam Darnold is a different player on a scorching streak. Darnold threw for 304 yards and scored two speeding touchdowns to finish as the No. 5 quarterback in delusion football for Week 3. He threw for 305 yards and two ratings in Week 2. This week, the Panthers face the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys have allowed the second-most passing yards and 12th-most myth points to opposing quarterbacks. seek Darnold, my No. 14 alternative, to throw for as a minimum 250 yards and two rankings. Taylor Heinicke of the Washington soccer team is a further QB1 streamer for Week four who may still simplest be used when you are determined. Heinicke, my No. sixteen option, entire simply outside the excellent 10 among quarterbacks for fantasy features in Week three. He may still log one more excellent performance in Week four. Washington battles the Atlanta Falcons, who allowed the third-most fantasy facets to quarterbacks within the first three weeks of the season. I are expecting this video game to be a shootout, which should enhance Heinicke's capabilities to effort extra passes and locate the end zone. Week 4 delusion soccer quarterback rankings 1. Josh Allen, Buffalo bills vs. HOU 2. Russell Wilson, Seattle Seahawks at SF 3. Patrick Mahomes, Kansas metropolis Chiefs at PHI 4. Tom Brady, Tampa Bay Buccaneers at NE 5. Justin Herbert, l. a. Chargers vs. LVR 6. Aaron Rodgers, green Bay Packers vs. PIT 7. Joe Burrow, Cincinnati Bengals vs. JAX 8. Kyler Murray, Arizona Cardinals at LAR 9. Dak Prescott, Dallas Cowboys vs. vehicle 10. Matthew Stafford, la Rams vs. AZ 11. Lamar Jackson, Baltimore Ravens at DEN 12. Kirk Cousins, Minnesota Vikings vs. CLE 13. Jalen Hurts, Philadelphia Eagles vs. KC 14. Sam Darnold, Carolina Panthers at DAL 15. Ryan Tannehill, Tennessee Titans at NYJ sixteen. Taylor Heinicke, Washington soccer crew at ATL 17. Jacoby Brissett, Miami Dolphins vs. IND 18. Jimmy Garoppolo, San Francisco 49ers vs. SEA 19. Jameis Winston, New Orleans Saints vs. NYG 20. Daniel Jones, big apple Giants at NO The Cowboys' Ezekiel Ellott runs against the Eagles. image by way of Ian Halperin/UPI | License photo The Eagles' DeVonta Smith makes a brief catch. photograph by means of Ian Halperin/UPI | License image Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders perform earlier than the online game. image with the aid of Ian Halperin/UPI | License image the new England Patriots' Kendrick Bourne pulls in a 22-yard landing reception while covered by way of New Orleans Saints Paulson Adebo within the fourth quarter at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., on Sunday. The Saints defeated the Patriots 28-13. photo via Matthew Healey/UPI | License image The Saints' Alvin Kamara is shoved out of bounds after a 9-yard reception. photograph by way of Matthew Healey/UPI | License photograph The Patriots' bill Belichick watches his team from the sideline. picture through Matthew Healey/UPI | License image The Saints' Jameis Winston (C) throws a pass. picture with the aid of Matthew Healey/UPI | License photograph The Saints' Marquez Callaway pulls in a reception while lined through the Patriots' J.C. Jackson. photo by way of Matthew Healey/UPI | License photograph The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady encourages Buccaneers' fanatics earlier than the game towards the la Rams at SoFi Stadium in Ingelwood, Calif., on Sunday. photograph by means of Jon SooHoo/UPI | License photograph Rams head coach Sean McVay watches his quarterback Matthew Stafford (L) throughout third-quarter action. photo by Jon SooHoo/UPI | License photograph The Buccaneers' Rob Gronkowski (C) is tackled via Rams Terrill Lewis. picture by using Jon SooHoo/UPI | License image Brady runs for 8 yards. photo by Jon SooHoo/UPI | License photo green Bay Packers head educate Matt LaFleur (C) cheers as kicker Mason Crosby hits a 51-yard field goal with out a time remaining to supply the Packers a 30-28 win over the San Francisco 49ers at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., on Sunday. photograph by way of Terry Schmitt/UPI | License photograph The Packers' Robert Tonyan (L) alerts good as Crosby (R) yells as he watches his fifty one-yard field purpose. photograph by using Terry Schmitt/UPI | License picture The 49ers' George Kittle cuts up the sideline for a 12-yard profit. picture by Terry Schmitt/UPI | License picture The 49ers' enthusiasts cheer all over the online game. picture by using Terry Schmitt/UPI | License image The Packers' Aaron Jones (R) flies out of the hold close of the 49ers' Nick Bosa. photo via Terry Schmitt/UPI | License photo The Packers' Allen Lazard (L) is hauled down by the 49ers' k'Waun Williams after a 42-yard circulate by Aaron Rodgers. photo by means of Terry Schmitt/UPI | License picture 먹튀검증

#먹튀검증

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nelapanela94 · 3 years

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Of Love and Other Misunderstandings

Kenya Oshitari x Fem!OC

will they be able to confess their feelings without leaving victims along the way?

Warnings: None

Sorry for grammar mistakes, English is not my first language.

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Tanaka Sora was standing before her black spiky haired kohai. Her head tilted to the side as she blinked twice waiting for him to speak. The Tensai of Shitenhouji shut his eyes closed and let out a heavy sigh. She noticed his strange behavior. Zaizen Hikaru, the second-year tennis regular, who was always calm and collected, was acting out of character. He avoided her gaze and his cheeks turned slightly pink.

“Ano, Hikaru-kun" she intervened. “Why did you ask me to meet you here?” The girl asked for a second time. “If you’re not telling, I’ll take my leave. Nakamura-buchou will make me run laps if I’m late again”

She whirled around to leave, but the boy's grip around her wrist stopped her.

“I like you Tanaka-sempai" he confessed. “I do like you”

Sora froze. Her eyes widened and she pressed her lips into a thin line. She was left speechless, but got the courage to face the boy and turned around.

“I…I don’t know what to say Hikaru-kun“ she stuttered. She had rejected other boys who had previously confessed to her, but Zaizen was a good friend and she wasn’t ready to break his heart. “You know…” she looked down. “I…”

“You like someone else" he completed her sentence.

Sora lifted her gaze to meet his.

“Then why…?”

“…did I confess to you?” Sora slightly frowned at the second interruption. “I just needed to let it off my chest” He bit his lower lip and shrugged.

“I’m sorry Hikaru-kun” she shook her head.

“There’s nothing to apologize for sempai. I knew the outcome beforehand”

An apologetic smile drew on her face.

“I don’t want to ruin our friendship nor make things awkward between us”

“Neither do I” she replied. “And I’ve told you hundreds of times to call me Sora"

“Alright Sora-sempai" he mockingly grinned as she rolled her eyes. “If you want me to call you Sora, call me Hikaru then”

“Deal, Hi-ka-ru" she extended her hand.

“Deal, So-ra" they shook hands in agreement.

Sora took a glance at her watch and sighed. “I guess I’m running a hundred laps around the field again”

“Me too" he added. “What a bother"

“Let’s go then" she positioned herself next to him and linked arms with the boy. To get to the football field she had to pass by the tennis courts first. “I’ll drop you at the courts"

“Ja-ne! Hikaru”

The boy simply waved and headed to the club house to change into his tennis uniform.

“Why late today, Zaizen?” kenya Oshitari asked his kohai as he closed his locker.

“I was with Sora" the bleach haired boy scowled. “We were to organize the movie selection of the month”

“Sora?” The second year was sometimes disrespectful to his sempais, but he always addressed them with the proper honorific.

“She asked me to call her by her given name" he bluntly answered. “And she calls me by mine”

Zaizen enjoyed annoying his short-tempered sempai.

The baka pair was eavesdropping while changing into their green and yellow uniforms and mischievously grinned.

“Ne-ne Yuu-kun, don’t you think Sora-chan and Hikaru-chan are getting closer since they joined the library committee?”

The boy with the headband nodded in agreement. “you’re right Koharu, they even use their first names"

Kenya’s jaw tightened.

“Aho! You should address her as sempai"

“I can’t. We made a deal"

Suddenly their captain, Shiraishi Kuranosuke, entered. An irritated look drawn on his face. “Practice began ten minutes ago. What’s going on?”

“Kurarin~” Koharu began. “Our Hikaru is growing closer to Sora-chan and Kenya is getting jealous”

“I’m not!" the bleached haired boy snapped.

The captain lifted a brow. “Mind to explain"

“They’re on first name basis and they were walking together to the courts" Hitouji explained.

“Is that so?” Shiraishi addressed the second year, who indifferently shrugged.

The tennis regulars were totally aware of Oshitari's and Shiraishi's feelings for Tanaka Sora. The trio had been in the same class since freshman year and had become good friends. Nobody knew about whom she liked back, though.

“Zaizen" the black haired glanced at his captain while unbuttoning his shirt. “Fifty laps!”

Zaizen Hikaru deeply sighed. Stupid sempaitachi.

The baka pair left the clubhouse giggling at the war scenario they had just created.

“Ano, Kura" Sora turned her head towards the boy sitting next to her. “Can I borrow your biology notes? I fell asleep yesterday during class" she sheepishly smiled.

“You should pay more attention or you’ll fail again" he replied.

The girl frowned. “Are you on your moon days or what?” she rolled her eyes. “Sorry for not being perfect in everything like you. I don’t get what’s wrong with you and Kenya. You’ve been out of character since last week.” She hissed. “I´ll find another way"

“Ask Zaizen, he's a tensai after all" he didn’t bother to look at her.

“Hikaru? What does he have to do with this?” she sighed in defeat. Sora didn’t feel like arguing with one of her best friends. “Let me know when you get back to normal" she finished putting her things in her backpack and left the room.

If only she knew how perfect she is.

Sora had her mind buried in the biology book when the second-year genius took a seat in front of her. “hey" she greeted.

“hey"

She closed the book and looked at the boy. “Do you know what’s wrong with Kura and Kenya? They've been distant to me since last week"

He shook his head.

“It hurts, you know? They being so indifferent" her eyes emanated sadness. “And they don’t even tell what I did wrong”

“Sora" Zaizen changed the topic. “Who is the one you like?”

Her eyes went wide at the sudden question. “Why are you asking?”

“curiosity”

“mmmmm, I’m not telling"

“Give me a hint”

“iie"

“I won’t stop pestering then"

Tanaka Sora sighed.

“It seems I don’t have a choice" she muttered. “he’s in my class, plays tennis and he’s fun to be with"

Zaizen narrowed the eyes. “Is the health freak or the one that collects weird erasers?”

“it’s a secret" she placed her index finger on her lips. “Fun fact, I’ve had a hard crush on this guy since first year"

“And why don’t you just tell him? You’re always saying we have to be honest with our feelings.” He mimicked her.

“Collateral damage. I don’t want to ruin a good friendship" she leaned back and looked at the ceiling, then back at the boy. “Why the sudden interest in my love life? What about yours?”

“The girl I like rejected me last week"

“What a heartless bitch!"

“Don’t be selfish to yourself sempai” he said interlacing his fingers and stretching his hands in front of him with the palms facing outwards. “You'll end up hurting yourself”

The third year stood up and leaned forward flicking her kohai on the forehead. “Stop saying no sense” she swirled around. “I need fresh air” she looked down. “Can you cover up for me?”

“Sure”

Sora found herself near the broadcasting room. She claimed that the water fountain in that hall had the best tasting water of the school. She pressed the button and took some sips. Then she rubbed her lips with the back of her hand.

“Sora” she heard someone calling her name from behind and turned around.

“Hey, Kenya” she gave a forced smile.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in committee duty now?”

“Hikaru is covering up for me”

The boy irked.

Sora studied his face. “Did I say something wrong?”

The Speed star of Naniwa took a deep breath in order to constrain his annoyance.

“Are you dating Zaizen?” he shot the question without anesthesia.

The girl in front of him raised her brows.

“What are you talking about?”

Kenya looked away after the realization of what he had just asked. His cheeks were turning red.

“Hikaru and I are just friends. I actually see him as a younger brother.” Her eyes saddened. “Hikaru and Kin-chan remind me of my late baby brother, that’s why I’m always spoiling them. It makes me nostalgic when Kin-chan calls me nee-chan” the ends of her lips lifted.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”

“It’s ok Kenya. I never told you, and it’s been a while already”

He felt sorry for the girl. She had lost her mother recently due to a car accident. A drunk driver; and the bastard only got a few scratches.

Sora was about to swirled around; she didn’t want him to see her crying. But a sudden embrace stopped her. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close to his chest.

“it’s ok to cry Sora” he whispered as he patted her head. The girl hugged back and buried her face on his chest as tears began to form in her eyes. Kenya remained in silence. All he could hear were the girl’s sobs. His chest felt warm and wet, but he didn’t mind.

“You always go around giving hugs away and comforting people.” He rested his chin on her head. “Let’s change roles for a while”

The Oshitari loved having her petite body so close to him. He yearned for every second he could be near her ever since first year. Her positive aura, her scent, her smile, her eyes, her soft skin under his touch. He wanted her to be his, but he was aware that his best friend and captain of the tennis team had feelings for her as well. In fact, he was jealous of Shiraishi for sitting next to her in class and having her near almost all the time. And confessing his feelings for her would ruin his friendship with the silver haired boy, and might bring trouble among the tennis club members. That is why he decided keep it to himself.

The sobs faded and the girl finally pulled away. “Thank you, Kenya” She rubbed her swollen eyes. “I feel better now”

“iie” He looked at her in the eye, then he gently kissed her on the forehead. “You’re very welcome Sora” His action made her cheeks heat up. The girl swallowed hard.

“I must go back to the library Kenya” She nervously said. “Our bratty Kohai is waiting for me”

“Waiting for a couple of minutes won’t kill him”

She lifted a brow. “You have no right to say that. You can´t tolerate a single second of waiting time” Sora gently hit him on the shoulder. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“See you tomorrow then” She finally said with a smile. “And I’m sorry for your blazer”

“Nah, don’t worry” he carefreely said.

Kenya walked back to the broadcasting room. He placed his hand on his chest where Sora had buried her tears and clutched the fabric tightly. He was dying inside. Locking up his heart like Yuushi advised was not working at all. He felt he was about to explode anytime soon.

“Oi, Sora, you have to cover up for me tomorrow” Zaizen nonchalantly said.

“Ne, ne, Hikaru, it’s Ok” she happily replied while putting her texts inside her bag. Her kohai threw an inquiry look at her.

“Takoyaki no nee-chan!!!!” The wild redhead first-year cheerfully waved at her from the tennis courts. Sora waved back with a big smile. He ran towards her and threw his arms around her, almost making her lose her balance. “Wow Kin-chan" She patted her beloved Kohai’s head. “I’ll take you to Akaoni this Friday after practice, ok?”

“Hooray!” The boy happily celebrated by jumping and throwing fists to the air. “Ne, ne Shiraishi” He called his captain. “Isn’t Takoyaki no nee-chan the best?”

“She is, Kin-chan" he muttered to himself as his eyes followed the girl. “Jaa ne, Kin-chan, I gotta go” She swirled around and her gaze locked with Kenya’s for seconds. They didn’t say a word and she continued her way.

When football practice was over, Sora showered and changed into her school uniform. She said goodbye to the club members and left the clubroom, walking to the rhythm of her favorite song. She mumbled the lyrics with her eyes closed as she headed towards the main gate.

“gomen” she opened her eyes and pulled the earphones off of her ears when she bumped into someone. “Kura, I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking” she bowed and continued her way.

“Wait, Sora” Shiraishi took her by the wrist.

She turned around and looked at him wide eyed. “What can I do for you?”

He let go and sighed. “I wanted to apologize for the way I’d been treating you lately” he confessed.

“It’s ok” she faked a smile. “I’ll get going, dad is waiting for me to do groceries. See you tomorrow” Shitty excuse she came up with.

“Listen, I know I’ve been a …”

“Jerk?” she scowled. “you’d better tell me why because I don’t recall doing anything wrong!”

Shiraishi’s face reddened. He knew he owed her an explanation, but telling the truth would expose his feelings for her. If he didn’t, however, she'd still be mad at him, and that may be worse.

“So…” she interrupted his thoughts. Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she took it out.

'Is the one with a beetle or the one with the pet iguana?’

She rolled her eyes and texted back.

‘Stop bugging me'

“Can you make Hikaru run a thousand laps tomorrow?” she asked with a wry look on her face.

Shiraishi startled at the question.

“What did he do?”

“He’s been a pain in the ass lately” she put her phone back in her bag. “Anyway, do you have an answer already?”

His hands cupped her cheeks and his eyes held her gaze. He wasn’t sure about what he was about to do, but he had to give it a try. He was in love with the girl who sit next to him in class. The one whose hair smell like strawberries. Whenever she was distracted, he would pass close to her to feel her sweet scent.

Without a second thought he leaned pressing his lips on hers. Sora's eyes widened, then she closed her eyes and gave in the kiss. Shiraishi’s lips were soft and gentle. His lips brushed hers delicately, long enough that he could taste the vanilla of her lipstick. Sora’s lips were warm and sweet, just like he had imagined they would be. He had longed for that moment since summer of their sophomore year.

For Sora, the kiss didn’t feel awkward; but didn’t feel right either. She didn’t feel butterflies in her stomach like it was supposed to be according to the books Kenya’s cousin used to read. They broke the kiss and locked their gazes. “Kura” she began. “I’m sorry, but…” before she could finish her sentence, he embraced her.

“I know, you don’t have to say it” he wasn’t ready to hear those words. He closed his eyes and rested his chin in her head. Sadness clouded his features and he didn’t want her to see him heartbroken.

“I was jealous of Zaizen” he explained without letting go. She had her head pressed on his chest.

“Hikaru?” she slightly narrowed her eyes. “he’s like a brother to me” she stated.

He finally released her. “Wait a second. You don’t like Zaizen?” she shook her head. “Then, who…” he stopped at the realization. “Oh!”

“I have a hard crush on him since first year, but I knew that confessing my feelings would ruin our friendship and I didn’t want to cause trouble”

“You should tell him before it’s too late”

“But…”

“I know it won’t be easy, but I’ll get over it” he gave a half smile. “I don’t want to see my closest friends suffering, Sora”

Kenya had received his first drum set when he was three as a birthday present from his grandfather.

Genji Oshitari, a well-known pediatric doctor in the Kansai area, was very fond of Classical music. He dreamed of his grandchildren to master an instrument of the beloved genre. Erina, his only grandaughter had inclined for the Harp. Her younger brother, Yuushi, began to play the violin at the age of four. Shouta, the youngest Oshitari grandchild, was still learning how to play the flute. However, with Kenya was a different story. The Oshitari Grandfather noticed that the boy needed an instrument to channel all his hyperactive energy. That is why he opted for the percussion set.

Kenya cherished his drum set. His mother not too much, though. The Oshitaris had received many noise complaints from their neighbors; therefore, his father built a soundproof room at home.

“Shouta, where is your brother?” Mariko Oshitari asked when she took her place at the table. Her youngest boy nonchalantly shrugged.

“He locked himself in the music room. He was upset when he got home, I didn’t dare to ask”

“Don’t worry, he'll eventually come out” her husband added.

The bleached haired boy had been practicing Bleed by Meshuggah, one of the hardest songs to play on drums. He still wondered how Tomas Haake was able to play the whole thing live. It was virtually impossible for any mortal being, even for the Speed Star of Naniwa. Yet he wasn’t quitting. Playing drums was Kenya's therapy. He used it as a relieving tool that allowed him release his towering rage. He needed vast concentration to forget the scene that involved his best friend kissing the girl he died for.

He had witnessed the confession and felt a wrenching pain consuming his heart. If only had he told Sora about his feelings for her. If only had he been brave enough. If only, if only, if only. ‘if only’ didn’t exist. He hated himself for being a coward.

When his arms and legs could not keep the rhythm any longer, he called it a day.

Kenya took a cold shower and went straight to bed. He laid on his back, staring at an imaginary point on the ceiling. Tears formed in his eyes and he shut them closed, covering them with his forearm when he heard knocks from his door. The knob turned revealing his brother.

“Nii-san” Shouta worriedly asked. “Are you ok?” He didn’t get any reply. “If there’s anything I can do let me know” and with that he closed the door.

What hurt the most was that he had to see Sora and Shiraishi everyday in school. He wasn’t sure about how to deal with it.

Kenya exhaled before sliding the door open. He rapidly scanned his classroom before entering. His classmates were chitchatting. He heard girls’ conversations about make up and random stuff, while boys were discussing about the latest video games. His eyes darted towards the tennis captain. He and Sora were sitting together at her desk. Shiraishi had dragged his chair next to her. Their eyes were focused on her iPad screen and the two shared earphones.

The Speed Star of Naniwa headed towards his desk, placed his bag on the side and took a seat. He crossed his arms on the desk surface and rested his head.

“I swear if they don’t end up together, I will sue everyone involved in this drama” Sora annoyedly slammed her hand on her desk.

“Wow, calm down” Shiraishi Kuranosuke was Sora’s Korean drama partner. They would meet up on the weekends to watch the series together.

She pressed paused.

“What’s wrong with Kenya? he didn’t say hi” The girl tore a page from her notebook and formed a ball, then threw it hitting the Oshitari’s back. Kenya turned around with a wry look on his face. Sora and Shiraishi waved at him, but he just ignored them. The Korean drama freaks exchanged glances and shrugged.

When the lunch time bell rang Kenya stood up and left. He wasn’t hungry at all and holing up in the broadcasting room sounded good. He had to do the noon broadcast after all.

Sora followed him, but keeping Kenya’s pace was impossible. She carried a paper bag with her with a cute drawing of the Oshitari chibi version. It also had a handmade card that had “arigatou” written on it. The girl was awake all night baking pain au chocolat for the bleach haired boy.

She entered the broadcasting room and scanned the place with her eyes until they landed in the boy she was looking for. He was sitting on a chair leaning back with his eyes nailed on the ceiling. Sora closed the door behind her.

“There must be something interesting up there” she broke the silence. She grabbed a chair and took a seat in front of him. He accommodated, sitting tall to face her.

“You look terrible” he carelessly said. It didn’t bother her though. He was right.

“I stayed up all night making this for you” she handed him the bag. “I know you like them. It’s my way to say thank you for yesterday.” She warmly smiled.

He looked at the chibi drawing of him and half smiled.

“wouldn’t Shiraishi be upset with you for giving away baking goods to other guys?”

She tilted her head. “Why would he?”

“don’t play dumb with me Sora!” he snapped. “I saw you two yesterday near the school gate. At least you could have found a more private place”

Realization hit her. “Oh! You mean that”

“Are you jealous Kenya?” her giggles irritated him.

“Stop laughing!”

“I’m not dating Kura, nor anyone else” she finally admitted.

“But…”

Before he could say another word, she leaned forward. Her lips met his in a quick peck. “you’re the one I like. The one and only” she sweetly whispered before brushing her lips against his one more time.

She pulled apart and locked gazes with the boy for few seconds, that seemed an eternity for him.

“Enjoy your pain au chocolat” she smiled and stood up. Before she could turn around Kenya grabbed her wrist and pulled her closer to him.

“Tell me I’m not delusional” he asked under his breath. He stood up and cupped her cheeks, caressing her smooth skin with his thumbs.

“This is real” she muttered.

There was nothing left to say. Sora didn’t have time to react before Kenya slammed his lips against hers. The moment she was yearning for so long. She hungrily kissed back.

It was rough, the good kind that turned her on. Her arms reached up and tangled around his strong neck. She felt fire igniting inside and consuming her entire body. His lips were warm. His Acqua di Gio fragrance was so addictive she didn’t have any intention to let go. She was doubtless Kenya was the right one.

The boy's insistent mouth parted her lips. Sora pushed Kenya making him fall on the chair behind him with her on top. Without taking a break from each other’s lips, she accommodated her knees on each side of his legs. Kenya’s hands slid down until they found her hips and pulled her closer. A sweet moan escaped her lips when she felt something hard right there.

They broke the kiss before it was too late, resting their foreheads on each other’s. Their gazes interlocked as they tried to catch their breaths. “I…ah, we can continue later” her voice was trembling. “I mean, only if you want to. Dad is out of town…”

He suddenly embraced her and buried his face on her neck, inhaling her fragrance. He wanted to memorize it.

“Only if you’re certain you want it" he whispered.

“Daisuki, Kenya" she softly said.

He leaned back, meeting her eyes one more time. “Daisuki, Sora"

Three figures from the outside were peeking through the door. They could hardly see anything, though.

“Hikaru-chan, you’re too young to witness this" Koharu said to his Kohai.

“Koharu is right" Hitouji covered Zaizen’s eyes, who immediately snapped his sempai’s hands off.

“Yuuji-sempai, Koharu-sempai" Zaizen extended his hands in front of him, palms facing upwards. “It’s my win” the kohai triumphally smirked.

His sempais wryly took the money out of their wallets.

Damn Zaizen.

“Congratulations Hikaru-kun” Sora opened the door; a mocking smile grew on her lips. “Sorry guys, but the show is already over”

“We were just passing by, right Yuu-kun?”

“Hai, Hai, Koharu”

“Jaa-ne, Sora-chan" they waved at her and left before they got murdered.

“Get me some chocolate and I’ll spare your life” She addressed the spiky haired boy.

“Oi, Zaizen” Kenya stood behind the girl. “I want chocolate too”

“No” The youngest nonchalantly replied. “And Kenya-Sempai, don’t make her cry”

“Stupid brat” The bleach haired boy hissed as the black haired walked away.

“Let’s cuddle on the couch, Kenya” She smiled at him, and took his calloused hand in hers. The boy followed with a blush on his face.

_____________________________________________________________

Thanks for reading!

#shitenhouji #prince of tennis #tennis no oujisama #oshitari kenya #shiraishi kuranosuke #zaizen hikaru #Oshitari Kenya x oc #Oc #Shitenhouji x oc

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hauntedbreadartisan · 3 years

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1) Download the patch by clicking its filename in the opening post beneath 'Download Link'. 2) Once downloaded, click on the zip file and it will open in File Explorer. 3) Extract the contents to a preferred location on your device. 4) Open the folder and you will see a file called 'cmpatcher-2.22-wip0.exe'. Championship Manager 0.Downloads - CM 0.Championship Manager 2001/2002 full game legally available for free download from Eidos website. CM, CM 01/02, Season. This is a brief tutorial that shows you how to use a virtual drive to install and play the classic Championship Manager 01-02 game on your PC without ever ne. How Install Championship Manager 01/02 on Mac / Linux (CM0102).Updated. September 5, 2017 By MacRetro CM01/02 for us is the best installment of the Championship Manager/Football Manager series from inception through to today.

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daleisgreat · 3 years

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30 Years of Super Nintendo - Flashback Special

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) recently celebrated its 30th anniversary of the North American launch, so it seems the perfect time to post a Flashback Special honoring it! Suppose you have not perused a past Flashback Special of mine (all linked at the bottom of this entry). In that case, they are essentially my history with the platform over the years, with a little bit of history thrown in, and recounting all my favorite games, accessories, memories, and moments with the system.

Odds are for the average gaming enthusiast reading this, and you probably are familiar with the core details of the SNES launch stateside (if not, then I highly recommend CGQ’s video on it for a quick breakdown). The SNES launched in 1991 when I was eight. I did not have a subscription to any gaming magazines yet, so I most likely first found out about the system around that time from classmates at the time at school, the infamous Paul Rudd commercial, and the fourth season of Roseanne that transpired from 1991-92. I vividly remember the Roseanne episode with her son, DJ, pleading with his parents for the brand new SNES for his birthday gift and how his parents dreaded not being able to afford the system. I covered that episode when I did my Roseanne complete series re-watch here in the year leading up to the relaunch of the show several years ago. It brought back memories of how that was the story with my parents also denying me the much sought-after SNES, saying it cost too much and that I already have an NES to tide me over. ”But mommmmm, the SNES is 16-bits!!!!” Yeah….playing that angle got me nowhere. Kiosks & Friends The first couple of years for the SNES, I mostly remember playing at store kiosks. Super Mario World blew me away from the brief time I played it with it being such a leap from the NES installments. I always ate up the precious few minutes I could procure at a store kiosk if no one were playing Super Mario Kart. One last store kiosk memory was eye-gazing over the impressive WWF Royal Rumble. I loved WWF WrestleFest in the arcade, and for a couple of years, it was the only WWF game that offered up WWF’s marquee over-the-top rope elimination match, the Royal Rumble, and it was endlessly fun to play in the arcade. Fast-forward to playing it on console kiosks around its 1993 release, and I could not eat up enough of that game’s Royal Rumble mode either, and at the time, the graphics seemed like a huge step up from the wrestling games on NES. One of my favorite issues of Nintendo Power is the 50th issue that did a several-page spread on WWF Royal Rumble that I must have thoroughly re-read at least a dozen times.

I read this NP spread of WWF Royal Rumble many times, and it was one of my initially most desired SNES games! Around 1993/94, a couple of friends and classmates started to get the Super Nintendo. An early SNES memory that stuck with me all these years is my grade school friend, Jon-Paul, having me over for his birthday where he rented a SNES console and Street Fighter II: Turbo from the video store, and we played it for several hours straight. Another is spending a lot of 1994 at my neighborhood friend’s place, where we played countless sessions of NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat II. Both games were big on codes and secrets and perfect two-player games. I was just regularly getting into video game magazines at this time and ate up issues of Tips & Tricks, Game Players, and Electronic Gaming Monthly to see what kind of hidden character and other much-rumored codes were making the waves each month for both of these games. Mortal Kombat II especially dominated the code-fervor that season with trying to uncover how to face off against secret characters like Jade, Noob Saibot, and Smoke, and trying to memorize all the input sequences for the game’s infamous Fatalities. Fast forward to late 1995/early 1996, and I still did not have a SNES, but a new neighborhood friend, Rich, just got one and the next several months at his place introduced me to so many SNES games. Rich kind of got me somewhat into RPGs at the time, and while it may not sound fun on paper, there were many times I recall just kind of embracing the role of “armchair gamer.” I did this for games like EVO: Search for Eden, and Eye of the Beholder while keeping an eye out during gameplay to offer whatever suggestions seemed viable.

FFVI was eye-opening to me at the time of what video game narratives were capable of, and I devoured the latest secrets for FFVI discovered in the latest issue of my Game Players subscription that was delivered. The RPG I felt like that I contributed something to was the game that was originally released as Final Fantasy III. That game featured two-player support for battles only, so it was refreshing to help Rich with progressing through the game finally. My two favorite characters to use were Sabin and Cyan. That game especially blew me away with its larger-than-life story with two different game worlds, the momentous opera scene with Celes, the dazzling mode-seven graphics when traveling via airship or Chocobo, constantly getting irked at Shadow whenever he deserted the party, and so many other priceless moments. Over the years, I tried restarting the GBA version on a couple of occasions and regrettably have yet to finish it. Finally Owning a SNES….in 1996

Growing up with divorced parents put me in a unique childhood when it came to gaming. I lived with my mom, who provided for us as best as possible for the three siblings I grew up with, so we only had an NES for us for the longest time. However, when visiting my dad on weekends, he would always be big on hitting up as many garage sales and second-hand stores as possible and would acquire whatever he thought seemed like a bargain. Games-wise, this usually meant he lagged behind a generation because everyone was offloading their Atari VCS/2600s at garage sales for cheap when the NES was king, so I could have a great couple of years to become familiar with the pioneering-era of games on Atari. He then got into the NES scene when the SNES hit in 1991. Sure enough, the same month the N64 launched in America in September 1996 was when he bought a Super Nintendo for the family used at our local Premiere Video. The game we picked up with it was Street Fighter II: Turbo. My dad instantly remarked upon booting it up the noticeable jump in graphics. We played nothing but Capcom’s second Street Fighter game on SNES for a few weekends. I could only finish that game by button mashing into a victory against the final boss, M. Bison, once….with M. Bison. I still have a lot of love for this era of Street Fighter - whether it be for the roster, every character’s stage and theme music, and receiving Nintendo Power’s strategy guide for the game for Christmas and studying it regularly to improve.

After a few weeks, we realized we needed something else than a fighting game, and after another trip to Premiere Video, we came home with Super Mario All-Stars. It felt like the easy choice to go with 16-bit remakes of all four 8-bit versions of the core Mario Bros. games. Every game felt like a whole different game with all-new graphics and sound, and more importantly, being able to save progress midgame. This was a bigger hit with the entire family, and it provided many days of taking turns in its alternating two-player mode to see who could get the farthest in the four Mario games included.

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Make sure to have some tissues by your side as you witness FFIII/VI's infamous "opera" scene. Seriously, this was mind-blowing stuff to 13-year old Dale in 1996. 16-bit Sportsball Fun

After playing a lot of those first two SNES games, I went into this stretch for the next several years, where most of what I played was sports and wrestling games. I attribute this to many multiplayer sessions with Rich, my brother, Joe, and my dad. I know my dad was not all that into sports other than a passing interest in rooting on hometown Minnesota pro-sports teams. Still, I have to give him credit for spending as much time with us and taking the time to learn and become a pretty solid player at teaming up with me in many sports games. It is worth noting that I feel the 16-bit era is probably the last-gen where most of its library of sports games had a relatively simple pick-up-and-play feel that NES games had. That changed a little bit in the final SNES years, where it was usually EA’s games that started to incorporate more realism in their sports games and make use of most of the buttons of the SNES controller. For football, Madden NFL ‘97 was the one I played the most. I played plenty of the Genesis version at Rich's place, so much so that I noticed too many little differences with the SNES version to make it stand out on its own. For 16-bit sports nuts that want to know, the Genesis version had the better playing version, but the SNES had a better overall presentation and more popping audio and visuals. I was part of a small slice of sports gamers big into NES Play Action Football, and the 16-bit version played almost exactly like the NES version, but with a 16-bit upgrade and also has a nifty feature to play games at the high school, college, or NFL level.

NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime dominated my 16-bit sports lineup. The code scene for these games were so intense at the time I had to keep my own binder of notes on them all that I still have today as seen above! As I alluded to earlier, when it came to hoops, I played way too much NBA Jam the first year it was out at my friend’s place. However, the arcade hoops game I played the most on SNES was NBA Hangtime, which was developed by the same people who made Jam. I got that game new for Christmas in 1996 and must have played it regularly with Rich for nearly a year straight. I do not hear that game receive the same level of praise as Jam, but it added a few new fun layers to freshen up the gameplay, like being able to do co-op dunks and earn “Team Fire,” and being able to create players. For more simulation-focused hoops, I played a lot of NBA Live ’96 with my dad, in addition to Nintendo’s NCAA Basketball which appeared like a technical marvel to me that was ahead of its time with the mode-seven camera allowing constant 3D rotation whenever possession of the ball changed and foreshadowed what would become the go-to camera perspective for the next-gen of basketball games. Finally, I will cherish my time with Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball for it being the only hoops game I ever had to consult a guide to figure out how to shoot the damn ball….and for its surprisingly rocking soundtrack. Find out all about it when I broke that game down with the Your Parents Basement crew on their penultimate podcast.

Nintendo incorporated the same camera style into its hockey game, NHL Stanley Cup. Its graphics also impressed me, but it was rather challenging to score a goal, and I did not have as much fun with it. I played EA’s hockey games more on Genesis than SNES, but EA’s baseball game, MLBPA Baseball, was the hardball game I spent the most time with on Super Nintendo. Many years later, I picked up Nintendo’s Ken Griffey Jr. Presents: Major League Baseball, and had some fun with it, but already played the Game Boy version of it to death by the time I picked up the SNES version, and thus did not invest as much time with it as I did with EA’s game. Wanna Wrassle!?

I must have read through this review of WWF RAW countless times in my youth, and seeing how this essentially is a bigger and better version of Royal Rumble only increased my desire to one day own a SNES! The North American wrestling library was a significant step up from the bottom of the stairwell where most of the NES games hung out….but on the SNES, it only made it roughly halfway up the stairs. The aforementioned WWF Royal Rumble provided many hours of fun for its day, but it has not stood the test of time with the button-mashing grapple meter it featured that will obliterate thumbs on the normal difficulty level! Its sequel, WWF RAW, was noteworthy for having more match types available and being one of the first games to have a selectable female wrestler in Luna Vachon, but it too used that same ill-fated grapple meter that has not aged well. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game is a fun little hybrid of Mortal Kombat and wrestling, but the SNES version is notorious for lacking two wrestlers compared to all other home versions.

For non-WWF games, WCW SuperBrawl Wrestling is rather unremarkable….except for its exceptional wrestler select screen.There were a few interesting unlicensed wrestling games in America. Natsume Championship Wrestling featured a solid wrestling engine but removed/altered the AJPW wrestlers from the Japanese version of the game. Hammerlock had a promising concept of having part of the screen dedicated to nonstop Tecmo-esque cinematics. In contrast, the other half of the screen featured 2D gameplay, but the cameras constantly flipped on screen, to which half was dedicated to cinematics or gameplay. It resulted in it being a jarring mess. Saturday Night Slam Masters is no such mess, however, and is a better hybrid of fighting game meets wrestling game, with this one done by Capcom. It features larger-than-life character sprites, full-on ring entrances with laser lights, and is a fun-playing combination of wrestling and Street Fighter. To top it off, Slam Masters has Final Fight’s Mike Haggar on the roster to boot!

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Joey Pink does a fine job detailing why Capcom's "Street Fighter" in a wrestling ring should not be missed! Ensuring RPGs are here to Stay Aside from watching Rich play some of the RPGs I listed above, and of course, playing Final Fantasy VI with him, I did get a chance to play a few other RPGs on the SNES over the years, and it was not until the last few years that I finally finished a couple of them. In the late 1990s I first started two RPGs that stood out to me at the time because they broke out of the medieval fantasy mold most other RPGs at the time took place in. Shadowrun on the SNES was drastically different from the Genesis version I first encountered at Rich’s. This one still had the same futuristic cyberpunk world setting and terminology, but there were many more dialog options with NPCs that were pivotal in asking the right questions to progress the story. Additionally, the hacking games played out differently and had more of a puzzle theme to them than the action-oriented ones in the Genesis version, and the combat had kind a PC interface where a cursor had to be dragged across the screen on which target to aim at. I still wound up being totally into it and became stuck in the back half of the game before my save data became corrupted. I thought that would end my days with Shadowrun…

SNES Shadowrun remains one of my all-time favorite RPGs as of this writing! The final gauntlet tower was an ordeal and a half to work through, only to face off against a dragon as the final boss! …until nearly two decades later in 2016. I mentioned on past flashback specials how I occasionally guest host on the Your Parents Basement podcast, where they cover a random retro game per episode. In 2016 they asked me if there were any games I had in mind to cover, and Shadowrun felt like worth revisiting and possibly knocking off the “must beat this game” bucket list. I progressed until about a little over halfway through by the time we all met to record and broke down the game, but by that point, I just started to make further progress than my last effort and was determined to see this one through! I was playing on actual SNES hardware and was surprised that the battery still held a save but ran into trouble in the final tower with a gauntlet of enemies on each floor to overcome before the final boss. I looked up a walkthrough and discovered an exploit to grind experience to beef up my character. Eventually, I managed to persevere and finally conquer the final boss, a fire-breathing dragon, to cross finishing Shadowrun off my bucket list! I had a riot podcasting with the YPB crew about it too, so please click or press here to give it a listen if you want to know more about this under-the-radar 16-bit RPG.

Fast forward three years later in 2019, and the awesome YPB hosts of Steve, Huell, and Todd helped me once again restart and finish another SNES RPG that I came close to finishing in the late 1990s before evil corrupt save data reared its ugly head again. This time the game of choice is the uber-expensive Earthbound. Like Shadowrun, that game stood out to me because its setting went against the grain of fantasy settings and instead took place in modern times as grade school kids. The opening levels felt like getting lost in your neighborhood and using childlike items as weapons like Yo-Yos and baseball bats. I do not own that ridiculously expensive game, but by 2019 I did own a SNES Mini (more on that in a bit) that I made sure to abuse the save state and the rewind functions it provided to overcome some troubling bosses in the back half of the game. That final act of the game certainly goes places with its sci-fi twists and feels like an entirely different game, but I still loved it all the same! It felt exhilarating to finally knock this one off my “to do” list as well, and I had just as much fun dissecting it to pieces with the YPB crew that you can check out by click or pressing here. Unfortunately, this is where my extensive hands-on time with SNES RPGs comes to an end. I played a lot of FFIII/VI, and finished Earthbound, and Shadowrun. Sure, I dabbled in several other games but did not put more than an hour or two into them. One of those games is the much-heralded, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and I have no excuse for never sticking with it because I loved the NES original. It was the GBA re-release I played, and I think I was spreading myself thin while playing and reviewing too many games simultaneously. Lufia and Breath of Fire II were another pair of RPGs I put a couple of hours into that both left me with promising first impressions, but there was a whole other reason why I did not go back to those again, and that is because then I was waist-deep at the time in….. Discovering Emulation Right around the time my family acquired its first computer in the fall of 1997 was when I found out about emulation. It seemed way too good to be true to easily download and play games right on the computer, especially when factoring in the SNES was at the tail end of its lifecycle, and there were still new games releasing for it. As an unemployed 9th grader at the time, I sampled countless 8- and 16-bit ROMs with the SNES games I was the most curious about. A few of the RPGs in the previous paragraph being prime examples of the ones I invested the most time into. It proved to be overwhelming with so many choices, but I took a long sabbatical after a year or so of taking in the emulation scene after the family computer crashed and I lost all the save data I had amassed in so many games.

It has been interesting to see how emulation has evolved over the years from programs like SNES9X and Retroarch to being incorporated into machines like the MISTer, RetroPi, and Retron 5. Nintendo has learned to embrace official, legal emulation over the years with purchasable digital classic games on systems such as the Wii, WiiU, and 3DS. Having a stable income as an adult now many years later, I feel guilty for embracing the emulation scene so hard in my teenage years, so much so that whenever Nintendo re-releases one of its classic hits several times over, I choose to purchase it again (well…usually at a sale price) to redeem myself. Keeping SNES Alive Today

Over the years, I find myself diving into retro games versus the latest and greatest coming out. I am a fan of the various SNES hardware updates/clones, both officially from Nintendo and unofficially from other companies, which has kept my SNES and other retro game fandom blood flowing over the decades. I am unsure if it feels right to lump it in here, but the Super Game Boy lead to me getting a lot of extra life out of my SNES. Playing Game Boy games on the big screen was a big deal to me back then, considering it was always a pain to make out what was happening on the non-backlit handheld. For some reason, those special border screens that would eventually have funny animations after being left idle for so long made an impression on me. Game Boy games with the “Super Game Boy Enhanced” logo on the front of the box usually have their own exclusive border and special color palette. I loved the Mole Mania and Donkey Kong Land borders the most! I thought it was rad that around 15-20 special enhanced Super Game Boy titles featured multiplayer support with two SNES controllers. They consisted almost entirely of Bomberman and fighting games, but it was still a cool feature nonetheless. The handheld Hyperkin SupaBoy is the unauthorized SNES take on the Sega Nomad by having a portable SNES. It is a bit on the bulky side, but it has a rechargeable battery, and its support has been flawless with my entire SNES library. Another Hyperkin product I got a lot of use out of is the Retron 5. I know that particular clone system is controversial with retro game enthusiasts based on the unauthorized emulators it implements. However, the user interface and emulation support made it possible for me to make record progress in many SNES games by taking advantage of save states and its optional Game Genie-esque cheats library. The SNES Classic Edition is an excellent official piece of hardware from Nintendo that has the pint-sized SNES pre-installed with 21 SNES games, one of which is previously unreleased Star Fox 2. It has an adorably intuitive interface and supports game rewinding and save states, which made it the way I was finally able to finish Earthbound. It was also surprisingly not-so-difficult to plug into a PC and import a bunch of SNES ROMs into. Other companies like 8bitdo made that system extra convenient by making their recommended wireless controllers compatible with it!

If you did not grow up with the SNES, then both of these options are great entry points for those looking to move on beyond emulators. The Analogue Super NT may have been pushing it too much price-wise. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of emulation tech, I am not a wizard by any means, except that by all sources, it sounds like the Super NT offers the best hardware emulation with its FPGA technology. It makes SNES games appear as pristine as possible on an HD/4KTV without any or as minimal of the fuzziness that happens whenever I try plugging in the composite/RCA cables from a base SNES system into a 4K/HDTV. For those unfamiliar with the Super NT, this video from the My Life in Gaming crew does a thorough dissection of everything it has to offer. The list of options in there is intimidating to mess around with, but this sounds like the way to go if one wants to keep playing their cartridges……although I have to admit I am pretty satisfied currently with the Retron 5 and SNES Classic Edition.

Odds are some of you are quite a bit younger than me and grew up post-SNES lifecycle. Not interested in going down the pricey road of hunting down old cartridges and hardware, and do not want to dabble on the dark side of illegal emulation? Then a terrific alternative is if you have a Switch with Nintendo’s $20/year online service membership and taking advantage of the Nintendo Switch Online and Super Nintendo Switch Online digital game portals. It has unlimited access to the slate of games on there, along with save points as long as your membership remains active. The implementation of save states and the user interface has also improved noticeably over the emulation used for NES & SNES Classic Editions. More importantly, it adds the feature to play online with a friend. Last year I played online SNES games with my nephew, who was wrapping up 6th grade at the time, and this was his first time playing SNES games. He loves Mario Kart 8 on Switch, and so when the first game we played was the original Super Mario Kart, I could not help but crack up when he instantly remarked, “Dale, this looks old!” He eventually came around, and then we had some fun playing co-op , Joe & Mac . A couple of years ago, on my Genesis Flashback Special, I made sure to reminisce of my fond memories of the summer I spent playing nonstop Sega Channel. These NES/SNES Switch portals are essentially the Sega Channel, but far better because it does not cost $15 a month (in 1994 dollars which equals $27.63 today per Google), offers multiple save states, and ability to play online for only $20 a year!!! Kids, get your parents to hook you up now!!! Miscellaneous Quick Hits

SNES games were the most common denominator on six of the 13 episodes I guest hosted on the retro game podcast, Your Parents Basement. Check out their full archives by click or pressing here. -Turns out I did quite a few guest hosting spots on Your Parents Basement Podcast for SNES games. For those that are podcasting fiends and dug the three episodes I linked to already, then I will link you to three more SNES themed episodes I appeared on where I breathed in the Mode 7 skies of Pilotwings, embraced Capcom’s action-platformer prowess in X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, and made sure not to miss any Gatorade and Wheaties health pick-ups in Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City.

-The SNES controller is my favorite pre-disc console era controller. It kept the similar button layout of the NES controller but rounded off the edges into its iconic “dog bone” feel so the controller no longer cramped in your hands! Throw in the two extra face buttons and two additional shoulder buttons, and it opened up all kinds of deeper gameplay possibilities! It made it perfect for most fighting games that used almost all the face and shoulder buttons. I found the shoulder buttons were also smartly implemented in NBA Jam/Hangtime for being assigned to use for turbo speed functionality. As far as other SNES controllers/peripherals go, since I loved the NES Zapper, I always wanted to try the Super Scope, but as a kiddo, its bazooka-sized proportions were kind of intimidating. It still kind of bums me out all these years I never got to experience it with epics like Yoshi’s Safari, T2: The Arcade Game, and Tin Star. I never had an opportunity to use the SNES mouse either, which I kind of regret all these years later after seeing all the marvelous creations from experts at Mario Paint, and it was cool to see some PC ports like Civilization, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D take advantage of SNES Mouse compatibility.

-The 16-bit era was when fighting games exploded, and as you can tell above, I spent a lot of time with Street Fighter II: Turbo, and the first two Mortal Kombat games. Other than that, though, the only other fighting game on SNES I put significant time into was TMNT Tournament Fighters. It was released at the tail end of the TMNT-mania when the cartoon peaked at its popularity. The game itself was a surprisingly competent licensed fighting game from Konami, and tried its best to feel like a solid Street Fighter-clone. Speaking of them pesky turtles… -…TMNT IV: Turtles in Time was the only beat-em-up brawler I put considerable time into on the SNES. I have vague memories of trying others out once or twice like The Peace Keepers, and Super Double Dragon, but Turtles in Time was the one I frequently revisited over the years. It is a superb rendition of the arcade game, with SNES-exclusive levels like the Technodrome that had a fantastic first-person boss fight against Shredder, where lowly Foot Soldiers had to be chucked right at him to defeat Shredder. The soundtrack is one of my favorite SNES scores, so much so that I went all-in to get the for it! I have so many great memories of this game, with the highlight being my friend Matt and I revisiting this for complete runs of it once every year or two for about a dozen years.

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Turtles in Time and FFIII/VI are my favorite SNES soundtracks, but Turtles in Time I own on vinyl so I will embed it here in all its glory for you to enjoy as well!

-The SNES library had a quality slate of racing games. Super Mario Kart quickly rose to the top of the ranks and was always fun to bust through a GP with a friend. Street Racer was one of the first kart-clones to hit in 1994, and for some reason, that one always stuck with me. As did it being one of the few games to have four-player split-screen support with all four screens being horizontal! Rock ‘n Roll Racing is another killer arcade racer on SNES; think of a more beefed up RC Pro-AM, but with a good dose of heavy metal mixed in. This past year saw it re-released as part of the Blizzard Arcade Collection for everyone to experience it! I remember trying out F-Zero at a store kiosk around SNES launch, but was too young at eight years old at the time to fully grasp its style of futuristic racing (or that the name was a riff on F1 racing until a couple of years ago). I was more into a game similar to its style that was the trilogy of Top Gear titles. Uniracers was a quirky racer I enjoyed with its unique aesthetic and one-wheeled racers taking advantage of their nature in races filled with jumps and loop-de-loops….too bad about Pixar holding a grudge against Nintendo and legally forcing them to yank it off shelves. Nintendo’s other racer, Stunt Race FX, was ahead of its time with the polygonal FX-based graphics running pretty chunky on the SNES. Still, it is a commendable piece of 16-bit tech they were just barely able to keep running at a passable-enough framerate. Another FX-chip game that did not originally gel with me was…

-…the original Star Fox. Being 10 when it released in 1993, I thought those polygonal graphics looked blocky and horrendous and would have none of it! Many years later, I would revisit it and rightfully come around on it! -Another Nintendo-published game that received a lot of hype was Donkey Kong Country with its cutting-edge 3D models. They were plastered all over gaming mags at the time. I briefly recall trying out the first and second of the three Donkey Kong Country games on SNES. However, I did not put more time into them because I beat Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy before our family got a SNES, which was just a watered-down port with some remixed levels for the handheld. I enjoyed my time with it, but its disappointingly blunt “congratulations” ending left a bad impression on me, and I never felt like giving the other entries a serious go all these years.

-Some may be wondering why there has yet not been anything dedicated to the pair of Super Mario World titles and Super Mario RPG? Super Mario World was probably one of the first SNES games I tried when I visited my older brother at his first apartment in the early 90s. I think the heavy-duty graphics and trying to comprehend attacking with Yoshi proved to be too much for eight or nine-year-old me at the time. I played it a few other times in my 20s, hanging out with coworkers on retro game nights, and had fun with it, but I think since I was exposed to the NES trilogy more and played the hell out of All-Stars, that those were the versions I preferred more. I appreciated how Nintendo stepped up to Sega’s edgier marketing at the time with Nintendo’s “Play it Loud” marketing campaign. Unfortunately, I think their ad for Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island was a bit too extreme for 12-year old Dale at the time. That ad (click here for it if you are feeling daring)was forever planted in my subconscious and always crossed my mind and indirectly caused me to avoid Yoshi’s Island for all these years. I did pick up Super Mario RPG and it is on my “bucket list” of games to play as well. I am holding off on it all these years because I was hanging out with Matt one day, and he explained how he was having a tough time with the final boss, Smithy. Well, he wanted to give me a quick demo to show how unforgiving of a challenge the boss was….but for some reason his clutch gaming skills kicked in right then, and he beat Smithy and was exposed to the ending right then and there!

-As far as other tough SNES games go, the two most challenging for me are easily Contra III: The Alien Wars and Zombie Ate My Neighbors. Contra III is like the first two games on steroids. I love the boss battles and intense walk-n-shoot chaos, but do not love constantly dying in one shot! Zombies Ate My Neighbors is another fun action-platformer that is also equally tough to make it farther than a few levels in unless you seriously dedicate yourself to it. Hey, both of these games also saw re-releases this past year on current consoles with the Contra Anniversary Collection and Zombies Ate My Neighbors & Ghoul Patrol set for those wanting to experience 16-bit nail-biting difficulty (but with save state support!).

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I hope this excellent video review from the quintessential retro video game source, Jeremy Parish, suffices for my lack of any meaningful Super Mario World memories here. -In 1997, I was hyped for a late SNES release, the original Harvest Moon. The farm/life/dating-sim series is still around today from publisher Natsume (as well as the original developers parting ways with Natsume and delivering their own competing Story of Seasons series). During the SNES era, I spent several summers out on a farm. I appreciated rural life's solitude and free spirit lifestyle, and that first Harvest Moon game perfectly encapsulated that. Trying to determine the best way to spend the day tending to the fields, livestock and managing a social/family life was surprisingly fun and engaging! Harvest Moon remain one of two games that I submitted a blurry Polaroid photo to Nintendo Power’s “Arena” high score section. I cannot recall if my score got posted or not.

-The original Sim City port on SNES received a lot of love around the SNES launch window, with Nintendo giving it a unique makeover with bonus Nintendo characters in it and an exclusive tutor in the form of Dr. Wright to ease everyone into the simulation gameplay. I never played too much of that version, but one night at Rich’s, the game we decided to rent that night was Sim City 2000. That one was released way late into the SNES lifecycle and lacked any Nintendo extras the first SNES game had. Still, we stayed up all night playing it and looking at our daily news recap and mayor approval ratings and trying to figure out where to stop underwater pipe blockages! It ran slowwww on the SNES, but we tolerated it fine enough at the time because I had yet to play the PC version. Eventually, I would check out the PC version and came away surprised with so much I had to put up within the SNES game. -For those wanting to dare the Super Famicom scene, there are a plethora of great games that never made their way stateside, and better yet, a hearty chunk of them have received English fan translations. I am partial to the FirePro wrestling games that never made it here that are vastly superior to all the American wrestling games I broke down above, BS Out of Bounds Golf is an addicting take on miniature golf, the original Star Ocean, and the Back to the Future platformer that was not a five-star classic by any means, but blew away the poor NES and Genesis games that did release here. If you are not that familiar with the Super Famicom library, this top 50 list from RVG Fanatic is a great place to start your research and very much helped clueing me into a bunch of Super Famicom games I had little-to-no knowledge of. Conclusion

If you are around my age reading this, you may be wondering why I have not gone on about the fabled “16-bit Wars” by now. Rest assured, I experienced it in the lunchroom and at recess and in gaming magazines at the time. I devoured all the side-by-side screenshots in gaming mags of dual-platform releases to see if I could spot which version was better. I want to say back then, I sided with the SNES because I grew up with the NES, but that does not seem like a fair choice since I did not own a SNES until 1996. Reflecting on it, although I experienced a fair amount of RPGs and other games on SNES with Rich, I primarily played endless hours of Genesis games with him back at the time. So whenever I hung out with Rich, I considered myself a Genesis fan, and when I finally got a SNES and grew my SNES library, I considered myself a SNES fan and avoided a lot of the “console wars” trash talk. For younger readers here who want to learn more about the fervor of the 16-bit wars, the book, Console Wars, and its corresponding documentary (which is currently only available on Paramount+/CBS All Access sadly) are my recommended ways to absorb all that hoopla. I will cherish all of the past 30 years of SNES memories and hope you have enjoyed reminiscing with me for the last several thousand words. If you want to hear more of my SNES memories in podcast form, I have a few SNES-centric episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted and have embedded below for your pleasure. They have some of the friends I repeatedly mentioned above as co-hosts that share their SNES experiences and memories, so please load up a random SNES “podcast game” and boot one of these podcasts up for fitting background noise….

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10 years ago I did a 20th anniversary SNES special with Matt!

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Here is the history of RPG series episode dedicated to the 16-bit era.

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Finally, here is Matt and I hosting the 16-bit installment of our history of comic book games series. Bonus Overtime

It would not be a Flashback Special without one random oddball bonus story to wrap it up with. The only Kirby game I ever finished receives that honor. One day, my brother and his friend Jake were over at my place. We were discussing SNES games at some point, and Jake mentioned how Kirby Super Star is his all-time favorite. I said how I never played it and did not think anything of it at the time, but the next time I met up with him and my brother, Jake had the copy of that game with him and insisted on borrowing it to me and said not to give it back until I finished it. I felt this sudden obligation to play through it as a priority, so I did not feel like I was keeping his game hostage. Luckily, Kirby Super Star is a damn fun game, which the front of the box labels as “8 Games in One!” Most of the games are abbreviated-length adventures of only a handful of missions in their unique theme of levels, and a few of the games are mini-games like a race against King DeDeDe. Regardless, almost every game provided that trademark Kirby lighthearted fun and was hard to put down! Kirby’s Dream Course is also a lot of fun on SNES, and is an interesting take of Kirby meets miniature golf! With that anecdote, I will wrap up yet another Flashback Special. Thank you for sticking with me this far, and If you dug reading about my trials and tribulations with Nintendo’s 16-bit machine, please take a look at the other Flashbacks I have linked below!

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th and 32-X 25th Anniversaries Xbox 360 15th Anniversary

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