My Collection: Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)

As part of my effort to chronicle my video game collection, I’m diving into my favorite system: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). My goal in putting together these lists is to get a good sense of the games I have, the games I want to try, and the games I want to finally beat. It’s been years since I’ve played SNES, but this is the week, I’m going to dust it off and tackle at least a few of these games.

In the first post of this series (My Collection: NES), I mentioned that the majority of overlap in my husband’s and my collections was in the SNES department. I mean, between the two of us, we have four SNES consoles! But, of course, like the good video game collectors we are, we can’t bear to part with any of it. We use the dingiest console for gaming, and the others are stored away safely.

Unrelated note: Maybe not as safely as we thought because I just discovered a leak under our sink that appears to have been going on for weeks, at least. Our basement game room is directly below it. My advice to you all, dear readers, is go and check under your kitchen sinks right now and make sure there’s no water. I’m serious- go right now! I’ll wait…. Okay, I hope you’re back and all is well because you don’t want to have to have to deal with standing water and mold and replacing cabinets and replacing drop ceiling tiles, like the adventure we are about to embark on. Back to the story.

The SNES is my all-time favorite console, even though I’ve been mostly a PlayStation girl since. I think it’s because the SNES was the system that turned me from a casual gamer into a serious core gamer (read more here: How I Became a Gamer Mom). My first system was the NES, but the difficulty of NES games combined with my age when I was playing (6 or 7 years old) meant a lot of frustration. When games were only about 128–384 kb big, game developers ramped up the difficulty to make sure we got our monies worth.

I liked it, but I think my life could have gone either way at that point. I could have set aside games and been done with them and taken up basket weaving or soccer or javelin throwing. In fact, maybe the SNES ruined my chances at Olympic stardom. But, I’m not mad. The SNES was a dream to me.

Suddenly, the storage capacity in those little cartridges ramped up, and we had games like Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past which seemed like sprawling epic adventures compared to most NES games.

Super Nintendo was the console I spent hours and hours playing. I remember sleep-overs with friends, taking turns beating levels in Super Mario World. I was always great at jumping through the Boos in the haunted levels. If pressed to pick an all-time favorite game across any platform, I’d say Link to the Past. And then if left to think about it, I’d switch to Super Mario World. And then Secret of Mana and then Super Mario RPG. It’s really hard to choose, but what always remains is that my favorite is one of the ones on SNES.

While going through the catalog, I was surprised to discover that I actually have fewer SNES games than NES games. I guess it makes sense because I’ve had more time to accumulate NES games and the price point tends to be a bit lower. Still, I was expecting my SNES collection to be larger because it was the system that made me a gamer.

The numbers:

NES

83 total games
48 played (58%)
6 beat (7%)
13 favorites (16%)

SNES

60 total games
29 played (48%)
15 beat (25%)
14 favorites (23%)

Other than the low total count for SNES games, these numbers pretty much fit what I expected. Despite having played more NES games, I have reached the end and enjoyed more SNES games. Given my day job as a scientist, I checked the numbers. I ran a test to tell me the statistical likelihood of these numbers happening because of chance, and guess what, the p-value was significant and the null hypothesis was rejected! So, I can tell you without a doubt, it is scientifically proven that the SNES is my favorite system. Well, I guess I only tested it against the NES. So, it tells us that between the NES and the SNES, the SNES is my statistical favorite.

I hope you all enjoyed that bit of math. And now it’s time for the list. My goal for the next week is to play at least one new game and beat another one. I’ve already picked the game I want to beat- Illusion of Gaia. It’s one of my favorite but I never beat it. It’s going down.