Nintendo Classic Mini SNES review – the greatest console ever made

90s style video gaming is back with the Nintendo Classic Mini SNES, which features 20 of the best games ever made and the never-before-seen Star Fox 2.

The day I got my first Super Nintendo is one of my most endearing and enduring memories. After pestering my parents all day except when I was at school or rugby or sleeping, they eventually relented after my daily regime.

These days I now pester our buyers to get me gadgets and games. This was however born out of those moments in front of the National AKA Panasonic TV playing Donkey Kong, Street Fighter II and so on and so on.

Whats in the box?

The SNES Mini is a tiny version of the original console, pre-loaded with 21 games of the 90s era. It is light as a feather is an exact replica of the European console, with functioning power and reset buttons.

The replica controller ports come away as a flap, with the real ones, which connect via USB, sitting underneath . Unlike the NES Mini released last year, the Super Nintendo classic comes with two controllers packed into the box.

You get a HDMI cable to connect to the TV, but you will need to dig out one of your mini-USB cables to power the thing. A large proportion of people buying the SNES Mini will have a suitable power supply lying around (a standard phone charger would do the trick) but, like with the NES Mini, it still seems odd to not pack a plug in as standard.

The controllers are perfect replicas of the originals, right down to the texture of the chassis and the clickiness of the shoulder buttons.

How does it work?

Hit the power switch, you are greeted with a side-scrolling selection of 21 games. You can get straight into a game at will and when you have had your fill, you can press the reset button and return to the menu.

Once out of the game you can save up to four resume points for each title. A new feature is that you can also rewind that save, leaving you able to clear up any mistakes before you hit reset.

As with the Mini NES all the games are the American editions, because originally the European versions ran slower than they were supposed to and with large horizontal borders around the picture (something common to all video game consoles until mid-way through the PlayStation 2 era). But the Mini SNES’s crown jewel is Star Fox 2, which never came out anywhere in the world. Instead it was completed in 1995 but never published, and so given its unusual status we’ve written up a separate review of the game. The emulation of the games is once again excellent and there are QR codes that allow you to download the original manuals to your smartphone. As before you have multiple save slots for each game, to help overcome the fact that many games don’t save themselves and are much more difficult than modern equivalents. But this time there’s also a rewind feature attached to the save, which allows you to wind back to over a minute from where you actually saved. The Mini SNES is filled with neat little features like that, including a demo mode that shows footage from your own save, and various different border options (the concept of widescreen video games didn’t exist at the time) and filters to make your TV look like an old non-HD model.

What we can say is that the Classic Mini SNES absolutely is worth the money and effort. It’s the sheer quality of the games which impresses the most, and while it’s easy to imagine what other titles could’ve been included all the most important classics are here. The SNES was always a special console and this is the perfect modern day homage, one that proves that the magic behind its best games isn’t nostalgia but ageless quality and sheer gaming brilliance.