Top Gear

Publisher: Kemco
Developer: Gremlin Graphics
Release Date: April 1992

When you think of Super Nintendo racing games, Top Gear is one that inevitably comes to mind. Produced by European developer Gremlin Graphics, publishers of the excellent Lotus Turbo Challenge racing series on the Amiga and Atari ST computers, Top Gear was one of the system's first racers, and remains today as one of the best.

A 2-player, split-screen arcade-style racer in the mold of Sega's OutRun, Top Gear borrows heavily from Lotus in both style and gameplay. Unlike OutRun, which is a race against the clock, Top Gear is a race against 19 other racers in a four-race circuit. You must finish in the top 5 of each race to advance to the next track, and you must finish in the top 3 of the standings to advance to the next circuit. There are 32 tracks in all.

The game is a blast to play, particularly against a friend. It is always in split-screen mode-- when a friend is not playing, a computer player operates the bottom screen. There are four cars to choose from, with varying attributes for some variety, but it remains a very basic and bare-bones, pick-up-and-play racer. The music is particularly unique in style, and remains as one of the most memorable scores on the system, though most of the songs are actually sampled from previous Lotus games.

The Top Gear name, though now obscure, continues to live on today. Two sequels were made for Super NES: Top Gear 2 and Top Gear 3000. The series then moved to Nintendo 64, and sporadic versions have been made for various consoles and handhelds in the last few years. Unfortunately once the series moved to N64, it became a mere brand-name, as the gameplay had considerably changed in the move to 3D, and Gremlin Graphics was no longer involved. Still, gamers who grew up on the Super Nintendo will always remember Top Gear as one of the great names in racing.

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.