Our Nintendo Memories: Highlights from our recent Nintendo Special

In our recent special episode of Aches & Games we reminisced while sharing our Nintendo-based gaming memories – from the NES and Game Boy all the way up to the Switch – while also looking ahead to the Switch 2.

Why not check out the full episode on YouTube or Spotify or read on for just some of the highlights.(Quotes below have been edited for clarity / brevity / so they make some kind of sense!)

Starting early

To keep things structured we split our chat into a few different sections – intending to start off with the earlier consoles (that’s NES, SNES and N64). But James had an early curveball for us all, revealing that his first Nintendo was actually something earlier still …

James: “Yeah, so my first ever games console / system / ”thing” was Snoopy Tennis, which was a Nintendo devised, tiny little thing with a LCD screen on it in black and white. You had Snoopy on one side and Charlie Brown kept knocking tennis balls at you and Snoopy had to go up and down the tree, whacking the tennis balls back.So that was my first ever video game that I ever owned. I think my mum or parents bought it second hand for me from somewhere. I got given it as a gift. It was good fun. So I played that for a long time. And that’s what first got me into that.But at the time I didn’t know it was made by Nintendo particularly. It was only when I was researching until I thought, hmm, I wonder who Snoopy Tennis was made by. And it was Nintendo. So that was my first ever Nintendo memory. Straight off the bat. Beat that one!”

Playing with friends

It was a handy detour as it soon became apparent that, while we each had fond memories of playing the SNES and N64 with friends, it had taken us a while to actually own a Nintendo console ourselves. For my part…

Giles: “I had very little experience with the NES. I sort of start off at the SNES, really … And even then I never owned a SNES on my own. You [James] mentioned going around to friends’ houses and for me, Super Nintendo was all about two games. It was Street Fighter II and Mario Kart. I had a bit of a deal with David Moore, who you might remember from our secondary school, where I got the Mega Drive, or the Genesis as it was known in the States, and he got the Super Nintendo. So he’d come around mine for Sonic on the Mega Drive and various other things, and I’d go to him for Street Fighter or for Mario Kart.

I also didn’t own an N64, so we’re really hitting our stride [laughs]. But actually, the N64 is probably one of my fondest consoles. I was a Sega guy through and through, so I would always live and die by the Dreamcast and it’s “over too far too quickly” lifespan.

But at uni, one of my housemates had an N64, and we lived in a house of four people. So the fact that you could play four player anything was like absolutely catnip to the four of us. Maybe not so good for our studies or for our results. But again, for me, the N64 was a very social console.

Four player Goldeneye in particular, we had very clear views on what wasn’t acceptable when it came to the rules. No-one’s allowed to be at Oddjob because, I don’t know if you remember, you could only move and look separately. So the fact that Oddjob was really short made him a little bit of a cheat because you couldn’t hit him unless you stopped to look down. I’d say, Goldeneye, yet another Mario Kart, which will feature heavily throughout the rest of my Nintendo experience. And we had a version of ISS (ISS 64) that we played a lot. I don’t know if you remember it? Even before the “Pro Evo” days, we had many a good time with four players plugged in for one of those three, wasting our mis-spent youth.”

Wii – a family console

James had a similar experience with the SNES but revealed that the N64 years had passed him by. The Wii however, was a different story and the start of Nintendo’s consoles establishing themselves as something “fun for all the family”. Well, mostly…

James: “Literally, my first Nintendo was the Wii, which still came much later. So we were quite old by that point already. Much younger than now, but still old. If you remember, Giles, we lived together for a while, didn’t we? And we had an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 2, I think, that we used to play on quite regularly. But then you moved off and Sarah bought your part of the house and I think you took the Xbox 360, I think, and the PlayStation 2 died.

So, to fill the console void, me and Sarah bought a Wii between us, which we used for lots of family type stuff. We used it for house parties, used it for Christmas. There were some great games on the Wii, as you know, because I’m sure you would have had one at some stage. We had 4 controllers and four nunchucks, so you could play every possible type of game. So we spent a lot of time playing Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort and that kind of stuff. So good family games, you can play different activities and events against different people. Very amateur graphics, obviously, but the whole fun was the participation from lots of people and getting involved and making everyone look a bit silly.

There was bowling and all sorts of fun stuff in there. We used to get Sarah’s family around for Christmas and my family and we all used to make our little avatars – those Miis or whatever they were called. That was always fun to try and create people looking as realistic as possible as your relatives.

And yeah, we used to have little family bowling competitions and different bits and pieces. My dad used to get involved with my mum and Sarah’s sister and mum as well. So yeah, like I said, it really brought the family together, which was nice. And good for parties as well.

Desperate to really make the most of it, we also got [more] bits and pieces. So we got the guitar and we got the drum pad, drum kit and Rock Band and we used to play along to the various rock tracks. I used to always like drumming in my head, never actually done it in real life, but I’ve got a good sense of rhythm… So I had a great time doing that one and tried to get Joshua into it a couple of years ago as well during lockdown and he enjoyed it as well. So those kind of games are always good fun, lots of special equipment and technology, all about family time and doing stuff together and teamwork and bits and pieces.

But I also played on my own as well. There’s a game called Manhunt 2, which was a very different than a family type game. I used to sit in a dark with the lights off and try and scare myself senseless in the middle of the night playing Manhunt 2. I think you woke up as someone with psychological issues and you’re trying to remember the past or something. Great game from what I remember and vividly remember the case to have an eyeball in the front of the case.”

Nintendo, to go?

Though our stories about the Wii were remarkably similar, it turns out James and I had very different experience of Nintendo’s handheld consoles. James only briefly acquired one when it was left behind by a previous homeowner (!) whereas I, well, let’s see …

Giles: “Yeah, well, as you said about the Game Watch earlier, that I’d completely forgotten just how many sort of handheld Nintendo consoles I appear to have owned, and also how many versions of Mario Kart I appear to have bought, because looking through this, I’ve been a complete sucker.

But for me, Nintendo was mainly a handheld game company. I’ve certainly owned more of their handheld consoles than their home ones. If you count Switch as maybe both, then that totals two with the Wii in terms of home consoles. But when it comes to the handhelds, I’ve owned a Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, the DS and the 3DS.

So Game Boy for me was kind of one of my earlier gaming memories. I also started on PC with my, my dad had PCs at home and Spectrums and Orics, those sorts of things. So going back even further. But the Game Boy came out in September 1990 apparently, which I think puts it just before when I got hold of that Mega Drive. So I suspect the Game Boy was my first console.

Obviously, played a shed ton of Tetris, as I think anyone did on the Game Boy and has done since. Addictive little game that was. Mario Land was a simple but very enjoyable time as well. And also, there was a tennis, Mario Tennis game there, which I really enjoyed. GBA, the Game Boy Advance, was a bit more fancy. Another copy of Mario Kart, this time it’s called Super Circuit, which was basically the SNES version of Mario Kart, so I was in my element. And my first introduction to Monkey Ball. Then I did get the DS around 2005, apparently, according to my notes. And I think that’s probably when I’ve played most single player Nintendo games ever, because if you were on the move, you didn’t have many options back then. Another Mario Kart, a version of Super Mario 64, which I’d never played on the N64. I’m not sure I got very far through that. I played my first Zelda on the DS, a game called Phantom Hourglass, which was really good fun. It involves sailing around different islands. Still not sure I’ve completed the Zelda, but one day I’ll get back into Breath of the Wild. Probably.

And then just a quick shout out to Elite Beat Agents, which I can see I’ve mistyped in the notes. That was a good showcase of the sort of weirdness of Japanese games that I really enjoyed, particularly around that sort of time and since. You were these three kind of like secret service agents, except they weren’t there to protect the president or shoot anyone, which was good, non-violent. They were there to cheer people on who were having a difficult day through the power of dance and music as you did. So it was really cool. Essentially, things would appear on the screen and you just had to sort of tap and swipe them in time with the music. And if you did it well, say someone would have, I don’t know, dropped their groceries on the floor and having a really bad day and these three guys would appear this crazy Japanese music would show up and you’d have to sort of tap and swipe away to try and cheer this person up. It was as crazy as it sounds. I loved that game.”

Switching things up

As I jabbered on about Monkey ball and glasses-free 3D, James kindly moved us on to that last part of our journey – bringing us “up to date” with the Nintendo Switch. Well, until the Switch 2 at least…

James: “[It came out] March 2017, it’s ages old! No wonder they’re planning a new one. Eight years old but it’s the third best-selling console of all time, so, about time for a update.But yeah, so I didn’t get on with a Switch at a start, so I didn’t jump on board with that one straight off, because like I mentioned before, I never had any really desperation for a handheld. And back when it came out, I wasn’t really massively into video game at the time. I’d kind of given up on it.

I was still playing the Wii every now and again, but not much. It was only for my 40th birthday, and Sarah couldn’t think of what to get me. So I said, oh, get a console and we looked into it and at the time, the Xbox One looked like it was quite good and it looked nice. So I’ve got an Xbox One for my 40th birthday, never took it out of the case for about two years until lockdown.And that was only when I started getting back into gaming again, bizarrely, because Joshua was me and were bored at home and thought let’s give that Xbox One out and see what it does. And it was really good fun, so I got right back into it.

Again during lockdown, I got into buying and selling stuff. So I bought some Switches, played a few bits and pieces of games, made sure they work and sold them off again.

So we had to Switch Light and the original Switch. And then I mentioned on our first ever one of our podcasts – I talked about the fact that Joshua was likely going to get a switch for Christmas. And he did from Father Christmas, which was very kind of him. And that was an OLED version. So at the time, that one was reasonably new still at the time. And yeah, we spent some good time playing that one at first. So it was back feeling a bit like the Wii when it first came out and that there’s lots of interactive games you can play. Instead of playing Wii Sports, you could play Switch Sports, and instead of playing Mario Kart on the Wii, you could play Mario Kart on the Switch. It’s all very similar.

It felt like time hadn’t really moved much, obviously graphically better but the games themselves were very similar games to what had come out originally on the Wii. And the whole point of the Switch at the time for me was again to recreate that family vibe with a new, more modern console. So me and Josh played a lot of tennis and we played a lot of netball, we played lots of other sports games and had a good time and got the family involved in that one. And again, when Sarah’s family, including a new member, came around for Christmas, they played a lot of time on the Switch. So sort of recreating the olden days, but with a child involved, which was nice.

So that was our Switch experience really. We used it on holidays, we take it on UK holidays, also take it overseas because you can just obviously tether it to a TV and use it on the screen. It’s been quite useful. It’s nice just to whip it out when you’re running out of things to do for half an hour on a holiday, if the weather’s bad or if you’re knackered from being at the beach or swimming in the pool for all day, you can just whip out and play a quick half an hour here and there.

We play a lot of Sonic stuff, weirdly, on it. Obviously, Nintendo used to be Sega’s big rival back in the day, but now you can get all the Sega stuff on the eStore on the Switch. We’ve got the Zelda Breath of the Wild on there [too] and Mario Kart and the various sports games.

It’s a good fun, don’t use it as much as I thought we probably would, weirdly, because Josh is still obsessed with Xbox and I spend most of my time on the PlayStation. But it’s there for days out and trips and stuff. And yeah, great console, very popular. And now the whole market in terms of the hybrid thing and top quality games, all the IPs that have been there for 20 years are still running as strong as they were back then, bizarrely. They’ve kept those, they’ve somehow kept reinventing all of their sort of franchises.”

But what comes next?

All of which left us in a funny position as we each wrapped things up and looked forward together …

Giles: “Yeah, the Switch has sort of been a nice social console. It’s not been my main either, which I think is kind of the story of Nintendo for me. Whether it was the Wii as a kind of more just a different thing really than my sort of main gaming console, more social activities, more family based. Or a handheld or later the Switch as a kind of second choice (often the first choice if you were traveling) but offering different experiences and sort of indie games, stuff like that – that’s how Nintendo has fitted into my life and certainly has fitted in as well.

But I think it’s fair to say neither of us was that excited about [the Switch 2]. My Nintendo was often my mobile console, and yet now I’ve got a ROG Ally here in front of me as I record, which kind of eats the Switch’s lunch a little bit in terms of I can play the indies, which is what I’ve really enjoyed on the Switch when it comes to some of those smaller, independent, more sort of innovative, different games. I’ve got a Meta Quest 3, so innovation, some of the VR innovation has really got me excited again in a way that Nintendo used to with their sort of crazy ideas, which just felt like something completely new. And then, like you said, Mario Kart’s a draw, but I’ve bought it so many times in the past.

Also, now a lot of the families that we, I mean, I don’t have kids, but a lot of my friends’ kids, my family’s kids are growing up. And they were the people who I think I was, especially the first Switch, they were the people who really were sort of pushing that, wanting to play on it, wanting to play those sorts of games. So I’m just not sure that there’ll be that draw anymore.

And finally, interestingly, for me as well, for a while, Nintendo’s been the cheaper option. And so it works really well as a sort of second or third choice, usually offering a different kind of use case and with strong battery life. And almost I think now with the Switch 2 being more powerful, closer to the other home consoles, but also more expensive, also with worse battery life, it’s almost taken away that differentiation and kind of taken away for me the attractiveness potentially. So yeah, it’ll be a while before I get suckered in, but I’m sure there’ll be a sale somewhere which will tempt me one year.”

James: “Yeah, I think if I didn’t have the rest, if I didn’t have the PlayStation and the Xbox and the PC, then obviously it covers all bases because you can plug it in and use it in 4K and have good graphics and you can take it away with you. So if I didn’t have all of them, then yeah, it’d be a no-brainer.

But being I do have all of them, then it’s a no-brainer that it’s not really worth the effort. For the times when I would use my Switch on holiday or for an hour here and there overseas when you’re bored or trying to relax, you don’t need the amazing graphics and you don’t need the most modern games. You just pick something off the e-store and just play for it for half an hour. It doesn’t need to be particularly good. So the original Switch is going to meet those needs for the next sort of five years, quite simply, because most of the time I’ll be at home playing on the PlayStation 6 or the Xbox Series whatever.”

Giles: “Of course, we haven’t even mentioned the fact that now we’ve all got mobile phones with plenty of games and options there. So that’s a whole other story…”

And that was that! Lots of memories and a fun trip back into the past. But if you want to hear our views on rather more modern games and consoles listen out for our monthly Aches & Games podcast episodes, dropping the first Friday of each and every month on all of your favourite podcast providers and YouTube.