5 Weirdest Games On The SNES

by

The Super Nintendo was a major win for Nintendo. It sold incredibly well, boosted by fantastic games like Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and it demonstrated Nintendo’s continued strength after the success of the NES. Perhaps most notably, the Super Nintendo showed Nintendo was willing to take risks and allow its partners to create some truly unique and unusual games.

Here are the five weirdest games on the Super Nintendo.

5) Packy & Marlon

The 1990s saw a surge in educational video games, with classics like Number Munchers and The Oregon Trail becoming popular. But the Super Nintendo Entertainment System also had some surprisingly niche titles. I want to focus on Packy & Marlon, though it’s worth noting that its publisher, Raya, released several unusual games.

Okay, so I recently checked out this really unusual game called Packy & Marlon. It’s a platformer where you play as two elephants… who have diabetes. Seriously! You’re running around trying to get back stolen stuff, but you also have to manage their insulin and blood sugar. It sounds bizarre, and it is, but it’s actually got a good reason behind it. The creators wanted to help kids understand diabetes isn’t something to be ashamed of, and honestly, I think they pulled it off. The same developer then made Bronkie the Bronchiasauras, which is about a dinosaur with asthma, and they’ve even got another game coming out that focuses on the dangers of tobacco. It’s a pretty unique way to tackle important health issues, and I’m here for it.

4) Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City

During the 1990s, Michael Jordan was well-known for not allowing his image to be used in most basketball video games. From a business perspective, this makes sense – he was the face of the NBA at the time, and it likely felt unfair to be paid the same as other players. But it’s puzzling that he did agree to be featured in a side-scrolling platformer for the Super Nintendo, a game completely unrelated to basketball.

Instead of focusing on basketball, he’s racing around Chicago to rescue Scottie Pippen and other all-stars before a charity game. They’ve been kidnapped by a villain named Maximus Cranium – a ridiculously over-the-top name, honestly – and Michael Jordan is the only one who can save them. While it’s not a traditional basketball story, Jordan does fight his enemies by throwing basketballs at them. It’s a bizarre and frankly terrible way to use his image, and it’s just plain odd.

3) Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D

I always dreamed of being able to step into my Super Nintendo games. Thankfully, Jim Power delivered a surprisingly immersive 3D experience for SNES fans. Using clever visual tricks like parallax scrolling and a pair of 3D glasses that came with the game, Jim Power was the only game on the SNES that truly felt three-dimensional.

Honestly, no one was really asking for this game. It was a fun idea initially, but lacked a genuine purpose beyond being a curiosity. The oddities don’t stop there, though. A version for the Sega Genesis was started but never finished. Surprisingly, in 2021, Piko Interactive found the lost version and successfully funded its release through crowdfunding. Interestingly, Jim Power also appeared on the NES, Switch, and PS4 – many years after the original SNES game. It’s just a really unusual title overall.

2) BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets

Back in the 1990s, Nintendo created a device called the Satellaview that connected to the Super Famicom. Though it was only available in Japan, it allowed players to experience a limited form of online gaming. As part of this service, Nintendo released a follow-up to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, featuring a brand-new story, unique dungeons, and even voiceovers.

It’s already strange that this game exists and hasn’t been updated for modern platforms, but the way it was originally released is even weirder. Players of Ancient Stone Tablets could only access new content at specific times – new episodes would become available hourly. Over several years, you played through the game in hour-long segments, making it one of the most unusual episodic games ever created.

1) Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!

The TV show Home Improvement was incredibly popular in the 1990s, with Tim Allen and Richard Karn at the height of their careers and Johnathan Taylor Thomas becoming a teen heartthrob. Given how many disappointing TV show adaptations there were back then, it’s not shocking that a Home Improvement game was made. But Power Tool Pursuit stands out as particularly bizarre and unusual.

I didn’t see every episode of Home Improvement, but growing up in the ’90s, I’m pretty sure I’d remember if Tim Allen had a showdown with a dinosaur using a nail gun, or battled robots and mummies with power tools. While the show’s workshop wasn’t exactly full of great video game concepts, it’s still strange that the developers decided to create a scenario where Tim Allen travels back in time to attach things to a T. rex with a staple gun.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

https://comicbook.com/gaming/list/6-most-disappointing-snes-games-ever-made/embed/#

Read More

2026-04-10 23:42