Regardless of what your friends said to you at school, the SNES was the clear winner in the 16-bit race, outselling its fierce competitor SEGA Mega Drive in both systems sold and the best-selling games.

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This was a time when Super Mario, Metroid and Donkey Kong had some of their finest hours, and where future stars like Star Fox were born.

With the excellent Chrono Trigger hitting its 20th anniversary in North America today (August 22), now's the perfect time to remind us of the console's stellar catalogue for anyone wanting to revisit Nintendo's illustrious roots.

1. Chrono Trigger

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Assembled by a 'dream team' of creative talent - Final Fantasy's Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii and Dragon Ball animator Akira Toriyama - Chrono Trigger has a rightful place in the role-playing hall of fame.

It was a story of stopping a far-future armageddon by recruiting a party of robots, talking frogs and cave-dwellers from across the past and future.

Not only did you see the world and its inhabitants evolve as you hopped through time, but based on your actions the story could too, with the mind-blowing option to replay the game and discover new endings if you cut corners and faced the big baddie hours before you were supposed to.

2. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest

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As SNES owners were teetering on the brink of jumping into shiny, 3D-enabled new games consoles, there was a series that kept them from making the leap.

Donkey Kong Country was one of the first mass market games to feature pre-rendered 3D graphics for a glossy, beautifully-produced side-scrolling adventure.

Thankfully, it played as great as it looked, and the sequel was even better, with incredibly well-crafted levels (the beehive levels still give us nightmares) and memorable music. Newcomer Dixie's guitar-shredding antics remains one of the best end-of-stage jingles ever.

3. Earthbound

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What do you get when you cross cutesy visuals with a slice of suburbia and Lovcraftian alien terror? The answer, of course, is the wonderfully quirky Earthbound.

The game's cheerful art style painted a sunny picture of Middle America, but lurking behind its bright exterior was a game that was brutally difficult, as players did battle with stray dogs and hipsters in a title that celebrated Asian and American culture.

It may have been a commercial flop at the time, but the years have been kind to Earthbound, and it's arguably more popular and well known now than it was back then, partly thanks to a Virtual Console release, and the fact that lead character Ness went on to appear in Super Smash Bros.

4. Final Fantasy VI

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While Final Fantasy VII is well-regarded for popularising the franchise in the West, you could argue the last game in the SNES trilogy of releases Final Fantasy VI - also known as Final Fantasy III in North America - did so first.

This was a huge game, with a massive ensemble cast of well-developed characters, and perhaps our favourite twist in a role-playing game ever - what if the grand villain actually carried out his plan of destroying the world, and what would happen next?

VI deals with the strife our heroes go through to make things right after the end of days, and has an epic score to back it up.

5. F-Zero

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The inspiration behind futuristic racing games like Wipeout and F-Zero helped the SNES get off to a flier back in 1990, giving gamers a small taste of what the console was capable of at launch.

It took advantage of the Super Nintendo's revolutionary Mode 7 graphical capabilities, which essentially let the developers create pseudo-3D environments - something we take for granted today.

Not only did F-Zero look flashy, but it was seriously fast and insanely difficult, requiring enormous skill just to keep the vehicles on track, let alone finish first. The only thing it was missing was multiplayer, although we're not sure we could handle split-screen at that speed.

6. Mega Man X

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Metroid and Legend of Zelda weren't the only games to see impressive evolutions when jumping to Nintendo's more powerful hardware.

Much like the Mega Man games that came before it, Mega Man X kept the classic, side-scrolling gameplay, as well as the innovative structure of letting players pick stages in any order and get new weapons to change how the game plays out.

It also then paved the way for more free-form exploration with dashes and wall scaling, and armour upgrades that added on new abilities - including a secret Hadouken move in a nod to Street Fighter - to make a technically impressive, excellent sequel.

7. Mortal Kombat 2

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The playground slanging matches between Mega Drive and SNES fanboys were as brutal as the battles in Mortal Kombat, and you'd often hear the Nintendo lot hearkening on about the fact that the SNES had "more colours".

The console's superior colour palette was most evident in Mortal Kombat 2, which was the best-looking version of the game outside of the arcade, even if you did have to use a cheat to turn on the blood.

Graphics aside, it's also a fantastic fighting game, and far superior to the original, featuring lots of additional characters, stages, specials and, of course, those all important finishers.

8. Secret of Mana

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Secret of Mana actually started life as a sequel to Final Fantasy III, but it was such a departure from the turn-based norm of the popular role-playing series, that it ended up becoming its own separate entity.

In fact, it ended up sharing more in common with The Legend of Zelda, containing fast-paced, real-time combat and a dynamic overworld, as the nameless hero embarked on a journey to re-energise a sacred sword.

It was also one of the console's secret-best multiplayer games, allowing up to three people to hack and slash together at the same time, provided they had the controllers and a multi-tap peripheral at hand.

9. Star Fox

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In the epic debates between Mega Drive and SNES fans that took place up and down the country in the early '90s, Nintendo's platform had an ace up its sleeve with the Super FX chip.

While F-Zero and Super Mario Kart's Mode 7 saw 2D planes come to life in 3D, the Super FX's technical wizardry paved the way for actual 3D games, made of (then very) spectacular polygonal graphics.

While only a handful of games made use of the technology, you didn't need to go much further than Nintendo's own Star Fox to find the most impressive, coupling incredible cinematic scenes with aerial dogfights against screen-filling space adversaries.

10. Street Fighter 2 Turbo

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Three different versions of Street Fighter 2 launched on the SNES, and while the first one may have put the franchise on the map, and the third one (Super Street Fighter 2) had more characters, it was Street Fighter 2: Turbo that cemented its position as the king of the beat-em-ups.

It was like a lightbulb had gone off in Capcom's head, and the developer realised that the one thing the excellent Street Fighter 2 was missing was speed.

With multiple settings to quicken the pace - including hidden settings that made things seriously fast - the multiplayer matches in Street Fighter 2: Turbo were insane, as Ken, Ryu and the rest of the gang did battle with the likes of Vega, Sagat and M. Bison, who were now all playable for the first time on consoles.

11. Super Mario Kart

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Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot and even Sackboy have tried, but nobody's managed to dethrone Mario as the king of the mascot racers, and it all started with Super Mario Kart way back in 1992.

Featuring Nintendo favourites such as Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser and Toad, Super Mario Kart was simple, fun and addictive, taking place on colourful courses such as Bowser's Castle and Rainbow Road, where players could lob shells, drop bananas and ingest mushrooms in pursuit of victory.

Conquering Super Mario Kart's single-player cup competitions was fun, but it was in split-screen multiplayer where the game really excelled, turning friend against friend in living room tournaments where the winner stays on.

New Mario Kart games come around with every console generation, and while Nintendo makes the odd change here and there, the core experience has remained relatively untouched - a testament to how well the original still holds up.

12. Super Mario RPG

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When he wasn't jumping on goombas, taking mushrooms or speeding around race tracks, Mario was starring in his own role-playing game, proving once and for all that he really could do everything.

Developed by Square - who were on a roll after Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger - Super Mario RPG Injected a little lightheartedness and fun into a genre dominated by dungeons, dragons and fantasy tropes.

It was accessible without being too easy, featuring avoidable turn-based combat that had a neat interactive element to make the battles that little bit more engaging.

It also laid the foundations for future Mario-based role-playing games, such as Paper Mario and the Mario and Luigi series.

13. Super Mario World

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There has probably been no better launch title for a console than Super Mario World - save, perhaps, Nintendo's own Super Mario 64 six years later.

While the N64 game boldly explored what no platformer had ever done before, Super Mario World built upon Nintendo's seminal side-scrolling efforts on the NES and perfected it on the SNES's first day.

This was a vast, sprawling adventure crammed full of surprises. The star of the show was its vast overworld map, seeing you hop back and forth between confectionary-themed areas to find new level exits and reveal every secret. No other Mario game begged to be explored end-to-end as this one.

14. Super Metroid

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Few games, at the time and ever since, have been quite as atmospheric as Super Metroid. With hints of space-bound horror movies like Alien in its long, creeping corridors, tense brooding music and terrifying enemy encounters, this was a wonderfully-paced game about exploration and discovery.

To find new weapons and shape-shifting abilities, players had to go back and forth between areas and discover new routes and secrets in a huge, diverse subterranean planet, helping to create the 'Metroidvania' sub-genre of games (alongside Castlevania) in the progress. Though arguably, it's never been bettered since.

15. Yoshi's Island

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After Super Mario World set the bar incredibly high for platformers at the SNES's launch, this sequel quite rightly took a completely different track.

While the ridable Yoshi was discarded at every turn like a pedestrian's car in a Grand Theft Auto game during his Super Mario World debut, in Yoshi's Island he's the indispensable hero, looking after a helpless Baby Mario that had to be safely ferried to the end of the stage.

With its slower-paced stages, egg-throwing puzzle rooms and beautifully drawn crayon-like visuals, it was unlike any other Super Mario game we'd ever seen before - but it's definitely one of Nintendo's best.

16. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

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Still considered one of the best entries in the long-running Legend of Zelda series, A Link to the Past took the formula laid out in the original NES release, and transformed it into something really quite magical.

A concept the series would later revisit, players started out in regular old Hyrule, but would soon visit a parallel Dark World, which essentially doubled the overworld map and transformed the world's landmarks and dungeons.

With two overlapping worlds to visit, A Link to the Past featured some truly ingenious puzzles and was absolutely bursting with secrets, not to mention it boasts some of the series' finest dungeons and most challenging bosses.

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