PLAYING WITH POWER, a multi-part Nintendo-centric ReCollection [Part 4]

 

It's time to wrap up 1994 with the remainder of the video games that found their way into my budding gaming library. My life as a video game enthusiast officially began with the Super Nintendo and later the Sega Genesis, both consoles giving me the absolute best gaming memories and delivering titles and franchises that I still play to this day.

So here we are, the stunning conclusion to 1994!

Mega Man deserves his own ReCollection entirely as there is a LOT of ground to cover there, but as par the course for the entries in this particular ReCollection series, I'm only going to go over just a sliver of my history with the game.

So, Mega Man X was a game that "Santa" had left for me along with the Super Gameboy and one other game. The majority of what I got that Christmas was Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers stuff, which had just hit its second season and had introduced the White Ranger and his Tigerzord. 
Mega Man X was the catalyst for a whole slew of different things for me, from an even greater interest in the Mega Man series to filming myself playing the games on an old camcorder to even narrating my runs of the game. Heck, I still have the very first VHS recording of the game to this day, cleaned and backed up digitally for extra preservation measures.

The funny story about this one is that I had mastered how to fight the final boss down to the point of knowing when, where, and how to dash through his AOE attacks. Initial encounters with him had me trying out various weapons to no effect, which led me to assume that ALL special weapons were useless against him, leading me to fight him with just the charged buster alone. That's one pip of energy per charged shot. The fact that I had done this at such an age (and that I failed to try every single weapon against him) still astonishes me to this day.

Gradius III was the other SNES game that I received that year, and while it was something I definitely tried my hand at more than a number of times, the Shoot-em-Up genre just wasn't something that ever clicked with me. Now, my father, on the other hand, had made runs through the game on numerous occasions, and it was by watching him that I only ever actually got to see the end of the game.

That wraps it up for 1994 and the Christmas Gameboy Story. The next entry will leap ahead a couple of years to 1997 and the advent of the Nintendo 64, so stick around!