Once upon a time, there was SNES

First video games I ever played. Those fond memories of playing them without a clue what it says on the screen, just having fun playing, usually with my big brother and sometimes my little sister. The only thing I really understood from those back then was the "GAME OVER" screen. 

Sometime in the 90's a SNES console appeared into our household. With three game cartridges - Donkey Kong Country, Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Rise of the Robots. 

The shit one

Probably the only one of these I managed to finish was Rise of the Robots, but only because it was so ridiculously easy. Or I might have had the setting on easy, I was probably 7 years old at maximum when I played this, so can't really remember. And funnily enough, it's been on the lists of shittiest SNES games... and I can totally see why. 

I also found out that you can actually try out yourself how bad it is! Right here. Controlling it with a keyboard just makes it even worse. 

The "this is too hard for me" one

Even the tauntaun is shaking its head "you ain't finishing this, kid"

Being so young and not really understanding much about games yet, this was just too hard and I'm not even sure if I ever got through even the first level... And looking through comments on YouTube on a playthrough video I see I wasn't the only one. This one is loved by many, but also resulted in a lot of meltdowns apparently. Some say that it was even harder than Dark Souls games nowadays. The game over screen with Yoda's face has been burnt on my irises for all these years.

So, if you're looking to challenge yourself with some hard old school games, try this one! Your best bets are an original SNES, a hacked mini SNES or an emulator.

The golden one

Donkey Kong Country is THE game that I will probably still remember when I'm old and riddled with Alzheimer's, being a pain in the ass to everyone just repeating "you know, there's this game..."

Despite never finishing this as a kid, I still played the shit out of it. Without any English skills, a lot of the progress my brother and I made with this game was lost, because we didn't really understand that there was this one lady to whom you could go to save your game. 

Timing is everything

This provided us hours upon hours of fun. All the enemies feel unique and just by playing you start to figure out how to best deal with them. Each of the levels have their own theme with gameplay; swinging from vines, riding a mine cart,  shooting yourself out of barrels... Sometimes the fun was making a miscalculated jump thinking you're falling to your doom, and finding out down there was a barrel that shoots you up into a hidden bonus level with bananas! And other times it was just simply very fun and well designed platforming, where timing your jumps correctly makes it a very satisfying experience.

This is one of the prime examples how a good art style in a video game can make it age very well. It still looks kickass! Also, the soundtrack. Some of the best in video games, ever. Fight me. 

For a long time I was very sad that our good ol' SNES console wasn't working anymore and I wasn't able to play this, only longingly gaze at the cartridge and watch videos on YouTube. But! Hail the mighty Nintendo, they brought out Mini SNES! And now it's even better, just this summer Donkey Kong Country has been available on Switch as well! Just try it out if you can get your hands on any of those three consoles, you'll see what I mean.