Ahem! Today…

Super Widget is one of many undistinguished side-scrollers for the SNES. The controls are slippery and it is pretty easy, but in 1993 I was obsessed with this game. “Why?” You may ask that. You would even be right to! It’s a long story. Around that time I got my very first pet. It was a hermit crab. Well, I had a turtle when I was in 2nd grade, but it died after 2 weeks (RIP Michaelangelo! You were the sweetest turtle. Too bad I accidentally fried you). Mr. Wimpy, on the other hand, lived for 3 glorious years. Now you don’t see it in this video, but one of Widget’s transformations was into a hermit crab, a hermit crab that bore a lovely, purple-faced resemblance to Mr. Wimpy. The other thing that’s awesome about Super Widget is that the power-ups are all basically identical except for the cryptic letters inscribed upon them. Seriously, I got that “M” probably stood for marine of some sort, but “S”? “L”? It has that magical combination of laziness and pure strangeness that’s sadly been lost in the post 16-bit world. The bosses were really poorly animated, but then you had things like the giant pig-satyr with the stick that spit things. Also, the music is really catchy. I still have a cartridge of this lying around, and sometimes I pop it in and relive those innocent days of yore, days of Mr. Wimpy, leggings, and giant “Save the Whales” t-shirts. So I guess the point is that Super Widget is a really, really bad game, but I love it anyway, because, hey, colors! And nostalgia! And hideous-yet-cute chimeras! Everyone loves chimeras! OK, maybe only I love chimeras.

n.b. my other favorite product tie-in game is Cool Spot, which unlike Super Widget is actually pretty good, and responsible for 900% of our household consumption of cool, refreshing 7-up!