Collection essentials #257: Super Bowling (SNES)

Here’s another early childhood game, one of the first video games I ever played, an obscure bowling title that not many people remember. There weren’t many bowling games on the Super Nintendo. Just two, in fact, and we had both of them when I was growing up! My dad loves bowling, so it wasn’t too surprising that he picked this game up.

Super Bowling is a pretty solid bowling game that tries to translate the various factors involved in the sport. For example, you can pick how heavy your ball is, how much oil will be on the lanes, and the speed and spin of your ball both matter. There are also a few different playable characters with different attributes, too. And so, this game made for a good multiplayer experience when my dad and I, along with anyone else interested, wanted some bowling fun from the comfort of home. I would imagine that my dad usually won, but I honestly don’t remember.

The main knock on Super Bowling is that there just isn’t a whole lot to it. There’s no kind of single-player campaign to conquer or stuff to unlock. You have the option to play a regular game, practice, or “Golf” mode, which involves being given a set of pins and being required to knock them down in the fewest number of shots possible. And so, the game provides a solid bowling experience, but just doesn’t do nearly enough to stand out as a particularly great game and comes off as a little unambitious. The presentation is a little bit cartoony and the music sets a fun vibe, but none of it does quite enough to make the game especially memorable either.

And so Super Bowling is merely “pretty decent”. But it was a serviceable multiplayer game back in my childhood when we had hardly any video games to play, so I do look upon it fondly. Good enough to make the essentials list as a nostalgiassential.