Donkey Kong Country
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"OMG look at the 3D graphics" Was a line I heard from many people when this game was released. At the time nothing this good had been seen before. Yes we had had 3D sort of games with Star Wing and others, but to me they are looked really blocky and crap. This was the first home console game to get some sort of 3D graphics in games right. Rare did a great job of re-inventing Donkey Kong and giving him a world to explore that was fresh and different, with a host of great new characters to go with him. Yes the game plays very much the same as Super Mario World but it looks and feels so much different. This was one of the only games I brought brand new for my SNES and paid full price of around £50-£60 for it. It was worth it, the game itself wasn't that hard but getting 100% was a mission that took me some time and in the end to find the last few % I had to use a guide. This was the start of a great run for Rare and I did love how their games were somehow different to Japen and USA output. Its great having an English company make games as I said before, such a shame they sold out to Microsoft.
Unirally
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Unirally is not a well know game to most people. It came near the end of the SNES life time for me, and was meant to show that the SNES could create a fast paced game like Sonic. In one player mode the game does get a bit dull but get some mates round and have a league going and you have an endlessly addictive game. And boy was the game fast, it was like Sonic on acid. I do remember playing this for hours at the weekend with my mates and also it was very frustrating when you didn't win. This is one of those games I remember playing loads but don't remember that much about the game and how to play it, will have to dig out the SNES and buy a copy off ebay.
Super Bomberman 2
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This was the last game I had for my first SNES, and what a little gem it was. Like Unirally the one player mode was a bit dull but again multi player was were it was at. This was the first game that had a 4 player option that I had, so I got myself a multitap and hooked up 4 pads and away we went for days of bombing fun. Most people must have played some form of Bomberman and the idea of the game is simple, blow everyone up with a bomb, sounds easy but trust me it isn't. Most of the time just trapping and blowing yourself up will do it. The power ups in this game were great, like the one to throw bombs and one to give you full screen blasts were such fun. This is what I like about older games, a simple game like this can take away hours of your life. I mean look the screen doesn't even change but I had more enjoyment out of this than the photo real worlds of most new games.
UFO: Enemy Unknown
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Now this is where I somehow gave away my SNES to someone at school and lost interest with console games, and I can't remember why. Teenagers do strange things. However I still had my trusty Amiga and this was the game to keep me going for a long time. My mates had been playing this game for a few months but I thought it looked very dull and couldn't get into it. But my mates made me play it and after a few hours I was hooked. We were all going through the X-Files alien stage of the mid 90s at this point, and this game linked into that very well. The game is a one player strategy but we used to have about 3 or 4 people playing, each one would pick a character and decide where they moved during missions. This added to the game as we used to fight about who had what weapon and which way each of us was going. It was a strange way to play a strategy game but it worked and we enjoyed playing this game very much and did in fact complete it. Also owned the game on the PS1 and the sequel X-Com Terror from the Deep, but none compare to this version on the Amiga. I am yet to play the recent updated version, don't have the time to put into it although the iPad version called Aliens versus Humans is a great version of the original.
Dogfight
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This was a little demo type of game on the Amiga that was a very simple in graphics and game play but boy was it good fun with 3 other mates. The aim of the game was to fly around the screen and shoot each other, but the fun thing was the screen never moved and it took some skill to fly the plane, it would stall and the handling of the thing was very poor this made it so much fun trying to get away from your mate by dive bombing into the ground and trying to pull out at the last minute but getting it wrong and ending up hitting the ground. Also the fact that if you hit each other you would die. which made it fun if you stalled your plane and went spinning into the ground and take your mate with you by hitting him. There was never a winner and you never got any points so there was no high score but it was so much fun for 4 of you to play (2 on keys and 2 on joysticks, none of these LAN parties or online back then).
Tekken
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After giving away my SNES I had about a year without a games console and really missed it. So when the Playstation was released I thought I would get one. I had never bought a brand new console from a company that was yet to prove itself in the gaming market. At around £300 it was a big risk! I would never do this now and would give most consoles a good 6 months to see how it plays out. Tekken was the first game I got with the console, and I was amazed by it. At the time the 3D graphics were amazing and the game controlled so well. This wasn't the first 3D fighting game I had played that honer went to Virtual Fighter, but I never liked Segas fighting game, it just didn't play very well and had dull characters. Tekken on the other hand felt like the new Street Fighter 2 in my eyes and kept me and my mates happy for a good few months. Although this game did bring with it the idea of button bashing to win and there was no skill to some of the moves like in other Beat'em ups. Still the dawn of 3D on home consoles had begun (for better and for worse)
Now we're talking data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7 Tekken was king when it came out but definitely got bettered significantly by the time the 3rd (And best) game came out.
Yeah looking at that pic of the game now it looks rubbish compared to today's standards but back in 1995 it was like nothing else.Never had Tekken 3, I had Tekken 2 which was a big step up and refined the game in many ways.
Destruction Derby
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It's fair to say that the Playstation went straight for teenage gamers, and this was for me the first game to do it. My gaming experience up to this point had mainly been fantasy worlds in most games I had played. This was something else this was a real life experience. The game set out to look real and feel real when playing. I had never played a racing game were your car had damage meaning you couldn't hit walls or other cars on the track. In the past you just bombed around the track hitting anything and not worrying about it. Destruction Derby turned that on its head and winning the race was only half the battle, keeping the car in good enough shape to get it to the end was the hard part. This was the main appeal of the game, playing on the bowl track and just hitting other cars and seeing your car change with each hit was such a new thing. This felt like a really interactive experience and made the game feel more real. With this and Tekken to me the 3D age of home computer games had been born, although not fully matured yet.
One thing i've learned is that video games date a lot faster and quicker than films do. I guess because it's heavily reliant of the technology of the time.
Ha, that's interesting because while I played Tekken 2, I never owned it. I owned Tekken 3 though I thought that was a huge step up from Tekken 2! data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7 spent all my money at the arcade and thought I had died and gone to heaven when my mum got me a PSOne with Tekken 3. The improvements post Tekken 3 have been marginal imo.