NES and SNES Nostalgia

As a kid, it wasn't RPGs or books that caught my interest: it was video games. One of my favorite "toys" was easily the Nintendo Famicom (also known as the NES in the US). Of course playing a Famicom game in the Philippines was quite a unique experience. Unlike the US, we were getting our games from Japan. Which wouldn't be so bad if we knew how to speak and read Japanese. So most of the games we played meant that we didn't have to understand the dialogue or never read the manual.

Speaking of manuals, the games I bought didn't really come in manuals. You see in the Philippines, most of the Japanese games didn't come in boxes. We bought them as cartridges only. They didn't come with anything else, whether it's a box or a manual. Of course because of this, games were significantly cheaper than they would have been. I had a few games that came in a box with gorgeous art and a manual I couldn't understand, but it cost around twice what the cartridge alone would have cost me.

For a time, it was interesting to see the competition between Nintendo and Sega, mainly because the former was still using an 8-bit system while the latter a 16-bit system albeit with less games that appealed to me.

And then came the Super Famicom. My biggest motivation for purchasing the system was due to the release of Street Fighter II. And yes, I bought every version of the game that got released for that console. Street Fighter II was quite a hit back then that Sega's Mega Drive, which had a three-button controller, had to release a six-button controller for the game (and subsequent games made use of this controller although they were similarly handicapped by the fact that their games needed to be backward-compatible with the three-button controller).

Unlike the games released in the Famicom, we didn't buy games in cartridges alone but in their complete package. Again, it wouldn't be so bad if we could understand Japanese and the beautiful game manuals, but alas, I had to purchase US games for that (and a game converter to play them).

Of course one of the interesting things is that while we didn't get the Famicom Disk System, one was eventually released for the Super Famicom. My friend bought one and he was buying games at a tenth of what it would normally cost (because you know, diskettes are cheaper than cartridges). This was easily the beginning of video game piracy in the Philippines, although bootleg PC games were already cropping up at the time.