When Nintendo systems are released, you can almost feel it under your nail cuticles that within a year and a half, there WILL be a cool accessory for these cool games! The NES had plenty, including the Zapper Gun, the Power Pad, the ROB robot, the Power Glove, and the (floppy) Disk System. The Super NES sported the Super Game Boy, NES on SNES Adaptors, the Super Scope, the Multitap, and the SNES Mouse. The N64 twisted out with the Rumble Pak, Expansion Pak, Game Boy Transfer Pak, and Controller Pak. But only about half of them ever succeed, and several are limited to just Japan (for instance, the disk drives for NES, SNES, AND N64!). Some were real fun, some were real stupid, and others just seemed useless. But nevertheless, accessories were and are still very fun! We love them very much, and here are the three coolest ones that not only add the most to the gaming experience, but also worked more than 2 out of 6 of the times! |-)
1 - NES Zapper Light Gun
Wee-haw! So much entertainment zapped outta' this baby! The game Duck Hunt was one of the coolest around, and still is, just because of the real feeling of actually **gulp** shooting an animal. Well, I know it sounds barbaric, but this is as much fun as it gets! Hey, imagine a game like Perfect Dark with one of these and the Power Pad (for walking in levels)! WOW, that'd be fun! And as opposed to the SNES light gun (well, actually... bazooka), the Super Scope, the Zapper Gun was actually light and small enough for a little kid (like WE were at the time) to handle and play pretty well with! It's perfect in every way, and I can't beleive Nintendo gave up on light guns just because of the SNES' light gun failure. There shoulda' been one for the N64, and there should be one for the GameCube, man! WEE!
COMPATIBLE WITH: Duckhunt, Gumshoe, Hoganīs Alley, To the Earth, Wild Gun Man, Track 'n' Field 2, Trickshooting, Bayou Billy, Freedom Force, Gotcha!, and Shooting Range.
2 - NES Power Pad
And this was a rockin' NES thing too! That... track and field game... THAT WAS SO MUCH FUN! You actually RAN when you ran past your opponent, and you actually JUMPED when you jumped over hurtles and obstacles! JEEZ, this was fun! NES just plain ol' succeeded in terms of accessories. Even the ROB robot was a little cool, though kinda' odd. ;-)
COMPATIBLE WITH: Athletic World, Dance Aerobics, Eggsplode / Shortorder (two-in-one cartridge), World Class Track Meet, Super Team Games, and Street Cop.
3 - N64 Rumble Pak
It rocked our 3D polygonal world (pun intended). These little babies plugged into a port on the back of yo' N64 controllers and in the game, when a funky thing happened (like, you hit a wall hard, or you got shot), the thing would rattle your controller and your hands as well. Not to say many models of this baby (including the Nintendo original) were EXTREMELY heavy compared to the controller w/o one. But shooters, racers, and tourny fighters as well rocked out when equipped with one of these. I don't really know why, but some games just WORKED with a Rumble Pak in da' back! Yow!
COMPATIBLE WITH: 173 GAMES, the famous including: Star Fox 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye 007, F-Zero X, Mortal Kombat IV, and Perfect Dark.
Honorable Mentions - Can't say I've ever used any of the disk drives other than the SNES DD. And that one was pretty darn cool! What the basic idea was that you could get a game really cheap and play for a while until an update was programmed for the game; then you could run over to your latest and greatest toy store, stick the disk in a slot, pay a small fee, and run home with the newest version of your already cool game!!! WAOWA! And it was a success back East; the only problem was pirating; it was all too easy on these floppy foppies. So, mainly, that's why NinNin never released these in America. But my friend in 4th grade, Allen Chen, had one of these from China (I think) for the SNES and we played a crool version of Mario Paint all day and it rocked! Wow. Too bad this never got put out in America; another BIG mistake Nintendo has made.
Super Game Boy was pretty cool. But the games were still the same ol' games; all it really improved on was the TINY bit of color splashed onto the screen, and the colors never looked... well, should I say, natural. Same idea with the N64 Game Boy Transfer Pak, except that with THIS, you could actually swap information from a GB version of a game to an N64 version and vice versa! Coo. All in all, nice accessories, but not nice enough.
