As I recall, transitioning from the world of Red and Blue into that of Gold and Silver was one that felt totally seamless. Though my enterprises in the world of the former had numbered many–I’d battled time and again against the CPU and against my own friends; I’d traded with companions and others; I had elevated g my prized pokemon up to level 100; I’d shared so many memories and laughed so often; and I had lost my save file twice, at least–I still felt so callow heading into this new world of colour. I was starting as no less a neophyte; there were not to be illusions of familiarity or confidence.

Sprout Tower was the first point at which I realised that I had learned little from Red and Blue. For all my resolve to train my pokemon equally this time around, it was at Sprout Tower that it became clear to me that this was a commitment that could only be made easy with practice. I was struggling. I reached an epiphany that no matter how extensive my experiences in Red and Blue when it came to the social aspects of the experience, there was a whole side to Pokemon that I had missed; it was a side that I had perhaps been too young and too blind to see. This side to Pokemon, a side that had existed even before Gold and Silver, represented a precipice into something more–a more sophisticated, more difficult, and more testing side that I had only witnessed once before in a battle with a friend, but had then been unable to wrap my head around. The precipice into this new approach to Pokemon would not be easy to cross–and it could only be crossed so if I accepted the invitation to do so. Sprout Tower and its impending, reflective music represent this ultimatum. They also represent my failure to accept it. I shied away from that harder Pokemon world, enjoying Johto as I had done Kanto, catching creatures and training up my strongest alone…eager only to discover the world and its mysteries.

I carried on in Gold and Silver as I had carried on in Red and Blue, ignorant of that huge and competitive dimension of Pokemon that seems indissoluble from people’s appreciations of the series these days. It would not be until Ruby and Sapphire, when I felt grown-up and seasoned enough, that I took to training my creatures equally and capturing selectively. The transition into Ruby and Sapphire, then, did not feel seamless; I was playing a different Pokemon to that which I had played before. I wonder if the reason that I no longer enjoy Pokemon is because, pursuant to R/S, I’ve finally played both sides of the coin.

In games, I look for the enchantment of an experience that enables me to transcend the physical. I want to find a game that situates me in my imagination, where I can move and explore without the agonies of flexing a muscle; where I can feel touched by the sights of the outdoors without feeling discomforted by winds or cold; where my movements can be narrated by a melody that inspires a realm of the ethereal in what is otherwise a believable fantasy realm.

DCK3 was the first SNES game I ever saw, still on GAME shop shelves in 1998 pursuant to my acquisition of a Nintendo 64. Memories of this enigmatic Nintendo game–a game for a Nintendo system that, eerily, didn’t seem to exist any more–equip the game with an air of nostalgia; and, crucially, they root the game in a time where the requests outlined in the first paragraph were often fulfilled. Hauntingly, playing DKC3 for the first time in 2010, I felt those elusive sentiments; it was as if I had been spirited away to my 6-year-old self and was playing the prelude to my first video-game, where I could be subject to familiar childhood emotions–and even unfamiliar ones. It is because of this that I want to call DKC3 my first SNES game; and it is because of this that it is my favourite.

Thoughts on the box: Way-hay. Mercy, I’m exhausted.

8. Starwing

Space Armada–a bit of music from this particular game–represents, to me, the very zenith of SNES music. It has that signature SNES sound–an indescribable quality found pervasively in games for the system–and it makes that sound riveting. It is rousing; it sends you straight into space and transforms it into a frontier that is wild and exciting. It speaks of a sense of mission; it speaks of a sense of grandeur; it speaks of a sense of scale.

Would I have cared for thee, O Starwing? I suppose so. I love anthropomorphic creatures like Fox–always have, in fact–owed to experiences with The Animals of Farthing Wood. That’s all there is to say on the matter: I would have loved the creatures in this; and I surely would have been very fond of the music, I guess.

Thoughts on the box: S’all right.

Assembling a colourful array of Nintendo favourites and offering a chance to play as any character I wanted, Super Mario Kart would have proved utterly irresistible in my younger days.

I would have obsessed over why Luigi was racing on a blue kart instead of a green one. I would have pored over character statuses and abilities, reflecting deeply upon which character best suited my predilections. I would have wondered where certain tracks existed in relation to the rest of the Mario universe. Super Mario Kart, combining so many different characters, would have felt to me like some truly tremendous undertaking–it would have felt like a game so big that it needed to involve all of these heroes into one package. Even in the absence of any story, Super Mario Kart would have felt grand to me, because it was doing something that could never have happened otherwise. This was something so big that rules were defied.

Thoughts on the box: I like this. The relationship between the black and the blue/yellow gradient and the image seems totally natural to me–though it’s the gravity of the black offset against the sunrise-esque gradient that touches me in particular. The excitement of the dawn pitted against the gravity of the dark communicates a great sense of magnitude to me; and the convoy of Nintendo heroes only implies that this undertaking is one of great import.

5. Super Metroid

This is wishful thinking. Being totally honest, there would have been little chance of my younger self even considering Super Metroid. In fact, were it not for Samus’s reputation during the Gamecube era, I would never have bothered with a Metroid game at all. The imagery does precious little for me: Ridley unnerves me, somewhat; and Samus just wouldn’t have struck me as a visually arresting specimen. For a guy who relies so heavily on demeanour in considering acquisitions, Metroid’s disabled.

Should it have transpired that I did end up with Super Metroid, though, I feel pretty certain that I would have been helplessly beguiled by the music. The Brinstar pieces entrench me in something of an adventuresome mood even now–so I emphatically consider what I would’ve been like as a kid, traipsing through caverns swamped with exotic plant life. And that’s saying nothing of Maridia–Super Metroid‘s water temple. Wizened though I may be at 21 years, I still feel a mood of mournfulness and engrossment whenever I occupy that place. Just as much as Donkey Kong Country touches a forlorn part of my spirit that I can’t otherwise access these days, Super Metroid gets beneath my skin–and it brings me to life inside my imagination.

Thoughts on the box: Not much to say, other than that the Player’s Choice colours complement the background on the box art very nicely. Doubt this would have entered my pantheon of favourite SNES boxes, mind.

6. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest

I’ll be upfront: if I had been a child when I played this first, there’s a good chance it would be one of my favourite games of all time.

The music; the locales; the characters; the music; the colours; the story; the music–it all blends together to create something beyond my feeble compositional skills.

Thoughts on the box: That sky–I wish I could etch out the sorts of feelings it instils. It speaks of sunset; it speaks of the shadows beneath an island colossus on a summer evening, where the sun glows behind the horizon as you clamber through dank swamps, foggy woods and sunken ships…alone, afraid, and excited. The childhood adventures of summer evenings are championed in this box; it speaks of carefree days where there’s nothing on your childhood mind but adventure. Here, nature is transmuted through childhood eyes into something mystifying, daunting, and gargantuan. Crocodile Island sits before a toxic sky; it has dark, mossy caverns and damp quarters as you swim ashore from abandoned sea vessels. From there, you brave a haunted amusement park engineered for a different species; you feel incongruous, frightened not simply because things look scary–but because you are too conspicuous against this atypical type of nature. Lava runs below the surface; ghosts roam forests; and, as you curl up to shield yourself from harm amidst the brambles, the most serene music plays and makes you feel even more than the prick of the thorns. It’s a gripping world, one in which your childhood sense of survival is invoked. The world feels scarier, as a child, for all its unknowns. Donkey Kong Country 2′s sensory appeals make you feel that you are trying to stay alive. It makes you feel like you’re trying simply to live. There’s no more imperative a desire than that.

I probably would have liked this a lot. I liked it well enough when I was 12, back in 2002, upon picking it up for the Game Boy Advance–though I attribute that to the fact that I’d seen the cartoon that was based on the game prior, and I was therefore thrilled to see everything in that translated onto the small screen.

Super Mario World just has everything that I would have been looking for. It’s got a magical island to explore, replete with sunny plains, hidden palaces, mountains, mysterious woods and sunken ships. There’s nothing that I can point to as anathema to my character in this game; it reflects so much of what I was in pursuit of in my childhood, back when I used to draw treasure maps scribbled over with ghost houses and rocks with large, menacing eyes drawn on them.

Thoughts on the box: I left the green/yellow gradient on the box because I love gradients and that particular design complements the box very well. As regards the image, I think it has an appropriate darkness to it that summons a sense of unease that marries very effectively with the excitement drummed up by the logo’s multicoloured demeanour and the heroic poise of Mario and Yoshi.

2. Donkey Kong Country

I really was quite averse to anything resembling claymation or Pixar when I was young–so I’m not sure if I would have been likely to pick this up. Yet, I somehow ended up with Diddy Kong Racing on the N64–so I guess it wouldn’t have been too out of the question.

Would I have liked it, though? The answer is very probably yes–and, for a time, I may even have begun to prefer it to Super Mario World. There is a darkness in the visuals of Donkey Kong Country that I find spellbinding; the sunsets and dark jungles just get at me–something that the music helps to accomplish. The music, while we’re on the subject, would doubtlessly have left one heck of a mark on my childhood. I daresay I would have grown intensely fond of Country…and I wonder if it would even have been my favourite.

Thoughts on the box: Admittedly, it’s easy to get excited with the kitchen-sink approach here: colours are everywhere; characters are all over the place; and the word “incredible” is there. I don’t get the same feel as Mario World, but I do not object to anything on offer here. Subsequent DKC boxes have affected me more greatly, it has to be said; I don’t get enough of a guttural feeling with this one.

3. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

I hated this game when I played it on the GBA; but I had been spoiled by subsequent Zeldas. Had it been the case that I played this first, I am confident I would have been enraptured by the ability to explore to my heart’s content and eke out hidden items and secrets. The scale of the game is appropriately epic; and the dearth of character interactions in the game would have invited my younger self to sketch out its own denizens for the world who could build a story around the one the game communicated.

Just how much could I have grown fond of this stuffy game, mind, in light of the dazzling Mario World and Donkey Kong… Zelda sounds samey; it looks rather plain; and it is, at times, a bit drab. Ocarina of Time–my first Zelda–had such a vast array of tunes; and it was a visual wonder. Doubtless, I would have enjoyed this. But not as much as Mario.

Thoughts on the box: I think the ancient scroll-esque background for this is remarkable–I absolute love that; it’s quintessentially medieval.  The illustration does not necessarily marry well with the background, all told, but taken in isolation I do remain very fond of the particular sword and shield used in this. The effect is redolent of the Sword in the Stone, almost, and I take it my childhood self would have been quite taken with the look of a sword that seems makeshift in design like the one here.

The new anime adaptation is not altogether confident enough to emulate the comic’s avant-garde character. A cautious adaptation, the 2011 HUNTERxHUNTER series eloquently translates the images of the comic into moving form, but it does little to capitalise on the spirit of the manga. Despite HUNTERxHUNTER thriving on explication and cogitation, the new anime is keen to downplay these characteristics: music plays in a slapdash form over any pensive scenes–undermining the suspense engendered in the manga; acting lacks subtlety, humiliating the cod-intellectual air of the source material; and the visuals are too by-the-books and typical to reflect the atypical pursuit of sophistication present in Togashi’s opus.

Where HUNTERxHUNTER (2011) does triumph is in its box artwork–a triumph not vis-a-vis the manga, but the 1998 animated series, itself plagued with some uninspired box covers. Here, there is a funky, colourful veneer that reflects the child-like veneer at first possessed by the manga. Underpinning this jauntiness, however, is something of a cloudy, metallic grey–a bleakness that speaks of ruthless background to HUNTERxHUNTER‘s seeming idyll. The grey implies the obfuscation of the shounen genre that characterises subsequent sagas in the series; and the metallic countenance is cold and artificial–a harrowing suggestion of things to come.

I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a Leon S. Kennedy. We’re both ridiculously fond of our ridiculous haircuts; and we both jettison out some bewildering one-liners whenever so moved–typically when Salazaar transforms into some giant, putrid mess of a thing. Thus, Leon S. Kennedy is the guy I have projected myself onto in the Resi universe.

With Resident Evil 6, Chris and Leon come together in one lovely hullabaloo that looks jolly well. I am excited, chaps, and anticipate this game with more fervour than I did Skyrim. Should it transpire–and it shall not–that Versus XIII releases this year as well, 2012 will be a splendid desinence to the final stanza of my life’s poem.

I wrote that with the objective of using the word desinence.

Remember when I did this before? The time where I tried to use the word heuristic? I still don’t know how to use that one correctly. Perhaps that’s because I’m not all that heuristic a soul, myself.

Whenever I’m exhorted to run, run, run, as fast as you can!! by a creature and get fed up with breathing, I pass the time by thinking hard about consonants. I thought of a particularly new and long one the other day—not that day, though—and it sounded a bit like this…but backwards! And there were long, heaving noises, because I was running—as fast as [I could] (probably)—and was making long, heaving noises.

I listened to this tune all of [today] and was simply spellbound by the image included.