might be a big lanky nerd, completely inept at every manner of team sport this side of...

well, everything. Except BOWLING. It’s the one thing I’m good at and dammit, I enjoy

it whenever I can. (When I’m not locking myself in a dark room to play some freakin’

Fire Emblem in peace, that is.) Anyway. From the depths of my big ol’ box of Super Famicom

games comes... SUPER BOWLING. Because it’s a 16-bit game on a Nintendo system and the

word “Super” is mandatory, I guess. Fine by me. I just want some BOWLING. And what

do I get? BOWLING. And that’s about it.

And, you knock down pins. And that’s about it. Look, what were you expecting, Jerome

Bettis to come out here and offer you a towel? It’s a 1992 game about bowling; you’re

lucky to get a decent game out of it. In fact, the mechanics are pretty sound, even if it

does seem like your spin doesn’t travel as much as you’d like it to. All you have

to do is position your bowler, aim your shot, set your spin and your throw strength, and

BAM. Pins go flying. And while the pin action is certainly better than, say, that Intellivision

bowling game I played a little while ago, there are some circumstances where the sprites

would seem to indicate a perfectly good hit but then screw you out of one pin. Seriously?

It’s the last ball of the 10th frame, jerk!

There are a couple little flourishes just to spice up the fact that this is, all told,

a pretty thin experience. You’ve got victory animations whenever you get a strike or spare!

(Or gutterball, for that matter.) You’ve got... um... actual racial diversity, which

is pretty darn rare for a Japanese game. And there’s... Golf! Well, bowling golf. You’ve

got a strange spare figure at the end of the lane, and you need to take it out in as few

balls as possible. Interestingly, this mode sometimes breaks from the actual bowling setup

of 10 pins and goes to a 4x4 square formation of 16. That might’ve been a stretch for

the word “interestingly,” but I don’t care. It’s still some deviation from the

standard, and that’s pretty cool. But I just know that friend of the show Dave Patricola

would tear me a new one if I didn’t mention that this was developed by the same folks

who brought us PEPSIMAN for the PS1. And in a really strange twist for these kinds of

games... it actually saw a US release! So find a copy of your own - they’re pretty

readily available, from what I’ve seen - and help me try to determine what the heck these

announcer things are supposed to be. Are they birds? Chickens? Turkeys? That’d make more

sense. Simpsons rejects? PLEASE, SOMEBODY PUT AN END TO MY IGNORANCE.