The character, Ness, from the outstanding Super Smash Bros series, as you may or may not know, is the main hero in one of the greatest game ever created. Many people may not even remember the Super Nintendo and that's why many people may not know where this character is even from.
Sure, he looks like a cute chibi sort of character that smacks DK out with a baseball bat; sets Samus on fire with a shot of fire, and even shoots himself with a psychically controlled bolt of electricity in order to shoot upwards, or head-first into an enemy. But where did all this come from? The answer: Earthbound.
In 1994 the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was the pinnacle of home-console gaming. Mario, the Italian plumber on a mission to save Princess Peach from the evil king Bowser in countless adventures (that continue to this day), was the star of the gaming world.
Every day, kids and adults alike would be raging at their consoles because they fell down an unsuspected pit of doom and lost their last life in the last level of the game, sending them back to level one. The clouds smiling in the background of the levels feel as though they're taunting you with their happiness.
It was a time when video games were difficult. They weren't interactive movies and in fact most of the time their story-lines were worse than Birdemic: Shock and Terror (though we know that can't be true).
Earthbound is an exception. The storyline begins as any game you might expect and rolls through the generic tropes of its genre. A kid wakes up to the sound of ultimate evil landing on earth and guess who has to save it?
No, not the government, or some armed forces that you might think has a fighting chance against pure evil, it's the little kid, Ness. As Ness you wander off into the world, encountering strange (and I mean very, very strange) lands, even stranger people and enemies that simply had to have been conceived in another dimension, an incomprehensibly strange dimension.
This kind of mixture of strange things (ok I've said strange enough now) wouldn't work in something like the ingredients of a broth, or the clothes of someone dressing formally, but it works in a world where the RPG storyline has been rinsed dryer than a washer's flannel.
The game references itself constantly, breaks the fourth wall when you least expect it and changes its own perspective in ways that leave you amazed at what 16-Bit video games are capable of. So get on eBay and buy yourself a SNES and experience this treasure of video game past that will leave you wondering why we ever invented the N64, or PS1.
