The NES will always hold a near and dear position to my heart due to the fact that it was my very first console. My mother bribed me with an NES to get me to stop sucking my thumb at the age of six, and boy does bribery work, as I never sucked my thumb again (save for one tearfully, and I'm sure hilariously, repentant moment about a week into my pledge). Despite that, my experience with the library was pretty limited until lately. When I was a kid, I had the following games:
Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt
Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 3
Bases Loaded
Jordan vs. Bird
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
Sesame Street 1-2-3
Adventures in the Magic Kingdom
The Legend of Zelda
Tecmo Super Bowl
Paperboy
Now, that's actually a pretty nice list of games for a six year old, to be honest. There's at least 5 5 star games there, and depending on your definitions, maybe 6. But I knew nothing about Mega Man, Castlevania, DuckTales, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, Kirby, or any of the other most beloved NES games, largely because of the time in which I had an NES. By 6, it was already 1993, which means that the Super Nintendo had already been out for 2 years by that point! I knew my neighbors had SNES and Genesis, and envied them, but there wasn't a whole lot of discussion going on about the NES by that point. So I was satisfied by getting beaten down by Glass Joe, getting killed in World 6, and generally being directionless as Link, woefully ignorant to the world around me.
By the point I was old enough to be interested in looking backwards at games, my eye was completely drawn to the SNES. I had borrowed the Final Fantasy Chronicles collection for PS1 from a friend, and was totally sucked into Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV, and had a remarkably strong nostalgic attraction to the console more generally as I had one at the tail end of its life span, but before the launch of either the PS1 or N64, which meant more of my friends were discussing games on the SNES and Genesis by that point. I spent a good deal of college playing SNES games through completely legal means, and dipped my toes occasionally into the NES, playing through the ones I'd owned as a kid, but not going too much deeper than that, save for a quick run through of Dragon Warrior.
As a result, a good deal of my exploration of classic games in the last three years since I started this blog has been on experiencing the highs of the NES. I had already had a pretty good coverage of the Super, so the NES was an excellent spot for jumping off for me. It was my most played console in 2018 by a comfortable margin, and was my second most played in 2017, as measured by total games completed. My SNES exposure is still far better than my NES, but I feel like I'm ready to pay an homage to some of my all-time favorites, so here goes!
Games that might be on here but I haven't seriously tried to beat (no offense if your favorite happens to be on this list, I aim on clearing out all of these at some point, save perhaps for Bubble Bobble, which sounds time prohibitive):
Contra
Ninja Gaiden II
Castlevania III
Metroid
River City Ransom
Bubble Bobble
Little Samson
Double Dragon II
Battletoads
Crystalis
StarTropics
Honorable mentions:
Mega Man
Super Mario Bros. 2
Duck Hunt-A silly little game that is still tremendous amounts of fun
Donkey Kong-Compared to it's 1981 arcade peers, it's a tremendously creative and fun game. Compared to any of the 10 games on the list, it's not close.
Dragon Warrior-It suffers from too many of the foibles of 8-bit RPGs to crack the list, but it's still very fun, and even more important than it is fun.
Now onto the true top 10!
10. Tecmo Super Bowl
Placing this one was tough. I haven't formally reviewed it yet, and it's been a long time since I played it, so I just put it in the spot in which it felt right. I could have easily moved it up as high a 7, but not really any higher than that. It's extremely fun, and the first sports RPG I can remember. The fact that people still update the rosters and play it to this day is a testament to its greatness, and everyone should own a copy.
9. DuckTales
This game is so much fun I think it may be one I return to every year, and the short play time really helps with that! Not all licensed games are garbage, and this is one of the finest out there.
8. Dr. Mario
This is the best puzzle game on the NES save probably for Tetris, but I just don't think of that as an NES game any more than I think of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as a 3DS game. Dr. Mario has frantic fun with a single player, and only gets better playing competitively against someone else.
7. Kirby's Adventure
This is a game I played for the first time this year, and really enjoyed it. It's a technical powerhouse on the system, has an accessible nature to it that invites a good time for players of all skill levels, and is just plain fun.
6. Mega Man 2
Commence the pointing, staring, and shocked whispers at my disrespect to this all-time classic. In my opinion, it's just not as good as another Mega Man game on the system, and is certainly not better than the other 4 games above it on this list. It's too easy, suffers from serious slowdown, and the difficulty comes in absolutely brain frying spurts that no human could predict (I'm looking at you, falling laser beam stage). But it's still beyond genius, and well deserving of being a top 10 game.
5. The Legend of Zelda
The pointing, staring, and shocked whispers are now devastating. This game is pure genius, has aged remarkably well, and laid the groundwork for one of my five favorite gaming franchises of all-time (another list for another day). But this is my list, and my own experience with the game is one of a great amount of joy, but also a surprising amount of frustration. I wish I had grown up with the manual, because maybe things would have been different. But I really struggled with finding my next objective in this game, even as an adult, and feel that a small bit of additional structure, as seen in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, would shoot this game up into the top 3.
4. Punch-Out!!
This game is still hugely fun today, and one of my favorite games as a kid. It's one you just have to experience to understand.
3. Mega Man 3
This game represents a huge leap forward in appropriate difficulty, gameplay, and story-telling from its predecessor, and that's enough to push it up the list. It's my favorite classic Mega Man game, and despite some brutal slowdown at times, and a worse soundtrack than Mega Man 2, I still give it the edge.
2. Super Mario Bros.
It's the game that got me into gaming, and I'll love it forever. It's probably the game I felt the most pride in completing, and it truly is perfect in every way. I really can't think of a single bad thing to say about the most important video game (for me) of all time but with all of that being said...
1. Super Mario Bros. 3
is unquestionably the best game on the system, and probably in my top ten video games of all time. It takes all of the charm of the first game, adds on a bit of technical polish and a ton of new stages and mechanics, throws together some of the best level design of all-time, and there you go. If you haven't played it yet, take a personal day, and go do it. It's that good!
Since I have so many NES games that I still want to clear, I may revisit this list in a year or so if I find I need to shuffle things around a touch.
I think it will be another week or two before I wrap up another game based on my current progress, so I'll probably check back in next week with another top ten list, this time for either the DS or the PS2. stay tuned!
-TRO
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