Super Play's Top 600 Super NES Games: #400 - #351

It was the mid-1990s and the band best-known for Wonderwall really hates it when you compare them to the Beatles. This was also the time when music fans who liked poorly-written trivia were told to Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Trainspotting wanted you to choose life and the Lee brothers put aside their differences in Super Double Dragon.

Hello, my name is Cyril, and that's just one of the Super NES games we're going to be talking as we continue our journey through Super Play's Top 600. This is the show where we're reading the verdicts and counting down every review published in the pages of Super Play magazine. Even if that means traveling to Stonehenge, where a man's a man and the children dance to the Pipes of Pan. We left off last week with 401, which means that today it's time to focus our attention on 400 - 351. We have a lot of ground to cover and not much time before the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky, so let's dive right into the next fifty games in our Super NES countdown!


#400: 3D Baseball
63% Only true baseball fans are going to get their money's worth. A fluent knowledge of Japanese is essential to work out what all the options mean.
#399: Super Off Road
63% A fast and funny off-road racing game, great with two players, but too small and short to be worth this sort of money.
#398: SD Great Battle III
63% Some great graphics and characters, but no-one will be impressed with the stale and unchallenging action. Cute though, and anime fans will appreciate it.
#397: Mech Warrior
63% Pretty good graphics, and the nearest thing yet to an assault suit simulator. This is great as far as it goes, but sadly that just isn't far enough.
#396: Total Carnage
63% Cleaning up all the gore would have been forgivable if the game was as good as the original, but it isn't. Although it looks similar to Total Carnage, this version fails to capture anything but a tiny percentage of the frantic, over the top, kinetically shot away action of the original. If, like me, you love Smash TV, then my advice is to go and play it some more. This is a step in the wrong direction.
#395: Extra Innings
64% Neatly presented, but ludicrously fast.
#394: Wing Commander: The Secret Missions
64% Despite the so-called extended gameplay and the more involved plot, The Secret Missions still failed to 'ring my bell,' and became increasingly tedious as I played. As far as I'm concerned, The Secret Missions are best off remaining a secret.
#393: Drakkhen
64% Fantasy role-playing games aren't too common on the SNES (not in English, at any rate), and Drakkhen is consequently a welcome release. It's not exactly brilliant, though.
#392: Bassin's Black Bass
65% It sounds stupid. And it is. But I have to admit that Bassin's is oddly compulsive, perhaps for its sheer novelty and laidback style. There goes my career as a games journalist.
#391: Super Strike Gunner
65% Extremely dull and run-of-the-mill, but still quite enjoyable in its own little way.
#390: Super Slap Shot
65% A fast and furious ice hockey game, but NHLPA Hockey is so much better.
#389: Speed Racer
65% A disappointing game; the decent racing bit is marred by the sloppy platform sections. Tch.
#388: Aaahh!!! Real Monsters
65% It's a tad more fun than the text above makes out, but not by much. Buy Mario, Lost Vikings or Pitfall 2 instead.
#387: Zool
65% Detailed backgrounds, fast, smooth scrolling and stomping music. Tinny, sparse sound effects, poor animation and repetitive gameplay. On balance? Average. Yeah, definitely average.
#386: Marvin Missions: Daffy Duck
65% Nice-looking, quite good fun to play, and with plenty of Daffy Duck-ness. You've already got lots of games like this, though, and -- take it from us -- you don't need another one.
#385: Cutthroat Island
66% Fair to middling scrolling slash 'em up that tries to incorporate new ideas, but ultimately falls flat.
#384: Champions World Class Soccer
66% Absolutely not the Ryan Giggs of SNES football games. Except that it quite obviously is, if you see what I mean.
#383: Fun 'N Games
66% Okay, so it's aimed at the younger folk but with the advent of multi-media, the quality and imagination behind this cart should have been much better. This could be more accurately titled: Questionable Fun 'n Very Poor Games.
#382: RoboCop 3
66% A difficult arcade game that might appeal to real Robocop fans, but otherwise proves to be frustrating and altogether unremarkable. It's a real shame there's no digitized speech, too.
#381: Pipe Dream
66% Neat race-against-time puzzle game format, well presented, but lacking the variety, number of levels and essential head-to-head two-player mode to make it a real classic. Almost identical, and cheaper on home computer formats.
#380: F1 Grand Prix
66% This is the nearest rival to Super F1 Circus in look and feel, but on playing, it proves to be far inferior. Graphically, F1 Grand Prix is pretty much on par -- if that was the only purchase criteria there'd be little to choose between then, but in every other way it comes across as a much shallower and less sorted game.
#379: Rushing Beat Shura
66% It doesn't look too bad and certainly plays well enough, but it's got all the lastability of an M&S prawn mayonnaise sandwich.
#378: Q*Bert 3
67% Gently amusing and nice to look at, but not for anyone other than the most casual player.
#377: Romance of the Three Kingdoms III
67% Dedicated strategy wargamers will be in anorak heaven for a couple weekends. I know I was. Normal human beings should steer well clear.
#376: Blues Brothers
68% A nice little platform game, though a bit simplistic, and out-classed by Mario et al. And it's not too easy, unlike many of its type.
#375: Big Hurt Baseball
68% A realistic and in-depth sim. There's immediate gameplay here, good look and strategy. But it's all a waste, 'cos, after all, it's baseball.
#374: Flying Hero
68% An average shoot 'em up with sturdy gameplay and a sense of humour, but hardly a must-buy. Full of cute things, though.
#373: Battle Pinball
68% The SNES has a hard time with pinball, and the release of this improves matters not a jot. It has lots of jolly ideas and a neat line in table graphics, but disappoints everywhere else.
#372: Dragon View
68% An infuriatingly entertaining RPG awash with compounded minor flaws. It improves vastly once you're about a quarter in and have found all the short-cuts and magic stuff. Perseverance, as in life and abominably moral cartoons, will pay off.
#371: The Fortress of Fury (Operation Logic Bomb)
68% A competent and fairly attractive shoot 'em up, but one starved of decent gameplay.
#370: Super Ninja Kun
68% If platform games were cars, this one would have electric windows and a sun-roof. But it would be the same colour as all the rest, and would still be looked on with scorn by the Honda Fireblades which represent decent, imaginative games. It's a crap metaphor but you can see what I mean.
#369: Super Double Dragon
68% Some varied and enjoyable gameplay, but why does it all have to look so primitive? With more variety in the later levels this might have been more memorable. Fun for a while, but a bit of a waste of money.
#368: X-Kaliber 2097
68% There are some decent bits in here, but the package as a whole lacks the quality required to make it altogether recommendable.
#367: Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV
68% For months to come, armchair strategists across the world will be united in a state of anorak nirvana by Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV's politics and intrigue. But be honest, it's still nowhere near as good as it ought to be.
#366: Warlock
68% No, really, don't bother. Save your money and rent the film loads of times. Presumably Julian still gets a cut every time the film is hired out, so get your friends to rent it too.
#365: Lethal Enforcers
69% The action may be a bit dull in one-player mode, but the two-player is a real hoot. And that'll cost you a hefty £93. Urk.
#364: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
69% A pretty standard, fairly old-fashioned platformer that only occasionally shows any spark of real life. Playable enough, it shambles along aimlessly (much like De Niro in the film) and ends up pretty unmemorable.
#363: Pac-Attack
69% Not a bad effort really, but it suffers from the simple fact that the competition is so much better. Get Super Puyo Puyo instead.
#362: Hardball III
69% It looks like there's loads going on but, in reality, it's a pretty limited and unexciting affair.
#361: Alcahest
69% As a great-looking slasher/blaster with clever power-ups, this works wonderfully. Anyone expected much more, however, will be disappointed.
#360: Exhaust Heat
69% A reasonably sound driving game that plays quite a bit better than it looks. (And, let's face it, it does look a bit naff. Apart from the pits scene, which is great.) But -- and it's a very big 'but' -- it's nowhere near as good as Super Mario Kart.
#359: Harley's Humungous Adventure
69% Cleverly thought out, fairly inventive platform game with it's fair share of good bits, but very average visuals. It's got potential, even if it isn't always realized.
#358: International Tennis Tour
69% A solid enough tennis game, but there are two or three others that are better, and which we'd suggest you buy instead.
#357: Spindizzy Worlds
69% A nice idea, with a distinct air of nostalgia about it, but it's a bit too patchy and empty feeling to hold one's interest for long. The original Spectrum game was more fun -- lots of exploration, and less of the crummy puzzles.
#356: Super Professional Baseball
69% Not bad if you can get used to the unusual camera angles.
#355: Super Off Road: The Baja
69% Simple and fun to play, with enough challenge to last for a little while. But it's nothing very new, and the two-player mode's extreme disappointing.
#354: Sonic Blast Man
69% Gameplay wise, just an average beat 'em up. But it's got lots of nice bits, and Sonic Blast Man himself is great. Fab for fans of the genre, but no-one else.
#353: Power Drive
69% It's like Micro Machines never existed. Old-fashioned bordering on primitive, Power Drive's like a fairly good mid-'80s Amiga game. It's playable enough, sure, but come on ... it's not exactly the sort of thing you bought a SNES for.
#352: Aerobiz
69% A well-presented attempt at a little strategy on the SNES, but it's too serious and down-to-earth. There's just not enough to do.
#351: Goof Troop
69% Gather round, Goofy-lovers, and hear the news. Goof Troop is fun for a while, has some neat puzzles and will fill your breast with a minor swelling of enjoyment in two-player mode. But it's too easy, too short and your Super Nintendo won't blow up through over-exertion.
What did we learn from this episode? One of the things that has really surprised me about making this list is how many baseball games there were on the Super NES. Between the American games and baseball titles coming from Japan, there are almost more baseball reviews than football. Either type of football. Also, can you believe there are that many overhead racing games on the Super NES? When I think about SNES racers, I picture the mode-7 effects in F-Zero and Mario Kart, yet there are so many games that don't seem even remotely interested in pushing the hardware. Most of these games didn't come to the U.S., and, based on these reviews, I'm starting to see why.

The good news is that we're almost into the 70% range. We ended this episode with 69%, which means that we're going to start seeing some real recommendations. We'll pick that up on December 10th, when we debut the sixth episode of Super Play's Top 600. That means that we'll be exactly halfway through countdown, if you can believe that. For now, I need to get out of here, there's a goat over there that has been looking at me wrong this whole time and I'm not a fan of the chanting happening in the background. See you on Friday.