EVERYTHING IS PIXELATED: The top 127 games from the third generation of home video game consoles (Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, Atari 7800)

Welcome to the first volume of the Home Video Game Console polls on ILX! This time around, we nominated and balloted against the third-generation consoles: The NES, the Sega Master System, and the Atari 7800 had games nominated (sorry, SG-1000, Casio PV-1000, Super Cassette Vision, Zemmix, Dina, Atari XEGS, Action Max, View-Master Interactive Vision, and VTech Socrates... no nominations this time). The top 127 have been compiled and will be rolled out here over the next ~2 weeks. Enjoy!

(Real trial by fire for me last night, making 26 of these images. I hope I have the endurance to do the other 100 to the same level. And I hope you don't think they're as hideous as I do after making 26 of them.)

127 - Gradius (NES) - 2 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/gYMpqMw.png

robbed

i dunno man, have you played the NES gradius? it's not great

127 - RC Pro Am II (NES) - 2 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/l5sqN6B.png

i enjoyed NES gradius, but it was plagued by bad slowdown issues (not nearly as bad as Lifeforce, but still pretty bad)

Scrolling shooter games like that were, inexplicably, never my jam on NES; I don't know why exactly. Maybe just too fundamentally action/arcade in orientation without the kind of depth I was already reaching for. I would get fascinated by the screenshots in Nintendo Power when the graphics were great (e.g. Life Force) but the games, even the good ones, would get maybe one rental out of me.

Pretty awesome box art though.

(p.s. HURRAH FOR THE POLL!)

124 - Ikari Warriors (NES) - 4 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/LWeuTYG.png

124 - Space Harrier (Sega) - 4 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/uHLalw1.png

i bought a usb controller just for this rollout. v excited :D

i threw this one a vote. i haven't played it since i was very little, so my affection for it might be partly attributable to nostalgia. but i do remember it being a fun game for 2-player co-op. my dad, at the end of each level, would shout "HEMORRHOIDS! HEMORRHOIDS!" as the victorious shirtless ikari warriors hobble=stepped off the screen with their legs spread wide open. i had no idea what that meant at the time but i thought it was really funny.

sorry, that was a blurb for ikari warriors. xpost

124 - Tiger Heli (NES) - 4 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/2aCSMxc.png

Space Harrier kinda blew my mind when I was a kid.

Out of curiosity, how many ballots were there?

I voted for Ikari Warriors ! but it only got one vote. HMMM

I cut Gradius for Lifeforce (spoiler!) but I loved Gradius too. what's the definitive version if not NES? arcade?

this is a good start; i have varying degrees of love in my heart for all those
BOLD CLAM: SHMUPS will not place in the top 20

Never played Space Harrier, but we had the gimmicky NES knockoff, 3-D World-Runner. It had a peppy soundtrack and some kinda trippy walking-on-the-moon physics as you would leeeeeeeeeap over vast pits. You could also play it in a 3D mode with blue-and-red glasses, which I'm sure we tried at some point but which I can't remember at all. Not in any sense a good game, though.

i was the lone vote for tiger heli. it's the only game on my ballot that i first played as an adult. it's nothing remarkable, it's just a really solid twitchy shooter. it also reminded me of how much i used to enjoy playing games for points. i could never beat a game like tiger-heli (at least without cheating for extra lives or something), but setting a personal top score and then trying to beat it was a game within a game that made it more approachable for me. kind of sad that playing for points has pretty much disappeared from games.

I voted for Ikari Warriors ! but it only got one vote. HMMM

oh shit, my mistake! i thought i voted for it, but i didn't. in the end, i subbed out ikari warriors for a very similar game that hasn't placed yet.

I loved Ikari Warriors because it was a rad co-op game at a time when that was rare.

Obv Commando will be much higher : no that was NOT a glitch that typed that

If you dig games like Tiger-Heli, Desert Strike etc., let me recommend Firehawk, an obscure unlicensed game which should scratch the same itch pleasantly. It also has pretty awesome music (though only over the titles and between levels, oddly); back around 2000 an old buddy of mine cut it all together as "The Firehawk Saga" and it's, thankfully, still online here: http://slaughtergate.tripod.com/bootblitz.html . His "Dragonfly King" (based on Chakan The Forever Man) is also super great.

123 - M.C. Kids (NES) - 6 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/EnRqPmg.png

i'm going to start rollnig these out faster than this haha. this is going to take all day and i have ot make more of these damn images at some point

Never played M.C. kids. that title screen is weird: <1UP 2UP>

what's the story with 1UP/2UP as shorthand for 1 player or 2 player, for a few years there in the 80s?

from wikipedia:

The story begins with the titular M.C. Kids, Mick and Mack, reading a book where Ronald McDonald was showing off his magical bag at a picnic in the meadow.

ronald mcdonald you are under arrest

in the end, 20 ballots! hit the number i wanted :)

hopefully the 4th gen one gets even more (whenever that is... in 2016 probably)

xxpost hahaha

ummm nothing to say about MC Kids, but RC Pro-Am II is probably better than RC Pro-Am I. I voted for Pro-Am I because of name recognition.
This series would have been a lot of fun if I knew about it as a kid. Back then 2-player games were all the rage. Alas, I didn't play it until I was in my 20's.

I totally support a fast rollout of all these "was one person's 18th place pick" entries, sorta doubt we're ever going to develop a rich multi-post discussion of fucking M.C. Kids.

good to know.

120 - A Boy and His Blob (NES) - 8 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/6EocrHm.png

re: MC Kids: I do like how the McDonald's swoop implies a jumping high-five

said it on the voting thread but A Boy and His Blob sounded SO AMAZING in nintendo power. like this super unique concept that would have all this really creative puzzle stuff going on. in practice it was nearly unplayable and really unpleasant to look at. but still, kudos to them for trying something different. david crane is an under-sung game designer with some really important credits to his name - pitfall and little computer people especially. and ABAHB still has that early 80s "one-man show" feel to it, which i think is neat.

120 - Winter Games (NES) - 8 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/nA96rdL.png

^^ highest box art quality : in-game graphics ratio maybe ever

xpost i remember the nintendo power coverage very well, and i agree, it sounded amazing. i never got a chance to play it though.

120 - Wizards and Warriors (NES) - 8 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/HVl4sfC.png

played the shit out of all the "games" games on C64 without ever getting any good at a single one of them. it was just fun making the people move around and hear their little quantized feet-stomping noises as they ran, and the digital cheers and such. doubt i ever got the hacky-sack guy to actually get the sack up in the air even once. my sense is that the NES ports were sometimes decent and sometimes disasters in terms of control, but yeah thankfully they held on to the BADASS box graphics.

I cut Gradius for Lifeforce (spoiler!) but I loved Gradius too. what's the definitive version if not NES? arcade?

I had the SNES version. There are some incredible 16-bit versions like the PC Engine CD one that are next level.

Going back and playing NES Gradius I was struck by how polished it seemed compared to other console shooters at the time. Yes the flicker and slowdown but also really precise controls and that ultra smooth scrolling NES was famous for.

MC Kids is a great SMB3 knockoff.

xxp
hacky sack was in Winter Games too? wasn't it California Games?

yeah i was talking about california games sorry - they all kinda ran together in my head as i think we had all of the major ones except 'world games.'

haha i was the lone wizards and warriors voter and now i have no complaints at all with lone-voter games making the rollout. wizards and warriors is not really a great platformer - it's repetitious and kinda stupid, but there are some GREAT tunes (first level tune, you're-about-to-die tune) and i was really taken by the vibe/environment. the first (forest) level goes a long way towards establishing this cozy medieval adventure feel, lots of shit is happening, you're finding cool shit in chests. then it seems like the next three levels are in alarmingly same-y caves before anything happens again. the one thing that reeeeeally sucks is waiting and waiting for an enemy to drop the particular potion you need to make a particular jump - that's bad design and they should have caught it the first time through playtesting.

you can tell they were going for a ghosts n goblins or castlevania thing, with this 'journey' (love any game where you see an overall mini-map of the levels and how they connect, after you beat each one), but just didn't have the chops to pull off CV... but thankfully they made it less arbitrarily punishing than G&G - you could rent it, beat it, and enjoy renting it and beating it again. given that the same cartridge could hold really fully-fledged adventures it's unquestionably kind of a throwback, but it would have been a top-tier home-computer game in 1987, where the competition was instead dark castle.

117 - Batman: Return of the Joker (NES) - 10 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/iGMtpxo.png

117 - Kung Fu (NES) - 10 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/Ps4qy8c.png

haha Kung Fu, man I sucked at that

117 - RBI Baseball (NES) - 10 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/kctHDoc.png

never played kung fu till emus - but i knew it, not from nintendo power but from its predecessor (?), this wonderful, big, full-color, screenshot-ridden tome:

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/nintendo/images/a/ab/PlayersGuide.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090701191944&path-prefix=en

real range of games in there tbh - everything from first-generation "this could be an atari 5200 game" cartridge-filler to some of the signature epics of the system. the comparatively slow build of the NES's north american success - released for christmas 1985, but the "action set" bundled with mario bros/duck hunt and the zapper wasn't until 1988! - plus the delay versus the famicom itself meant that things that really felt like "launch titles" to most kids my age (zelda, castlevania) were actually mature games released halfway through the system's effective lifespan. and then the imperial-phase games seemed to come right on their heels. it was just such a bonanza of high-quality stuff, with these much, MUCH more basic games sitting right alongside them on the shelf.

anyone ever watched a game of RBI baseball?

As a life-long sports abstainer, the ____ Games games are pretty much the only sports games I ever played (barring a recent half-hearted attempt at learning what football is from playing Madden). They were a ton of fun.

Hey Mordy, which USB controller did you get? I recently bought a Super Nintendo one and am quite pleased.

As the sole vote for Boy and His Blob, I gotta say Casino is probably otm, but I still loved playing that game just for sheer zaniness. It was flawed, but I loved what they were going for and enjoyed playing it.

Also RBI Baseball strikes me as a pretty quintessential 8-bit sports game, I'm surprised I was the only vote for it! Many hours spent with it as a child.

i got this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Classic-USB-NES-Controller-PC/dp/B002YVD3KM

it's great for what it is but damn i forgot how much the NES controller hurts your hands

how is the lag with that? the problem i've had with USB controllers is that they seem to have a small lag, which makes playing the reflex-based NES games impossible. on the other hand, using a keyboard eliminates the lag, but is really awkward for most games.

i beat mega man 2 + mike tyson's punch out with it a month ago and didn't experience any lag problems

i used OpenEmu (not sure if that makes a difference)

Grateful for the emulator info itt!

111 - Gradius 2 (NES) - 11 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/eknFwKB.png

yes, #111 = 11 points 1 vote, it is amazing

speaking of shmups at 111/11/1

111 - Parodius Da (NES) - 11 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/UT8Zpix.png

those images might be fucked up. found it tough to get a bead on which game was which

hmm, that image is from the coin op. my bad. here's the european release NES box art thx to wikipedia:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/32/Parodius_NES.jpg

111 - Recca (NES) - 11 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/gjRWNQC.png

So many shmups

never got Parodius over here. Was heavy into Stinger though (aka Twinbee 2 or whatever)

111 - Rocky (Sega) - 11 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/PBr80Ro.png

111 - Teddy Boy (Sega) - 11 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/dy05MV8.png

never heard of recca, looks cool? more interested in the goofiness of parodius though.

as a kid, even before getting into robotech, i was really drawn into anything with manga-style art, always disappointed on some level when the game itself featured nothing of the sort. i just really liked that 'look,' without even a name for it.

109 - Golgo 13 (NES) - 12 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/B6I0wsh.png

heyo

i've never played that game or even really seen it but it looks crazy!

109 - Ice Climber (NES) - 12 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/DnHBvla.png

^ also love this box art template. i actually made a PSD of a blank one and set it up so i could make each result in the style of a NES game box, but realized that it'd jsut be bettr to include the original boxes for these games (and also some of these games are sega and atari.)

GOLGO-13 was beyond Nintendo hard btw. After a certain point it just never let up, IIRC. I can't believe people actually beat it.

108 - Wizards and Warriors II: Ironsword (NES) - 13 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/73BwM0l.png

w&w II was all about the atmosphere and non-linear levels

Italian model Fabio Lanzoni portrays the protagonist Kuros on the game’s cover, but he does not make an in-game appearance.

102 - Bases Loaded (NES) - 14 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/I6wNxHZ.png

102 - Double Dribble (NES) - 14 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/0xmuiFf.png

102 - Golden Axe Warrior (Sega) - 14 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/9txNF4p.png

Used to play a TON of Double Dribble on NES. That games rules.

GOLGO-13 looks really cool and ahead of its time.

huh, so if you had an SMS, was Golden Axe Warrior your Zelda?

i beat w&w2:ironsword, just want that recorded. otm about the nonlinear levels. a maddening game tho.

looking at golgo 13 footage it does look kinda wild - bunch of different styles of gameplay, from side scrolling exploration/fighting stuff to a SHMUP, to a first-person maze thing.

102 - Mickey Mouse Castle Of Illusion (Sega) - 14 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/VxzCLWs.png

ooo forgot to vote for that but it was one of my favorites as a kid

the sms version?

i feel like that game will get its due in the 4th gen poll

haha i remember renting Golgo 13, that didn't go so well

oh yeah, maybe i didn't play it until the snes

102 - Shinobi (Sega) - 14 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/biHcKgu.png

I voted for RC Pro Am II. RC Pro Am was a very early 4p console game, so I played a ton of it. Sort of the Goldeneye of my youth?

102 - Spy Hunter (NES) - 14 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/TGGfVET.png

I've never seen or played Castle Of Illusion on the Master System but I can't imagine that it holds a candle to the Genesis version (which has a place waiting very high atop my 4th gen ballot).

Ha. Spy Hunter is another of mine. That makes something like five today. I must be the only person who voted for at least a third of the games on my ballot.

The GTA games would be much improved if you could drive up a ramp and into the trailer of a moving semi.

Spy Hunter is the first major upset versus Dom's 2008 poll, where it was deemed the 77th greatest game of all time.

i like spy hunter but it's an arcade game to me

101 - Ghosts 'n' Goblins (NES) - 15 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/9pLcAHm.png

that's the last one for today :D

Plenty to chew on - hurrah!

I hated Ghosts 'n' Goblins as a kid - couldn't even beat the first level, I think. Just not my kind of game, not my kind of challenge. Feel like it's become one of the gold-standard games for the kind of person who takes pride in deep-learning a game's timing to the point where they can beat even a game like this, where the difficulty really stems from mean-spirited, arcade-oriented limitations and the controls (which are not at all smooth in this one). I can at least begrudgingly respect some of the NES's really punishing and cheap games but this doesn't even reward you with pretty graphics or anything.

I never got past the first level either

p.s. the nes dogbone controller isn't as rough on the hands as the original. there's a usb analog of it but I haven't tried it. Might be a better purchase though

http://www.amazon.com/Retro-Link-NES-Dogbone-Controller-Wired/dp/B00HJXQNJ8/ref=sr_1_2?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1445456361&sr=1-2&keywords=nes+bone

might as well get a snes controller if you are going to break the mold

agreed on ghosts n goblins hate. i enjoy games like of that style (like ninja gaiden, which was high on my ballot), but G&G was just frustrating and not fun.

yeah at least there the actual running, jumping, climbing and killing enemies part is fun in itself. also you have a fucking life bar, which helps a LOT, until the inherently difficult aspects of the game become just too much to deal with - but you can at least enjoy playing a few levels before it gets to that point.

was ice climber actually fun? I think it's the only nes production from that era I never tried

man I love G&G and especially Ghouls n' Ghosts, maybe my favorite standup arcade game ever.

I never played any of these systems tho (so I didn't vote)

ice climber is fun. i've only played a version of it that was on a bootleg 101-games-in-one GBA cartridge, but it was by far the best thing on there

DAH-BULL-DREE-BULL

G&G in the arcade was straight fucking theft of kids's money

Oh god that damn red demon.

I was so busy working & also posting these that I didn't get to really discuss as much as I wanted! So here is a list of thoughts below

I voted for Ikari Warriors ! but it only got one vote. HMMM

This sent me into a panic spiral

anyone ever watched a game of RBI baseball?

probably i have

re: usb controllers

at this point i would jsut recommend anyone get either the xbox one controller or the ps4 one (if it does indeed connect to the pc and i didn't dream that), they're solid and they'll work with modern games and old ones.

re: recca

that was so weird and hard to find info on!

re: ghouls n goblins

i never played it, and i never will because that's exactly the kind of game i avoid!

re: a game i didn't post yet

i almost talked about a game i am posting tomorrow! WHOOPS

I want that GNG boxart as a poster. So rad.

The music was great too. But yeah, frustrating as hell, this game.

Ikari Warriors was a super entertaining way to spend an afternoon once. UH it just reminded me of Iron Tank which was probably the best NES version of top down combat shmup imo.

I just played through Batman Return of Joker using save states. The game has unlimited continues but that doesn't make the gameplay easier. It just means you get to die a lot more figuring out the patterns on each level. And that's the problem; there's too much damage that can't be avoided without precise moves. At least you get a health bar and it resets at the bosses. It just seems really unfair that many enemies fire immediately as soon as they appear on the edge of the screen.

The game looked good though. Joker was the only traditional batman enemy you get to fight.

I tested out G'N'G and I don't want to play that one. It probably did eat some of my quarters at one point. Even dumb kids are smart enough to move to the next machine after 1 or 2 tries

i hope someone voted for 'maniac mansion' cuz that game is super legit

re: usb controllers

at this point i would jsut recommend anyone get either the xbox one controller or the ps4 one (if it does indeed connect to the pc and i didn't dream that), they're solid and they'll work with modern games and old ones.

I disagree. I have my xbox 360 controller hooked up and it pales in comparison to my light little snes controller with a d-pad in the exact opposite side of the buttons (it feels way better). Also it doesn't have all the unnecessary triggers and joysticks.

The ps4 controller has the d-pad in a good spot I guess

Usb controllers are pretty damn cheap on amazon

RE: Parodious (NES version). just tested
Konami shmups like Gradius and Life Force may of had some lag but this game takes the cake. This has the most lag of any Nintendo game I ever played. Otherwise a very fun and colorful game.

yeah I didn't vote for Spy Hunter b/c I think of it either as an arcade game or as a ColecoVision game (was I only the only here who had a ColecoVision? loved it)

also agreed on the ghosts & goblins hate

I was the Double Dribble voter, I think that's where my ongoing love of hoops started (well, and moving to atlanta in the middle of the reign of the human highlight reel)

dunno if we're doing a pc game poll but re. hoops I'd vote lakers vs. celtics pretty high, that game was a monster with john fucking paxson hitting 3s at like 80%

huh, so if you had an SMS, was Golden Axe Warrior your Zelda?

― Gorefest Frump (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, October 21, 2015 6:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think golvellius and ys were closer to filling that capacity and no one had golden axe warrior. but that might be generalising massively from personal experience.

i played a pc-engine for the first time today. that was a ghastly experience

experience experience

there were some sweet games for the PC Engine, at least the CD add-on. best Dracula X of all systems, for sure. next poll i guess. but yeah, still pretty much a dregs system, they just didn't have the titles, and it was definitely not enough better than the NES for it to be a must-have next-gen machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9BicddeXdg

PC Engine CD is the one system I would definitely have imported back in the day. The music and cutscenes are so cool. Check out the above 5 minute intro to R-Type Complete CD. Dracula X is the arguably the best Castlevania of all. Their version of Gradius is incredible. They had CD sound but the music was still mostly made w these crazy FM synths and thus sounded really futuristic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3Yakoqi3I0

Golgo 13 has always fascinated me. I like how the main character walks down the street w his hands in his pockets like no big deal just gotta shoot some secret agents.

whoever nominated Parodious must have never played it on the NES :p

those mazes in golgo 13 drove me INSANE
used a lot of graph paper back in the day

is there a single good maze on the NES? could pretty much extend to "or any system" i guess. those pseudo-3D sequences on NES games were always the biggest drag, and never even made any sense - - you'd walk into like, a house in fester's quest or friday the 13th and suddenly it's this huge featureless maze. it didn't even seem technically dazzling because they were always so ugly. i guess the ones in goonies ii weren't so bad but my memory's hazier there.

PC gaming was all about this around the same time - king's quest V has a maze thrown in near the end. very blatant padding.

do zelda's dungeons count as mazes?

doc, you're talking about the pseudo FPS/etrian dungeon "3-d" mazes, yeah? those always suck

did the nes ultimas have those? probably not-- the first one was u3:exodus and iirc that was the one where the 3d wireframes went away. wonder if anyone voted for the nes u4. wonder if anyone played it.

yeah that was specifically what i had in mind. top-down mazes (like in "countdown," another PC adventure of around that time) are also often lousy, but can at least be integrated with actual interesting gameplay - the whole basis of gauntlet and its clones, which are action games with maze-like environments. zelda is sorta like that, but much less so; the dungeons aren't that vast, and the challenge of getting through them is not primarily a matter of mapping and navigating their winding passages; rather you're trying to survive each individual room, after which you'll pretty much have acquired everything that's there to be acquired. very few branches. so they're "mazes" only to the extent that any game with non-linear "scroll from left to right" levels has mazes. but at a macro scale, death mountain in zelda ii is totally a maze.

ultima had first-person dungeon sequences through V, and google suggests NES Ultima IV, like NES Wizardry and NES Bard's Tale, kept them. never played any of those. the whole idea of playing a game like that without a keyboard, even if everything else was the same (doubtful) sounds like a complete nightmare.

Hi everyone! I will be posting today's batch shortly... sorry for the delay! (it'll usually be AM or close to AM eastern time... just not today)

whoever nominated Parodious must have never played it on the NES :p

that was me :o I think you're probably right, haha

put it on the bottom of my list because I wanted a nice, even number and I thought I'd played it and that it resembled the arcade ver (which rules) well enough. guess not, whoopso!

DUNH, DUNH, DU-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN, ^DUNH, ^DUNH, ^du-^^DUN-^^DUN-^^^DUN-^^^DUN, DUNH, DUNH, DU-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN, ^DUNH - YALL READY FOR THIS?!?!?!

oh right. what changed in u3 was you got parties so it would go to a goldbox-style battle grid for combat instead of having you whack away at the wireframe skeleton in front of you.

dc otm re zelda's one-room-at-a-time dungeons, especially in this era. (altho wasn't one of them a swastika? a kind of maze anyway.) aside from dungeon crawlers, good mazes in general include text adventure ones (w syntactic gimmicks, ie, featureless rooms identical save for the order of the words used to describe them) and the terrifyingly narrow one in the unreal tournament 2004 deathmatch level dm-serpentine. pretty rare tho yeah.

looks like I was the only voter for gradius 2 and recca too. these games legit rule.

recca is like a manic shmup on nes hardware, pretty amazing.

gradius 2 is a big step up from the first but it broke my heart that it never made it out of japan. some magazine posted screens and this was basically torture to me ;__;

scrolled through the thread to look at the great pictures again, went back to working on something else, then realized gradually over several minutes that what i had stuck in my head was the invincibility music from wizards and warriors.

yeah one was a swastika, labeled "MANJI" in nintendo power and causing great consternation when i imitated the drawing in the condensation on our kitchen window - OOPS! and the last one approaches maze status, just for being so big and involving so many shortcut passageways. probably the biggest thing they have in common with CRPG mazes is that as you map you realize where a room SHOULD be and you have to look for secret passages (specifically with bombs). but generally the large layouts just mean there's some backtracking - get to the end of one path, there's a thing you can't pass yet, so guess you've got to go down the other path - or some superfluous things like the map and compass. i don't imagine most people get STUCK in zelda due to problems of navigation, which emerge basically the second after you enter one of those awful still-frame first-person mazes.

I've never enjoyed a first person maze tbh. Sitting down w grid paper does sound immsersive though.

mazes are the worst and should be banned. can you imagine being on an adventure and then suddenly you're in a maze? you'd probably have to take a break and think about your life decisions

used to love mapping on squared paper, Bard's Tale, the first couple of Eye of the Beholders, Dungeon Master etc etc. great days

actually i take that back, i guess being in a maze could lead to good outcomes

http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/2014-05/enhanced/webdr03/21/17/anigif_enhanced-buzz-29115-1400707328-19.gif

100 - Kickmaster (NES) - 16 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/gZXa7nZ.png

woah. never heard of that one. screenshot looks good.

99 - Little Nemo: Dream Master (NES) - 17 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/hYl7Ahg.png

just skimming the HG101 coverage, kickmaster sounds right up my alley back then - action platformer but with a 'story' and RPG elements, though in this case it looks like pretty limited ones where you just gradually acquire a specific set of predetermined powers as you march through the thing. still, i would have been all over this, like i was with Rygar. one of those late-in-the-system's-life games (1992) that struggled for attention, i think. by 1993 a sequel to an A-list title like Duck Tales could end up an obscurity.

re: RPGS and mazes - apparently they also made pool of radiance and might & magic for the NES. wtf. were any of these successful? i don't have the energy to read about each one individually but it'd be fun to see a review that just tries to see if any of them pull it off.

96 - Batman (NES) - 18 Points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/ay7BaND.png

96 - Commando (NES) - 18 Points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/oGgm4uj.png

I was really confused by the Little Nemo game at the time. Like, why did it even exist, what a weird thing to make a shitty videogame out of (which largely has nothing to do with the strip)

That's my Kickmaster vote. Still need to beat it. Yeah it's really good action rpg with great presentation and lots of cool gameplay options. Somehow you have a whole arsenal of kicks that you build up as you level up. The game also breaks a lot of rules, rather than just level, boss, level, boss, there will be mini bosses or maybe the entire level is just the boss.

The loot mechanic is really nice as well. Every time you kill an enemy three icons jump out before falling off the screen. They either heal you, hurt you, or give you MP. Usually you have time to get just one of these. It's a nice little touch that adds a fun bit of gameplay to an otherwise standard chore (collecting loot from fallen enemies).

Aw man, Batman. Walljump GOAT.

Surprised at both of those being so low! Didn't vote for either, but Batman has the rep of being one of the few good licensed titles (though also famously hard) and Commando was just ubiquitous though primitive. "High Resolution Graphics" indeed.

At the time I had no idea Little Nemo was in fact a movie. Clearly they were hoping it would be a hit and the tie-in game would follow along.

Man those early boxes were so wacky. Just noticed "One Megabyte Memory" down there at the bottom, lol.

and with Little Nemo you get a FREE 3"x2" sticker!!!!

Golgo 13 talk upthread reminds me of Abbott's posts here, a golden moment in ILXdom.

Batman must have been a late cut for me. Really good game.

NES games are hard is a CW truism at this pt but I've been playing through some of these as they come up and damn if it isn't true. even the most difficult contemporary vg like idk dark souls is incomparably easier then even an easy NES game

many NES games are just unfair, too, where there are certain chokepoints that are based purely on pattern recognition. there was some level early on in life force that was like that - suddenly walls would form all around you out of nowhere, and you just had to know that once you get to that part of the stage, you have to be on the right side of the screen.

i meant memorization there, not pattern recognition

bentelec otm

Yep. That's why playing through Batman Return of Joker felt a bit like a dissapointment. In seminally hard games like TMNT 2 at least it wasn't a pattern that you simply forgot to memorize.

Seminally? I think i used the wrong word

Dangit, there's a picture that I somehow didn't upload. :( and I can't get it to upload from work.

I'll put the pic later, in the meantime...

96 - Yoshi (NES) - 18 points / 1 Vote

Good game

great one, barely missed my ballot. that and yoshi's cookie.

95 - Willow (NES) - 18 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/QmnVH2w.png

94 - Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy (NES) - 19 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/u8PTIJi.png

willow was my #21

91 - Guerilla War (NES) - 20 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/n2FTrzI.png

hee hee seminally hard

91 - Mach Rider (NES) - 20 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/RLdTRO7.png

willow a rare case of a movie letting down expectations i'd built playing the game.

well a rare case in film-to-game adaptations. obv i'd be constantly disappointed by game-to-film, if i had expectations.

Guerilla War is a game I rented over and over again. That and Rampage were like crack when I was a 1st or 2nd grader chilling out spending the night at my best friend's house. Guerilla War felt kinda like the theme song of the cartoon show TMNT where I developed a tradition of spazzing out, jumping on couches and rocking out as hard as I could until title card rolled out.

Also it was an arcade game at Pizza Hut

91 - Rockin' Kats (NES) - 20 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/cmGX2VI.png

That one was my ballot. I had a friend who would rent it like every weekend for a month or two, I would go over and we'd play it together... eventually his parents bought it for him so he'd stop just renting that one game. My memories are hazy but I remember having a lot of fun with it.

87 - Cobra Triangle (NES) - 21 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/YlYYWKf.png

87 - Shadowgate (NES) - 21 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/BibJCNA.png

87 - Solar Jetman (NES) - 21 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/vUiPJtH.png

87 - Strider (NES) - 21 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/y2LNfQn.png

Cobra Triangle rules, but it didn't make the cut for me. I played a ton of it though.

never could get into the nes version of strider. loved it in the arcade tho

85 - Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball (NES) - 22 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/fX5kV7h.png

85 - Sonic Chaos (Sega) - 22 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/w8f31Nz.png

last one! tomorrow they'll be posted at a more british friendly time (and a more eastern time friendly time too, i guess it is like well outside of coputer hours for most now)

I remember the Willow game as an underwhelming rental - just kinda poking around, throwing acorns at people, not really getting anywhere. Wonder if it has more to reveal if I played it today. Had no idea there was a Mach Rider game. Surprised to see Shadowgate and Strider this low.

also, all-star softball was fantastic. you'd pick your team at the beginning, ijust liek grade school, from the available kids, and then each field of play had its own house rules that were weird ("this area: home run. this area: OUT")

i'm the shadowgate vote. you're all dead to me now.
strider was #22 i think.

cobra triangle! i completely forgot about that game. iirc it rules

So will this poll decide which of the 100 NES baseball games are worth owning or which is most popular?

Dusty Diamond/Shadowgate OTM.

Just get bases loaded 3 xp

Baseball Stars is #1 and this poll will prove it

i think over half of the baseball games have placed now, fwiw.

nope, that's definitely not true

Also Bases Loaded 1 is the only good Bases Loaded game

i was always partial to bases loaded II tbh

btw i just played cobra command and i think i was remembering a different game. not much fun. :(

cobra triangle is the one up there, not cobra command! (in case that's why you're bringing it up)

er, sorry, i meant i played cobra triangle and it wasn't the speedboat-y game that i remembered. (warning: i have the day off tomorrow and i'm having a wine-fueled solo NES party. this could get ugly)

how is cobra triangle not a speedboat-y game?

he just said it wasn't the one he remembered

oh, THE one. Gotcha

i'm racking my brain trying to think of another... was wave race on NES? or only game boy? that game was pretty cool.

Eliminator Boat Duel, maybe?

hmm, just tried eliminator boat duel and it's not that either (although it was a lot more fun than cobra triangle)

i dunno, who knows. my memory is completely awful and it's possible i just dreamed some boat game up when i was a kid

never heard of sonic chaos! i suppose everyone i knew had given up on the master system by '93.

disappointed to see batman so low, oddly i don't remember it being as forbiddingly difficult as everyone suggests but maybe playing it at the same time as that fucking tmnt game has coloured my memory.

i def loved batman.

In preparation for this poll I played some NES games I hadn't played before. Willow was the only one that made my ballot.

I was the one who voted for Castle of Illusion -- by mistake. I played a port of the Genesis version and didn't know there were two versions.

micromachines!
http://www.vgmuseum.com/images/nes/01/Micro%20Machines%20-%20Ingame.gif http://videogamecritic.com/images/nes/micro_machines.gif
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0vB7Yvgt6_8/T5SXaw6bLqI/AAAAAAAAA9Q/P01UHMgglVw/s1600/micromachines3.jpg http://www.jenesuis.net/images_site/jeux/nes/micro%20machines/Micro%20Machines%20%28Aladdin%20Cart%29%20%28Unl%29%20%28UE%29-14.png

whats the deal with sonic chaos? i thought sonic's debut was for the genesis. did they continue making games for the master system after the genesis was released?

Mach Rider was amazing, voted it high. fast driving on a bike WITH GUNS.

I wonder if my ballot is placing so heavily here at the bottom because I got my NES in 1985 and so really dug into the earliest games since there weren't all that many. like I left Wrecking Crew off my ballot but it was fabulous & weird.

whats the deal with sonic chaos? i thought sonic's debut was for the genesis. did they continue making games for the master system after the genesis was released?

― diamonddave85​ (diamonddave85), Friday, October 23, 2015 3:24 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there were ps2 games released last year brah

no, wait, PES 14 came out in 2013. there were ps2 games in 2013.

okay this is a kinda fascinating rabbit hole, i knew the master system was more successful in europe by comparison to north america but i did not know it was abandoned so early elsewhere! -- the last american release was sonic the hedgehog, which i guess is a pretty good way to capstone it -- with a less good version of the big genesis game

in europe there's a master system exclusive sonic 2 and sonic chaos. they are both pretty good; i would probably rather replay them than the genesis ones, though that's mainly about overfamiliarity at this point, i guess.

While I remember distinct eras for the NES and SNES, I was playing the Master System (which was parked at my grandma's house) and the Genesis at more or less the same time. The only difference being that any new games we bought were for the Genesis.

weird.. i guess i was just under the assumption that sonic was designed as a system seller and backporting to a prev generation would rob genesis of some sales

interesting history though, i was never really aware of the master system at the time

I think the Master System was so unpopular that it didn't matter - goal was to lure NES owners to make this their one 16-bit console. But yeah it does seem a little weird, like the Yoshi games for NES. But clearly there was some money to be made there.

SNEAK PEEK FOR TODAY: no missing pictures, and an atari game!

84 - Rygar (NES) - 22 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/5U20L1S.png

great one, barely missed my ballot. that and yoshi's cookie.

― nerd shit (Will M.), Thursday, October 22, 2015 5:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just checked my ballot... yoshi didn't miss it at all. I do not remember making my ballot... it is full of surprises i forgot that i left there. i should have spent more time on it :)

I voted for Rygar in 2008 and again here - glad someone else had my back. It's a cool game, if anyone hasn't played it - definitely not flawless and there is some tedious backtracking here and there, but it's another one of these things stretching the boundaries of a platformer just a bit towards Metroid territory with a modicum of leveling-up over time and items that unlock new areas. Also your weapon is a giant yo-yo, likely inspired by the one henchman's in Octopussy, that makes satisfying sounds when it hits things. Good music, and the levels are quite atmospheric even if the overworld is a bit bland. I have not seriously played it since 1991 or so, though...

wow, i just had a minor freakout. i thought there was one more ballot than was represented in my excel sheet. was thinking "i have to start this whole thing over"

turns out i just put my ballto in the "raw ballot" file twice, so there were 21 ballots there and only 20 on the compiler. SHORT STORY: SPENT 30 MINUTES FREAKING OUT FOR NO REASON

on with the show

83 - Ring King (NES) - 23 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/bpy50wa.png

so who's 'ray leonard jr.', is he a person whom people are still aware of the existence of

82 - Battle of Olympus (NES) - 24 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/qcsFEWU.png

re: ray leonard jr., it seems like that's sugar ray leonard's son? who would have been a kid when this was released, presumably... if wikipedia is right, he clocks at age 13 when this game was released. did they really get the teenage son of a famous boxer to play their video game and say it was good? the mind boggles

80 - Double Dragon II (NES) - 24 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/n6Ed3On.png

I was always interested in Battle of Olympus. Seemed very much like Zelda II, which I was super into.

these last four are all GREAT games

Rygar was a blast but it was hard. Would be fun to get it out and try again.

good old Broderbund. I'll have to test that game out. Nice cover

Battle for Olympus is fondly remembered for me; I recall it as being similar to Athena maybe?

Rygar, IIRC, is a no-password game, and pretty much right at the limit of a 10-year-old's sense of how big a game could be for one sitting... really a full afternoon's project. Not sure I could hack it in 2015. Obviously, emulators change that...

80 - Kirby's Adventure (NES) - 24 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/u6YURzN.png

<3 kirby

i forgot to vote for Kirby, but that's way too low. sorry Kirby!

i remember being really confused that that game didn't come out for the SNES.

i think i may have played it on an emulator years later. i think that's the first one where kirby could absorb his enemies' skills, which was so awesome. it really gave it a toybox feel you didn't get form a lot of other games. (it wasn't on my ballot either... sorry kirby!)

79 - Ufouria: The Saga (NES) - 26 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/ievN98o.png

suuuuuch a 16-bit-looking cover.

Loved the Double Dragons. I think I was the vote for Battle of Olympus.

ufouria looks great, somebody tell me about it

Looking at footage of Ufouria online, it seems like a really strong gimmick game that would actually drive me nuts in practice, unless the person I'm watching is playing it in a really weird speedrun way or something. Like, constantly, constantly going to the start-button menu to switch between characters: gotta freeze these guys into ice blocks, then switch to the one who can jump between ice blocks, then switch back to the one who can freeze people...yikes. OTOH it seems really big in that Metroid/Clash at Demonhead way, and I like the cartoony style even if it seems a little graphically chintzy for 1991.

looks like I dropped Rygar off my ballot but it'd have made other iterations of the ballot. we rented it & it was hellishly hard with no saves as mentioned so we left the NES on overnight when we had to go to bed and finished it the next day (so we could return it). kids these days...

i just realized that i can't remember how long the typical rental actually was. two or three nights, right? like you'd get a rental on friday and absorb it through the weekend?

i really can't imagine being a kid and playing video games and not having them be NES-hard. i mean it induced a lot of frustration and rage and dismal headachey evenings spent feeling defeated by THAT STUPID GAME but, like... that is what video games were. not to go on about today's namby-pamby kids hand-held by their games but i wonder if your psychic relation to gaming ends up different. like there is a fundamental difference between how you relate to something that is challenging and something that is not. the "not" could still end up being great and really fun - happy to just go on a really slow journey through an imaginary land, meeting things, enjoying amazing powers, discovering hidden places, all sounds great to me. and obviously there is a wide range between a totally-smooth challenge free unfolding of content, and what we might call "NES hard." but if the gameplay itself was fun enough, i was often surprisingly content to hang around in the first few stages, or just operating at a really low level in a game that would have rewarded me much more for knowing wtf i was doing (see sid meier's pirates! where there is all this deep shit you can be doing, keeping track of the prices of goods and where the treasure fleet might land soon, but i was happy to just tool around shooting cannons and swordfighting). like, we owned blaster master which i'm sure we'll see later, and i played the FUCK out of the first few levels of it, over and over, never got anywhere close to the end.

even within NES hard, there's total bullshit difficulty carried over from arcade games (ghosts n goblins), total bullshit difficulty owing to some miscalibration in their expectations of players' reflexes and ability to memorize patterns (ninja gaiden), and hard-as-fuck games that are legitimately beatable if you just seriously put in the time. i mean one of the great pleasures of gaming, for me, was that thing where you've tried to beat this one level/boss SO MANY TIMES and then finally have this one perfect run where you're firing on all cylinders and you NAIL it. i wonder if kids today have that. of course it hasn't gone away from games entirely; i think some of the most dangerously addictive things i've played in the last few years find this nugget and fucking DIG INTO it. lost a LOT of hours to desktop tower defense a while back - same thing. "okay, just one more try and this time i'll..."

the worst was when those NES-hard rentals didn't even come with the instruction booklets

I wasn't all that much of a gamer as a kid, so trying to play through unfamiliar 3rd gen (and earlier) stuff nowadays is often an infuriating, "oh, FUCK this unfair bullshit!" experience. I recognize and accept that this is a flaw in my character.

We definitely recognized some stuff as unfair bullshit. No continues was unfair bullshit, and only getting two continues was somehow even worse. Obviously if the game itself wasn't that hard, or that long, it's a different story. Super Mario set some precedents that really should not have been followed in other games that were vaster, harder, and cheaper in their deaths.

in the late eighties / early nineties, my mom switched from wal mart to phar-mor as the big box discount store of choice which meant we went there like twice a week at least. phar-mor was one of the only big box stores that had a video rental wing and they had three shelves of NES/Sega Master System games for rent. Their rental prices were insanely low: you got any combination of three games or movies for five nights for 69 cents per game/film. If you returned them early, you could swap them out for the remainder of the time. It stands, alongside the quarter box of the comic book shop, as one of my most beloved childhood business transactions.

The place was a total shambles; you rented the videos and games by taking the representative box to the front desk of the pharmacy and they let you rent it. The pharmacists didn't give a damn about this element of the job of course so they wouldn't answer questions about what games were available; you HAD to find the game box. Unfortunately no one seemed tasked with keeping the boxes in order and everything was mixed up; there were game boxes in every aisle, sometimes I'd find them hidden elsewhere in the store. I think some people were hiding RARE COPIES for future rentals... anyway, i certainly started doing that. Every time we went to Phar-Mor, I would bee-line to the video aisles with my meticulously kept want list notebook (culled from Nintendo Power and game magazines read at the local waldenbooks) and grab my two games that I was allowed. Mom usually picked out the movie.

My childhood OCD was on full display at Phar Mor. I would alphabetize all the shelves as far as I could before mom said we had to go. One time she just dropped me off there when she had to run errands and I actually finished the whole video section and proudly had the pharmacists come out to see. They were confused and amazed. I may have dreamt this.

When I got my first car and one of my first summer teenage jobs waiting tables at a nearby Cooker (since deceased), I would inevitably take ten bucks in tips and rent six games and buy a ton of taco bell and then sit up all night playing.

i never heard what happened with phar-mor, sounds like an interesting story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phar-Mor

i think i kept ultima out for seven months of re-rentals to beat it one summer. so anticlimactic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK1LB3gsujY

first-rate post

Thanks For Playing
See You Next Game

"For the last time kid, I DON'T KNOW IF WE HAVE GOONIES TWO. If it's on the shelf bring it up here."
"Are you SURE you can't check?"
"Oh for the love of god, I have a pharmaceuticals degree."
"Do you have Monster Party?"

lol "THANKS FOR PLAYING SEE YOU NEXT GAME" (xpost)

man. i had forgotten about phar-mor, or mixed it up with stein-mart. yeah, i went maybe two or three times, with the family across the street IIRC. there was one at atlanta's market square mall (now north dekalb mall), which we often frequented for other things (including major arcade time)... just we did most of our video game renting at a mom-and-pop place, and then blockbuster. i remember it as being so weird to be in a store that had such a different selection of games. like if blockbuster had bought A, phar-mor bought B. it was the only place i ever saw and rented Turtles III: The Manhattan Project. that game kinda colors my memories of phar-mor, like it's all a kind of pale yellow-orange-beige and gray.

phar mor's rentals were SO cheap that any game I couldn't get there had a mythical quality about it
infrequent blockbuster trips would cause near brain hemorrhages as I was forced to decide between the unknowns of Deadly Towers and Klax... which was better, HOW COULD I KNOW
twenty years later, i have every game made for the system as a niche on my hard drive and no time to play them. i miss being too young to not know this was coming.

The collapse of Exodus Castle looks terrifying IMO

that thing where you've tried to beat this one level/boss SO MANY TIMES and then finally have this one perfect run where you're firing on all cylinders and you NAIL it. i wonder if kids today have that. of course it hasn't gone away from games entirely; i think some of the most dangerously addictive things i've played in the last few years find this nugget and fucking DIG INTO it. lost a LOT of hours to desktop tower defense a while back - same thing. "okay, just one more try and this time i'll..."

otm. I remember having level patterns down so pat through repetition that ANY change was a huge reward. I finally made it past that one enemy .... woah look at this new bit of level design? The games rewarded you as you played them, as you mastered them, it unlocked the game. Dark Souls is probably the only modern game that does this, with the helpful death mechanic. Who knows if kids have that today, it seems like games have gotten less and less about playing them and more about CONSUMING CONTENT. The Interactive Movie craze from the early 90s has finally come true and most games nowadays let you sit in the body of a pre-defined character w a pre-written backstory and pre-scripted story segments. There is a very strict goal for the given level, and if you do anything outside of it, you will have an instant death. Or there is a pre-scripted action sequence that looks very impressive as you run across a crumbling bridge and buildings collapse all around you but really you are doing the gameplay equivalent of holding right while Mario jumps and leaps automatically through the entirety of World 8.

NES hard because of many conventions that have largely been completely eliminated in games. Now every game has infinite lives and recharging health. If you fall off a bottomless pit you will respawn nearly instantly due to checkpoints. If enemies die THEY STAY DEAD. This is a cool thing about the old 8-bit games, how they were programmed to save space and use scrolling buffers and such, that enemies would eternally respawn, making your positioning in the level even more important. Or enabling you to toe-step forward and backward in an attempt to scroll-gitch enemies off screen.

Also the land of Bullet Hell has seemed to go away w more realistic games. In Contra you could dodge multiple bullets from multiple directions, all because they were flying really slowly across the screen. This is a convention fueling all SHMUPS as well. But today that kind of play does not really exist. Shooting games may be more realistic but they can't match the stress and tension of maneuvering your space ship just pixels away from the nearest cloud of bullet.

xp if you didn't get out of the castle fast enough, you died! i seem to recall losing several times that way.

Double Dragon 2 was TOUGH i remember it had 2 modes, one that made 1P and 2P harm each other, and one that did not. And of course they weren't clearly marked as such on the menu screen.

Jumping in that game is a huge pain. There's an area (past the waterfall level I believe) that I could never get past bc of jump controls.

Kirby flat-out rules. I played the Gameboy game first and loved it. He's a great heir to the Mario platforming crown.

i daresay that my undying love for the dark/demon's souls + bloodborne dynamic is nearly entirely due to a childhood misspent on the nes with the frustration + time = new unlocks mechanism burnt into my gray matter

in the nes days there was no place to rent games in my town (this was Britain in the late 80s early 90s and I don't think this was rare, probably the norm), as a result ive played hardly any of the nes games mentioned here (nes games were expensive in the uk, saw some in my parents attic a few years ago and the legend of Zelda was 50 pounds in circa 1990 money which is insane).

Kirby is one of my favourite games ever, sad it didn't place higher, if id bothered to put in a ballot it would've.

I didn't have an NES I had an Atari 7800 and there were no places to rent those games. I do remember the day Big Lots started selling the games at $1 per game, which was even better than renting. My personal experience w the great Video Game Crash of the 80s.

All my friends has NES's though, so I saw and played through a ton of different games. They all went to Movie Depot.

ah, Movie Depot! Hollywood Video! Phar-Mor! Blockbuster! Hastings! The great Valhallas of game rental long past, all gone now...

77 - Kid Icarus (NES) - 27 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/RsBzzmB.png

great post, AB, and great points, especially about the dodging multiple lines of slow-moving fire. there were obviously games where this basically became impossible (NES silver surfer is just mowing you down from minute one - awful game) but it was a legitimate challenge where you actually could get better at it. i remember somewhere picking up the stock line that video games weren't bad for kids because they improved "hand-eye coordination" which obviously is the kind of nonsense a 9-year-old would find really compelling evidence...but i also have to think this was sort of true? but maybe would not be if the games weren't hard? you had to be fucking in the ZONE, reflexes firing. if you wren't, sorry, no gently unfolding content for you. try again from the beginning. again! again! it's like getting piano lessons from a drill instructor.

the one recent game i've really sunk myself into, foolishly, was borderlands 2 (see relevant thread) but my biggest beef, and probably the reason i've been least drawn to ever pick up that controller again, is that it was never hard. it sprawled through my time, hours and days' worth, but just because there was a lot of it. obstacles but not difficulty, ground to cover but very little that could really set you back. the one penalty of dying was losing tons of money, which you never needed for anything anyway. people play games differently these days and i get that losing a half-hour of progress is seen as un-fun. it is un-fun. but it's what made the game as a whole fun or at least satisfying. i'd say "especially action games" but man, nothing made the descent into some dark dungeon in an RPG come alive like the feeling that resources were running low, you'd fought all these creatures (with a few nail-biting victories) and found all this shit but you might not make it back to the surface. MUDs had this; original Final Fantasy had this. once you start seeing save points cropping up in the dungeons themselves you're already on your way to instantly respawning at the start of the current room you're in.

kid icarus was always weird to me - seemed like it was supposed to be this A-list title, much-hyped as part of that original "series" lineup of things, prominent though boring character on Captain N, but the game itself felt really clunky the one time i tried it. i gather that it gets easier, and in the way of metroidvanias, you get more powerful, but at the start you're just kind of poking along with this dinky arrow, and (IIRC) dying when you fall off the bottom of the screen even though that's where you just jumped up from. maybe i should try it again someday.

A+ nostalgia posts. I think I was relatively passive about this era of gaming because I had a huge enough backlog of C64 games to wade through that the consoles felt a little vestigial. No crazy rental memories for me.

I don't think I ever made it past the opening screen of Kid Icarus. I have the same memory if it being an 'important game' as well. Maybe it was on a cartoon or something.

man i went home for one hour and missed a bunch of amazing posts! now i gotta catch up w/ them while posting more awesome games (i really like today's batch)

it was on captain N!

https://saturdaymourningcartoons.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/captain-n-megaman-kid-icarus.jpg

seen here with ...ugh... mega-man. "Mega Hi!"

hahaha

admittedly better than the treatment of simon belmont as a preening bozo obsessed with his tan good looks:

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/castlevania/images/d/dd/Simon-belmont-captain-n.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20121226200328

mind you we all watched this regularly but we also haaaaated how they got stuff so wrong. actually this made it more satisfying - kids love having something they know about that they can be condescending to the larger world about. was thinking about this when we visited this really good animatronic dinosaur park recently - it was cool that they got so much RIGHT but actually if i was a kid, it would have been more complete if they'd gotten one or two dinosaurs mixed up or something. you need room to be smarter than the adults. i should really go get some work done today i guess, if i'm gonna waste time on ILX i might as well be playing rygar to be honest...

people play games differently these days and i get that losing a half-hour of progress is seen as un-fun. it is un-fun. but it's what made the game as a whole fun or at least satisfying.

YESSS. It's not that you just played a half hour of game and died it's that you LOST YOUR PROGRESS. As if the game is something you are supposed to be completing, filling it out like a spreadsheet. This is one reason Dark Souls rules, anything you loot is instantly yours regardless of if you die. It puts the emphasis back on the player's skill. Playing the game is playing the game, if you like to load up 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. and just jump around in the first screen you are playing the game. I think the internet, gamefaqs, and especially Achievements culture has done a lot to ruin this. If you don't have an obvious benefit or NEW CONTENT to show for your effort, it has been wasted. If you can't brag to your friends what is the point in playing?

picking up the stock line that video games weren't bad for kids because they improved "hand-eye coordination" which obviously is the kind of nonsense a 9-year-old would find really compelling evidence

LOL yes i found that immensely compelling. i still want to credit my early artistic leanings and a proficiency at drawing at least partially due to video games =)

BTW Kid Icarus is highly underrated.

77 - Sweet Home (NES) - 27 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/N7cRg3V.png

HG101's write-up

kid icarus is a top ten game, y'all aren't real gamers
*turns on heel and stomps away*

(i just fired up willow on openemu; trying to catch a few minutes of play every hour)

beating a typical NES game, or even being able to consistently progress pretty far into one, was an indicator that not only had you sunk a lot of time into it, but also that you were good at it. these days, beating a game just means you sunk enough time into it. like AB said, it's more about consuming content. i'm not sure that it's better or worse, it's just different. there was a recent kotaku thing where they argued that all games should just come with all the content "unlocked", so you can skip around to any level you want from the very beginning, and making the obvious analogies to films or books, where the intention is that the viewer/reader progresses linearly but there's nothing stopping them from skipping to the end. that argument would have seemed preposterous and radical, but it seems inevitable and correct in the context of today's games.

i'm not sure that it's better or worse, it's just different.

i know i'm quoting my own post there, sorry, but shit i'm just going to go all out and say the older way was better and more satisfying. it's not just the nostalgia talking. my irrefutable evidence is that there was a popular game (which will appear later in this rollout) that i played constantly as a kid that was notoriously difficult, but i could never beat it. several years passed, i sold my NES, went through the SNES/N64/PSX cycle, and then bought a new NES as an adult in the mid-2000s. i sunk way more time into the old impossible game and finally beat it, and goddamn if it wasn't one of the most satisfying moments i've ever had. it wasn't nostalgia, it was the feeling of doing something that relatively few people are able to do. i didn't just sink enough time into it to consume all the content - i finally saw everything by mastering it. tl;dr get off of my lawn

phar-mor

wow that really takes me back (grew up in columbus). i remember that phar-mor was the only place that i could rent the TENGEN games because blockbuster wouldn't stock them for whatever reason

really i shouldn't complain at all about the relative lack of challenge in today's games, because that's something that really only applies to the mainstream games. the challenging and rewarding games are still there, not only in the occasional blockbuster like Dark Souls but also in the whole roguelike community. i've been playing Downwell obsessively for the last week, desperately trying to just make it to level 3-1 (i really suck), but when i get there i know i'm going to be pumped.

74 - Little League Baseball: Championship Series (NES) - 28 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/6uyDZEb.png

this was my vote. i just really loved little league baseball.

pretty sure i've never played that

74 - StarTropics 2: Zoda's Revenge (NES) - 28 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/VOYr6O3.png

excellent cover, underrated game
MIKE IS READY FOR ANOTHER ADVENTURE...

woah that cover is EXTREEEEEME

I really must play Sweet Home. Every time I read about the game it sounds incredible. Maybe I should do that this weekend...

74 - Ys (Sega) - 28 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/Y7O4XNZ.png

wow, great posts everyone, i'm totally loving this thread

I was one of the Kirby's Adventure votes, that was a really great game that I think suffered from being a late addition to the NES. It came out in the middle of 1993, almost 2 years after the SNES release.

although it somehow looks like it placed in the top 100 of the Dom video game poll referenced upthread

no idea man, that dom one was all over the dang place

70 - Base Wars (NES) - 30 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/15Tp3CL.png

and the balls just keep on basin'

interesting, seems like everyone has a different favorite NES baseball game

hard not to love base wars though, just look at that screen shot!

i'm deadline-scrambling (so why am i even here) but this thread rules

i sunk way more time into the old impossible game and finally beat it, and goddamn if it wasn't one of the most satisfying moments i've ever had.

totally. i remember this week in college, maybe around 2004, that i got way back into castlevania. just sunk right back into it, only this time for whatever reason, i found i could actually get past frankenstein and igor, who had always been my major stumbling block. the grim reaper stage with the axe-men and the medusa heads was a fucking nightmare, but i really ground on it and i beat the fucker. i ultimately got to dracula.... and couldn't beat him. couldn't figure out the trick. kept trying, kept trying, kept trying. i did in fact give up one rainy night, but it didn't feel bad, or was at least bittersweet: i had gotten to dracula.

70 - Desert Falcon (Atari) - 30 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/KbsKzKL.png

ATARI 7800 MAKES AN APPEARANCE WHOOOOOAAAAAAA

ha, sphinx from this game should face off against the sea serpent from cobra triangle, based on the screenshots.

sincerely did not expect any 7800 games to place.

karl malone otm that there are actually plenty of hard games these days (and that tech advances have made games that are just about being somewhere, rather than necessarily doing something, more and more successful) but i sorta think the increasing passivity of the play experience in AAA games is indicative not just of the industry's dumbass cinematic pretensions but also of an audience expectation that power fantasies of ever-increasing sensual sophistication will not be made difficult or frustrating to access. it is a consumer-satisfaction thing. especially now that video game consumers are actual grown-up consumers who post angry comments instead of agencyless homunculi begging people w no understanding of or interest in the medium to buy them a game or two a year. (or being taken by pushers in dark alleys, as in the arcade era.)

dc that story is a vision of beauty

very good points re: the buyership of games. on the other hand, i've also been thinking lately about the buyership of 80s/90s high-end adventure games, text or later graphical. my dad played these before i played them, and he still remembers particular puzzles from zork ii. so while i played the games like crazy, they weren't all necessarily a "kids, beg your parents to buy this" kind of proposition. it's only become clear to me as a grownup how these were meant to fit into a grownup (particularly a white collar grownup)'s life: play a little every evening, get stuck on a puzzle, talk about it at the water cooler the next day, brainstorm shit with people who maybe aren't even playing the game maybe but might have ideas. "well, you said you have some kind of a brick with a string in it... what is it, like, a fuse?" the fifty dollar purchase might last you a month, maybe. that's good value if you've got the cash for it, and the value was related to the idea that you would get stuck and it would take a while.

so now i see people on the internet saying "those old games were only made arbitrarily difficult so you felt like you got your money's worth!" which isn't wrong but kinda misses the point, i think. getting your money's worth meant getting something difficult. that's what you wanted. it is not a less legitimate means of extending a game's length than adding more and more facile fetch quests and sub-missions. and it comes in different forms baked into the gameplay. in adventure games it was tough (sometimes, or often, ridiculous and stupid) puzzles. in a shooter, it's a million things flying at your face and being able to slip through those little one-pixel gaps. in mega man it's much more deliberative and patient, timing your jumps, choosing your weapons, and then having to really be fast on your feet for the bosses who are all faster and way more powerful than you.

70 - Ghostbusters (Sega) - 30 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/U7C5NdR.png

Last one of the day incoming!

70 - Ultima IV (Sega) - 30 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/7eui1Re.png

I guess I was the only person to vote for Base Wars. I spent many hours perfecting my approach to robot baseball domination. As a non-child I think I bought at least two used copies of it to relive my old glory. I wonder if…it’s possible…I am THE BEST PERSON ON PLANET EARTH AT THAT GAME

only one way to find out: plan and execute an international competition, preferably at the staples center with mountain dew as the sponsor

Doctor Casino otm.

feel like ILX has enough old school gamers where i can finally understand where u all are coming from compared to every single other video game forum on the internet.

and YAY at Desert Falcon making the list. i played that game forever, eventually getting to where i memorized the most beneficial hieroglyph combinations to get the one that warps you straight to the end boss of the level. every level has a palette swap for the main graphics, meaning after 3 or 4 levels things start to look very strange indeed.

what's funny is that i think this crowd is going to be even more on point for the 16-bit era. that one is really gonna be awesome. i know a few people bowed out of this one for not knowing the NES as well, and i also am more of a 16-bit guy. looking at my ballot now and smh smh smh

i am as baffled by someone putting ghostbusters in their #6 slot as i was for it even getting nominated. i guess i haven't played the master system, but at this point i suspect there was exactly one voter who had a master system, and voted a straight ticket of master system games. time will tell i guess. but i DARE all of you to play the NES version of that and come tell me it's one of the best games of its generation. tbf i also hated the movie so what do i know.

i'll definitely participate in the 16-bit poll, eagerly, but it'll be a different animal for me - MUCH more driven by stuff i checked out as an adult from say '99 on, emulated or otherwise. as a kid, we had a genesis and a small handful of games for it, and neighbors had super nintendos, so i experienced the games in various settings but not with anything like the same intensity as the NES. as well, honestly, the division of turf due to the console wars meant much less school-cafeteria consensus to draw on. everyone knew mario 3 and mega man 2 were the best, but most couldn't even have an informed opinion on say the sonic the hedgehog games. also i was becoming more awkward, withdrawn and ill-socialized which surely didn't help. but hey - i'm also nostalgic for my early 20s and the house i was living at in 2003 and all the excellent link-to-the-past collaboration that went down there, so i think i can manage a real ballot.

I'm more of an 8-bit guy. It's my parents fault they would never buy me a SNES.

Doctor Casino hates the Ghostbusters movie?! Say it's not so!

For the record: I was the sole vote for Ghostbusters, I did have a Master System, I did []not have a Nintendo but also didn't vote a straight Master System ticket. I played the shit out of Ghostbusters and was very fond of it. But I also, a few years earlier, played the shit out of E.T. on the 2600 so it's possible that my judgment is for shit.

haha i played a loooot of e.t. on the 2600, hating and not grasping every second of it, so i really have no leg to stand on.

ghostbusters the movie - got covered on this thread - I Have Never Seen Any Of These Movies; Please Advise - i've soured on it further since then i think. basically might be a "you had to be there" movie imo.

ufouria looks great, somebody tell me about it

― a llove spat over a llama-keeper (forksclovetofu)

It's somewhat metroid-ish in that it has a big map and power-ups that let you traverse new paths. has three bosses you can play as after you beat (hence u.FOUR.ia). has some rudimentary physics you didn't see elsewhere in that era. It wasn't released in North America until the Working Designs guy, Vic Ireland, got it on the Wii VC -- but that version has messed up audio, so play a ROM instead.

I guess I was the only person to vote for Base Wars. I spent many hours perfecting my approach to robot baseball domination. As a non-child I think I bought at least two used copies of it to relive my old glory. I wonder if…it’s possible…I am THE BEST PERSON ON PLANET EARTH AT THAT GAME

― rap is dad (it's a boy!), Friday, October 23, 2015 10:24 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You're a robot?

Damn i didnt read the last line

oh hey id never heard of ufouria before but it's the first in the hebereke series, hebereke's popoon is a classic snes puzzler that my brother used to play like crazy on rom in our teens.

Rygar and Kirby kinda got robbed IMO!

Rygar was the game I could barely get the hang of but that might be one of the first instances that I can trace back my current Twitch / YouTube "Long Plays" fascination to. I remember having friends in elementary school who were good enough to make substantial progress in Rygar and just hanging out watching them (or their older brothers) play Rygar to levels I'd never seen - it was amazing.

Kirby's Adventure is one of the first games I'd never played before I tried it out with an emulator on Mac OS 8 and then OS 9, and then I beat the thing, and I was so impressed - that was one of my first "WHY IS THIS NOT A CLASSIC?!?" experiences, having loved Bionic Commando and all the NES Mario platformers, and Strider, I was like oh yeah if the hero isn't a military assassin or a mustachioed plumber or armored knight, then of course nobody I would have known at the point in my life when Kirby came on the scene would have dared to admit "this is an awesome game!" I mean he's a pink globe that devours tough-looking people and assumes their most terrifying attributes. Without chewing. Anyway, it turns out Kirby's Adventure is a STRAIGHT UP CLASSIC and fuck all y'all who didn't vote for it.

yeah i have a lot of fond memories of kirby's adventure, espec the weird surprise last level that took place in space or something.

I never played NES Kirby, but I will be throwing Kirby's Dreamland lots of points when we get to the 4th gen poll.

i am as baffled by someone putting ghostbusters in their #6 slot as i was for it even getting nominated. i guess i haven't played the master system, but at this point i suspect there was exactly one voter who had a master system, and voted a straight ticket of master system games. time will tell i guess. but i DARE all of you to play the NES version of that and come tell me it's one of the best games of its generation. tbf i also hated the movie so what do i know.

my ballot was perversely anti-NES -- sonic chaos and ultima iv are me, along others -- but i did not vote for and have not played this ghostbusters game

C64 Ghostbusters had an interesting design -- bust ghosts for money, lose the game, restart with more cash, repeat until you win. I think the SMS version was the same. Can't say it all hung together (the driving sections were a big nothing, for example) but it was an interesting experiment.

The synthesized speech on the Spectrum Ghostbusters was gloriously incomprehensible.

AND WE'RE BACK

69 - 1943: Battle of the Midway (NES) - 32 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/VQd5NEz.png

i think i'm the one vote for that. my dentist office when i was a kid had an arcade machine w/ contra and battle of midway and i spent hours over my childhood playing both of them. surprised this didn't get more votes - such an excellent ww2 shmup.

I think of it & 1942 as arcade games more than nes ones fwiw

1942 was one of my favorite games. didn't know there was a 1943!

xp fair. i played it a bunch as an arcade game but later played it mostly on the nes (and found it was a fairly faithful port)

def rad games

woo! always happy to see this thread going again. How many are you planning on doing today, Will M?

fifteen today!

68 - RC Pro Am (NES) - 32 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/AZEMzAk.png

67 - Excitebike (NES) - 33 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/zOQIXDj.png

wow nice run of games.

"Excitebike" one of the very best titles for a game in the whole NES library IMO.

great cover too

65 - Phantasy Star (Sega) - 34 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/rw3weJU.png

Wrecking in Excitebike was one of the first things that I remember ever made me LOL from a video game. not every time, obviously, but there were some maneuvers that could happen in that game that were pretty decent approximations of slapstick.

Phantasy Star is one of those very big-name series where I've somehow managed to never played a single game. It looks great; never had a system it was available on and probably couldn't have played it if I did:

In the United States, Phantasy Star sold for the then-high price of $69.99, with some retail outlets such as Toys R Us selling for as much as $80.00. Although some home computer games had been known to sell for $100 or more, such as 1982's Time Zone, Phantasy Star was the most expensive console game ever sold at the time. When the Sega Master System received a price drop in the form of the Master System II hardware, the game was only $10 less than the console itself.

Yikes! Oh well. I could still rent Dragon Warrior.

1942 and 43 are the ur-SHMUP for me, definitely the first scrollers i got into.
RC Pro Am is loads of fun, the few times I played Phantasy Star I loved it. It felt like a better Dragon Warrior but we were a Nintendo household so...
I was one of the votes for Excitebike, primarily because it was the first game I remember playing where you could MOD LEVELS and I spent a lot of time building. Love the physics.

also that gear grinding noise as the engine almost overheated followed by the CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK purrrrrrrrrr of the crash as you stumble walk back to the bike are hardwired to my brain

It's insane to recall how expensive some early console games (and movies in the early days of VHS) were. Like almost impossible to understand insane.

And now you can buy a new copy of that PS3 Sega Genesis collection for probably $15, wherein Phantasy Star is one of severar dozen games to choose from.

A simple Purchasing Power Calculator would say the relative value is $104.00. This answer is obtained by multiplying $60 by the percentage increase in the CPI from 1991 to 2014.

That is $60 in 1991 dollars is worth about $100 in 2015 dollars.

64 - Romance of the Three Kingdoms (NES) - 35 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/UgOhW5Z.png

xp y'all are forgetting about the neo geo and the 3do
http://techgenmag.com/2015/05/neo-geo-high-cost-of-arcade-perfection/

Unfortunately, the AES did not have the MVS’s value proposition. In fact, the AES had value against it as the cost of the system and its games far exceeded the norm. A new AES cartridge retailed anywhere from $100 to $300. Put another way: a Neo-Geo cartridge cost as much as a Nintendo or Sega console packaged with two controllers and a game.

who was the other RotTKingdoms voter?
I loved that game. Used to keep notebooks of fanfic describing every year's events in the kingdom.

Tried to read the english translation of the source material in college, got about halfway through. it's long!

oops, i skipped one.

65 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (NES) - 34 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/UGOAp4s.png

This sort of came out too late to matter - the neighbors had an SNES and Turtles in Time and so this got one rental from Phar-Mor as mentioned above but never had a place in my heart. The previous one was similarly sort of saddled by being explicitly a port of the arcade game --- a pretty good port but nonetheless not the same thing. Would have been better just to call it Turtles II since it was so clearly superior to the first one, would have had a better narrative going in. Nonetheless, both were good beat-em-ups by NES standards - if not as colorful and detailed as their arcade counterparts, they were at least as fluid as Double Dragon, with a little more fake variety owing to the pseudo-differences between Turtles, and without too much sprite lag.

63 - Lemmings (NES) - 36 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/rrYDf3x.png

loved lemmings on PC, found it unplayable on NES

I think I was the other romance voter. They (Kaoi?) put out some amazing classics on consoles which is kind of remarkable since all their games seem like pc games. Snes had some amazing games by them- when we get to that poll I look forward to replaying their revolutionary war game (liberty and death?)

TMNT3 was my vote, btw. I played this one more than 2 (maybe I played the arcade version more, but I played Manhattan Project the most on NES) because a friend of mine owned it. It's one of the first beat-em-ups I remembered with asymmetrical abilities. (I hope I'm not misremembering that). The different Turtles had different super-attacks, with some of them being awesome (Donatello) and some of them not so much (Raphael). Also, I think I beat this game? MAybe with a Game Genie?

60 - California Games (NES) - 36 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/3pWJIhK.png

ah, California games. one of the standout titles of the Collection of Minigames Including One That Doesn't Make Any Sense and Someone Lost the Instructions So It's Permanently Impossible genre

Californian games surfing was awesome, can still picture it perfectly in my mind like I played it recently, probably haven't played it in more than 20 years.

holy shit even just at screenshot of romance of the three kingdoms, never played that.

I don't think any version of Lemmings was perfect. There'd always be a section where you had to do things with perfect timing, or a section where you had to click on a pile of lemmings and hope you'd get the one facing the right way.

I played all of the Epyx Games on C64. Great fun. The modern counterpart is probably those 1-minute-long flash/phone games.

romance3k was basically a pen and paper tabletop game that would have required eight or ten players

60 - Friday the 13th (NES) - 36 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/NnXUMCf.png

60 - Prince of Persia (NES) - 36 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/nUgtmpI.png

friday the 13th is kind of subjectively not very good.

or objectively? it's not very good.

i never played it, only nightmare on elm street, which was REALLY not good.

59 - Mother (a.k.a. Earthbound Zero) (NES) - 36 points / 3 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/lbqWY5C.png

Coincidentally, the AV Club just today put up an article about the NES Friday The 13th game.

someday i will play Mother... I haven't yet. In fact I haven't beat Earthbound or Mother 3 (although Earthbound I got pretty far in).

58 - Blades of Steel (NES) - 37 points / 3 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/16HMcKM.png

That AV Club article is on point. Friday the 13th can't be written off as easily as Nightmare because it has these cool ideas in there submerged in a terrible game.

Earthbound is brutal enough to get through, even with emulator shortcuts. Never got past the opening 15 minutes of the Mother US prototype. You're not really playing them for the gameplay anyway...

Friday the 13th is MISERABLE to play though. You have to tramp all over the goddamn camp and it's virtually impossible to time it right.

Oh, I know, I know. That game is bad enough to give PTSD.

I have a flight on Weds w a very long layover in Denver so I plan on bringing my PSP loaded w an NES emulator. Might miss the rollout at the end of the week though...

Didn't vote but BoS would have been top 3 for me.

man blades of steel is so legit. not dodgeball great but way better than the blackbox classics

about a decade ago i scoured the internet for a rom of romancing the three kingdoms (nes) but couldnt find a working english one. i was deeply invested in the snes sequel and really wanted to play the first one and have always been curious abt it. i spent hours playing seiken denetsu 3 instead iirc. the o.g. phantasy star is pretty legit but its worse than final fantasy probably. but all those early rpgs are pretty bad i think, outside of phantasy star ii and maybe some of the ultimas.

remember when sports games were fun?

55 - Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES) - 38 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/k2OxtBa.png

blades of steel was awesome but ice hockey is forever my fave nes icerink game

blades of steel was incredible in my memory. what did you do to make your dude blink like invincible mario? and what did it do for you? realizing my memories of a lot of these games is SOOOO spotty

lamp, i think my ro3k rom works, ilxmail me. you should know that it is VERY remedial.
all the lolos are highly underrated

55 - Metal Gear II* (NES) - 38 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/fhbpgTd.png

big, big, big asterisk there. I am the only voter for that one because I thought I was voting for Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which never came out on NES. I was instead voting for Snake's Revenge, which is apparently a different game and also apparently kind of a piece of shit.

WHOOPS.

I GOT RATIONS

xp lol

55 - Speedball 2 (Sega) - 38 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/hxYoVfn.png

aaaaand that's it for today!

almost all of the sega games so far look hideous

Misread that as Spaceballs 2 and wondered how I'd overlooked the first one.

speedball 2 was amazing but i guess it had no business coming out on master system, that version looks garbage

Lolo rules.

mea culpa. the master system games look slightly worse because they output at a different resolution as the NES games, and I am forcing the images to stretch to the NES's resolution for the poll. they don't look QUITE as bad unstretched.

don't make excuses for the Master System. don't you EVER make excuses for the Master System.

256x240 NES, 256x192 Master System (fyi)

xp haha i'm sorry. it just nintendon't look very good.

for graphics this is how i basically break it down to an extent
NES > Master System
SNES < Genesis
N64 < Saturn

was genesis higher resolution?

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~dherring/cgt141/project1/comparison.html
Note that this ignores Mode 7
(on a different day, i might say SNES > Genesis tbqh)

blades of steel was awesome but ice hockey is forever my fave nes icerink game

same here! ice hockey is really light and floaty but it's FAST. so much fun with another friend. blades of steel is p stiff in comparison and I could never really get w/the slightly tilted perspective.

otoh, "FLIP THE PASS!"

xp SNES had much much MUCH better games of course

weirdly, yes, though SNES had a lot more tricks (might higher color depth, alpha transparency, layer modes) which generally gave it the edge imo. also a double resolution mode that nobody used? I do remember some wack SNES ports where the Genesis got the superior/crisper version though (Aladdin)

And Ice Hockey was a better game, but Blades of Steel had CINEMATIC FIGHTING!

btw, I didn't bother to vote in this poll, because EMOTIONS.

I do remember some wack SNES ports where the Genesis got the superior/crisper version though (Aladdin)

iirc genesis aladdin and snes aladdin were two different games made by two different companies.

also a possible reason that games looked better on one console or the other is that some companies would make one console their "lead platform"-- i.e. the one they developed for first, the other being a "port," more or less, done at the same time (but better than a port b/c it's being done at the same time with the intent being that the two are equal in quality). I believe the MK games had genesis as a lead platform, which is why it looked a bit better, but many other games had the SNES, probably because it was the better-selling platform and that's where the money was, therefore that version needed to be the best. (granted, i am applying modern game-making methods to older consoles, but this is definitely why ps3 games weren't as good as they could be, because the 360 was the lead platform and it was a weaker console, for example).

I did not see this poll in time and I suspect that these fantastic NES games will not make the cut:

Double Dare
Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular
Adventures of Dino Riki
Balloon Fight
Power Blade 2
Fester's Quest

Also, Little League World Series > RBI Baseball >>>>>>>>> Base Wars >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Bases Loaded

Little League World Series > RBI Baseball >>>>>>>>> Base Wars >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Bases Loaded
*vigorous head nod*

but not bases loaded 3 tho

balloon fight! love that

baseball stars was my fave

really anguished over letting players go because this screen was so sad ;__;

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/48948-baseball-stars-nes-screenshot-you-re-fired.gif

haha. I've not played Baseball Stars. But I can tell that it's better than Bases Loaded because you don't have to bat from the second baseman's perspective.

I loved letting players go because they were replaced on your roster with an empty stat version of the same player, so you could reallocate their stats in whatever way you wanted. Built some real juggernaut teams that way!

Base Wars was cool, but you could win games by destroying enough players on the other team by hitting them with pitches. You could also build your own team filled with players having laser guns and laser swords! You didn't have to but of course you are going to if you have that kind of power!

you heartless monster!

x-post, haha

good tunes, blades, and newt suits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIy6AWXMTc4

Friday the 13th isn't bad. It has some patterns like any other game and it's very easy to master. And since it's just a couple patterns and locations that you gotta memorize, it's way easier than other games. Beating Jason takes about 35 minutes once you get it down.

I bought this in college because I was ready to face my fears. Definitely worth it. 4/5 stars. Would rate again.

http://i769.photobucket.com/albums/xx334/Elkovsky/NES%20pics/Fridaythe13th_013.png
ps. If you accidentally find Jason's mother (not required to win), you're gonna get fucked

omg get out of there laura!!

lol

I don't think I knew that a Sega Master System existed before this thread. The name "Sega Genesis" threw me off the scent for a few decades.

same here!

I think of genesis & nes as same gen btw, b/c the genesis came out between nes & snes.

only vote of mine to place today was RC Pro Am, that game seemed like NEXT GEN graphics when it came out.

woulda voted EXCITABIKE (that's how I say it, friend musta said it that way) and Blades of Steel with a longer ballot though

that's how EVERYONE should say it: EXCITABIKE
i had a friend with a master system and an nes. he also ultimately got a genesis, a neo geo, an snes and a turbographix 16. First kid to get a gameboy too. He was quite a popular dude for sleep overs.

man a friend with a neo geo, that would have been amazing. I wasn't ever sure that they were real even, like how could something that good even be possible. I actually don't know if they were that good.

they weren't! they were basically like having an arcade game in your house which woulda been GREAT if he had samurai showdown or something but i just remember this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvFuRvZaQLw

and maybe this too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDjqJDAYA6I

basically SMB3 > everything put together that you could get on a neo geo in 1991

yeah those don't look great, like lame versions of contra

fyi everyone: i am sick as hell and i might not be able to post any tomorrow (since I may call in sick to work, and i have all my images and stuff here)... I will try though!

almost all of the sega games so far look hideous

― polyphonic, Monday, October 26, 2015 7:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i just can't with you people

:(

actually a lot of these NES games look a lot better than the generic NES platformer image i have in my head! the master system is technically better (bigger sprites / more colours on screen / no sprite flicker / higher res) but i think there's a more cohesive 'good looking NES game' look -- its a matter of designing pixel art around negative space and contrast or smth

i'm equally baffled by forks' assertion that genesis/megadrive games look better than snes games, there is a cohesive megadrive look also and that look is 'our game just got back from a long run on a muddy day'

100% agreed about genesis graphics - the system did certain things fine, and its best-looking games do look GREAT (the sonic series obv) but in general either the system or people designing for it seemed to favor a basic dinginess. not that every SNES game was bright, colorful and punchy (something like super castlevania iv basically looks like a 'genesis game' in my head) but in my mind they mostly are closer to chrono trigger than final fantasy vi to put it another way. but i'm sure we'll revisit this next poll...

it may just be a "grass is greener on the other side" thing, i dunno. I never owned a genesis but playing some of those games on an emulator has me envious that i missed them when they would've given me real excitement. cest la vie.

I only had an NES up to the 64 bit era, and I would have chosen a Genesis over SNES back then. The Genesis always seemed more provocative. I think this was largely due to things like the urine fatality in Primal Rage being taken out of the SNES port. My mind was ruled by blood codes in those days. Today, I'd say that SNES towers over Genesis, maybe even showers it with acidic urine.

this list seems pretty bad

I was so happy when Nintendo finally relented and let them put the blood back in MK2. There are still many games the Genesis had that were awesome like Streets of Rage 2, Gunstar Heroes, Castlevania Bloodlines, etc. but as has been said, it'll be well trodden when we get to the next generation poll.

That list doesn't have games that were ported to later generations, like the ones I mentioned

My mind was ruled by blood codes in those days.

xp yeah, true. I don't think that list is a good argument after reading more closely.

the SNES equivalent wouldn't have any of the final fantasy games, for example, but would have the snes-only sequel to the TMNT arcade game

anyway, five games on that list i would happily give a few hours of my time to right now:

ranger x
herzog zwei
castlevania: bloodlines
crusader of centy
rocket knight adventures

i also watched a let's play and a speedrun of the dungeons and dragons game recently but that is not recommended to other human beings

i'm gonna do an unrated genesis-only ballot next round and see if i can manage a straight streak of 20 games no one else voted for

also i believe the next game is another master system one of mine that i decided the other day the famicom version was better after all

yeah, youtube gameplay for those games looks pretty great. I am definitely biased toward NES franchises.

deadly towers isn't getting any votes, is it? we spent hundreds of hours on that game and we knew it was terrible

yes.

hahaha we did the same, for reasons I cannot fathom

oh shit I messed up

I did not nominate LUNAR POOL

BAN THIS POLL, best game ever

anyone here who did not grow up in the NES era should play an hour each of deadly towers, spelunker, and elevator action to simulate having an older brother who did not always spend his summer-job income wisely. but the games were there; you were going to play them.

elevator action wasn't that bad. was much better than in the arcade b/c it was a quarter eater in the arcade

something unfathomably depressing about even the title 'elevator action'

Adventures In The Cupboard

I'm realizing that my ballot for the next poll will probably be a straight Genesis/Game Boy ticket, as I barely touched a SNES to my recollection.

I'm also realizing that my ballot for this poll is peppered with C64 games I confused with their console analogues but which are not actually the same game at all (e.g. Friday The 13th). Mea culpa, mea culpa.

haha yeah elevator action was a perfectly serviceable port of a fine little arcade game, and the jaunty little tune does pop into my head from time to time, but like, why did my brother think he had to own it? he didn't understand about renting before you buy and he did not read nintendo power. actually most of his NES game-buying may have been from the year or two before nintendo power dropped. would explain a lot. maybe the video store wasn't even renting nintendo games yet. i would have been in like kindergarten/first grade so it's a bit hazy.

I'm also realizing that my ballot for this poll is peppered with C64 games I confused with their console analogues but which are not actually the same game at all (e.g. Friday The 13th). Mea culpa, mea culpa.

The C64 "Friday the 13th" was one of the worst games I ever played on that computer, the only memorable thing about it were the fake blood capsules that came with the package. Can't imagine why anyone would vote for that?

Oh, I'm certain that I played and enjoyed even worse C64 games than that. Besides, you got to walk around and pick up random weapons and kill people (who would scream when you killed them). That was like Shangri-La for an 11-year-old horror fan in the '80s.

whenever we get to polling C64 games i am going to have a REALLY hard time making a ballot - so, so many hours sunk into so much crap of which i am now irrationally fond. unlike NES games, i've never seriously picked any of them back up except maybe occasional what-the-heck plays in the mid-to-late 90s, so i have no later-life experience to help clarify things.

the computer and all the games are still in my dad's attic; i can easily imagine myself as the kind of retiree who gets into painstakingly restoring his corroded malfunctioning C64 and tries to coax life out of 5-1/4" floppies of spy vs. spy, olli and lisa, and cave of the word wizard.

OLLI AND LISSA!!

Yeah, I'll probably wind up buying/rebuilding a C64 at some point. I'm sure all the games are still at my mom's somewhere.

Old Lunch, thank you for helping Friday the 13th rank higher on this list ;)

so here's the process i have to do to make the images

- get all of the pics to go in it (screens, box art)
- put them in a PSD at work
- once the batch is done, email them to myself from work pc
- when i get home, download them from email and upload to imgur
- email myself the links to the images
- put the image links into the text file w/ the rankings
- post the text files

so last night i didn't have the time/energy to make the images because i was late/sick, so i am going to make them now, so basically: is anyone willing to spoil for themselves today's rankings for the greater good? can i email you the images and get you to email me back URLs to them uploaded (pref imgur because it works the best, but any good alternative works)?

i'm happy to if you want.

ok cool forks! I'll send you an email shortly, thanks!

bravo to both of you!

Thanks duders, enjoying this thread

today is brought to you by forks :D thanks for the quick turnaround forks!

54 - Dragon Warrior III (NES) - 38 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/I2eWkIN.png

no prob.
i don't think i ever played DWIII; the first (which will likely place high here) and the second were fairly important games in my mythology.

I got DWIII only in maybe 1995 and had a grand old time with it even though I'm pretty sure I got through maybe the first fourth or third of the game before it glitched and I lost my savegame. Couldn't tell you a damn thing about what actually happens in it, just that I'm sure in my memory that it was much richer and bigger than the first one - way more of a classic JRPG with a party, character class changes, a lot more dialogue and towns, etc. I guess there was an SNES port, which makes it look even more like a Final Fantasy game. I should emu this sometime.

upcoming: the last "only voted for by one person" entry!

53 - Bomberman (NES) - 40 points / 1 First-place vote / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/U3dlTWT.png

as DW3 the one that took place over multiple generations? or was that 4? or something else?

I guess that was 5, haha. i played the remake for DS. i didn't ever play DQ 1-3 I don't think.

dee dubs iii kinda a bad game tbh - all the nes draggy wars are really. i have no nostalgic attachment to games of that era and cant imagine the stamina it took to play them when you couldnt use the tilde key to ff through the tedious grinding and travelling. good mechanics though even its mostly a drag

didnt know there was an nes bomberman - the snes bomberman legit all-timer

NES Bomberman had surprisingly huge horizontally-scrolling maps for the time. I loved it though I never got too far.
The Dragon Warrior games were brutal, but I vaguely remember III and IV doing some really cool stuff with multiple-character story POVs that other NES RPGs hasn't yet tried (though I guess Phantasy Star already did?)

I wasn't aware of the nes bomberman either. 4 player snes super bomberman one of the greatest playing experiences possible

nes bomberman was my first exposure to the gameplay. it remains maybe my fave multiplayer.

51 - Ninja Gaiden II (NES) - 41 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/7ZXsIot.png

narrowly beaten by the first one for my ballot but an undeniable classic

never could beat the first one so i never bought the second one.

51 - Wonder Boy in Monster World (Sega) - 41 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/1ckUFmo.png

That one's okay. I really dig Monster World IV. Both are available in a bundle on PSN.

50 - Ultima Exodus (NES) - 42 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/IJmQhnT.png

Ninja Gaiden II would've made my Top 5. God I love that game. Always frustrated when modern games don't have same deftness of feel, what put this one above the original for me was how smooth it felt to bounce from wall to wall as you were cutting through stages, along with that great shadow clone gimmick. The game's music and cutscenes are committed to my memory forever.
(It's also a lot easier than the first one, which was another plus in its favor.)

Higher than Ultima IV shocker!

49 - Crystalis (NES) - 44 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/x1Zg7IS.png

I wrote this game's name as Crysalis forever, didn't realize the sword was supposed to be a T

the soundtrack to this game is so good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT932-ecqJE

check out One Hope, Fields, Inner Mountains, some others that I am probably forgetting

shit, i thought htat'd just be a link with the https, click view on youtube for bookmarks

48 - Baseball Simulator 1.000 (NES) - 50 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/v8cSdXs.png

You guys really loved baseball games !

man, something really dramatic about the juxtaposition of ninja gaiden and "wonder boy in monster world" - i love a good sunny cartoony game but man... i'll take impossible ninja bullshit in this case. actually the two ninja gaiden sequels kinda blur together in my mind. i know III was the one that limited the number of continues, which was insane - was anyone clamoring for these games to be harder? was this the one that had the wind level, and the level where everything's in the dark? good gimmicks, good level design. together with the cut scenes you always felt like you were in a really exciting, forward-moving story in ninja gaiden games - you could really buy into that urgency for your character.

as noted above i find it totally bizarre to imagine playing CRPGs on the NES, but it makes the most sense with things like Exodus. like basically this is not that much more complex than something like dragon warrior iii, so no reason it can't translate. by IV it's nuts - everything that's really interesting about the game comes from the text parser, keywoard conversation, role-playing choices, and increasingly, interacting with the world. not to mention mixing reagents (ugh).

confession, i have always gotten startropics and crystalis mixed up. two zelda-ish games (with more elaborate RPG elements and story), same year. both intrigued me but both felt, i dunno, too kid-friendly or something? like the way Mystique Quest and Secret of Evermore did a few years later. and i never really checked them out even in emu days.

47 - Adventures of Lolo (NES) - 51 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/t5n3RQm.png

i didn't know abotu crystalis until the emu days, so i never mixed it up w/ startropics which i played at my best friend's neighbour's house on nintendo. they both nailed a kind of loneliness that i don't think exists in games as much anymore (and which i feel like i have made my goddamn thesis on every board ever, it's will talking about lonely video games again!) but i played them years apart. i really gotta play both again.

startropics is the better game but crystalis was more unforgiving iirc

lolo was solid. curious what you mean about loneliness, will! like the general unsociability of the game world?

v upset about these baseball game rankings

at the end i might compile (unless will has his own plans!) all the series together, see how they would rank without vote-splitting. kinda thinking one 'series' might have to be "every baseball game." how were there so many of these!?!

startropics is legit crystalis is... not, really. ninja gaiden should probably be a lot higher

I would bet this is partly due to baseball being a popular sport in Japan (compared to, like, ice hockey or football)

Ninja Gaiden should probably be higher

yeah, i feel like a lot of the best moments in games are ones where you realize that your character can never really "be" an npc, if that makes sense. it can be superficial things like the fact that your sprite has more animations, better art, etc. but it also manifests, at least in those action rpg type games, as this thing like "all of these people, just live in this town, they'll never know what it's like to go into that ice cave." you continue on, you gain levels, and as you do, you become less of a townsperson and more of something that townspeople can't comprehend. you mutate and grow and become more alien.

most of my comparisons will be 16-bit, but chrono trigger is a rare-ish example of a game that is truly ensemble--everyone in your party feels equally "important" so it's less lonely, and yet crono is still silent. still lonely. compare further to illusion of gaia--a game where the only people who help you can only exist in the game world when you don't (will, shadow?, the knight guy) and it's a character who needs to do something for the wood of the world that other people can never quite comprehend.

last game that i think nailed it was the first mass effect. you have the party, but so often you'll just be out on some remote moon, tooling around in the mako, no chatter from your team, nothing--just you, a mission nobody else can do, a barren landscape, ambient synth jams and an incredible imagined alien sky.

many xposts haha. @ Doctor Casino, go for it! with the series thing i mean. although maybe i should do it, because then if someone votes 3 times for one "series" i can just count the highest one or something?

also baseball is popular on NES because it was the easiest sport to reproduce, i would reckon!

46 - Pro Wrestling (NES) - 52 points / 3 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/EEOBeKL.png

Ahh some of my picks have arrived, excellent

but it also manifests, at least in those action rpg type games, as this thing like "all of these people, just live in this town, they'll never know what it's like to go into that ice cave." you continue on, you gain levels, and as you do, you become less of a townsperson and more of something that townspeople can't comprehend. you mutate and grow and become more alien.

this is one of my favorite things about fallout 1

Pro Wrestling had the best characters of any wrestling game ever

http://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/system/images/photo_albums/super-smash-bros-challengers/large/pro-wrestling-smash-bros.PNG?1384968217

ninja gaiden 2 ain't so hard. not nearly as rough as 1 or 3. building up a wall of shadow ninjas really let you do some damage.

While Pro Wrestling was totally awesome, I weep for the lack of recognizition for Tecmo World Wrestling which was totally a better version/ripoff of this with Ninja Gaiden cutscenes

hm maybe ill buy NG2

Will, I've love to read your lonely game thesis!

we have zero clue where THE AMAZON could possible originate. his age: unknown. however he is a solid 230 pounds, no doubt about that.

Ninja Gaiden II was my #6 pick. Awesome game.

God, I forgot about Tecmo Wrestling. I played a ton of that.

I might make a "lonely games" thread on ILG after all of this

45 - Duck Hunt (NES) - 54 points / 5 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/QdS3b12.png

<3 light gun

i was the nes bomberman #1. i think i might have meant bomberman 2, but it wasn't nominated--not sure if the first one had multiplayer or not. multiplayer is essential. regardless, bomberman is tetris-mario-doom beautiful.

Duck Hunt, starring THAT F@#$ING DOG

re: ninja gaiden - i expect we'll still see #1 higher up in the list!

re: loneliness - that makes a ton of sense. and yeah, i like that about these games. in general, the hero's 'quest' has this weirder, more mythic quality in games with very little dialogue and just the one protagonist... you can fill in a lot of the scope or importance of the story, this one solitary struggle. a few choice illustrations (whether in cutscenes or in the manual, like zelda) are enough. the sparseness of the townsfolk dialogue really enhances this. i never played illusion of gaia, but terranigma probably takes this to the most extreme extent in a way by having you survive various geologic ages of the world while everybody else putters along dealing with their obviously super minor problems.

i also fall on the side of it being good for the protagonist to be an empty, mute vessel for the player. sometimes the protagonist is very clearly a character and it works just fine (ninja gaiden) but i feel like the more you introduce this person, the greater the risk there is of fucking up, or miscalculating what a player really will identify with. in particular i feel like it was always a huge mistake to introduce the lead character as a kid, where you find the helmet or sword or whatever and become the hero. like, that's what imagination is for, i would be the hero anyway. this probably contributed to my vague feeling that StarTropics was a "kid's game." but i'm also reaching back across two decades here. it's possible that as a kid i actually did daydream about being the dumb kid from Blaster Master, and finding a secret tunnel under the yard that led to adventure. but i don't think so, even as i do think that game would have benefited from having more of a story - cutscenes after the bosses or even bits of text to find in the dungeons would have given you a lot more to chew on.

re: series games, well, if someone was willing to use two of their vote slots for games in the same series, i'd count both!

PRO WRESTLING 4 EVAAAAAAAAA

I can't remember if I voted for NG2 but I should have. played so much of it. I remember being totally blown away by the graphical upgrade too. seems like that was around when devs really started figuring out how to push the NES.

iirc there's also this one cutscene where a pool of blood awakens a demon or something and I was very into that cutscene, thank you lazy censors.

exodus higher than avatar would totally have been an upset on the pc but i never played the nes ports, what were they like?

if allowed, the SMB/Duck Hunt combo cartridge would win

44 - Maniac Mansion (NES) - 54 points / 1 First-place vote / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/HSWfpyG.png

lol re: the amazon. i guess he/she has to weigh in to enter the ring whereas the rest of the stuff on the form has fine print saying it's optional and is collected only for statistical purposes.

duck hunt is great and placed pretty high n my ballot. it's all about the synaesthetic union of the particular p-KANG! sound/feel of the light gun's trigger in synch with the NES's noise chip PFFFWFF and the microsecond flash of light when you make a hit. later light guns and light gun games seem to have always struggled and i think on some level it's because it's obvious that if you had duck hunt, you had everything they could offer. a very very simple game, like an old arcade game - was always weird to me that it was ever its own cartridge and not a twofer with super mario bros. but the good kind of arcade-simple.

it's a shame there weren't any more good light gun console games. even while games of that type continued to do pretty good business in arcades. presumably developers were skittish about a game that required a peripheral that not everyone had... most of the light gun games are very basic things from very early in the system, clearly intended to support the idea that this package of accessories corresponded with a library of fun titles. would have been amazing if the ingenuity and richness that appeared in platformers and action-adventure things over the later years of the system's life could have shown up in a light gun game. it's hard for them to not just feel like a target-practice "cardboard cutouts are popping up!" deal like operation wolf and its successors but it's interesting to think about.

starting to think that gyromite mite not place :(

OMG, if anyone mentioned Pro Wrestling before just now I would've been all "yeah, okay, Pro Wrestling, so what" until I saw that screenshot and goddamn if I don't totally remember Pro Wrestling. The Amazon!!

man, maniac mansion has such a great cover. this is another one that i think of as fundamentally a PC game, but one for which the port seems to have really been almost harmless to the basic gameplay, assuming you could stand controlling a point-and-click cursor with the D-pad.

question: how many people here knew that if you aimed the light gun at an incandescent light bulb, it would register every shot as a hit?

question 2: how many people knew that a controller plugged into port 2 could control the duck?

^ above q's about duck hunt btw

I think Maniac Mansion was a game I rented and didn't get very far with. I love the idea of it.

during moments of peak Duck Hunt rage, I would have given anything for the rules of that universe to slip up and allow me to zap that dog. he totally had it coming

I used to cheat at duck hunt by firing the light gun point blank range at the centre of my tv screen, would almost 100% result in a hit. Really useless and silly cheat, and since it wasn't quite 100% not even that effective.

The story in Crystalis is pretty terribly sad as I recall. Maybe not as sad as some latter day entries in the Zelda series but definitely bad news for an NES game.

Baseball Simulator 1.000 was THE SHIT. I used to run that thing in season mode. My teams with all the super abilities would inevitably destroy everybody else. I loved setting up my lineup to inevitably produce a grand slam every time the cleanup hitter came around.

lol yeah, you could have a friend use the 2nd control pad to fly all the ducks into a corner iirc

I think I was the first place vote for Maniac Mansion. I was borderline obsessed with that game for a long time. Still have never played Day Of The Tentacle but it's being released for the Vita soon. So I'm gonna have to finally buy a Vita, I guess.

DOTT is GOAT

old lunch, you are truly in for a treat when you get to DOTT, it's a classic.

and I didn't know that trivia about Duck Hunt! neato!!

baseball simulator 1.000 is the king of NES baseball games, glad to see at least one other person voted for it!

the wikipedia for maniac mansion (specifically regarding the NES port) is a hoot, just in terms of what a struggle it was with the nintendo board of censorship.

The ability to microwave a hamster remained in the game, which Crockford cited as an example of the censors' contradictory criteria.[1][33] However, Nintendo later noticed it, and after the first batch of cartridges was sold, Jaleco was forced to remove the content from future shipments.[32][33]

i was wondering why they didn't attempt any of the other SCUMM games - at least zak mcracken, after which the complexity of environments and animations may have really left the NES behind - but maybe it was just so much of a hassle they just said forget it. or maybe maniac mansion was a flop; i have no idea.

Are baseball games still a fixture of console gaming? I know football is, but I have no idea if baseball is as popular. I have a feeling it isn't, that the NES was the system/era most suited to video game baseball.

43 - Deja Vu (NES) - 55 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/8WUZQ9n.png

Are baseball games still a fixture of console gaming? I know football is, but I have no idea if baseball is as popular. I have a feeling it isn't, that the NES was the system/era most suited to video game baseball.

Yeah not so much. The Show and Super Mega Baseball are both excellent tho

there def arent 40 nes games better than maniac mansion

baseball games nowadays are pretty much down to:
- mlb: the show for the playstation consoles, which are incredible. i would probably put them on my year-end list every year if there weren't other games i wanted to rep harder.
- 2k i think still makes a mediocre product? or maybe they stopped? it was bad
- some arcade-y games to varying degrees of success: the rbi baseball reboot, and super mega baseball
- some mobile games
- out of the park baseball, a football manager-style spreadsheet game

definitely not the open field (no pun intended) it once was. xxp yeah i took too long to write this

how do kids/teens relate to baseball these days? i was never a fan but my understanding in the late 80s/early 90s was that it was a Big Deal, maybe partly because atlanta was doing well so it was in the paper and on the news a lot. my vague sense is that the many scandals and so on have contributed to its further marginalization from the national-pastime center. in general i feel it's a mistake for all the sports games to chase super-realism and real players and real licenses and so on. i would be more interested in cyborg death-match baseball or whatever. but i don't buy video games really.

Super Mega Baseball looks p tight.

Unless my memory is totally deceiving, almost every kid in the 80's / 90's played co-ed t-ball. At least where I'm from. It was enough for almost everyone to have a general understand of the rules. I have no idea how kids today relate to the sport.

42 - Rad Racer (NES) - 56 points / 3 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/Cq4P2sU.png

(second last one of the day)

One time I blew this kids mind by playing rad racer with a power glove.

Rad Racer seems really familiar but it also looks a lot like a bunch of other games

rad racer...a rad game...

"it's a shame there weren't any more good light gun console games" GUMSHOE!!!!!

Hogan's Alley was sort of fun I think

wow, Gumshoe is p weird

yeah it was but GUMSHOE was a gun platformer! bizarre game but totally fun

xp

otm

I remember rad racer being p terrible but the 3d glasses just gave me a headache so maybe that extra dimension was key

41 - Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap (Sega) - 60 points / 2 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/Gf04N90.png

40-26 tmrw. 25-11 thurs. 10-1 fri. STOKED

hellll yeeeeeah

dragon's trap was in my top 5, this game is the shit

rad racer was surprisingly deep and amazingly fun to play as a non-racer gamer

you're not fooling anyone Wonder Boy, we know you're a 31-year-old father of 2

It's a prequel to the Michael Douglas film iirc

hahaha, would totally play an 8-bit Willow-style Wonder Boys RPG

Speed Run of Deadly Towers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXggQm9EGLw

At one point early on the guy doing the run is like "the thing is with this game is it's just very badly programmed, and nobody playtested it."
And a lot of innuendo from the audience regarding the phallism throughout.

wow that guy hates the game! it is a hateable game.

it looks kinda ok. very spectrum zx-ish

dragon's trap was in my top 5, this game is the shit

― (⊙_⊙?) (original bgm), Tuesday, October 27, 2015 8:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i voted for this but i don't think i'd want to replay it -- i played the intro sequence again on the pc engine because someone had mislabled it as that alice in wonderland game. it's got a hilarious map -- i guess they'd seen metroid and zelda but didn't have the time to put into level design -- where essentially iirc you are just leaving the hub area in five different directions with each set of powers, and they don't actually link up

it's okay i guess. the correct speed to slash your sword as you approach enemies is nicely calibrated. the lizard man sucks ass though.

i was the nes bomberman #1. i think i might have meant bomberman 2, but it wasn't nominated--not sure if the first one had multiplayer or not. multiplayer is essential. regardless, bomberman is tetris-mario-doom beautiful.

― playlists of pensive swift (difficult listening hour), Tuesday, October 27, 2015 11:54 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

had to be terse but some elaboration: despite not being literally abstract this game is so purely about geometry--right angles and interrupted lines, splitsecond judgments of distance and alignment--and in multiplayer, once the initial clearing-the-board "mining" phase is past (and incidentally what an elegantly bisected structure every two-minute game of this has; no artificial impositions but two v clear phases, the mining phase and the frantic gladiatorial phase), players carve out their own constantly reconfiguring spaces of safety+peril, this morphing game board written in fire. getting trapped in a corner or a niche (as a kid used to call this getting "trapped in the bathroom"?) gives you the feeling of being a piece in go: first your options close down then you are suffocated. one of those games whose geometrical patterns colonize yr mind because you have to train yourself to see the world in them, like tetris, or chess. (strictly the geometry is less complex than either but on the other hand it is a hyperactive real-time duel. maybe more like tennis, cf dfw.)

again i think i did mean to vote for the sequel, but since i'm alone anyway that's ok-- the fundamentals are here, and after the addition of multiplayer the fundamentals didn't change any more than they changed through versions of frogger or pac-man. (never much of a fan of the various gimmicks--conveyor belts, self-reconstituting bricks etc--used over the years to distinguish "stages". just give me a brick-choked grid of indestructible rocks.) the first version i ever played was actually a sluggish ripoff written in BASIC which a friend+i used to execute directly from the qbasic ide. it could barely handle simultaneous input under those circs but we played it obsessively until i tracked down a nes copy, which killed us with joy. its reputation has probably suffered from its having 829539242 incarnations and no definitive one but it is absolutely up there with the above list of famous imagined spaces.

such great advanced moves too, growing naturally out of the physics: trapping a player for a precious second behind a wall of flame, then kicking a bomb down a corridor to be prematurely ignited by the same wall and kill them. etc.

(kicking not actually in this game because i suck at the 8-bit poll. bomberman rules is the point)

dlh did you play that hundred-player online bomberman world thing from a couple years back

that game ate up several days of my life

no! but i had a lil fun with a leaderboard-equipped wii version a while ago.

it launched as 'bombermine' but appears to persist in a much more hideous version called 'game of bombs'. it used to be all stolen assets, they were much prettier

huh, apparently there were various asian iterations of the concept before this rip-off version. including one from a decade ago with legacy servers still running in SK.

it's interesting that there are no current versions of bomberman (one in development for iOS, i guess.) it's a bit like there being no current versions of tetris, i guess -- there's not really anything technology could add to {insert favorite 16-bit iteration here} so once emulation became trivial there was no point?

lol @ game of bombs

early 3d era produced some strained misfires (bomberman 64 is one, tho the multiplayer's still ok). atomic bomberman for the pc is badly remembered, mostly i think because despite being a v simple game it took up a for-its-time-obscene amount of hard drive space because you had to copy all the obnoxious wavs of peak-of-ace-ventura's-cultural-influence taunts that played every time you did everything and could not be turned off and otherwise would have to be read from the CD w/ accompanying microsecond delay, but once you'd gotten used to 700 megabytes of comedy voices it was at once a very pure and a very customizable realization of the game, with clear+crisp 3d-on-2d graphics, in the end up there with the snes version(s) as platonic.

another thing about it was that for some reason you accessed the level editor by pressing ctrl-e six times from the main menu. an almost hostile game.

ha, yes! i remember Atomic Bomberman very well. It supported the daisy-chaining Microsoft Sidewinder pads. i was console-less during those days so it was my go-to Bomberman

legend has it that the "ultimate" version of Bomberman is the Saturn one, but of course you'd need the game, a Saturn, and multitap and nine other players to make it work

we've all been "trapped in the bathroom" at some point, very evocative phrase.
i fucking looooooooooooved Bomberman on Saturn, that shit was the jam

loving that long dlh post

does anybody have a pdf/cbr/etc of the official nintendo player's guide. i'm jonesing all of a sudden to see it again.

^^^

whole thing is burned into my brain, along with the SMB3 and FF special strategy guides from nintendo power, but it would still be a blast to flip through. i think mine was on my shelf right up until i finished high school and it was time for a grand purge before college. i also had this hardcover collection of nintendo comics crap

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51jGOvwFPLL._SL500_SX369_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

and at least two or three of these mass-market-sized paperbacks:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_SsFdta-Zpzc/SfaNv6nBvNI/AAAAAAAAARA/XAeq7gJV-yY/s400/72pin+001.jpg

i remember reading them on trips to the beach, at school, everywhere. i can still smell the cheap paper and recall little swatches of how i pictured the games i hadn't played, since these didn't have pictures. IIRC, amagon sounded particularly exciting.

the stupidest though were the junior novelizations, worlds of power books:

http://noiselesschatter.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/worlds-of-power-books.jpg

would love to meet the people saddled with turning repetitive action scrollers into enough narrative prose to fill an admittedly short book. they were terrible of course. a lot of pre-teens getting sucked into the game worlds to assist simon belmont or mega man in their quests, IIRC.

i lost so many things on that off to college purge that i wouldn't mind seeing again.
dayo was nice enough to mail me a massive pile of late 90's video game mags some time ago and i read thru all of them with glee, even though they mostly missed my era.

oh shi
http://www.zeldalegends.net/files/other/guides/tatcover.jpg

http://www.vgmuseum.com/mrp/cv1/packing/officialnpg_pages82-83.jpg

that is so beautiful

I had the Players Guide, it was scripture

I used to call the tip line.

I still remember when a local games mag revealed both the existence of the minus one level in Super Mario 1, and the super-hidden warp route in the very first level of Mario 3. Our minds were blown!

I can imagine some kid discovering the minus one level in Mario 1 by sheer chance, but I wonder if anyone actually found the warp zone in level 1-1 of Mario 3 without reading or hearing from somewhere how to do it? It's so counter-intuitive: "I'm gonna stay on top of this white column in a grouching position for a minute to see what happens..." Even though they kinda tried to hint at it by making that column the only white one in that level, it's still a pretty weird way to get to the warp zone.

Because some of these hidden things were genuinely so suprising to discover, there were also a lot of stories among local kids about easter eggs that never actually existed. Like, someone claimed to have actually finished the minus one level in Mario 1 (it's impossible), and there were also stories what would happen if you managed to jump over the flag next to the castle at the end of stage, and continue running past it... TVtropes has a page that collects a lot these rumours, it's fun to read:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UrbanLegendofZelda

Duck Hunt is terrible.

1) the dog is rage inducing
2) the levels never change or increase difficulty
3) after walking up to the tv and shooting point blank there is no reason to play sitting down if you really want a high score
4) the frisbee game only moves it from a D- to a D+ . one sliver of variability
5) only redeeming factor is any cherished memories you might have. like the fact it might be one of the first video games you ever played

It still blows my mind that a light gun was ever a thing. Glad I had the old gray one before they made it bright orange.

it's been a long time since i played so my memories are probably off but
1)yes, although he's kind of the dog you love to hate
2)don't they add more simultaneous ducks as you progress?
3)yes but you have to have some self control to enjoy certain things in life
4)i think those are...what are those called? skeets? (looool)
5)yeah, but those are canceled out by the really annoying IRL sound the Zapper makes when you pull the trigger

the rumor on my street was that if you pointed the zapper at people IRL it would eventually give them cancer

2) the levels never change or increase difficulty

Reminds me of this Atari game that I obsessively played (and which should have been super concerning to any adults who were paying attention) that I can't remember the name of but which should've just been called Plateau, wherein you shot three spaceships with a tank or something and then moved on to the next screen where you did the exact same thing at the exact same level of difficulty, ad nauseum. I honestly have no idea what the appeal of it was.

The ducks get faster, iirc.

Loving the posts between yesterday's games & today's, almost don't wanna post any today

BUT I MUST

SO I WILL

HERE WE GO

40 - Castlevania II (NES) - 60 points / 3 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/sNDur08.png

39 - Double Dragon (NES) - 61 points / 3 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/EYpTgDA.png

I never understood Castlevania. I think my child-brain believed that castles should only be one level at the end of a world, and there should always be a princess waiting there, unless it turned out she was in another castle.

Double Dragon was cool though. Karate and street fights A+

did the NES version of double dragon have abobo? i tried to find a screenshot with abobo but had no luck.

weird, now i can find them...

even though all the kids did it, i don't see how putting your gun against the screen made Duck Hunt any easier

i'm telling y'all, point blank was how dummies cheated. light bulb was TRUE CHEATING

(the reason the screen would flash was because it would draw the hitbox for the duck in a different frame as the rest of it, to hide the box... so the light gun would effectively check if it was hitting the color white in that one frame where the duck was white and the rest of the screen wasn't. if you shot at white light all the time, it would only register hits.

or something. it has been a while since this was explained to me.)