Happy (ever-so-slightly belated) 25th anniversary, Super Famicom!

Twenty-five years ago, Nintendo made its second cartridge-based games console, the Super Famicom, available to the Japanese masses.

I breathlessly followed its development in the pages of magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power and Video Games and Computer Entertainment. (Note: I remember reading this article--over and over again--like it was yesterday.) I was especially obsessed with coverage of Super Mario World, of course, although I was nearly as keen on "launch window" titles Pilotwings and F-Zero.

Despite my overwhelming interest in the Super Famicom and its initial releases, though, I didn't buy one on or around its Nov. 21 debut. Granted, I was just about to turn 14 at the time, and buying Japanese consoles (or even games) wasn't really an option--especially since doing so likely would have cost me somewhere in the vicinity of $400.

Instead, I had to wait until shortly after the Super Famicom's North American counterpart, the SNES, launched in my own neck of the woods a year later before I was able to experience Nintendo's brand of 16-bit gaming for myself. 

A couple of years later, I finally got to play my first Super Famicom (as opposed to SNES) game when I imported a used copy of Final Fantasy V--which I still have today, mind you--via one of those companies that advertised in the back of DieHard GameFan and the aforementioned EGM.

Actually, I may have picked up Parodius Da! first, but who really cares this many years later, right?

Strangely--given my current love of imported games--those two Japanese titles, along with Final Fantasy VI, may have been the only ones I ever bought to play on my trusty SNES. (Don't worry, I've bought a few more Super Famicom in the last couple of years, although only a few--so far.) 

Also, I've never owned an actual Super Famicom system. Which is a crying shame, as I've always considered its design to be among the most attractive and appealing of the consoles that have seen the light of day since the early 1980s.

What else did I--and do I--love about the Super Famicom? I've always loved its graphics capabilities, which for me represent the peak of two-dimensional, sprite-based game visuals. I've also always loved its audio components, which allowed the best musicians and composers of the day to produce some absolutely stellar soundtracks. 

And then, of course, there was the system's controller, with its four face and two shoulder buttons, which I've long considered to be as eye-catching as it is comfortable.

How about you? Do you have any particularly fond memories of this superb entry in the fourth generation of game systems? If so, feel free to share them in the comments section below. 

Calling all present and future Vita owners: here's a Q&A about DanganRonpa that's worth a peek

I'm going to have a very interesting decision to make once Sony finally gets around to announcing the Vita TV's North American release: am I going to buy one of those sleek (and cheap) micro-consoles--along with a handful of games, of course--or am I going to buy a regular ol' Vita?

Regardless, I think the writing is on the wall that I'm going to buy a Vita in some form over the next 12 months or so--thanks in large part to the release of delicious-looking games like Spike Chunsoft's DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.



Speaking of which, DieHard GameFan's Joshua Moore recently picked the brains of two Nippon Ichi Software of America staffers about their employer's decision to localize this enhanced remake of the first DanganRonpa title, which achieved a respectable amount of attention from Japanese PSP owners all the way back in 2010.

A few of the passages of this Q&A--with Phoenix Spaulding, the NISA editor working on the project, and David Alonzo, the company's marketing coordinator--that particularly stuck out for me:

Spaulding on why NISA decided to work on this title--"We’d been doing a lot with the Vita and wanted to do something that was a little bit outside of our normal wheelhouse. The tone is really different from anything we’ve done and the gameplay is different, but we saw with 999 and Virtue's Last Reward that there’s an audience [for this type of game], not just in Japan, but an establishing audience here as well."



Spaulding on DanganRonpa's being like 999 mixed with Phoenix Wright--"In terms of style, I guess that closest thing that a lot of people would know would be the Phoenix Wright games, where there’s sort of two components: the research and investigative part, and the trial portion. It’s sort of an information game where you have to keep track of a lot of details and look for those little points in the game." Also, like 999 and Virtue's Last Reward, the tone and style are "very dark, where you can’t really trust anyone and your life is on the line, while you’re sort of under pressure to figure out what’s going on."

Spaulding on the title's "hardcore gameplay"--"A lot of people tend to describe [the game] as sort of a visual novel, or that kind of thing, but I think people will be surprised that there’s a lot of hardcore gameplay elements that people don’t realize: there’s a lot of timing-based stuff, once you get to the class trial you’re not just sitting there. It’s very active, you have to be paying attention. There’s a lot more than just sitting there reading a lot of text."



To read the full comments of Spaulding and Alonzo, direct your browser of choice to diehardgamefan.com.

DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc will be released in both Europe and North America--and in both digital and physical formats, I believe--in early 2014, courtesy of NISA. Pre-order the boxed US version here.