5 Weirdest Games On The Snes

The Super Nintendo was a big success for the Japanese company. Not only did it sell well thanks to great games like Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but it also proved Nintendo had staying power by following up on the success of the NES. Maybe even more importantly, it showed that Nintendo wasn’t afraid to get weird with it, letting its partners make some spectacularly strange video games.

Here are the five weirdest games on the Super Nintendo.

5) Packy & Marlon

During the ’90s, developers really started to pump out educational games. We’ve seen great ones like Number Munchers and The Oregon Trail, but there are a few oddly specific educational games on the SNES. I’m highlighting Packy & Marlon here, but please know that publisher Raya made quite a few oddities.

Packy & Marlon is a platformer game starring two diabetic elephants. You’re tasked with recovering stolen goods, but you have to remember to take your insulin and check your blood glucose levels. Like I said, it’s weird, but there’s a purpose. The developers wanted to help de-stigmatize diabetes for kids, and they sort of succeeded. Raya followed up on Packy & Marlon with Bronkie the Bronchiasauras, which is about a dinosaur with asthma, and has another game about the dangers of tobacco.

4) Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City

In the ’90s, Michael Jordan was infamous for keeping his likeness out of many popular basketball games. From a business sense, you can kind of understand it. The guy basically was the NBA during the ’90s, so asking him to take the same cut as everyone else was probably insulting for someone with Jordan’s ego. However, that doesn’t explain why he agreed to appear in a platformer on the SNES that has nothing to do with his basketball exploits.

Instead, he’s running around Chicago, trying to save Scottie Pippen and the rest of his fellow all-stars before a charity match. A madman named Maximus Cranium (they weren’t even trying) captured them all, and Air Jordan has to get them back. I said basketball isn’t involved, but that’s not technically true. MJ’s main attack is throwing different basketballs at his enemies. It’s such a weird use of Jordan’s likeness that is as bad as it is strange.

3) Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D

I always wanted my Super Nintendo games to come out of the screen. Thankfully, Jim Power came along and gave SNES fans a true 3D experience. By using parallax scrolling and 3D glasses that were included with the game, Jim Power was the SNES’s only true 3D game.

Of course, nobody really wanted it. As a gimmick, it was neat, but there was no real reason for it to exist outside of being a novelty. The weirdest doesn’t end there, though. See, a Sega Genesis version was in the works, but was ultimately cancelled. However, in 2021, Piko Interactive recovered it and crowdfunded its release. Jim Power also came out on the NES, Switch, and PS4, several decades after the SNES version. It’s just a strange game all around.

2) BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets

In the ’90s, Nintendo released the Satellaview add-on for the Super Famicom. It never left the country, but provided a way for fans to jump online in a limited capacity. As part of that system, Nintendo released a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It features an original storyline, new dungeons, and even voice acting.

The fact that it exists and has never been brought to modern systems is weird enough, but I also have to talk about how it was released. See, if you wanted to play Ancient Stone Tablets, you needed to log on to the system at specific times for the hourly episodes. Over a few years, you’d play through new episodes in hour-long chunks, making for one of the strangest episodic games of all time.

1) Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!

Home Improvement was huge in the ’90s. Tim Allen and Richard Karn were at the peak of their powers, and Johnathan Taylor Thomas was making teen girls swoon weekly. With how prevalent bad adaptations were in the ’90s, it’s not a huge surprise to learn there was a Home Improvement game. However, it ends up on this list because Power Tool Pursuit is stranger than you could possibly imagine.

Look, I haven’t watched every episode of Home Improvement, but as a child of the ’90s, I feel like I would’ve remembered an episode where Tim Allen fought a dinosaur with a nail gun. Or one where he took on robots and mummies in a power tool battle. Granted, the Tool Time set isn’t exactly brimming with good video game ideas, so the developers had to do something. It’s just baffling that they went with Tim Allen going back in time to staple a T. rex.

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