During this period, I rented a game on the weekends and followed the releases monthly in GamePower magazine. I have GamePower issues 1 to 20 at home:
The last GamePower I bought was issue 20 which came out in February 1994. At that time I was already quite dedicated to game programming. In the spare time, I played fighting games.
Due to the huge success of the game Street Fighter II on Super Nintendo, in almost every corner of the city where I live there was a house with several Super Nintendo available where you could pay to play Street Fighter II for an hour.
Close to my house there was one of those gaming houses. It was maintained by two brothers. I became friends with them and would often stop by to play Street Fighter II or just to chat with my friends.
During 1994, my focus on Super Nintendo was training to compete in fighting games. I trained really hard on Street Fighter II Turbo, Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat 2:
I became known in this gaming house. Sometimes they set up challenges with me for the weekend. The matches were very exciting. I had good times in this gaming house.
Besides these fighting games, there was only one other game I played in 1994, and that was the Shadowrun RPG:
I rented this game in early 1994 and really enjoyed the game's setting which has a more mature theme. Because it was a long and complex game, it couldn't be completed in a weekend. Even if I rented it again, the save file with my progress probably wouldn't be there.
The game store where I rented Shadowrun had a list of used games that were sold at an affordable price. They were games that weren't rented much, so the owner put them up for sale.
I imagined that Shadowrun was not rented much in this game store, as the RPG style was not very popular, mainly due to the difficulty of understanding the texts in English. I kept insisting with the clerk telling them to put the Shadowrun on the used games list. One day when I went back to the game store, the clerk called me and said he had spoken with the owner. The owner had authorized the sale of Shadowrun to me at the price of used games. I was really happy.
Regarding Shadowrun's story, in the first minutes of the game, your character is murdered by a gang:
Then a fox appears running towards you. Upon reaching your side, the fox turns into a woman and casts a spell on you:
After that, the morgue guys appear and take you to the morgue. You wake up in a morgue drawer, confused and amnesic. When you open the door to the room you are in, the morgue guys get scared and run desperately to another room. Their door is locked and if you try to talk they reply:
- There is nobody here, but us... mice!
Shadowrun has many interesting environments. In one part of the game, we have to enter the concert of the rock singer Maria Mercurial:
Through the dialogue screen we meet several interesting characters:
Shadowrun was my last great adventure on Super Nintendo. At the end of 1994 I stopped playing video games, but I continued with my dedication to game programming.
These are the Super Nintendo cartridges I have at home:
