Twenty-five years ago on October 18th, 1985, the Nintendo Entertainment System first reached American shelves, and it was good. It's not my favorite system (that remains and may always remain the Super NES) or even my second favorite (longtime readers may recall my
top 64 N64 games list from a couple years back), yet it remains as inextricably bound to my childhood as eating and breathing. I don't know the exact date in '86 that my parents bought our house in New York an NES, because I was still drooling and shitting my diaper at the time, but I do know that I quite literally have no memories of
not playing NES.
My infancy was spent watching my older brother play. As a toddler I began fiddling with the controller myself, delighting in making Mario and Mega Man and Kid Icarus move on the screen with no idea that there were even levels or objectives at hand. I sharpened my nascent reading skills on Nintendo Power. The rare hours I wasn't playing were spent crudely drawing Nintendo characters with Crayola Markers. I hummed game music while walking to preschool. I dreamed in pixels.
Twenty-five is considered old for just about any living creature on earth beyond humans and turtles, but when it comes to computer hardware it's positively primeval. Hell, my laptop from 2006 has been on the rattling, crashing brink of death for a year now. The only objects I own that are a quarter of a century old are a handful of books, my Nintendo Entertainment System, and a few early NES cartridges. And you know what? The NES has held together even better than the books. It's been shlepped across the country and lain dormant for years at a time, but when I plugged it in earlier today the red light blinked on and I began playing as surely as if it was straight out the box. The NES is a sturdy motherfucker, and that sturdiness earns sturdy love.
Of course, the hardware itself is nothing to love — without
games, all you have is an odd, bulky paperweight. It was the games that consumed my childhood daydreams, the games the images of which flash in my mind when the word "NES" is uttered still today, the games that I love the most. So in light of the NES's 25th I could think of no better way to celebrate than by going back and discussing roughly 25 games that I retain strong childhood memories of. Note, this is
not a list of the best NES games; there's masterpieces entirely absent, and there's horrible games present. But it is, for better or for worse, 25 games I'll always remember.
Hell, most of them are sitting on my shelf, so it'd be hard to forget.
Adventures of Lolo Trilogy
Contrary to popular belief, Tetris is not the greatest puzzle game on the original Nintendo. The most timeless, sure. The most famous, absolutely. But the best (and, hell, maybe one of the most underrated game trilogies of all time) is the collective whole of Adventures of Lolo, Adventures of Lolo 2, and Adventures of Lolo 3. Produced by HAL Laboratory, the same in-house Nintendo developer who would go on to create Kirby's Dream Land 1-3, Kirby's Adventure, EarthBound, Kirby Super Star, Super Smash Bros., Super Smash Bros. Melee, and most recently Kirby's Epic Yarn, the Lolo games can be very simply boiled down to pushing stuff. That's all; you push.
You push boxes in front of Medusa statues to block their lethal eye beams. You turn enemies into eggs and push them out of the way or into rivers to make rafts. You push your way through mazes. Anything and everything you can do to reach all the hearts, open the door, and get your ass to the next floor. It sounds deceptively simple, but in all three games the later levels get apocalyptically hard. The Lolo games are some of the strongest (and, more importantly, most fun) exercises in geometry and logic I've ever seen, genuine mind-expanding stuff that proves doddering old farts were wrong about "video games will turn your kids' minds to mush!" from the very beginning. I still don't think I've beaten all three; not without looking up the solutions anyway. Nothing else on NES tickles your brain in a more satisfying way. Love these games.
Bionic Commando
This is blasphemy in certain NES circles, but I honestly can't say I ever enjoyed Capcom's Bionic Commando that much. I know we had it when I was a kid because I still have the cartridge and the first level's music is fresher in my mind than any of Mozart's symphonies, but in well over twenty years since its release I'm pretty sure I've never played beyond a third of the way through the game. I just can't get my head around the lack of a jump button in a shooting sidescroller. It's just too weird.
Bokosuka Wars
Bokosuka Wars is one of the most awful games on the NES, a game that sails so far beyond the realm of ineptitude as to become a fascinating grotesquerie, like the grisly aftermath of a fatal car accident. Basically, it's a kind of prototype real-time strategy RPG where you command a king and his knights and soldiers in a campaign against an ogre chieftain. Battles are completely random; when you walk one of your men into a bad guy the game simply flips an internal coin and one is left standing. If you make it to the final boss only the king can beat him and you have a 50% chance; if you're unlucky you start the whole game over again. The control is slow and horrible and the soundtrack, consisting of one grating, hideous song, will drive you to murder. It's easier if you just
see for yourself.
Yet for some reason I retain a bizarre fondness for this game. It's so lovable in its ineptitude. "So bad it's good" is a conceit generally applied to passive media like film and television while in mediums like gaming and literature that force you to actively engage bad is usually just considered bad, but I confess that in my life I have probably put a good three or four hours total into this putrid piece of shit. Bokosuka Wars is the worst game of all time. It rules.
Castlevania Series
The original Castlevania is totally sweet. Not as sweet as Castlevania III and certainly not as sweet as 1991's Super Castlevania IV, but it oozed gothic atmosphere in a way that no contemporaneous NES games even began to measure up to. I don't want to call it "mature," because it still had a narrative that amounted to "go kill king bad guy!", but compared to what else was available on the system, it totally was. It had a grim atmosphere and skeletons and mummies and vampires and Medusa and Frankenstein and Death and
badass tunes. Sure, the controls were stiff and the difficulty was brutal, but it felt cool, foreboding. It remains a classic.
Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is less impressive. Still got
sick beats, but it introduced exploration and nonlinear elements akin to a poor man's Metroid and their clunky execution made it the weakest of the NES trilogy (however, I still played it to death as a little kid — I couldn't beat any of the Castlevanias any more than I could sprout wings and fly, so as long as I could whip zombies it didn't make much difference if I couldn't beat what I was playing due to impossible jumps or baffling structure). Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse wisely decided to just reprise the original, but enhanced: three additional characters, branching paths, radder bosses, crazier level design, more attacks and techniques, slicker graphics. It's the best of the three and probably one of the best sidescrollers on NES.
Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers
Rescue Rangers is pure sidescrolling bliss. Lightning-paced levels, zippy tunes, and fast and fluid control make it one of the most kinetic games on the system. Mix that with crazy fun two player co-op and clean, colorful graphics that perfectly capture the look of the Rescue Rangers cartoon and you got a rare licensed game that actually does justice to its namesake. The difficulty is also perfectly balanced, far from easy but nowhere near as insurmountable as Castlevania. In summary, game rocks hard.
Beyond the jump, many more NES memories!
