When the NES is cool, it's really cool.
ShatterhandHigh-octane side-scrolling punching action assembled with deadbolt precision and ingenuity. "Serious fun" was Natsume's slogan back in the day, and they really meant it here. Your bare fists provide you with a rather short range, which is never really improved upon, so really have to hone your reflexes. The game does provide upgrades to give you a flying robot buddy to dish out some additional damage. There are 8 different possible helpers, and they are all cool. Overall, it's unrelentingly difficult (I've never beaten it), but I feel that it always plays perfectly fair with you. Even nowadays, I don't think that many action games, of any genre, are as well put together as this is.
tl;dr - It's a game where you can block bullets by punching them. Also, killer graphics, awesome sound.
The Guardian LegendThis is my nostalgia choice. It's a hybrid of a vertical shoot-em-up and overhead Zelda thingy. The overhead sections aren't amazing, but they get the job done and provide a heavy dose of atmosphere. The shmup sections are amazing. Compile knew how to push obscene amounts of sprite flicker out of the system. It's completely frenetic and chaotic and it's brilliant. Crazy weapons (lightsabers!), enemies, and bosses; also, a lifebar. Call me a wuss, but I tend to like shooters with a life bar better (Contra exempted).
For the longest time the game absolutely confused me. I never had any idea what anywhere after the intro stage, the passwords didn't make any sense, and it just seemed like a slipshod game. Then, one day, I had an epiphany and everything just
clicked. The weird passwords? All those umlats are there to help you not get capitals and lowercase letters mixed up. Where to go? Just look on the map on go to the blinking dots, and explore at your leisure. After I figured that all out, I managed to complete the game over the course of the next week or so. To date, it is the only NES game that I've completed on the original hardware.
Super Mario Bros. 3Like The Guardian Legend, this is another game which I enjoyed on a surface level for quite some time, but was never able to get very far into it until some neurons clicked. One evening I was playing with my younger brother (I was player 2), and we stayed up playing through the game without any warp whistles. I recalled that he stopped playing somewhere around the 3rd or 4th world, but I kept on trucking forward until 3 or 4 in the morning when I finally beat the danged thing (as Luigi
). Throughout the entire experience, I was amazed by the sheer breadth of high-quality game design that I always missed out on because I had always warped to World 8.
Other favorites that I really just have to list off
because:
Zen: Intergalactic Ninja (Konami's last A-list NES game imo)
Zelda 2 (incredible swordplay. better than Zelda 1 overall)
Mega Man 2, 5
SMB2j (the Lost Levels)
River City Ransom
BATMAN
Summer Carnival '92 - Recca
Gimmick!
Donkey Kong Jr. (inexplicable nostalgia, perhaps, but seriously the game needs a DK '94 style reiteration)
Balloon Fight (pretty much the best part of Animal Crossing)
Metroid (it's a love-hate relationship)
Metal Storm
Vice: Project Doom
Solar Jetman (best cave-flier on the NES, pretty much by default)
Contra/Super C
Yume Penguin Monogatari (just for sheer silliness)
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), but then I got punched in the face, so I guess that I have nothing better to do than make maps while I recuperate over the next few weeks.
