![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
The Super Nintendo was the second console that I bought for myself, again well after it had been released to the world. But a little bit faster than I bought the NES, because I could still get cartridges for it fairly easily in used places and stores. This was a good thing, because I bought it at an amateur radio show for 20 dollars. It came with all the things I needed to hook up to a television, one game (a baseball simulator) and one joystick. Suffice it to say, I very quickly added on the gamepads and significantly more software so as to have a fun time on the kitchen television with different games. Mostly the Super Mario games released for the system, but I did also end up getting Mortal Kombat II for the system, which had significantly more blood and fatalities than the original Mortal Kombat for the SNES due to a relaxing of some of the editorial decisions that Nintendo had insisted on for other hand cartridges.
The SNES, however, was positioned at exactly the right time for people growing up and getting themselves immersed in Role-Playing Games. Since they came from Japan, they were usually labeled as JRPGs to differentiate them from RPGs created in the U.S. or Europe. The JRPG genre didn't spring into existence on this console and console generation. A company called Square had created what it assumed would be its Final Fantasy as a way of going out big, only to have the sales of that game keep the company profitable and continuing, creating two more Final Fantasies for the NES. A different company called Enix created a series called Dragon Warrior in the U.S. (Dragon Quest in Japan) and released four games for the NES as well, and Nihon Falcom was busy releasing the Ys games for PCs. But among a significant segment of the RPG-playing group, the Super Nintendo had a really long string of hits on the system, including the original releases of Final Fantasy IV-VI (IV and VI would be rebranded as Final Fantasy II and III, since the original II and III hasn't made the trip across the seas, and neither had V), Secret of Mana (the second of the Mana series, as the first had been released as Final Fantasy Adventure for the Nintendo portable, the Game Boy), Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars, EarthBound (Mother 3), and the game that an inordinate number of people will still reflexively place at the top of any "all-time" RPG list, Chrono Trigger. (Although they may dither a bit first about whether to put this or Final Fantasy VI on top.)
Chrono Trigger is a game where a lot of things that would not necessarily be super features on their own all come together to make a unique experience that was positioned just right for its time and audience. The plot involves a Cute Mute getting involved in a Crash-Into Hello with a girl, who volunteers to be teleported by the character's brainy childhood friend, except that the pendant she has as a family heirloom interacts with the teleporter field and instead slings her hundreds of years into the past. Which, in itself, causes an unintended timeline ripple that results in the disappearance of the person who instigated it all, because she's a princess, the pendant is a royal artifact, and it turns out that the many great-descendant of a missing queen looks enough like her that they call off the search for the queen, so she never gets rescued and dies before she can continue the line that eventually leads to her descendant. And that's how it starts. The game itself spans all sorts of time periods and their respective civilizations, with villains and allies and trying to stop a timeline where a parasite called down from space in prehistory bursts free in 1999 and causes an apocalypse. The combat gameplay forgoes random encounters in favor of having enemies on the screen that can be touched to begin their encounters (without a screen transition) and the active battle system allows characters to unleash double or triple attacks if more than one character is in a ready state. The story progresses in a linear manner to a critical point in the narrative, at which point the narrative calls it quits and the back part of the game is composed of several other stories that can be optionally completed in any order before going to the final battle against the apocalypse. The New Game Plus option for it was also interesting, in that it granted the characters the ability to go to the final battle at any time they liked, which would trigger up to a dozen possible endings to the game, depending on how far in the narrative plot the game had progressed before triggering the final battle. Some of those endings are whimsical, some serious, and at least one of them has the main party taking on the role of one of the major antagonists against a new hero character that has appeared in their absence.
Final Fantasy VI is remembered for a similarly world-saving plot divided into two halves, with a linear plot in the front and a non-linear plot in the back, and like Chrono Trigger, there's an apocalypse that happens during the narrative, but this one is unavoidable. The most memorable scene from the game comes from the Opera House, where one of the characters, who could conveniently pass as a body double for a famous soprano, takes on the starring role in hopes that they can lure the owner of one of the few airships to kidnap his favorite opera star. The "voices", such that they are, for the original are the sound chips doing their best, with MIDI instrumentation, but the Opera scenes themselves paint a touching story, and the Dream Oath Opera hinted at what the future of game music scoring and performance would be. (Chrono Trigger also has a stellar soundtrack that takes full advantage of the sound system of the Super Nintendo.) The full orchestration and cinematic quality of both video and sound that accompanies a AAA game (and that has inspired a lot of orchestras to play orchestrations of video games, classic and modern) has its roots in games like both of these, the kinds of games that made spectacular things with what they had available to them. (That, and after the plan goes almost according to plan, a giant octopus crashes the opera and has to be fought on stage by the party, with the implication that the long-suffering pit orchestra is able to pivot almost immediately to a battle theme without too much surprise at the presence of the unexpected cephalopod.)
Games like these also remembered, either fondly or derisively, for some of the localization decisions of Ted Woosley, who gives us iconic lines like "You spoony bard!" and "Son of a submariner!" in various Square titles throughout the era, along with several of the other decisions that went into localizing Japanese games for the U.S. market. Localization generally made the games more child-friendly and removed a lot of religious iconography, since the systems were still being thought of as entertainment for children, possibly teenagers and very young adults, at this time. Even though there was Mortal Kombat, it was much more of an outlier in terms of blood and gore for console. Less so for PCs, which were seen as more mature than game consoles at this point in time.
The RPG and the popularity of the RPG on the console also really cemented the idea that single-player games have a place in the space, rather than games being meant to be fully social things you did with other people. It also proved there's an appetite for games that take tens or hundreds of hours to complete. Not that there weren't such things in previous eras, but Final Fantasy, the Legend of Zelda, and the kinds of games that needed battery-backed RAM for saving progress seemed to be much less prevalent than games that either expected you to go start to finish in one go or that used a password system for progression in the NES era.
At least for me and my family, though, the presence of games, and especially long games, was always a thing that got monitored. In addition to the presence of violence and sex as things to get noticed and commented on, my parents were always concerned that I would choose to play single-player games over social anything else or going outside to run around. My upbringing was much more rural than urban or suburban, and so, while I had neighbors who were nearby or next door, I definitely didn't have a library, a community center, or any other youth hanging out place, not did I really have people of my own age who were nearby and who were part of the same social class as I was such that they would be approved people to hang out with. Getting punted (figuratively) off of computers and consoles to go "run around" or to engage in some other activity, like card game playing or book reading, was a regular occurrence for me as I was growing up. I doubt they thought I would end up NEET or a hikikomori, mostly because those terms wouldn't have been available to my parents to use, but I think they bought into the idea that video games were potentially a problem. Perhaps not in the Murder Simulator or Satanic Panic ways, but in the idea that making digital progress would become more important and more attractive than trying to make social progress with embodied life. The likelier explanation, one that would have been more useful at the time, was that there's some brain chemistry things that make it easier for me to chase one more "five minute" piece of progress that will actually take over or two hours to complete, because it never goes according to plan. Time management and being aware of how long things will actually take is the problem, as well as wanting to feel like something is at a good stopping point, not whether or not I felt that the digital world was better than the physical one. (That the digital world has consistently been better in a lot of ways than the physical world will probably come up later in the series.)
The brain chemistry and the long time investment for the kinds of RPGs that I like playing has made it difficult to play them, because all the necessary parts of adulthood are really good at making sure you don't have uninterrupted blocks of time to play those kinds of games with in your weekends, and that's assuming the machine in question doesn't have other people who also want to use it, or others around who will have issues with the experience of moving video or repetitive sound as distractions or problems, and so forth. The ideal time to play long form RPGs is when you have only school to worry about, clearly, and so you can spend some time making progress as you dash from save point to save point (one of the major limitations of the console over the PC was that consoles needed to have defined points where they could access the save RAM, whereas PCs could generally touch a button and save the state of the game at any time, for good or ill) hoping that your progress wouldn't be wiped out as you get close to the save or because there's a big boss battle coming up that you may or may not be properly equipped to handle.
I've spent a lot of time on this console talking about the RPGs that I played on it, but there were some other interesting developments while playing SNES games that deserve some memory, too. I played a decent amount of Super Mario World for the system, but as a small I didn't fully appreciate how the design of Super Mario Brothers levels introduces concepts that will be necessary to master early on and gives the player plenty of time to practice and understand them. I had beaten the game several times, using various warp capabilities, finding the various Switch Palaces to access new spaces, figuring out the secret of the map dots to indicate whether a level had one or more than one exit available, even defeating the extra hard Special Zone and discovering its musical Easter egg, along with the graphic changes that came to the game by beating the Zone, but I hadn't fully grasped everything I'd been taught about the game, because I hadn't discovered all the exits, including one pathway to the Star Road that contained, as it turned out, a unique enemy find only in that course on the pathway and no other.
The first key revelation that came with finally figuring out all of this was "Most Ghost Houses have multiple exits." The Ghost House items on the map did not have dots underneath them to indicate how many ways out they had, but the purpose of a Ghost House is for the player to traverse a somewhat confusing maze while pursued by ghosts and haunts of all different types until they found a hidden door that actually led out of the House and to the next stage. Thee only stage that has two Ghost Houses is Donut Plains, and a technique learned in one of them (use the cape to fly to the ceiling to find the secret exit) can be used in the other one to find a hidden pathway that leads to the second, Top Secret exit of the other house. Hiding things only in flying spaces is pretty common in the Ghost Houses, often requiring the player to bring a Mario with the correct power up into the stage and keep Mario from getting hit until the power needed would be used.
The last secret exit took a lot of lateral thinking to achieve. It's on a stage in World 4 that had a lot of automatic scrolling and that needs the player to change heights regularly to avoid saws and other cutting objects in their path. There are two easy ways to complete the stage. One is to use the cape power and fly over all the obstacles until Mario crosses the end stage barrier. No matter how high above the barrier Mario is, he will trigger the end of the stage by crossing that space. The other way exit is to obtain and keep a Yoshi dinosaur until about the midway point of the stage, at which point there is an easily collectable set of Yoshi wings, which transports the player to a bonus area and finishes the stage when the bonus area is completed. To collect the secret exit from this stage, both of these temptations have to be avoided. There's only one thing on this stage to suggest what the actual solution is, other than someone getting curious and trying it for a lark, as we did: it's one of the few end of stage gates that you can potentially go underneath. It's not an easy task to achieve, requiring either a precise dive to swoop underneath and then snap back up on the other side of the gate, or to sacrifice a Yoshi by jumping off of the Yoshi after having passed underneath the end gate. There's a second end gate up the vine once you've done the tricky part, and that leads to the unique enemy stage and an entry to Star Road after cheating the unique course. It took me many years of maturity, curiosity, and playing the game before I finally got the 96 exits clear, even though I'd beaten Koopa much, much earlier.
Games teach us problem-solving skills, especially when we're faced with a Puzzle Boss or a Bonus Boss that requires handling in a manner completely different than everything else in the game. Not sure those skills always come back to help us in physical-world situations, but it's often useful and interesting brain exercise to solve a thing, especially when it's a situation where there are multiple possible solves and some are more optimal than others. And like other media, they offer us the chance to go somewhere else and be a hero or jump ridiculously high or other things that engage our storytelling core. And like other media, sometimes the best thing ever is finding people who have enjoyed the same thing you have same sharing a bond over it. Rather than getting addicted and surrendering all my time in solo play, I've found there's a pretty robust community of fans and other players of games that I can connect with and share memories with. Rather than staying isolated, the network has helped me find some of my own people. Even if it might feel like there's no singular place that I can be all of my identities in at once.
- CPU: Ricoh 5A22 @ 3.58 MHz
- Memory: 128KB general RAM, 64KB dedicated RAM for video and audio subsystems
- Graphics: Picture Processing Unit, 256x224, 256 colors from the 15-bit color space
- Sound: Nintendo S-SMP, 8 audio channels in stereo
- Inputs and Outputs: Custom plug that accepted gamepads, joysticks, multi-tap adapters, light gun (Super Scope), and several single software controllers, like a mouse, bat, or tennis racket. The system could also, with a compatible official adapter (Super Game Boy), play handheld console games on a television. (Also, Game Genies and other unofficial accessories, like for other consoles of this and previous eras.)
The Super Nintendo was the second console that I bought for myself, again well after it had been released to the world. But a little bit faster than I bought the NES, because I could still get cartridges for it fairly easily in used places and stores. This was a good thing, because I bought it at an amateur radio show for 20 dollars. It came with all the things I needed to hook up to a television, one game (a baseball simulator) and one joystick. Suffice it to say, I very quickly added on the gamepads and significantly more software so as to have a fun time on the kitchen television with different games. Mostly the Super Mario games released for the system, but I did also end up getting Mortal Kombat II for the system, which had significantly more blood and fatalities than the original Mortal Kombat for the SNES due to a relaxing of some of the editorial decisions that Nintendo had insisted on for other hand cartridges.
The SNES, however, was positioned at exactly the right time for people growing up and getting themselves immersed in Role-Playing Games. Since they came from Japan, they were usually labeled as JRPGs to differentiate them from RPGs created in the U.S. or Europe. The JRPG genre didn't spring into existence on this console and console generation. A company called Square had created what it assumed would be its Final Fantasy as a way of going out big, only to have the sales of that game keep the company profitable and continuing, creating two more Final Fantasies for the NES. A different company called Enix created a series called Dragon Warrior in the U.S. (Dragon Quest in Japan) and released four games for the NES as well, and Nihon Falcom was busy releasing the Ys games for PCs. But among a significant segment of the RPG-playing group, the Super Nintendo had a really long string of hits on the system, including the original releases of Final Fantasy IV-VI (IV and VI would be rebranded as Final Fantasy II and III, since the original II and III hasn't made the trip across the seas, and neither had V), Secret of Mana (the second of the Mana series, as the first had been released as Final Fantasy Adventure for the Nintendo portable, the Game Boy), Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars, EarthBound (Mother 3), and the game that an inordinate number of people will still reflexively place at the top of any "all-time" RPG list, Chrono Trigger. (Although they may dither a bit first about whether to put this or Final Fantasy VI on top.)
Chrono Trigger is a game where a lot of things that would not necessarily be super features on their own all come together to make a unique experience that was positioned just right for its time and audience. The plot involves a Cute Mute getting involved in a Crash-Into Hello with a girl, who volunteers to be teleported by the character's brainy childhood friend, except that the pendant she has as a family heirloom interacts with the teleporter field and instead slings her hundreds of years into the past. Which, in itself, causes an unintended timeline ripple that results in the disappearance of the person who instigated it all, because she's a princess, the pendant is a royal artifact, and it turns out that the many great-descendant of a missing queen looks enough like her that they call off the search for the queen, so she never gets rescued and dies before she can continue the line that eventually leads to her descendant. And that's how it starts. The game itself spans all sorts of time periods and their respective civilizations, with villains and allies and trying to stop a timeline where a parasite called down from space in prehistory bursts free in 1999 and causes an apocalypse. The combat gameplay forgoes random encounters in favor of having enemies on the screen that can be touched to begin their encounters (without a screen transition) and the active battle system allows characters to unleash double or triple attacks if more than one character is in a ready state. The story progresses in a linear manner to a critical point in the narrative, at which point the narrative calls it quits and the back part of the game is composed of several other stories that can be optionally completed in any order before going to the final battle against the apocalypse. The New Game Plus option for it was also interesting, in that it granted the characters the ability to go to the final battle at any time they liked, which would trigger up to a dozen possible endings to the game, depending on how far in the narrative plot the game had progressed before triggering the final battle. Some of those endings are whimsical, some serious, and at least one of them has the main party taking on the role of one of the major antagonists against a new hero character that has appeared in their absence.
Final Fantasy VI is remembered for a similarly world-saving plot divided into two halves, with a linear plot in the front and a non-linear plot in the back, and like Chrono Trigger, there's an apocalypse that happens during the narrative, but this one is unavoidable. The most memorable scene from the game comes from the Opera House, where one of the characters, who could conveniently pass as a body double for a famous soprano, takes on the starring role in hopes that they can lure the owner of one of the few airships to kidnap his favorite opera star. The "voices", such that they are, for the original are the sound chips doing their best, with MIDI instrumentation, but the Opera scenes themselves paint a touching story, and the Dream Oath Opera hinted at what the future of game music scoring and performance would be. (Chrono Trigger also has a stellar soundtrack that takes full advantage of the sound system of the Super Nintendo.) The full orchestration and cinematic quality of both video and sound that accompanies a AAA game (and that has inspired a lot of orchestras to play orchestrations of video games, classic and modern) has its roots in games like both of these, the kinds of games that made spectacular things with what they had available to them. (That, and after the plan goes almost according to plan, a giant octopus crashes the opera and has to be fought on stage by the party, with the implication that the long-suffering pit orchestra is able to pivot almost immediately to a battle theme without too much surprise at the presence of the unexpected cephalopod.)
Games like these also remembered, either fondly or derisively, for some of the localization decisions of Ted Woosley, who gives us iconic lines like "You spoony bard!" and "Son of a submariner!" in various Square titles throughout the era, along with several of the other decisions that went into localizing Japanese games for the U.S. market. Localization generally made the games more child-friendly and removed a lot of religious iconography, since the systems were still being thought of as entertainment for children, possibly teenagers and very young adults, at this time. Even though there was Mortal Kombat, it was much more of an outlier in terms of blood and gore for console. Less so for PCs, which were seen as more mature than game consoles at this point in time.
The RPG and the popularity of the RPG on the console also really cemented the idea that single-player games have a place in the space, rather than games being meant to be fully social things you did with other people. It also proved there's an appetite for games that take tens or hundreds of hours to complete. Not that there weren't such things in previous eras, but Final Fantasy, the Legend of Zelda, and the kinds of games that needed battery-backed RAM for saving progress seemed to be much less prevalent than games that either expected you to go start to finish in one go or that used a password system for progression in the NES era.
At least for me and my family, though, the presence of games, and especially long games, was always a thing that got monitored. In addition to the presence of violence and sex as things to get noticed and commented on, my parents were always concerned that I would choose to play single-player games over social anything else or going outside to run around. My upbringing was much more rural than urban or suburban, and so, while I had neighbors who were nearby or next door, I definitely didn't have a library, a community center, or any other youth hanging out place, not did I really have people of my own age who were nearby and who were part of the same social class as I was such that they would be approved people to hang out with. Getting punted (figuratively) off of computers and consoles to go "run around" or to engage in some other activity, like card game playing or book reading, was a regular occurrence for me as I was growing up. I doubt they thought I would end up NEET or a hikikomori, mostly because those terms wouldn't have been available to my parents to use, but I think they bought into the idea that video games were potentially a problem. Perhaps not in the Murder Simulator or Satanic Panic ways, but in the idea that making digital progress would become more important and more attractive than trying to make social progress with embodied life. The likelier explanation, one that would have been more useful at the time, was that there's some brain chemistry things that make it easier for me to chase one more "five minute" piece of progress that will actually take over or two hours to complete, because it never goes according to plan. Time management and being aware of how long things will actually take is the problem, as well as wanting to feel like something is at a good stopping point, not whether or not I felt that the digital world was better than the physical one. (That the digital world has consistently been better in a lot of ways than the physical world will probably come up later in the series.)
The brain chemistry and the long time investment for the kinds of RPGs that I like playing has made it difficult to play them, because all the necessary parts of adulthood are really good at making sure you don't have uninterrupted blocks of time to play those kinds of games with in your weekends, and that's assuming the machine in question doesn't have other people who also want to use it, or others around who will have issues with the experience of moving video or repetitive sound as distractions or problems, and so forth. The ideal time to play long form RPGs is when you have only school to worry about, clearly, and so you can spend some time making progress as you dash from save point to save point (one of the major limitations of the console over the PC was that consoles needed to have defined points where they could access the save RAM, whereas PCs could generally touch a button and save the state of the game at any time, for good or ill) hoping that your progress wouldn't be wiped out as you get close to the save or because there's a big boss battle coming up that you may or may not be properly equipped to handle.
I've spent a lot of time on this console talking about the RPGs that I played on it, but there were some other interesting developments while playing SNES games that deserve some memory, too. I played a decent amount of Super Mario World for the system, but as a small I didn't fully appreciate how the design of Super Mario Brothers levels introduces concepts that will be necessary to master early on and gives the player plenty of time to practice and understand them. I had beaten the game several times, using various warp capabilities, finding the various Switch Palaces to access new spaces, figuring out the secret of the map dots to indicate whether a level had one or more than one exit available, even defeating the extra hard Special Zone and discovering its musical Easter egg, along with the graphic changes that came to the game by beating the Zone, but I hadn't fully grasped everything I'd been taught about the game, because I hadn't discovered all the exits, including one pathway to the Star Road that contained, as it turned out, a unique enemy find only in that course on the pathway and no other.
The first key revelation that came with finally figuring out all of this was "Most Ghost Houses have multiple exits." The Ghost House items on the map did not have dots underneath them to indicate how many ways out they had, but the purpose of a Ghost House is for the player to traverse a somewhat confusing maze while pursued by ghosts and haunts of all different types until they found a hidden door that actually led out of the House and to the next stage. Thee only stage that has two Ghost Houses is Donut Plains, and a technique learned in one of them (use the cape to fly to the ceiling to find the secret exit) can be used in the other one to find a hidden pathway that leads to the second, Top Secret exit of the other house. Hiding things only in flying spaces is pretty common in the Ghost Houses, often requiring the player to bring a Mario with the correct power up into the stage and keep Mario from getting hit until the power needed would be used.
The last secret exit took a lot of lateral thinking to achieve. It's on a stage in World 4 that had a lot of automatic scrolling and that needs the player to change heights regularly to avoid saws and other cutting objects in their path. There are two easy ways to complete the stage. One is to use the cape power and fly over all the obstacles until Mario crosses the end stage barrier. No matter how high above the barrier Mario is, he will trigger the end of the stage by crossing that space. The other way exit is to obtain and keep a Yoshi dinosaur until about the midway point of the stage, at which point there is an easily collectable set of Yoshi wings, which transports the player to a bonus area and finishes the stage when the bonus area is completed. To collect the secret exit from this stage, both of these temptations have to be avoided. There's only one thing on this stage to suggest what the actual solution is, other than someone getting curious and trying it for a lark, as we did: it's one of the few end of stage gates that you can potentially go underneath. It's not an easy task to achieve, requiring either a precise dive to swoop underneath and then snap back up on the other side of the gate, or to sacrifice a Yoshi by jumping off of the Yoshi after having passed underneath the end gate. There's a second end gate up the vine once you've done the tricky part, and that leads to the unique enemy stage and an entry to Star Road after cheating the unique course. It took me many years of maturity, curiosity, and playing the game before I finally got the 96 exits clear, even though I'd beaten Koopa much, much earlier.
Games teach us problem-solving skills, especially when we're faced with a Puzzle Boss or a Bonus Boss that requires handling in a manner completely different than everything else in the game. Not sure those skills always come back to help us in physical-world situations, but it's often useful and interesting brain exercise to solve a thing, especially when it's a situation where there are multiple possible solves and some are more optimal than others. And like other media, they offer us the chance to go somewhere else and be a hero or jump ridiculously high or other things that engage our storytelling core. And like other media, sometimes the best thing ever is finding people who have enjoyed the same thing you have same sharing a bond over it. Rather than getting addicted and surrendering all my time in solo play, I've found there's a pretty robust community of fans and other players of games that I can connect with and share memories with. Rather than staying isolated, the network has helped me find some of my own people. Even if it might feel like there's no singular place that I can be all of my identities in at once.
