55 Best SNES Games that are Still Cheap in 2022

Best Cheap SNES Games Under $20

Pilotwings

That Mode 7 makes Mode 6 look like Mode 5!

Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 is in full display here. If you didn’t know, Mode 7 was a display function that allowed the SNES to show sprites stretched out and manipulated to create zoom effects, or create vast (completely flat) landscapes that fade into the horizon. Players see a LOT of horizon in Pilotwings.

There is a wide variety of gameplay modes and different vehicles and plenty of challenge later in the game. It’s definitely worth a look.

Fly on over to eBay

Street Fighter II

One of the first great fighting games, Street Fighter II rocked us all in the arcade. The kids would line up their quarters to be the next challenger. There was always one kid would dominate the machine. And it definitely wasn’t me.

So when Street Fighter II came to the SNES, we all jumped on it. You could battle your friends or the CPU opponent. And it changed gaming forever.

For SNES collectors, there are plenty of versions of SFII: World Warrior, Champions Edition, Super Street Fighter II, Turbo… There is plenty of debate over which is best, but TBH, any of them will give you a good time for a miniscule price.

Get it Hadouken this game on eBay

Mode 7 was a big deal when SNES launched!

F-Zero

F-Zero was a launch title with the Super NES, and was my favorite racing game until Mario Kart came out. Along with Pilotwings, F-Zero was a perfect means of impressing audiences with the Mode 7 capabilities of the SNES.

Somehow, despite the game’s inherent flatness, the bright colors, bitchin’ tunes and fluid controls make it tons of fun, even in 2022. If only it had been able to support multiplayer…

Race over to eBay

I got this one for $5 in 2018, back when I was a young man.

Judge Dredd

Movie tie-ins have a bad reputation. Usually they are a rush-job cash-grab with little value beyond experiencing a little more of a movie you like. But Judge Dredd is different. It’s a mazelike platformer with great graphics and sprawling maps. There’s a real challenge and plenty of secrets to keep you busy. 

Arrest or execute Judge Dredd on eBay

Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure

Like a lot of us “gamers of a certain age,” I was a huge fan of Pitfall! for the Atari 2600. My sister and I used to play the crap out of it at our Grandma’s house. There was nothing else to do there.

Mayan Adventures doesn’t quite live up to the original, but it does offer excellent graphics and animation and some pretty fun exploration. Considering it’s one of the cheapest SNES games around, it’s definitely worth the price.

Fall into the pit of eBay for this one

It looks like you’re playing a cartoon.

Buster Busts Loose

As usual, Konami takes no prisoners. Even in a kids’ game.

Tiny Toon Adventures was my favorite cartoon at the time. And Buster Busts Loose really does the show justice. All the favorite characters are there, and they are nearly cartoon-quality.

But the challenge is real and I have yet to beat this game even after 20+ years of trying. Don’t worry though, the difficulty is due to that unforgiving Konami level design only. The controls and gameplay are great.

Bust this game loose on eBay

Stunt Race FX

One of the handful of SNES games that used the Super FX Chip, Stunt Race was revolutionary in its use of high-quality (for the time) polygons in a 3D environment. But the resolution and framerates were both pretty small and didn’t make for a great play experience.

Oddly, Nintendo chose to bring this game back into the spotlight when they launched their Switch Online SNES lineup.

Stunt Race isn’t terrible, and it offers a pretty unique take on the racing genre. If you can forgive abysmal frame rates, you will have a good time with this one.

Race to eBay for Stunt Race FX

Jurassic Park

Every 90s kid grew up with this movie. It was great, and it spawned a cottage industry of dino T-shirts, lunchboxes, coloring books, and of course a handful of video games.

Jurassic Park for allowed players the option to use the SNES Mouse to navigate the many computers and terminals throughout the game, as well as using PC-style navigation in the first-person shooter sequences. Of course back in them days, PC navigation was a far cry from the streamlined WASD movement we enjoy today. In this game you literally roll the mouse forward to move forward and left/right to rotate. It’s much easier to just use the controller indoors.

Regardless, Jurassic Park is really a decent game and well worth the price tag.

Chomp Jurassic Park on eBay

Disney’s The Lion King

Another great platformer based on classic animation. The graphics are great and gameplay is tight. However, like many of these games, the difficulty could be maddening. Especially for a kid.

Still, The Lion King is a well-made title that should yield a good amount of fun relative to its paltry price tag.

Hunt The Lion King on eBay

Mortal Kombat

Another staple of 90s culture, Mortal Kombat did what Street Fighter didn’t. By capitalizing on the blood craze of the era, Mortal Kombat became an incredible success.

And by including a blood code, Sega’s version outsold the SNES by a wide margin. In fact, until Mortal Kombat II came out in all its bloody glory on the SNES, Sega’s Genesis had a pretty tight Fatality Grip on the US console market. But Nintendo was very concerned about their reputation as a family-oriented company and chose to replace Mortal Kombat’s signature blood with what I assume is sweat? The result was weird.

In a lot of ways, Mortal Kombat II is superior, but the original is still a lot of fun. Pick up both Mortal Kombats and a Street Fighter II and you’ll already have a great multiplayer SNES collection for cheap.

Get Mortal Kombat on eBay and FINISH HIM!!

Mortal Kombat 2 or 3

Take your pick. Or get both?

I’ve listed these together, but separate from MK1, because they are so similar in graphics and play style. Nintendo realized how foolish it had been to disallow blood from the original Mortal Kombat port, and MK2 hit the SNES in all its gooey, gory glory.

The biggest difference between MK2 and MK3 is the set of characters you have to choose from. Choose wisely.

Uppercut Mortal Kombat 2 and 3 on eBay

Jurassic Park 2: the Chaos Continues

…as if the chaos ever stopped!

Ocean’s follow up to Jurassic Park has heavy Contra vibes.

Taking a completely different approach than its predecessor, Jurassic Park 2 was a Nintendo exclusive that took you and a friend on a side-scrolling shoot-em-up through the long-abandoned dinosaur park. Everything’s out of control and it’s up to Dr. Alan Grant and his plus-one to get the park back under control.

You can choose between non-lethal or lethal ammo. Meaning you can choose to mow through hordes of dinos with an uzi, or with a high-powered syringe gatling gun. But if you kill too many dinos, it’s game over. So pick carefully.

This game features some pretty great—if repetitive—graphics and impressive Dolby Surround Sound digitized noise effects. 

Oh yeah… it’s also insanely difficult. But overall, it’s a quality game and definitely justifies its price. As of this writing, Jurassic Park 2 is valued right at our $20 limit. There’s a good chance it will never be this cheap again.

Get Jurassic Park 2 on eBay so the chaos can continue continuing

I had no idea there was a whole genre of games like this.

AD&D Eye of the Beholder

Back when Dungeons & Dragons was still Advanced, it spawned several epic trilogies of PC games. With interfaces designed for mouse-and-keyboard play, developers had a hard time effectively porting these to consoles.

But when the SNES Mouse came into being, a whole new opportunity for PC-style games cropped up. Eye of the Beholder is an absolute classic RPG. Be warned though, that if you’re going to get lost without a guide. Unless you do what we all did as young’uns and sit in front of your screen with a pencil and some graph paper and track every single step.

And of course you can play this with the standard controller, too. The mouse is kind of a pain, let’s all be honest.

Behold this game on eBay

Star Fox

The Super FX Chip promised to revolutionize gaming. And Star Fox was its flagship title.

And while Star Fox was definitely fun for its moment, it’s hard to say that gaming was revolutionized. However, the Super FX Chip did allow some nifty 3D graphics on the SNES—like in the case of DOOM—and allowed for some otherwise interesting effects in games—like in Yoshi’s Island.

If you can forgive the painfully slow frame rates and chunky polygon graphics, Star Fox is worth owning and playing.  

Scramble to eBay for Star Fox

Fatal Fury

Another classic fighting game. Sure, it’s a gutted arcade port. And yeah, a lot of people prefer the Genesis version (which is also pretty gutted). But if you like fighting games, it’s nice to have another cheap option for multiplayer.

Get Fatal Fury on eBay

Tetris Attack

It’s hard to call this an actual Tetris game, since Nintendo totally eschews the classic block-twisting formula in favor of color-shuffling squares. But it’s a really fun puzzle game in its own right, and it actually tells a bit of a story. Bowser has returned and cast an evil spell over all the Yoshis. Only the classic green Yoshi is spared. To break the spell and return order, you have to… you know… arrange blocks.

Makes sense, right? Regardless, this is one of the cheapest first-party SNES games you can find. It’s super-colorful with lots of eye candy, great music, frantic head-to-head gameplay and everyone’s favorite dinosaur! 

Attack this game on eBay

Lemmings

Here’s another SNES port of a PC game. The Lemmings were quite popular at the time, spawning countless sequels and spinoffs on all kinds of home gaming systems.

This port was definitely decent. And the 125 short levels have a way of pulling players in. And the lemmings’ many gruesome deaths are pretty entertaining as well.

Walk mindlessly off a cliff to eBay for this game

Daffy Duck: The Marvin Missions

The 16-bit era was amazing for those who were there. Game developers could finally recreate our favorite cartoons in almost the same color palettes we were used to seeing them. And in nearly the same resolution.

Daffy Duck: The Marvin Missions features beautiful cartoon-quality graphics and animation, along with digitized sounds from the classic cartoons. The graphics look fantastic and the gameplay is tight. This game is quite long though, and really challenging at times. Capcom was ruthless as ever.

Zap this game off eBay with your space modulator

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

One of the more divisive Final Fantasy games, (if it even IS a Final Fantasy game) Mystic Quest is the only Final Fantasy SNES game for under $20.

There are two reasons to own this game.

  1. You are a Final Fantasy fan and need it for your collection.
  2. You (or a young family member) want an easy, easy, easy game to pass some time.

Mystic Quest was introduced to the western gaming world as an “Entry-level role-playing adventure.” The belief (in Japan) was that western audiences just didn’t get RPGs, so this game was released as a sort of training adventure for those who were interested, but needed a long tutorial to understand the genre.

Sounds like a bad premise to me, as I was rocking Dragon Warrior long before 16-bit RPGs hit the shelves. And I played Mystic Quest, too. It was the first Final Fantasy game I ever played all the way through and, even though I was never challenged once (even as a kid), I enjoyed the story, graphics, and music just fine.

It’s a quality game, certainly. But holy moly is it a cakewalk!

Quest mystically to eBay for this one

Uniracers

This is a really unique twist on the racing genre, and it features some pretty impressive (for the time) pre-rendered 3D graphics.

Instead of the typical racing game’s race toward the horizon, uniracers takes an entirely 2D approach, pitting sentient unicycles (not sure how I know they’re sentient, but…) against each other in the style of a 2D platformer. During jumps you can rotate your cycle along the X, Y, or Z axis, creating Tony Hawk-esque combos to earn points and speed up your racer. 

There are quite a few courses, though they are often hard to distinguish from one another, and you can play against the computer or a human opponent. The action feels super fast, even without Blast Processing.

It’s kind of weird. But it’s a lot of fun. It would be interesting to see this franchise resurrected with modern, full-3D graphics.

Unicycle to eBay for this game

Super R-Type

Gotta have some shoot-em-ups on the list. Super R-Type continues the long R-Type tradition of smearing your puny ship across all kinds of space madness and crushing your bloated ego. But if you like a challenge, and don’t want to waste money, give this one a shot.

Shmup on over to eBay for Super R-Type

Super Star Wars

The Super Star Wars trio is at best challenging, and at worst straight up masochistic.

The first one is probably my favorite, and I can actually make it a whole entire half of the way through the game. The Empire Strikes Back, though? No way. Can’t even finish level 1.

If you think you’re good at games and you crave a challenge, check out any of the original Super Star Wars games for SNES. They’re pretty cheap, well-made, and infuriatingly fun.

Bullseye this one like a womp rat at eBeggar’s Canyon

Gradius III

Another classic shoot-em-up series makes its SNES debut as a launch title.

Like with most launch titles, it is cheap, fun, and a great representative of its genre. 

The object of the game is to shoot them up. All of them.

eBay is the place

NBA Jam Tournament Edition

NBA Jam was a blast in the arcade. But not just the arcade; it was also great fun at most any Pizza Hut you visited in the 90s. Bless you, Pizza Hut in the 90s.

If you’re not nostalgic for it, NBA Jam won’t be as fun. But if you play it like an anthropologist, you’ll have a good idea of what it was like to be a 90s kid. And who knows? You may just become an addict like the rest of us!

Browse eBay from downtown; boom shakalaka!

Total Carnage

The kinda-sorta follow-up to Super Smash T.V., Total Carnage reuses a lot of what made Smash TV great: novel (for the time) twin-stick controls, over-the-top blood and guts, intense top-down multiplayer co-op action and tons of loot.

Total Carnage attempts to take Smash T.V. out of a one-room-at-a-time recording studio and into a Commando-style battlefield. It doesn’t work as well, but it’s still pretty fun with a friend.

I’d buy THAT for a dollar! …wait…

Final Fight

A classic beat-em-up! And an example of how well an arcade port can actually be done.

With big, detailed character sprites, great animation and responsive controls, this is a great beat ‘em up. There’s just one problem. It’s single-player only.

If you want to team up with a Final Fight buddy, you’re going to have to splurge on Final Fight 2 or 3. They are each many times more expensive than the original, so weigh your options carefully.

Kick this game on eBay with both feet!

Darius Twin

What do you do to an evil race of space fish? Shoot ‘em up!

This is relatively easy for a shoot-em-up. Which, for a lot of us broke gamers, is a good thing. Basically, an “easy” shoot ‘em up is still pretty hard for a regular game. This one is definitely quality, though. Especially for the price.

Go space-fishing on eBay

Goof Troop

By the time you read this, Goof Troop might have priced out of the $20-and-under category. While I was updating this, I found one single loose copy for $19.99 and Pricecharting puts it at $20.10.

I’ll leave it in the Under $20 category for now because I believe vigilant hunters will still be able to score a cheaper copy of this. Also, I’m hopeful SNES prices will drop a teeny bit more before they get crazy forever.

Disney’s Goof Troop is included on so many “SNES Hidden Gems” lists that it can probably safely be removed from them.

This is really an interesting game. Think of it as a co-op Adventures of Lolo, in a Disney world, with a Zelda: A link to the Past aesthetic. Capcom really nailed this one. Get it before the price goes up!

Quit goofing around and head to eBay, hyuck!

Super Mario All Stars

It’s hard to beat the value here. Super Mario All-Stars includes 16-bit upgrades of four official Mario games from the 8-bit era: Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 2 (US version), Super Mario Bros Lost Levels (Super Mario Bros 2 in Japan), and Super Mario Bros 3!

There is another version that also includes Super Mario World, but it’s a bit pricey for this list. At any rate, you should already have Super Mario World.

Flap your raccoon tail over to eBay and throw a turnip at this game!

Donkey Kong Country

Kids today will never understand. Games in the 80s and 90s were just really tough. And Donkey Kong Country stands out among those.

This is another classic title with perfectly retro pre-rendered 3D graphics. Trust me, kids. At the time, they were mind-blowing!

Shoot yourself out of a barrel over to eBay for DKC

“Uncle Furry” – Google it from your work computer.

True Lies

R.I.P. – I regret to inform you that this formerly extremely cheap and underrated LJN game is no longer cheap. As of this moment, it goes for $60 for a loose cart. I’m truly sorry for our loss and deeply saddened that I never added it to my own collection.

Just for preservation purposes, here is the entry for True Lies back when it was still under $20:

Another top-down shooter, published by LJN, based on a Schwarzenegger film. Sounds like a recipe for 16 bits of mediocrity. But ackchually, this game has a pretty good reputation among retrogamers.

Play as Harry (Schwarzeneger’s character, of course). The stages are mission-based, so you have to actually perform actions beyond mowing down hordes of enemies. In fact, you have to watch out for civilians; if Harry kills too many, it’s game over, man!

– April 2020 (When the price was $19.)

You can still get this one on eBay, but sheesh! To afford it, you might need to moonlight as a stripper like Jamie Lee Curtis.

Disney’s Aladdin

Does it seem like there’s a LOT of Disney on this list? For some reason, movie and cartoon tie-ins tend to stay cheap. Maybe it’s because so many SNES gamers in the 90s were in their tweens and considered themselves too “cool” for Disney and cartoon games. Not that I would know or anything.

At any rate, there are a lot of Disney and other cartoon-based games that have yet to get crazy expensive and are a lot of fun for the price. This is one of ’em.

Go to eBay to toss apples at this game (meanwhile Genesis players stab it with their scimitars)

Continue to Page 3: SNES Games Between $20 and $30

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2 responses to “55 Best SNES Games that are Still Cheap in 2022”

  1. […] 55 Best SNES Games that are Still Cheap in 2022 A nicely arranged collection from @dmgamiing. Keep it up! […]

  2. […] me, I just updated an article of mine called The Best SNES Games that are Still Cheap, and it was a struggle to find SNES games that are fun to play, but aren’t a zillion dollars. […]

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