 Alright, let's dig into every Super Nintendo bowling game, and there's only two as far as I can tell, Super Bowling and Brunswick World Tournament of Champions. There might be some weird obscure Super Famicom bowling game out there that I wasn't able to find due to a translation issue or something, and there might be a couple games out there that feature bowling mini-games, but otherwise, there's only two full-on bowling games in this video, starting with Super Bowling. This one was made in September 1992 by Athena, who usually made shoot-em-ups, like Strike Gunner STG and Biometal, but hey, what goes together like shoot-em-ups and bowling? And what do you know, this game is pretty good. The devs went for kind of a punch-out formula here, keeping things simple and turning up the charm, featuring four different anime-styled characters you can choose from, and a green bird that provides commentary in the upper right corner of the screen. Super Bowling features a one-button three-click swing system that you'd normally see in a golf game, but adapted to bowling. First you set your aim, then you set the spin, then you've got a small window of time to set your power. This format always lends itself well to games like this, and Super Bowling does a nice job allowing you to play certain ways, like sheer straight-ahead power or more of a finesse approach. Each of the four characters has their own obvious strengths and weaknesses that you'd expect, like for the big, muscly guy, his power meter is a little slower, so it's easier to really throw some rocks, but his spin meter moves much faster, so it's harder to set the spin you want. The bio for each character in the manual is pretty funny, Pete Pins Peterson likes pretty girls' fast cars, loud guitars, and even louder strikes. Robin Red Randall likes picking up tough spares, shopping with Spinner, the other girl character, and going to the beach. What, are these two the Barbie and Ken of the Super Bowling universe or something? You can also adjust your ball weight, and here's where I laugh like butted for the next five minutes, as well as the oil distance, where I laugh like Beavis for the next ten minutes. The weight plays into how you want to play. If you're a power player, pick a heavier ball. If you're more finesse, pick a lighter ball, but not too light. You still gotta, you know, knock the pins down. Oil distance has three options, low, medium, and high. Low means the ball will start its spin right away, and high means the ball will slide a little bit before the spin kicks in. Most importantly, though, applying the right amount of spin to get your ball to behave properly is going to be your bread and butter in this one. Like in this situation here, you'll need some spin one way or another to try and finagle a spare from this. Like I said, though, there's more than one way to skin a cat in this game, so if you want, you can just aim right at it and go full-powered and see if that works. To the game's credit, the physics here are consistent. There's not a lot of wonkiness, unless you turn up the oil distance all the way. That can make things pretty weird. The game doesn't let you just power through, either. You won't get consistent strikes or knock down as many pins without some spin on the ball. Either way, it's a good idea to get familiar with both approaches, and thankfully, this game features a very flexible practice mode where you can set pins any way you want, so you can practice any sort of scenario you'd like. The other two game modes here are turkey bowl, or regular bowling that keeps track of up to four different players' scores, and golf mode, which is the best reason to play this game today. That's right, this is a title that dares to combine two of the most boring spectator sports out there into one game, and it's actually really fun. Each hole, so to speak, is represented by a pin setting that's assigned a par, and that's determined by how many rolls it should take you to knock every pin down. If it takes you fewer rolls, then you're under par, but more rolls will increase your score, which is, you know, a bad thing in golf. This is a fun mode, and I really got a kick out of it, so if you want to play this one and you're not even in that bowling or golf for that matter, then you still might enjoy this. But yeah, super bowling is a bit of a surprise. This game does a nice job taking a simple bowling game and plussing it up with characters, options, settings, a flexible practice mode, and a golf mode. The only real downer is that there's not a single-player campaign, so there's no computer opponents to play against. But this one is still good for what it is. Super Bowling got a sequel for the N64 over eight years later, and it's very similar, just with N64 graphics. But because this game was released so late in the N64 life span, not many copies were made, so it's effectively become one of those status symbol cartridges, which means if you want to play that one, your best way to play it is to play it any way you can. But Super Bowling for Super Nintendo is easy to find, and I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up on the Nintendo Switch Online service one day. What I'd really like to see though is a ROM hack, where the four characters are redone as characters from The Big Lebowski, just anime style, where in between roles, you could have the dude say, this aggression will not stand, man! Or Walter would be shouting about how someone was over the line, or whatever. That's a pipe dream, but for now, Super Bowling is a solid game. Next and last, we've got Brunswick World Tournament of Champions, made in August 1997 by Tier-Tex Design Studios, a team that occasionally worked with EA sports on some of their later games. I can't tell if the title is actually Brunswick World Tournament of Champions, or Brunswick World, like there's a Disney World out there somewhere for bowling. Either way, if you want a single-player tournament style experience with bowling, then here you go. There's six different tournaments you can compete in, eventually leading up to showdowns with actual professional bowlers like Walter Ray Williams Jr. I don't know who any of these dudes are, there's about a gazillion names in this game, but the name Walter Ray Williams Jr. makes them sound like a point guard for the Seattle Super Sonics in 1981. If you're really bored, you can sim fictional tournaments between these dudes, if you'd like. The roll system is two circular meters. They determine your power and spin, and it can be kind of tough to get the hang of it first. The devs may have known this too, because there's an option to manually adjust the spin meter to a certain skill level, so that's cool. But the whole idea here is to hit a specific space with a certain amount of spin and power, and that's either between the one and three pins if you're right handed, or one and two pins if you're left handed. This is one of those late-era Super Nintendo sports games that tries its best to lean into quote-unquote realism. Rather than lean on cartoony charm and simplicity like Super Bowling, this game feels more like an EA sports game. It goes hard on traditional bowling stuff with a lot of options. There's all sorts of balls to choose from, and they have names, like Quantum Violet Hook. Each ball varies in hook, length, back end, track flare, and cover heavy. I know what, like, two of those terms mean, I think. But yeah, there's Exhibition Mode and League Mode, and you can keep track of eight-player scores at the same time if you want to play multiplayer, and there's plenty of customization options and stuff here, too. Personally, I'd much rather play Super Bowling, it's more accessible, and I don't know, more video game-y, I guess. Brunswick World Tournament of Champions isn't bad, it's just one of those games that's kind of stuck in its time, because it leans pretty hard into serious bowling. If you're into that, then you might like this one, but otherwise I'd pass. So yeah, I'd recommend to go check out Super Bowling, and that's all for now. I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.