The natural progression from the NES of course was right into the SNES. I think the SNES may still be my favorite console, mostly for the graphics. There is such a perfect simplicity to the sprits of the SNES. It was just enough power and memory to make larger complex titles, but not overly complicate them. I enjoy modern pixel graphics games, but they are always much higher resolution with so many more colors. It’s just not the same. After the SNES, consoles became much more about polygons and 3D graphics.
In case you didn’t catch it, I had a SNES growing up. My friends had a SNES, one had a Genesis, but we were all basically cemented in as “Nintendo people” at this point. The SNES somehow ended up being a different experience as well, less multi player gaming and more solo playing together. We did play multiplayer titles, Super Street Fighter 2 was one for sure, and of course Mario Kart. Everyone loved Mario Kart.
But a lot was solo gaming. The SNES was also when I started really getting into RPGs. The SNES had so many good RPGs, and specifically, the Final Fantasy series. I’ve probably played through Final Fantasy 2(IV) and 3(VI) a dozen times or more. It was everything I loved of the first game on the NES, except the stories were so much more. It’s a love that would continue on for a long while.
I wasn’t only a SNES person though, my grandparents had a Sega Genesis for us to play when we visited, which was fairly often despite that we lived 2 States and an 8-hour drive away. We didn’t have as many games for the Genesis but I absolutely loved Sonic 2 and Aladdin. Eventually, I did get a Genesis for our house though as well, or maybe we just somehow ended up with the one from my grandparents. It never quite dominated my game-playing like the SNES did. It always felt a little off graphically I think, like everything with just kind of “dirtier” somehow. The SNES was a crisp cartoon world, the Genesis felt like it was trying to reproduce a real environment but ugly.
It’s probably worth noting, even though it’s not a 16 bit console, I also had a Game Boy around this time period. I think the Game Boy was just as played as the SNES. I’ve always been really partial to handheld consoles for sure. I had the gigantic HandyBoy attachment that would split out into a big mess of speakers with a magnification screen. I think it was bigger than the Game Boy itself. My brother had one too, I think part of why we got them was to keep us busy on car rides when traveling, which we did fairly often. My parents liked to go to my grandparent’s home, and we went camping a lot.
Final Fantasy was a big favorite on the Gameboy as well, with the Final Fantasy Legend series, though I would later learn these were technically part of another series called Saga. There was also a lot of Tetris too. I got really good at Tetris in the early 90s.
