Firepower 2000 is notable for being one of the few shoot em' ups on the Super Nintendo that allows two-player action. This is a game that looks,. Simon's Quest took you away from the all-too-familiar atmosphere of Dracula's castle and instead set you loose in an Eastern European locale full of mysterious villages, haunted mansions and, ultimately, the remnants of the castle Simon Belmont destroyed in the original. After a few minutes with Contra's militant anthems you'll want to put your controller down and headbang along. Each character has its own powers and limitations, for instance the mouse makes up for its measly health meter with its ability to cling to ceilings and walls. The entire game fit on an infinitesimally small cartridge sized at 192 kilobits. Top Down Shooter Engine. A game no one bought, but everyone had. When one stage is cleared, Scrooge can pick from any of the remaining stages to undertake his next quest. And talk about difficult if you were unlucky enough to lose all of your lives in the game's final stages (which gamers did over and over and over again), you'd have quite the trek in front of you to get back to where you were to try all over again. Get ready to relive the days when shooting down enemy forces and dodging oncoming fire while sipping a can of Surge was all we needed for a quick adrenaline rush. But back on the NES, there was no besting LucasArts' Maniac Mansion for deep, involved and genuinely funny pointing and clicking action. Super C, like Contra, is a nearly perfect cooperative experience, and is best enjoyed with a buddy to high five as the iconic level finish tune plays. TMNT II: The Arcade Game for the NES was an incredibly impressive 8-bit conversion of one of the most popular coin-op cabinets ever created the original side-scrolling Turtles brawler from the early '90s arcade scene. It's a weird gory little body horror shooter, you're working your way through a giant planet-sized being trying to rescue a princess who's the last surviving member of her race. This game kicks a wave of unrelenting ass, so while people bitch and moan like the cartridge killed their parents I'll happily relive this dare-to-be-different classic with all its quirks. Yeah, it can do that too. Every self-respecting gamer has fond memories of Bionic Commando, and most of the time those memories are of the first 12 minutes of the game or so. As a bonus, your stunned partner can double as a bludgeoning tool. The Deadly Tower of Monsters. Not one, not two, but three games in one. For such a late release, Mega Man 6 ended up being worth the temporarily ignoring of my SNES I had to go through when I played it. The detailed, cartoon-like graphics go a long way towards easing the pain of the game's extreme difficulty, as does the inclusion of cooperative play at least you have someone to blame when you run out of continues on the second level. Before Final Fantasy, there was Dragon Warrior. Batman didn't try to do anything unique, but rather took a cue from a few already-established NES staples to make Batman a fun, worthwhile experience. In this post I'll run down some quick reviews of the games that I have. What were they thinking? That's right if you've ever cursed the skies after falling prey to the infamous Blue Shell, you can trace the source of your rage all the way back to Rare's R.C. A different Konami Code can be used to get 10 lives in Super C, making it only 1/3 as awesome as the original Konami Code. Watching elaborate slams and suplexes in the glorious 8-bit cinematics captured my imagination immediately. But it belongs on our NES list as well, for the port of Lode Runner was pixel-perfect and provided something that only Excitebike had done prior: a level editor. Our Fondest Memories Sure, Duck Hunt's gameplay was as simple as pointing-and-shooting, and one could easily cheat by standing an inch from the television. Wyatt Earp's Old . My best memories of Ring King are the epic fights I had on the higher difficulty levels. It wasn't even that compelling. But while action games on the NES are a dime a dozen, it's this very fact that made Batman stand out amongst the competition. ), Legendary Wings features standard shoot things/power up/shoot more things gameplay but it's the oddball setting that truly sets it apart from vertical space shooters. Discovering each new level was a joy. Why would you buy Mario Bros. when you can buy Super Mario Bros.? And guess what? No sooner would an unprepared adventurer leave a town and cross a bridge into a new area than he would find himself smashed by an enemy much stronger than he. Kung Fu is an enigma. Although you can't tackle Gradius with a pal, you can outfit your ship with "options" mindless, floating turrets that flank your ship. If you've played and enjoyed ExciteTruck or ExciteBots: Trick Racing on your Wii, this is the original you have to thank for them. In 1983, there was nothing cooler than sitting in the cockpit of Spy Hunter at your local arcade to cruise the streets with the Peter Gunn theme blaring in your ears. Eventually, you must learn to apply your gravity-defying skills to puzzles, while at the very same time applying your blasters to the faces of many, many enemy robots. We could only afford a new game every few months growing up, and when we were stuck with a game like Kung Fu, you might think we were disappointed. No longer bound by primitive side-scrolling constraints, the levels of SMB2 can be freely explored, with secret areas, warps and more to discover. Every Ice Hockey player discovered their own perfect combination of men, and then it was on to the ice. And that's exactly the plot here Astyanax is a 16-year-old Greenview High student who just so happens to be named after the figure from Greek mythology and also just happens to be swept away to a distant magical land called Remlia where he's asked to, of course, save a kidnapped princess. Its top-down view makes it a bit of an action-shooter, while its emphasis on collecting items and upgrading weapons lends it more to the RPG and adventure crowd. Little did I know that Nintendo put the NES hardware in the arcade cabinet. And if you somehow run out of those, you can always steal one from your unsuspecting partner. River City Ransom's excellent amalgamation of action, adventure, beat-em-up and RPG game elements has won it many vocal supporters, yet it seems destined to remain in the shadow of big name brawlers like Double Dragon. When the eight stage select-bound stages were defeated, players entered a more linear part of the game, where both Protoman's and Dr. Wily's multi-stage castles had to be completed for the gamer to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Mega Man 5 continues the tradition of tight action-platforming which made the series incredibly prolific by the time of its release. Shadowgate, originally made for Mac systems, was a point-and-click adventure game seen from a first-person perspective, wherein you ventured deep into a complicated dungeon filled with traps, monsters, riddles and hidden treasures around every corner. When Tengen released its first unofficial games using its new technology, Nintendo quickly sued. But, for now, it stands as a hidden gem that only the hardcore faithful got to experience 20 years ago. It wasn't so. In Qix, the titular entity bounds randomly about the playing field while the player attempts to gain ground by drawing boundaries with a stylus of sorts. Fester's Quest also takes its cues from a hodgepodge of genres, which will appeal to many kinds of gamers. Whatever!). Made up of only five stages and a few types of enemies, a skilled gamer can get through Kung Fu in its entirety in less than ten minutes. You could take several different paths through the house, discover tons of interactions between characters and objects, and replay the game again and again with a completely different trio of the seven potential playable characters (each with unique skill-sets and abilities). Some people made maps. Joes. Go back and grab it, either on cartridge or through the Wii's Virtual Console, and experience for yourself the defining console debut for one of the Big N's biggest mascots. Released in 1988, it pioneered something very important for the racing genre. It was so complicated for me as a six or seven year old that I had to let my brother take the reins, and when I finally got around to playing it when I was older, I realized what all of the fuss was about. Simon Belmont, the whip-wielding Vampire Hunter, controlled uniquely. Mega Man's unique approach is what initially made it so interesting to gamers. The Ninja Turtles do love their pizza. These powerhouse efforts were complemented by a robust library of third-party titles. So what if it wasn't originally a Mario game? But that didn't matter. It's no Blades of Steel (hell EA's NHL09 isn't Blades of Steel), but growing up in Minnesota and playing on a hockey team ensured that this one was in the NES as much as Super Mario 3. This game mixes amazing platforming with some quirky gun and driving missions; almost like Bayu Billy, if that game didn't suck and instead played like Ninja Gaiden. Unfortunately, almost everyone agrees that Tengen's version of the game was far superior to Nintendo's, even including a two-player mode which Nintendo's version sorely lacked. But Klax is more than just the sum of its '90s neon parts. What's funny about The Legend of Zelda's title was that the gamer played as a character named Link, who was in turn trying to save the famed princess named Zelda. The inability of the NES to more accurately render detailed animations continues to be one of the system's greatest charms, though, so it's no real negative against the game, just a chuckle-worthy aside that might leave you just a bit embarrassed today. Cruising the skies unhampered by the copious random battles of surface travel is truly exhilarating. As far as legacy, we never would have had games like Symphony of the Night if the trail wasn't blazed back on 8-bit with Simon's Quest. Adventure Island II took the original Adventure Island's somewhat tedious straightforward platforming and fleshed it out, becoming the foundation for a solid series. My earliest forays into the Cave of Monsters were rarely solo. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before a videogame followed the television show and toys. One of the most successful RPGs on the NES, the first Final Fantasy improves on many aspects of Dragon Warrior, a game it very clearly attempts emulate. Fantastic. In an era of 8-bit graphics and MIDI music, Konami crafted a game that immersed you in the horror of Dracula's castle, while all you were looking at and hearing was an artful combination of the typical sights and sounds of the day. In a sort of desperate-sounding effort to distinguish itself from other puzzle games that may happen to feature falling colored blocks, Klax's title screen boldly proclaims that "It is the nineties, and there is time for Klax." Who knew The Goonies were big in Japan? Officially titled The Dark Sword of Chaos, the gameplay remained true to the original, with one notable addition: While Ryu always could (and in many cases had to) grapple to walls to get around, Ryu could now scale up and down walls easily. But while the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were starring in lame TV and movie spin-offs on the NES, Rare actually spent time crafting Battletoads into a surprisingly arcade-like beat-'em-up. Kind of like Pixar's Toy Story, this was a world seen from a toy's perspective races took place on top of massive billiards tables or in backyard with gigantic, looming flowers and blades of grass. To this day I still vividly remember the cutscenes that showed my sword becoming more powerful. Then, Skate or Die 2 came along and trumped its predecessor in many ways, offering a full storyline adventure in addition to the standalone skating events as well as adding in the "Double Trouble" half pipe, a massive structure that spanned two full game screens and let you pull off highly stylish (for the time) vert skating tricks. Still, dying needlessly was satisfying. Capcom listened to clamoring gamers' wants and introduced Mega Man's brother Protoman as a character of consequence. At least, they're our favorite NES shooters to play. Top. I remember playing this a lot with my dad when I was younger. How did we pick the games? More than any other past gaming console, the NES was the birthplace of long-lived mascot characters. I used to apply the Konami code to every game from Konami just to see what would happen. It was the first game I ever played with an NES Advantage. The concept added some strategy to the mix, and makes this one fondly remembered to this day (along with that unforgettable name). If you fully power up your weapons you turn into a flaming, butt-kicking phoenix. Astyanax is armed with a massive golden axe which has a unique mechanic attached to it it's linked to a power meter at the bottom of the screen which depletes and refills after every attack. Seen from a three-quarters viewpoint that placed every environment on an angle relative to the player, you were tasked to take command of a snake that, initially, had no body. The car is called the G-6155. This was a defining day for my brother and I, though I'm sure neither of us knew it then. What makes the game so special, then? Jackal - A top down shooter based around the NES version get a new Amiga v6 demo via Neeso Games! But in reality, the games were different enough, and Ice Climber so much better to me when I finally played it, that I felt silly for ever thinking that. Mega Man is one of the few franchises on the NES that made it to four games. Everyone remembers the simple, but effective cinematic in which series hero Ryu Hayabusa stands atop a mountaintop and stares off into the distant landscape. Brawling brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee were once again playable in both single-player mode, but for the first time on the 8-bit Nintendo you and a friend could team up to punch, kick and hair-pull your foes to death simultaneously through an all-new set of side-scrolling beat-'em-up stages. It may be hard to believe, but at one point Zombies were a greatly underrepresented class of brain-dead enemy in videogames. The sequel to the original Mega Man was quick on the heels of the first, with barely a year in between the release of the two titles in the United States. And here's the kicker the pit stop comes to you! Ice Climber's biggest claim to fame for its time, however, was the ability for two players to play the game simultaneously. 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