Do you remember the days of 8- bit entertainment? Sitting on the floor at 3 am mashing buttons like crazy to get through Kung-Fu,The Legend of Zelda, Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, and Contra. We all had our favorite titles, all under one Nintendo. It was the early 90's that really started to pick up the craze in gaming and it started to lose the so called "geeky" stigmas (so we'd like to think, at least... you are still cool to me!). The Gameboy was also fairly new, and soon enough I would begin Zelda: Links Awakening on my green gameboy pocket, which was also my first handheld console. I remember spending countless hours trying to get every instrument in the game to awaken the wind fish. It was quite a story compared to the barrel jumping I was subjected to in Donkey Kong... storyline is something that kept games going, no doubt. Although arcade games were fun and repetitive, after a certain point, pumping all the quarters into the machine became a drawback for some players. I loved exploring fantasy worlds full of lush 8 bit scenery. The art aesthetics in both 8-bit and 16-bit games combined with electronic compositions providing the music, created something that is simply unparalleled in today's industry, although many titles are still very fun.
Art quality really started to improve on the SNES. There was more bit-depth in the fourth-generation era. 16-bit games were bringing the graphics to a whole new level (we thought), games like Secret of Mana, Chrono-Trigger, Earthbound, Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, and of course, Super Mario world. I remember many years of my life when I would go over to a friends house and we would take turns playing Super Mario World. Once I was able to own a super nintendo, my friends would come over to my place after school and we beat donkey kong country 1, 2, and 3. There was something about the SNES artwork and music that just made it enthralling. Traveling through The Secret of Mana, late night, with a couple of my friends, the 16-bit tunes playing along our journey. Good times they were. Never will I forget the good games I played on my Nintendo. Those days were classic.
