Super Adventure Island

Publisher: Hudson Soft
Developer: Hudson
Release date: April 1992

This is one of the first games I ever played on SNES, so it has always held a special place in my heart.  Hudson's Adventure Island series, a slight variation of Sega's Wonder Boy arcade game, had been very popular on the NES and quickly received a SNES incarnation in the system's first year.

In all honesty, Super Adventure Island is a simplistic and somewhat unremarkable game on its surface.  The design is very basic: You generally run to the right while shooting and avoiding enemies, you die with one hit, you ride a skateboard on occasion, and there is nothing to collect other than a few weapons and fruits to increase your score and timer-bar. In fact the game is actually more simplistic than the series' previous two incarnations on NES, which featured a variety of dinosaur sidekicks and the ability to collect spare weapons in an inventory which could be accessed between levels.  In all, besides enhanced graphics and sound, the SNES rendition has very little more to it than the mechanics from the original Wonder Boy.

Of course, anyone who played Super Adventure Island back in the day knows the most memorable part was the music.  The game has a jazzy, R&B-style soundtrack composed by Yuzo Koshiro which was quite distinct and notable for the time.  This was one of those early SNES games that really showed off what the SPC700 sound chip could do, and which made the Genesis's FM synthesizer seem archaic in comparison.

Altogether, Super Adventure Island is a fun, fast-paced arcade-style game that doesn't do anything unexpected, other than dazzle us with one of the more spectacular soundtracks on the system.  A sequel was later released on SNES in 1994, but was more of an action/RPG style game in the mold of Zelda II, and lacked the prodigious Koshiro soundtrack which had made the original so memorable.