25 Years Of The Nintendo Entertainment System

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Nintendo I decided to make a list. As with any list it is definitive and permanent but I reserve the right to change my mind at anytime. When I sat down to make this list I thought about what would go on it. Pretty quickly I determined that only one game could represent a series but the placement of the game in the list wouldn’t represent the entire series. Meaning I could only choose one Super Mario game for the list. It would be too easy to combine all of the games into one even though the three games released for the NES are vastly different platformers. Also the list would be strictly NES games.

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11. RC Pro Am
Still one of my all time favorite racing games, RC Pro Am maybe the first game in the ‘kart’ genre of racing. Years before Nintendo would release Super Mario Kart defining the genre for close to two decades Rare released this little gem of a game. The game had missiles, oil slicks, cheating A.I. and spelling. Spelling? To upgrade your car you had to collect the letters that would spell out Nintendo. The game was impossible to beat as the higher the level the faster the computer controlled cars would go to impossibly high speeds. The game would be higher on this list if it had a two player mode but it sadly didn’t.

10. Crystalis
A game largely forgotten by many people this game had a lasting effect on me looking back on it. The game was one of, if not the first, RPG I ever played. Looking back on it this game probably had a huge influence over me that I don’t fully understand. The game took place in our reality just a few years in the future. As the screenshot above states the end of the world was October 1 1997 and this game takes place in the post apocalyptical wasteland of Earth, a setting I love. The game isn’t the greatest RPG I’ve ever played but it had a lasting effect on me that is rather hard to ignore.

9. Bubble Bobble
I never owned Bubble Bobble. It wasn’t one of the 30 or so games I owned for the NES. I in fact never owned any of it’s sequels. I never needed to because so many of my friends did. The game was simple had amazingly catchy music and was tons of fun to play with friends. There is one memory I have of playing it. With a friend who I can’t remember in his playroom on a tiny TV. I remember the playroom more then the friend which mean’s the kid wasn’t a normal hanging out friend. I don’t think the kid and I had much in common. It’s an odd memory of the extremely vague and fading kind. Pretty much like a lot of my childhood but I remember playing the game and loving it. And everytime I hear the music I think of the simplistic fun-ness of one of my first forays into multiplayer gaming.

8. River City Ransom
The ‘newest’ game on my list. I never played this game until two years ago. I was working at RLTV and Freddy came into my suite all excited that this game was released on the Virtual Console. I had never heard of it. We got together with some hot cocoa and meatloaf and we played it. I instantly fell in love with the game. It was a beat ‘em up game similar to Double Dragon and Battletoads. It had great controls, unlike Double Dragon, and wasn’t impossibly hard like Battletoads. It also added a slight RPG element by collecting money to buy upgrades and health restores. It was the one element of beat ‘em ups that I always wanted but never knew I wanted until it was there. I immediately bought it for my personal VC collection and love it. I never play my Wii anymore but the few times I have this past year has been mostly for this game.

7. Blaster Master
Blaster Master was damn right ambitious. It was a side scrolling platformer with massive level design. But unlike previous side scrollers you where inside an awesome space tank AND you could leave the space tank and trek outside it for an added level of fun. For some reason I never owned this game as a kid but I rented it close to 100 times.

6. Ducktales
If I say blathering blatherskite and you start looking for a lispy duck on an unicycle you’re my kind of person. Ducktales was a genius cartoon airing on the Disney Afternoon programming block and a staple of my childhood. And while the cartoon had brilliant episodes where Uncle Scrooge went back in time to put his logo (a dollar sign) on a coal mine that would become a diamond mine the game was where it was at. Instead of being just a quick tie-in game the game had depth. It had a linear structure but with some non-linear elements. It was made by Capcom during their platformer heyday of the 80s so the controls were tight. Especially when you wanted to bounce around on a cane. The game is generally remembered for it’s excellent Moon Stage theme that’s been covered by just about every game band around. The theme is awesome but the game is awesome too. I played this a ton back as a kid but a buddy of mine Josh at UNCW emulated the crap out of this game back in the day which really showed me how great the gameplay really was.

5. Punch-Out
I wrote a lengthy write up on how awesome this game was and is. But frankly it isn’t really needed. This game is awesome.

4. Tetris
Tetris is a perfect game. It’s infinitely replayable and unbeatable. Recent versions of the game add stupid features like saving tetri for later or being able to rotate a tetri forever. These are stupid additions added so people can feel better about themselves. The game was brutal but insanely fun. It’s also the only game my sister ever actually loved. I thankfully didn’t own the evil TenGen version of the game just the official Nintendo version. It’s hard to have memories of Tetris because the game just is that memorizing but there is one I have. It’s way back to the early 2000′s I was going to school at NCSA and hanging out at a friends on campus apartment – something I tended to do a lot back then – and this lanky kid (who would go on to give himself a monk hair cut just for fun) pulled out a classic NES. He then preceded to get to level 19 with little problems. He was the best Tetris player I’ve seen. That dude? Jesse who still isn’t Jess but writes everyones favorite column NESessities of Life.

For some reason the video I wanted to link to can’t be embedded. Go watch it anyway!

3. Mega Man 2
Not much else can be said about this game. It’s crown jewel of the Mega Man franchise. Bundle this game with Mega Man 3 and you have a couple of years of my childhood right there. As an ‘adult’ I’ve come to appreciate this game not just for it’s tight gameplay but for the games excellent score. The game didn’t have a save system back in the day so I had ton’s of paper lying around with bubble patterns detailing various save points. I eventually made my mom buy a giant book full of tips and tricks on how to beat something like 1000 games just for the help for Mega Man 2 and 3. I kept that book for well over a decade and only recently lost track of it. One day it’ll turn up and it’ll be in my time capsule of classic NES games.

2. Super Mario Bros
When I was younger my cousin Karen spent some time in our house. She had gotten a job in Jersey and was staying with us helping out. I was pretty young at the time so all I wanted to do was play Nintendo and specifically Super Mario Bros. Only downside was that the NES was in the den which was were she was staying. As legend has it I totally dominated my family in the game. Apparently they would play for 30 seconds before dying then I would come along and play for an hour straight before dying. Karen and Art (her now husband, then boyfriend) have repeated said that they would stay up late into the night practicing at the game because it was hard to believe someone so young could so easily whip their ass at something. If only they could’ve seen into the future to see how I would turn out they probably would’ve gotten a lot more sleep.

1. Zelda
There are three games that I associate playing with my brother. Street Fighter 2 where the gnat move forced him to punch a wall. Goldeneye where he could not beat me. And finally Zelda. I showed a sneak peak of this list at Jesse when I was formulating it and this is what he had to say about it.

“You can post this list as is, but I will take huge issue with it.

To start, memories of Zelda 1 are nightmarishly skewed in favor of the game, which is largely unplayable. There simply aren’t enough clues about where to go next for the game to be fun. The franchise’s first taste of greatness was on the SNES. Everything before that is frustration a la carte.”

He is right and wrong at the same time. The game is very hard and doesn’t help you at all. There is no Navi (if you just thought of Avatar kick yourself in the face) to tell you where to look. In fact the game doesn’t even tell you where to get your first sword you have to figure that out on your own. So it’s brutally hard and requires trial and error to get anywhere with the game. To me though that is part of it’s charm. When you discovered something you really felt like you were discovering something because it took a lot of effort to do it.

I remember playing the game through with my brother. I don’t remember a lot of specifics but I do remember the end of the game. We had just found level 8 after an arduous search for it when it was time to leave for some sort of dinner. I’m not sure what or where but I do know we were gone all night. We for some reason didn’t have time to save so we paused the game and turned off the tv. I was worried about the NES thinking it would somehow be turned off and we would lose our place. This of course didn’t happen and the next morning I woke up real early to check on the game. It was still on and at the same place! Only problem? It was 630 in the morning and Nick wouldn’t be up for another 3 hours at the earliest.