61 NES Games You Simply Gotta Play: You Simply Gotta Play

By Sean Burke

To millions of Japanese gamers, it was the Famicom. To our old comrades in the Soviet Union, it was the Dendy. But to most of us, it was simply the Nintendo. And it was every bit as beautifully and quintessentially 80s as Mr. T, Rick Astley and A Flock of Seagulls.

The release of the Nintendo Entertainment System straddled the whole decade as it made its way around the whole world, en route to selling over 60 million units. One of those units proudly belongs to Burkey, the author of this NES retrospective book. Join me in this nostalgic walk through the past, as we take a look at 8-bit classics such as:

 

- Super Mario Bros. 1 - 3 -

- Donkey Kong -

- Final Fantasy I - III -

- Dragon Quest I - IV -

- Metal Gear -

- Metroid -

- Tetris -

- Tecmo Bowl -

...and more!

 

Check out what other NES leading lights have to say about this author!
 

"Burkey analysis complete: Target is a waste of ammo" - Mega Man

"If that guy shows up at my door again, he's getting vaporized" - Samus Aran

"Who...?" - S. Miyamoto

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sean Burke
• Release date: Oct 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223922001

Sean Burke

Writer, gamer and raconteur based in Dublin, Ireland. I'm a writer of non-fiction pieces on gaming and pop-culture, as well as a writer of fiction.

Book preview

The NES is like heroin, and not in a good way

To paraphrase Gordon Gekko: retro, for lack of a better word, is good. Retro is right, retro works. Retro clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the gaming spirit. Retro, in all of its forms; retro for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. Retro is what sells, and everybody wants to be retro.

Well, maybe that’s a bit over the top, but this retro desirability was pretty evident when the NES Classic came out. I know geeky stuff had already gone mainstream, but there were people frothing at the mouth for this little device.

When the NES Classic came out, you couldn’t get your hands on one for love nor money. People really, really wanted Excitebike, it seems. Those poor fools. I had to laugh from my ivory tower, because I knew better.

I knew only too well what some of those games were like. Yes, games like Ghouls ‘n Ghosts are your dictionary definition of classic, but come on.

It’s like that pet that you unconditionally love and only ever see good qualities in, even when it rears up and bites you at every opportunity. When people say classic, I immediately think of a hateful ferret, or a mean cat.

The NES controller is classic too, and you’ll delight upon holding one for the first time. Unfortunately, the controller is not as happy to see you. Right from the off, it’s an unrelenting square that’ll tear welts in your hands before you even come near to beating the game.

You’re clinging onto the hard plastic for dear-life, desperately trying to avoid Mike Tyson’s lethal punches, and you feel every bit of the struggle. So that’s great – even the controller hates you.

It’s one thing to own a NES, but you can’t consider it truly complete until you get a R.O.B. unit alongside. Having switched careers from being a nuclear missile launching platform for the Japanese, the Robotic Operating Buddy is a delightfully insane but ultimately useless piece of kit that barely responds to the whole two (cack) games it’s designed to work with.

But that’s retro in a nutshell, whether it’s games, cars, or antiques – looks great on a shelf, but wheezes and spits back at you whenever you fancy turning back the clock and actually firing it up for old time’s sake.

Of course, you’ve always got to undergo the classic ritual of blowing on your cartridges. It’s a necessary evil because you will never, ever get these games working on first try. Now that scientists have undertaken extensive cartridge study, we know that blowing on the cartridges will possibly do the trick in dislodging some dirt and get the game playing – but that’s only for now.

Turns out however that this is actually quite bad in the long-run, as you’ll be showering the cartridge connectors with little bits of spittle, eroding the chips and diodes and connectors as if they were sandcastles.

Is blowing on the cartridges really that bad? Probably, and I’ll have to cede to the boffins’ superior knowledge on this one. But I’ll still do it until the day I die, because no other measure works so consistently.

Even after you’ve just about gone light-headed from blowing on the game, blowing into the console, and even blowing into the controller ports for good measure, you’ll immediately know that your efforts are in vain when you see the blinking red Power light that signals to you that there’s still a disconnect somewhere.

Now, you’ve spent an absolute bomb on the NES console and games, because stuff this retro doesn’t come cheap. And then it refuses to power on for you. That’s not right, is it?

Heroin costs a bomb as well, but heroin works. You buy it, it performs its function as expected. There’s always an aspect of caveat emptor of course, especially considering you can hardly take this stuff to the small claims court. But in general, drugdealers seem to adhere strictly to the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act 1980.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t know personally if heroin works, but I have it on good authority. That ‘authority’ being the drawn-out, strung-out, monotone drone that’s been perfected by junkies on the back seats of buses up and down the country. Heroin seems to work just fine for them.

The NES ought to be heroin, but all too often it’s Tic-Tac Ecstasy tablets, talcum powder cocaine. You’re all excited, you try to get a bang out of it, but then nothing happens and you’re left feeling... not much. Just slightly disappointed. You’d half-expected it, really.

If ever there was a console to just emulate and save yourself aggro on, it’s the NES. Anyway, even if you did get the game to work, then what? You’ll find that maybe about ten NES games of a US library of over 700 are worth it nowadays.

You’ll get good mileage from the three Super Mario Bros games, which are timeless. Once you have a guide, you can get into the original The Legend of Zelda. If you’re pretty hardcore, you can move on to Zelda II, so long as you’re prepared for the chance that you might hate it.

Mega Man 2 and perhaps 3 are good fun; the other four Mega Man games aren’t especially worth it. Contra and Super C are great. Castlevania 1 and maybe 3 are worth a look – if you can hack the difficulty. Finally, you can pick Kirby’s Adventure, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and one of Crystalis, Double Dragon or Tetris.

You’re struggling after that. Final Fantasy will put you to sleep. Metroid will have you tearing your hair out. The Dragon Quests, or Dragon Warriors as they were, are stone-age. Ice Climber and Balloon Fight are just laughable. We never received Fire Emblem. We did receive Kid Icarus, which is unfortunate. And you’ve just got to see Soccer and Pro Wrestling for yourself.

Those are all the notable games, but that leaves us with 600-odd average, mediocre, or downright gank games to sift through. The games were bad enough to give the Angry Video Game Nerd a career, and if there was a film released in the 1980s or early 1990s, you’d best believe it had a bad NES game based on it. If you’re looking for even one good game out of Die Hard, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, Karate Kid and Hook, then I’m sorry, but your childhood has just been destroyed. 

Even if you did play them, most of them suffer the same fate that plagued almost all NES games – they were designed to be unrelentingly rock-hard. Why was that?

I can somewhat understand that some games only had the capacity for only a small number of levels, so the developers just mad each level nails to artificially extend the game’s length. It’s sneaky, but I understand that. What I don’t understand is that the developers at the time, as incompetent as they were, seemed almost frightened of allowing people to beat their games. 

I like to replay Mega Man 2 (on Normal difficulty of course) because I can actually get to the end to the end of that one. There’s a bit of a difficulty curve, but it’s manageable.

Then you get a game like Dragon’s Lair or Double Dragon III that tells you to go and pleasure yourself. And it’s no coincidence that the most fondly remembered games are the ones that can actually be beaten by us mere mortals.

Ultimately, the NES has aged just that bit too poorly. The Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive is about as far back in gaming history as you can get without it becoming wholly depressing for all parties.

A bit of a strange choice then, me compiling this book in the first place, not to mention writing off the console and its games on page one. Well, that’s the funny thing about it – with the possible exception of the Atari 2600, the old Nintendo Entertainment System is as classic as it gets, so it always warrants us giving it a re-examination.

Retro enthusiasts will always pay through the nose for a NES with games, chasing that incredible retro hit from way back when. But when the Nintendo refuses to power on and the internal springs start to break and the cartridges throw up glitched graphics, don’t blame me when blood starts pouring from your nose and Lou Reed starts playing in the background.

If only they’d dropped Mario cartridges on Pearl Harbour instead

Iwon’t bore you to death on the whole video game crash, blah blah blah, E.T. wrecked it for everybody, and all of that other stuff. History was the most boring of school subjects as we know, and anyway, the whole event is pretty much the first thing a prospective gaming YouTuber researches on Wikipedia.

That’s before delivering a webcam-filmed lecture about the whole affair with jumpy editing, a slightly too desperate plea for subscribers and a far too long intro.

No, neither of us have time for that. Suffice to say, we had an awful lot of terrible games - and I’m talking, less impressive than interactive DVD menus - polluting the market in the late 70s and early 80s.

I’m not just talking about clag that delivers less than 5 seconds of enjoyment either. Even clag is too weak a word for games like Custer’s Revenge, or Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em. It was this kind of rubbish that was being sold, Morse code graphics and all, into households at premium rates.

Eventually the poor old gaming camel took one too many straws to the back, that straw being a game based on E.T., and over she went. Electronic TV games were a fad that had come, stank up the place a bit, and now they were mercifully gone.

Well, that’s not really how it ended, of course. Nintendo decided they wanted to claw themselves back into the game and they knew they’d have to invade the United States to do it. And with a string of arcade hits behind them, the most famous of them being Donkey Kong, they wanted more of the action.

The trouble was, the words video game were pretty much mud with consumers, retailers, suppliers, and whatever else is in the chain – truck drivers maybe. it’s been a long time since I studied business.

So, to ensure success for their plan to bring a new dedicated games console to market, and hopefully rot millions of children’s brains along with it, Nintendo needed a few USPs (there’s that business knowledge of mine again) to set their new Nintendo Entertainment System apart.

Firstly, it had to be affordable – some sets were more expensive, with the Deluxe Set weighing particularly heavy on the old 1980s leather wallet. But the console deck by itself could be had for a mere $90, or even $100 when bundled with a game I’m just about to mention.

Mind you, Christ knows what those prices would be now, looking at the rate of inflation in the United States since 1985. Enough to guarantee you the far more sensible investment of 20 assault rifles and a heap of ammo, most likely.

The second necessary unique selling point, if you can believe it, was that the whole idea of the NES being a games console had to be played down. I understand that the initial plan here was to stick a comedy moustache onto the console, but some of the children choked on the hairy prototype apparatus in the testing and proofing phase, so that had to be kiboshed.

Instead, the boys at Nintendo of Japan found a few dozen multi-storey car-park robot attendants going cheap and converted them into a fleet of R.O.B.s, short for the Robotic Operating Buddy – a robot that interacts with your TV and your unsupervised children.

So now it’s not a video game, see? It’s a virtual friend and TV enhancer. Once R.O.B. had helped crowbar Nintendo into homes, he was quickly forgotten.

Third on their list of selling points, to cap it all off, Nintendo needed a strong pack-in game from the beginning. And there it was, not just one but two games – Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. We’ll get onto the anatine quacky-quacky-shooty-shooty shortly - another game that spurned the traditional controller-to-games-console setup with its iconic NES Zapper light-gun.

The real gem to be found in the package was Super Mario Bros. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t the first Mario game available for your home console. But it might just as well be, since Mario Bros. Arcade is that bit too dismal.

I’m conscious of the fact that time ain’t getting any slower for me, and I now have to recognise a new social ill called Generation Z. But really, I don’t see how even the most obnoxious zoomer could fail to recognise this game.

Nintendo still beats us over the head with Super Mario Bros. nostalgia to this day, even marking its release as Mario’s 35th anniversary despite this not being quite true.

But why wouldn’t they be fixated on this game? With 8 entire worlds of 4 levels apiece, plus the fact that the levels even move across more than one screen in a side-scrolling fashion, Super Mario Bros. was unprecedented in scale for 1985.

This wasn’t just one fuzzy Atari screen, this was a grand platforming adventure. To gamers young and old at the time, it must have been like that Train Pulling into a Station short film from the 1800s, where the train hurtles towards the screen causing the terrified first-time viewers to jump out of the way.

You even had a lovingly composed soundtrack, for God’s sake, with the Main Ground theme being surely the most famous song in all of gaming – and we’ll really know we’re old when dabbing kids out there start failing to recognise it.

I’ve often lamented not being an 80s child, although that could put me close to 40 years old today so one has to count one’s blessings. Still, I’d like to have been there right from the off in terms of gaming, the Big Bang event of gaming as it were.

Things like the Atari, Intellivision and ColecoVision were pretty popular in the USA, and indeed we had the Sinclair Speccy, Amstrad (Lord Sugar’s pride and joy) and Commodore over here, or in the UK moreso.

But, I have to be honest, that’s not where gaming started for me. The beepy boopy rubbish of the late 70s and early 80s was just the precursor – the whole gig started with the Nintendo and Super Mario Bros.

Why else would Nintendo be thriving today, alongside later entrants to the console market Microsoft and Sony, while leather companies from Connecticut went tits up? To say nothing of how Atari failed to make the grade coming into the 90s.

As a game rather than a historical piece, SMB is simple, sometimes rough, but you’ll know you’re in the presence of greatness and you’ll shut up accordingly. You wouldn’t loudly talk over a war hero’s greatest story, and it’s the same here.

The game’s bloody harder than you might think as well. Top gamesters like me are aware of a crafty little cheat where you can hold A and press Start after a Game Over, which will let you start over from whichever world you’ve just been bounced out of.

It really is a necessity to know that one, because otherwise you could be right on Bowser’s door and lose the last of your measly three lives. If that happens, then oops, back to a silent title screen for you.

Not everyone’s beaten this game, you know, because once you get to that fiendish eighth world, you’ll have Hammer Bros throwing kitchen sinks at you and you’re damned if you can find a safe place to stand. And speaking of the eighth world, you’ll never forget the first time you realise that Mario can run right over gaps of one block in width, setting him up for even greater jumps.

Look, being honest, the movement and jumping physics that Mario exhibited here have been refined dozens of times over the last 35 years, and coming back to play this particular game after having a sweet slice of physics cake like Super Mario World or Super Mario Galaxy 2 may get you a little frustrated.

But this game’s importance could not be overstated. It is the daddy, the precursor, the top of the food chain. What Atari and E.T. killed, Nintendo and Mario revived. The portly plumber’s come a long way, yet he still hasn’t relinquished his crown as the most famous gaming character of all time.

If you could only time-travel back to 1985, or 1981 even, and take a punt on Nintendo’s stocks early... although knowing my luck, I’d probably shoot Nintendo down like one of those poor duckies on the other half of the cartridge.

Don’t be a lame duck – tool up with the NES Zapper and get hunting

I’m gonna let you in on a secret that makes me look equal parts softy and petty: I had to block someone from my social media sites because they kept presenting photos of ducks that they’d shot on hunting trips.

How soft is that? I all but crumbled when I went to a firing range and shot a gun for the first time, so there’s no way I could turn a shooter on a nice little ducky and murder the little thing. We once had to dissect a sheep’s heart in Biology class, and I couldn’t even hack the idea of putting a knife into it. So how could I give both barrels to little Huey, Dewey or Louie?

If the theory of reincarnation as a reward for living a charitable life holds any water (and it can’t, or I wouldn’t have come back as myself), then I’d love my next roll of the dice to be as a duck. They can fly in the air, swim through cold water, and waddle about on the ground. They’ve got bundles of nice down and feathers to keep them warm – an ensemble that must be as comfy as your nicest duffel coat.

And crucially you’ll be the envy of all the local mallard mammies, because whenever you see a mother duck she’ll always have her ducklings in a perfect circle all around her as she cuts about the place. That is until a tragic gust of wind blows a few duckies off course, but so long as they don’t get swept down a drain, then no harm, right?

Mind you, I’m a terrible hypocrite because, while I could never blow one away, duck dishes from the Chinese are delicious. Isn’t that just the duality of man? Recognising the preciousness of life, but being more concerned with how it tastes.

It’s no wonder the dogs go mad for ducks either, since dogs love a good feed. This natural relationship has given rise to the name of many’s a rural pub, although The Dog and The Duck is hardly the most symbiotic relationship I can think of. A bit stacked against the poor duckies, wouldn’t you say?

And maybe a dog is the man you want, if you don’t like ducks at all. But if you really must shoot them, why not do it in a virtual setting? Duck Hunt for NES doesn’t have blood, there’s no health-packs, no terrorists, no explosions. It mightn’t sound like the most compelling prospect for a shooting game nowadays, but what we’re looking at here is one of the most well-known shooters of all time.

On top of that, it’s easily the most famous light-gun game of them all. Even ahead of Time Crisis or House of the Dead, or that Revolution X game where you need to save Aerosmith from the Nazis. I know you don’t believe me, so look it up – it happened, and it was dreadful.

Any hunter needs his or her tools with them, and I don’t mean their companions. This isn’t The Deer Hunter, you won’t have Christopher Walken in the background mouthing off, and they never made a NES game about Russian Roulette. Get equipped with the NES Zapper, the classic grey plastic gun that came with zillions of NES sets, alongside one of the most versatile pack-in games ever: the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt double cart.

Almost every NES owner had this cartridge, and it was a great deal: any time you’re bored jumping and bounding through the Mushroom Kingdom, you can wind down with a colourful bit of shooting instead.

It’s a nice piece of technology, the NES Zapper – simple but brilliant, as all tech ought to be. Pull the trigger and revel in its distinctive, clunky, spring-loaded sound. Assuming the thing still works, your TV screen will go all black for a moment. Only your target remains, now represented by a white shape, and if the Zapper lines up with this shape, it registers as a hit.

You might think that the gun fires some sort of invisible laser or something wildly cool like that, but I believe the Zapper actually just takes this white light into a photosensitive receptor somewhere in the gun’s barrel. That’s why almost everyone quickly figured out that you could get perfect accuracy against the darn ducks if you just held the gun up against a lamp or something like that.

Or, of course, you could shoot your eyes to hell by bringing the gun as close to the TV screen as possible. I tried that one and now you wouldn’t believe how thick my glasses are.

It doesn’t matter anyway because you’ll have a real job trying to get your Zapper working these days. It simply won’t work on modern TVs, something to do with refresh rates or their flat-screened-ness, so that’s that. Terrible to miss out on the likes of Duck Hunt and Hogan’s Alley, but having access to HD Babestation is a decent trade-off, one supposes.

Assuming you get the game and gun working, there’s always a savage bit of satisfaction to be had when you nail the onscreen ducks, even if I hate to say it. If you bottle out, though, and miss all of the ducks, then your trusty companion dog won’t waste a second popping up and laughing at you.

That’s when you’ll really turn feral and try to turn your weapon on the beast that mocked you. Well, we’ve all wanted to do it, but try as you might, you’ll never be able to slay the dog.

Or will you? We ended up getting the Dog and the Duck together as the Duck Hunt Duo in Smash Bros. It was exactly the kind of left-field, wild selection that Smash Bros is known for, and I don’t mind telling you that their inclusion is what led to me buying the Smash Bros. Wii U game. As if I wasn’t going to already.

No kidding, I simply had to have that dog. I’m not even a dog obsessive, but how can you resist a cheeky, long-eared spaniel? Even if it’s done nothing over the years to correct its terrible habit of laughing at you for doing something wrong.

Also, if you’re cursed with the burden of having a Wii U in your possession, you can still download Duck Hunt onto it, a version that’ll work with the Wii Zapper. Pretty nifty conversion actually, I’m not quite sure how they managed to map the light gun’s inputs to the Wii Remote so well.

The Remote doesn’t give you a satisfying click when you pull the trigger and obviously you don’t collect all the retro points that you could have, but you always have the option to enjoy Duck Hunt nowadays this way. Of course, the game barely holds up anymore, you’ll get maybe ten minutes out of it. And you can’t cheat anymore and you still can’t shoot the mutt either.

I don’t particularly enjoy the idea of putting bullets in dogs anyway, to be honest. You often do it in Resident Evil, although those dogs needed a mercy killing anyway. You can blast regular dogs with a revolver in Metal Gear Solid 3 to stop them biting your bum, if you really fancy it.

But if you’re really on the squeamish side, you can leave the dogs and ducks aside altogether and go for Duck Hunt’s clay pigeon shooting mode instead. They don’t much look like pigeons to me, more like particularly fragile Frisbees, but it makes proceedings a bit more classy.

Clay pigeon is the type of shooting you do on country estates, when you’re wearing your best tweed and you’ll be breaking for elevenses shortly after putting on a jolly good show for all the other viscounts. The only problem is that clay pigeon shooting won’t give you an opportunity to show off to everyone how good a marksman you are.

No, if you want to be able to indulge in some proper back-slappery, you need to line up a row of dead ducks, and take a picture of them to prove you did it, as if anyone wanted to see. But what they’ll never show is their companion dog, laughing at how bad some of the missed shots were. There’s my advice to you: never give your dog an opportunity to have a giggle at you.

It’s the fastest circuit board on two wheels

Afriend of mine recently expressed his desire to dispense with that ozone-killing, turtle-plastic-trapping deathmachine known as a car, and instead get himself a motorbike. It’s a lot more nimble, he said, and would get him to and from the train station or the shops a lot quicker.

Cheaper to run too, of course, and I imagine less chance for something to go wrong. Well, it all sounded very green to me, though not as green as his even more outrageous intention to test drive and intentionally buy an electric car. Still, his motorcycle wish was definitely up there in the madness stakes.

Of course, his partner strongly vetoed his planned decision. That doesn’t mean an awful lot of course, any man can get around that. But when his mother put her foot down, from her house miles away, that was the decider. And, although it’s not like I had any kind of casting vote, I like to think my input was taken on board as well.

I’ll admit that there’s definitely something enticing about the idea. After all, motorbikes are almost the personification of speed, as close as you can get to stupid fast without somehow bringing a drag racer or jet fighter out onto your street.

I’ve been on them before, and driven one for myself, and even at a speed that I would call moderate and proper bikers would call granny, I felt like I was cheating death and injury. It was as if the Gods of physics were going to notice me any moment, as I tore right through the air