Gaming - One Of My Childhood Passions - Part 2

Hi all you blog fans out there. I hope you’ve been enjoying the recent posts, I try to update as much as I can in between work for University and the voluntary work I participate in. In the last blog post, I talked about my passion for gaming in the 8-bit era. In this post, I want to talk about the 16-bit era, in which my passion got bigger for the medium. This is the era of the SNES and Megadrive. As a child, I was a Super Nintendo person, mainly due to the great experiences I had with Nintendo’s 8-bit console. This is where the passion truly hit its peak.

As with many people, my first experience was the enhanced versions of the original Mario games from the NES era remade for the SNES. I loved the graphics and this new polished feel of these classic games. I spent a lot of my time on third party titles who were trying to make money from the success of platform games. I loved games such as Plok and anything made by Disney. They always had the imagination and new ideas. I never quite had the same enthusiasm when 3D platformers came rushing by when the N64 hit the scene in the mid 90s. 2D platformers were, and still are, the way to go in my opinion.

In addition to the newly improved graphics and sound, the group feeling we started in the 8-bit era stuck. I still remember playing the original Mario Kart and being amazed by the graphics and the fact I could race my favourite characters round a track with a friend. Competition really did ensue!

I didn’t have much contact with the Megadrive until much later on in years when I decided it was time to experience it. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations but maybe that was because I decided to do this in the PS2 era. Games like Sonic on the Megadrive weren’t as good in my opinion as their 8-bit counterparts. They still had that platforming magic but it wasn’t as easy to master in my opinion. I also found that there was a lot of repetition with the Megadrive’s output. I mean a lot of the SNES games from that era, would also be on the Megadrive, but would have things cut or added on; most of the time it seemed like the latter. The SNES had something its competitor didn’t, the Mode 7 capability; quite what this is I’m not sure of even today.

I’m going to end this post for now, as the 16-bit era is massive in my opinion and there is so much more I wish to talk about in respect to this time of gaming. Thanks for reading and please don’t hesitate to comment if you have any opinions on what I have said in this post.