(Chance to win Wii Points within. Read on!)

I’ll get this out of the way right now–I didn’t grow up with a SNES. I bought a Super Famicom from a Japanese junk store for about fifteen bucks in 2008, and that was the first chance I ever had to really explore the system and its library. And by then everything else had happened, so it wound up on the back, back burner.

But while I may not have the expertise of a person who grew up playing the SNES, I do have the vivid trauma of a person who grew up pining for a SNES. Surely that’s good for something.

For me, at age nine, it was all about the beat-’em-ups. In the spring of ’93, my family went on a week-long cruise around the Caribbean. Cruises are fun–especially if you’re an independent adult with expendable income. For my brother and me, however, there was little to do besides hang out in the “game room”, which was a dingy, desolate affair housing a mere two cabinets: Pit Fighter and Final Fight. Guess which one we were glued to for the majority of the week.

Yeah, there was something so compelling about Final Fight. As a hallmark entry into the beat-’em-up genre, the game consisted of little besides “beating them up,” “them” being everybody in the entire world. But to the child weaned on ‘80s and ‘90s action flicks, playing Final Fight provided hours of thrills. Haggar’s daughter was on the line here, and it was up to us to punch, jump-kick, throw, and turkey-eat her back to safety!

With enormous sprites, life-like grunting, and a variety of highly detailed backdrops, Final Fight on a home console seemed like a pipe dream to me with my sputtering, decrepit NES. It wasn’t until I visited a friend’s house that I learned a home version of Final Fight already existed. Sure, it did away with a number of major elements, including two-player cooperative play, Poison, and Guy, but SNES Final Fight preserved much of the game’s original essence and brought it to your living room, king-sized sprites and all. Indeed, the port was such a hit that Final Fight is still largely remembered as a Super Nintendo game at heart.

And Capcom would only improve upon their brawler recipe from there. In 1994, the SNES got a port of Medieval brawler Knights of the Round. This time, two-player co-op was fully operational. The game also featured more lavish set pieces, as well as a new blocking mechanic that allowed for more skill-oriented combat and less quarter guzzling (which made a lot of sense for a console game). You could level up your character, hack apart power-ups to multiply them, and even get on horseback at certain sections and trample those brigands but good.

The game was a deeper experience overall, paving the way for future Capcom classics like Tenchi wo Kurau II and the Dungeons and Dragons titles.

In 1995, the SNES got one more great Capcom beat-’em-up, much to my deprived lament. The name of the game was Captain Commando, whose titular character was a bionic superhero with his own squadron of Commando Companions, including a mummy with daggers, a ninja, and a baby in a giant mech. Co-op was back, and characters each had a wider array of moves at their disposal, including running special moves and running-jumping special moves.

Each of the three brawlers was a shining gem in the SNES’s otherwise formidable library, and a source of perpetual anguish for me as a child. An anguish I’ve now unearthed.

Oh yeah! Almost forgot to mention, leave a comment with your memories of any of these three games, and you’ll have a chance to win some Wii Points. Unfortunately Final Fight is the only one available on the Virtual Console, but hey, they’ve got the whole Final Fight trilogy, and I’ve heard the sequels are pretty darn rad (though I do question their application of the word final).

Also, check the comments thread in the near future to have a look at some of the more outstanding comments.