Blast from the Video Game Past

Things have gotten fairly busy in recent weeks curtailing my blogging somewhat. I've accumulated a rather large stack of subjects I want to blog about, and now that I have some time that stack will... remain exactly the same size. Thanks to NumberThree over at fringeofacity a new topic has shot right to the top of the list: Favorite Old School Nintendo Game. Picking up that original Nintendo Entertainment System in Kindergarten (bundled with Mario 1 and Duck Hunt) was a turning point in my life putting me on track to log countless hours on various systems since. Of the games I loved in those head 8-bit days these ten were the most beloved.

• 10. RBI Baseball

I am not a baseball fan. I haven't really followed baseball since the 1997 World Series. In the days of my wide-eyed, innocent youth, however, I couldn't get enough of it. I was on a little league team and played the shit out of this game. To this day I can only name a couple of baseball games that I'd rather play, and in fact one of them appears later on this list.


• 9. Tecmo NBA Basketball

Though Tecmo Bowl is generally more beloved, I've personally always been more in love with basketball. For NES basketball, while competitor Double Dribble sported a sweet little dunk cut scene it also sported inferior gameplay and graphics. It took me years to break the habit of wildly jacking up threes from the far corner developed from too much Tecmo NBA.


• 8. Gradius

Technology leaps and bounds head of its Atari predecessor, Defender, Gradius was a side-scrolling shooter in which the player controlled a space ship, dodged and shot at enemies, and obtained power-ups to allow greater efficiency at aforementioned dodging and shooting. It remained my favorite scrolling plane-based shooter (a rich genre in those days) until the SNES's epic Raiden Trad.


• 7. Excite Bike

This was not a game that was exciting graphically, nor conceptually, but hearing the title screen music immediately brings a smile to my face to this very day. I spent hours upon hours constructing my own courses, dodging oil slicks, hitting ramps and stepping on the gas too hard to the point of overheating.



• 6. Jackal

The only game to do shooting and lobbing grenades while rescuing hostages better than this was Half-Life's Counterstrike mod. To this day one of my most satisfying memories of the NES is seeing watching those soldiers get on that helicopter and fly to safety. Gameplay-wise, it's everything riding around in the Turtle Van should have been but wasn't.


• 5. Super Mario Bros.

This was the start of it all. A twenty year (off and on) love of video games stemmed directly from a little game in which a plumber jumps on walking heads and turtles to rescue a princess from a larger turtle. Eating mushrooms, smashing bricks, throwing fireballs, kicking ass and taking names.


• 4. Base Wars

In number 10 I alluded to a handful of baseball games that did it better than RBI, and this is on that short list (indeed, the only one on the NES platform.) Adding power-ups, robots, upgrades, and fights to anything is a recipe for success. I distinctly remember avoiding force-outs just to get into more battles.

Flybot Scott FTW.


• 3. Contra

Few games display the deterioration of my reaction time like Contra. Where as a 6 year-old I could waltz through a hail of bullet fire - spreader rifle firing madly - level after level I now rely on the Konami code to play for any extended length of time. Though this amazing dexterity was likely due to the hours I poured into memorizing exactly where to jump and when to shoot.


• 2. TMNT2

The time I put into this game in arcades across the greater Cleveland area is only rivaled by the time I put into it at home. Games like this (and X-Men and the Simpsons, which all basically followed a similar side-scrolling formula) part of what led to the strength of the video game arcade in this era and porting this experience to the home console was a stroke of genius. This game kicked off a string of fantastic Ninja Turtles games for Nintendo and remains one of the system's best titles.


• 1. Super Mario Bros. 3

This game outclassed every game that came before it and many that came in later years on later systems. Graphically it held its own or surpassed many titles from the later-gen 16-bit systems and from a game-play standpoint it was one of the most ambitious games released by Nintendo until Mario 64. It was bursting with content from power ups (mushrooms, fire-flowers, raccoon suits, frog suits, hammer bros, tanooki, p-wings) to bonus levels (mushroom house, spade house, ghost ship) to hidden secrets (warp whistles, hiding behind scenery). Nintendo used the formula form this game to create the superior Super Mario World for the SNES and while it rivaled Mario 3 in fun-factor few games can rival it for groundbreaking ingenuity.