My 15 Favorite NES Games

[Music] hey everybody this is restal gamecore we're going to do something unique in today's video we're just going to talk about games generally I will do reviews and guides for Hardware but I get a lot of questions about what are my favorite games for any particular system so I want to do a new series where I pick a system in this example is going to be NES and then I'm going to talk about all my experiences my favorite games with that particular system so that's what we're going to do here today now I'm hoping this video is going to be helpful in two ways number one is if you've just never played NES before I think that you'll find that this list is pretty eclectic and it's a great place to start I'm not saying these are the top 15 games ever made for the NES but these are the ones that really connected with me when I was younger and so I hope you enjoy them too now if you're already familiar with the NES catalog I'm hoping that there's maybe a Hidden Gem in here that you haven't heard of before or if anything this will just be a celebration of some of those really great games on the system like I mentioned I don't think these are the top 15 games you wouldn't find these on a list and so maybe your favorite game isn't on this list and that's totally cool I think other people will have different lists for me this is just in particular the games that I really enjoyed and we're going to talk about why and so without any further delay let's go ahead and dive [Music] in now to start I did mention this isn't going to be a Hardware video but all the same I do want to talk about some of the handhelds that are really great when comes to playing NES and so let's talk about a few of those before we get started I would say overall my favorite handheld to play when it comes to NES is actually the pal Kitty rgb3 this one costs about $90 but has a really unique screen it's 4 in and has a square aspect ratio with a 720p resolution and I tend to play these games in an 8x7 aspect ratio on this display just because it fills out so much of the screen and it looks really great this one also has support for a bunch of custom firmwares including one called jealous which is the primary one I Ed on this device and yeah I just really love this experience and so if you're looking for something under $100 that can play NES really well then I would recommend this handheld in fact in my review of the rgb3 I did a whole section about the NES and so I'll leave all that stuff linked down below another handheld that works really well with NES is actually the steam deck this one has an aspect ratio of 16x 10 and so when you're playing 4x3 content which is usually what you'll play with NES it actually fills out most of the screen and so it looks really good in addition the steam deck is very comfortable to use and has a nice big display and so it's really impressive to play NES games on it another handheld that's super impressive is the analog pocket this one actually uses Hardware emulation through a process called fpga now essentially what this is doing is very accurately re-representing the NES and so as a result it's a very accurate and faithful Recreation of playing some of those games now this one's pretty expensive it's around $250 and so it's not the cheapest way to play NES and honestly I mostly play Game Boy on this one anyway just because it looks so good in this form factor but all the same if you're looking for something very accurate than I would recommend the analog pocket another device I really enjoy playing with NES is the Odin 2 this one recently came out and it's totally Overkill this one is over $300 and it can emulate up to GameCube PS2 and Nintendo switch so it's definitely more powerful than you need for NES but all the same I love the big 1080p display here that means that all the pixel scaling is going to look really good and so it's just a really fun way for me to play NES on now all the same I also like having NES on the go and so one of my favorite ways to play this system is actually the trimi smart this one is what I would call a micro handheld so it's something that can easily fit in your pocket but the minui operating system really makes this a joy to play and I've got a whole video about this handheld and this operating system and how they play together so nicely so I'll leave that link down below but all the same if you're looking for something to just throw in your pocket and play I think the trimi smart is a really great deal now it's a smaller kind of screen so you're going to be squinting a little bit with certain games so it's not a perfect setup but all the same it's really nice to have it in the pocket and then and then finally another great all-around handheld when it comes to playing NES is the Miu Mini Plus this one is also on the small side so I would consider it to be pocketable but it also has a nice 4x3 aspect ratio display with a 480p resolution that's going to look really good especially if you're using onion OS which is the operating system I recommend for this it's just going to be a really great plug-and-play experience when it comes to playing NES and so yes I know I'm going through this very quickly but I did want to point out that there are many ways to play NES on a handheld and depending on your preference when it comes to size and Screen you've got a lot of options here and I'll leave all this stuff linked down below if you want to watch more about any of these okay so let's jump into the games and I think we're going to have a lot of fun here but I do have a couple notes number one I'm not treating this like a documentary so I'm not doing a bunch of research and then presenting it to you instead we're mostly going to go off my own memories from back in the day I want to talk about why I love these games so much and why they were revolutionary at the time and then also I want to talk about why they're still great today in addition these games are going to be in alphabetical order it's really hard to rank all of these my favorite game of all time is still Super Mario Brothers 2 but after that it gets really muddy and so instead I decided let's just play him in order and it actually works out really well because it makes it a very eclectic list so let's go ahead and get started with our number one game which is going to be Batman now I don't think we can talk about the Batman game without first talking about the 1989 Tim Burton movie and I'm dating myself here but I was nine when that movie first came out and it was just super awesome number one you know we had grown up watching the older show from the' 60s and that was kind of cheesy it's still pretty cool but then this was like a whole new level it was dark and Moody and funny and then also had really great acting and a new Batmobile and then also a soundtrack made by Prince it was just like a perfect storm of coolness when I was 9 years old and so when this game came out the following year in 1990 yeah we played it a lot it's not one that we actually owned but we were rented all the time now this game is tough as Nails it's a sidescrolling game it actually reminds me a lot of ninja giden in the fact that you have like your own basic punch but then you can also get other weapons and then use those you only have a limited amount of ammunition for each of them but it does give you an advantage depending on the enemy that you're playing against now the game itself is not closely tied to the movie in fact there's only a couple times when it actually feels like it comes from the movie there's a couple cutscenes and also Joker is the end boss but other than that it's really mostly an action platformer that requires very precise controls there's not a lot of variation when it comes to levels but all the same the gameplay mechanic is very solid and that was kind of rare with these movie tie-in games and like I mentioned it's a pretty challenging game in in fact the only way I can beat it nowadays is to use cheat codes and so it's definitely not a game I would recommend if you're looking for a relaxing jaunt through the NES catalog but if you're looking for something that's a little bit more Precision oriented and a little bit challenging then I think this is going to be a great time okay the next game up is going to be Blaster Master this is a game that I read about all the time in the magazines but it was one that was kind of hard to find in real life I don't know if it was just kind of rare but all the same when we did find it we would rent it immediately it was not a game that we actually owned now the thing that's really amazing about Blaster Master is that it's super varied and in fact there's like a really intricate backstory to it and there's a whole cut scene in the beginning of the game now essentially what happens is you have a pet frog and it escapes out of its Bull and you obviously go and you chase it down a hole which goes into the center of the world while you're down there in the center of the earth you meet this tank that you then get inside of and then that becomes a part of you and so you play the game inside of this tank for the most part so you're like jumping around with his tank which jumps by the way and it also can aim in all these different directions which is a really unique mechan iic for NES back in the day now in addition you can also get out of the tank and you'll be this little tiny guy in the Overworld but then you can go in these really small doors and all of a sudden you're like this huge character and so it's almost like two games in one and I was always really impressed at how big the Sprite is that's one of those really big things with the NES was how big your character could be the bigger the character the better the graphics so to speak and so Blaster Master kind of had it all it was a really kind of intense platforming game that also allowed you to shoot but then also you could get out of your car and then go into this door and then have a completely different game experience as well so if you're looking for a game that's kind of surprisingly complex and deep then I would recommend Blaster Master it's a lot of fun okay next up we have the Castlevania games now there are three that were released on the NES and Castlevania 1 and three are very similar Castlevania 2 is kind of the black sheet of the bunch and I honestly didn't play that one very much so I didn't really like it it was really kind of obtuse and confusing but I really liked Castlevania 3 this one came out later in the systems life cycle but I just thought that it improved on the first Castlevania a bunch now when you think of Castlevania you might think of the Metroid Vania genre which is where you kind of level up as you go forward that definitely happened in the original Metroid but the old Castlevania games were not really like that they were just action Platformers it wasn't until later that the RPG elements actually came into it with the turbor graphic CD and then PlayStation 1 so these games are more straightforward kind of action titles but I think they're a lot of fun and I do love the whole whip element as well I thought it was really neat anyway I think that if you are going to play a Castlevania Game the first and second games are still really good good but the third one really takes the cake for me I also think it has the best soundtrack among the three as well and so it's just my favorite among the Castlevania games and definitely worth checking out now next up we have Contra and this one is definitely up there as my top NES games and it's obviously one that I play all the time because I do the Contra test on my channel when I'm testing Hardware now I would consider Contra to be the quintessential Konami game this one starts with only three lives and so it's almost impossible to play with that many lives however you can put in the Konami Code that's going to be up up down down left right all that stuff when you do that you're going to get 30 lives and that was basically essential for us there was no way that we could beat this on our own and so that was really cool to be able to have this kind of secret hack to be able to beat this game so we really enjoyed that on top of that this one had two-player Co-op and so you and a buddy could actually play at the same time and it would make the whole experience a lot easier not only that there's a good amount of variation to this game we have different types of levels like the jungle and snow level but then also there are other levels where you have a top down or kind of forward-looking perspective and so this game always felt like a huge Blockbuster because you had those different perspectives and then also it had like basically Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the front and so we always kind of loved that idea of this game I also love the fact that we have different powerups that we can use that will change our weapon types and everyone wanted the spread gun and so we would always fight over that but all the same it was just a really fun experience and I think it's still one of people's favorite NES games and that's for a very good reason and another thing is that it doesn't take a lot of time to beat the game in fact if you put in that Konami Code you can beat the game in under 30 minutes and so it's just a really great sit down experience okay next we're going to talk about Double Dragon 2 but first we'll talk a little bit about Double Dragon one now this was one of the very first beat him up games available for the NES and so it was just really kind of an amazing game back then and the first Double Dragon is also surprisingly complex because it has RPG elements to it we didn't know what that was back in the day we just knew that something happened the longer you played the game the more points you got you would actually unlock more moves and so when you first start the game you can only punch and kick and jump but later later on you can uppercut and jump kick and that becomes really important now this game also supported two-player Co-op which was awesome but it always turned into a competition because as you start punching a character you would get more points and so it turns into this fight to get the most points you can get the upgraded skills and so as a result it always turned into a fight with me and my brothers so I didn't really like playing Double Dragon one just because it was really hard to play on your own but when playing with somebody else they would always steal your points and so it wasn't a great feeling and so that's why I prefer Double Dragon 2 over Double Dragon 1 number one the Sprites in the characters just looked a little bit better in the second one but then also you started with all your skills right there in the beginning so there was no competition when it came to the points or anything else like that you really were just kind of working together and I always enjoyed that more and so when it came to Double Dragon yeah we really like the first two games but I like the second one better there was actually a third one but we never really played it just because it came out really late in the NES life cycle and so we never got an opportunity to play it so Double Dragon 2 was the choice for me this one was also a lot of fun to play on your own it actually had a difficulty system now if you played it the very easiest difficulty it was pretty easy to get through but it wouldn't play the whole game you actually had to play it at the harder difficulties to get through the whole story it would actually just cut off at a certain level but I also like that idea because it allowed me to practice on those levels to get really good and then I could move on to the harder levels later on anyway yeah if you're looking for a beat them up game I think the Double Dragon series is really good my favorite is Double Dragon 2 and there are other beat them up games that are really great for example the River City Ransom game this again was another late in the NES life cycle game that we didn't really play but this one is also a really great game to play too okay next up we have Dragon Warrior and this was a really influential game for me definitely in the top five for me when it comes to NES games now to start this game actually came free if you subscribed to Nintendo Power in its first year now we didn't really have the money for that so we didn't do that but I had a friend who did and so he had this game for free and it was just awesome and the thing about it was that it came with a map that also had some of the enemies on there as well and so this is one of those very few games where we actually had all the information up front it's not like we had the internet back in the day and we could look up a map we often played these games like completely blind but Dragon Warrior was one of those where you could see everything at once and so that was just kind of a revelation to us that this game was so much bigger than we saw when we first started playing it but we knew what we were getting ourselves into and so that was a really great experience in addition Dragon Warrior was my very first role playing game and so I really enjoyed that experience the idea of leveling up and grinding and getting experience all that stuff was really fun and you could upgrade your weapons to get a stronger sword and then you also there were like hidden items you had to get like the special sword and shield and armor and so this is a very deep and complex game especially back in the day and so we really enjoyed that experience in fact I still like playing through this game from time to time it's kind of simple by today's standards in fact it's a little bit annoying sometimes for example you have to go into the menu and select the word door if you want to open up a door or if you want to take the stairs you have to select stairs like it's not very intuitive and there's a lot of nuances to it for example when you first start start the game all you're obsessed with is gold you want to get as much money as possible because you see that in the store there are some weapons that you can't quite afford just yet so as you start to play these enemies you start to focus on the ones that give you the most gold because that's going to let you level up at least in terms of your equipment the fastest however as you get further into the game you realize that experience is a lot more important and so then you start trying to find those enemies that will give you more experience in particular there's one called the metal slime this guy will run away every time you try to fight him but at the same time if you're able to kill him it'll give you way more exp than anything else in the game and so that was always awesome anyway I got a lot of fun memories of this game it doesn't hold up very well nowadays just because of the mechanics but all the same if you're looking to go back into a time capsule of what role playing games were back in the day this is a really good experience okay next up we have life force and this is a Konami game as well and it's actually an offshoot of a game called gradius which you've probably heard of which is a lot more popular now this game originally was called salamander both in Japan and I think Europe as well but in North America we knew it as life force and this game had a lot of the same mechanics as the gradius game so you would kill these guys and it would give you a power up and then you could choose when to use it so you could level up more and more as you progress further so you could maybe make yourself faster right there in the beginning but if you saved up your powerups you could then get the laser which would like shoot through enemies and so that was really helpful anyway this game reminds me the most of Contra because a lot of the Sprites and assets are actually very similar so when it comes to like explosions it's very similar to Contra and this one also thankfully used the Konami Code so you can get those 30 lives which made it a lot easier to beat this is a game we actually owned and so we played through it all the time if it was like a boring rainy weekend we would sit down together cuz it had Co-op and we would play through the game and having two players on the screen made it a lot easier to get through the game and so this is a game we used to beat all the time and you can usually do it in about 30 minutes or less this one also had a lot of variety when it came to levels much like Contra and so you had the sides scrolling typical levels but then also top down levels which were kind of unique as well so if you're looking for a shooting kind of game on the NES I think that life force is really amazing and it was my favorite among this type of games now the next game up is Little Nemo the dream master now I didn't know a lot about this game all I knew is that it was made by Capcom who made some really awesome games but then also it had some really incredible graphics and a really cool gameplay mechanic as well now later on I learned that this is based off of a movie which is also based off of a comic strip from the early 20th century I didn't know any of this stuff in fact this movie flopped in the US to the point where I didn't even know it came into the theaters I never saw a trailer or anything else like that all I knew is that we had this Little Nemo game that looked amazing and all that being said the existence of the movie didn't really take anything away from the game itself which had a really nice kind of complex story as well essentially you play as this little boy who goes off into Slumberland and while you're there you've got a bunch of candy and so you can throw it at these random animals and then when they fall asleep you can jump into those animals and it basically becomes an animal suit and so this was a really neat mechanic that would give you special powers so depending on where you were in the level this would get you through the next section and so I never really got really far in this game because it is very difficult but I do remember playing as a frog which could like swim in the water really quickly but then also jump really high and there was also the mole character and that guy could like dig through the dirt and also ran pretty quickly as well but he couldn't jump also later on in the game you get a wand which can be used as a weapon which makes things a little bit easier so it kind of had this nice kind of upgrade mechanic to it as well anyway among all the other Capcom games including like Duck tails and Darkwing Duck this was the one that I like the most and so this is the one that made the list now another Capcom game that was a lot more popular is Mega Man 2 now there were actually six Mega Man games released for the NES but some of those came out a lot later in the life cycle and so there were very few copies of them in fact if you own Mega Man 4 five or 6 on the NES it's worth a lot of money personally I only have Mega Man 2 I can't afford those other ones but it is pretty awesome that they had six total Games available for the system and I got to be honest the first Mega Man just flew under my radar I never heard of it or anything but when Mega Man 2 came out it got really popular and so that's the game that I know the best and of course all the trademark things from Mega Man are available in Mega Man 2 number one you can choose your level right in the beginning so you have a bunch of choice but then also it is very hard so this is a very difficult game but the thing that makes Mega Man game so amazing is that it gets a little bit easier the longer you play it so as you beat an end boss you absorb their powers and now you can use those powers to help you with the other levels now there's an entire map that you're supposed to use when you go through like you start with one enemy and then you go on from there honestly I was so bad at this game I never really got to that point so I just treated each of those levels as like Standalone levels can I beat this level and so that was kind of the way that I played the game back in the day these games are still very hard for me and I can only beat the game with cheats but all the same it's just a really fun experience I'm not saying that Mega Man 2 is the best among all of the six that are there I think that it's probably the most well regarded but it's just the one that I'm most familiar with and so I think that if you want to play any of the Mega Man games on NES it's going to be a great time but for me I recommend Mega Man too now next up we have Mike Tyson's punch out this one's pretty unique it was actually officially licensed to have Mike Tyson in it it actually had him on the cover but then also he was the end boss however at some point the license expired and they didn't renew it and I think a lot of that had to do with how Shady Mike Tyson was at the time but then later on they also released an official version called punchout and that had a different end boss it was called Mr Dream and this was essentially Mike Tyson just with a different skin now the punchout games were actually remakes of original arcade games that came out way before that and so so it was kind of cool to be able to see these on a Home console and I got to say that this game was pretty revolutionary number one it was a one-on-one fighting game you can remember with like Street Fighter 2 and stuff those games didn't really come to NES and those came out a little bit later and so to have a on V one fighting game was pretty amazing it's obviously a different mechanic than when it comes to like a Street Fighter game but all the same it was pretty cool to have this like huge boxing Sprite that you were fighting against and the other thing that was really unique is that each of the different boxers that you fought against had their own different mechanics to it so you kind of had to memorize the patterns and the timings for each of them and so it was a deceptively complex game when it came down to it in fact I would argue this is one of the very first Rhythm games because you had to memorize the feel the timing of it and it had kind of a musical property to it and so I really enjoyed that aspect of the game in that it was very different in terms with timing and everything else compared to other games so we really enjoyed this one and this game was also very popular like all our friends had it and it was funny because some of us were better at certain characters than others and so like of us would get around we would play this game and be like okay who's good at Sandman I'm good at Sandman okay you play Sandman who's good at bald bull you play him you know that kind of thing and so it was always a lot of fun to have your friends around because we each had our own skill set okay next up we have a very weird entry into the catalog but this is a game I really loved and it's Robin Hood prince of Thieves now this is based off of the movie that came out around the same time and the reason why I like this one so much because it had a lot of variety to it and it was also a very short playthrough this is a game we didn't own and so we would rent it all the time but if you played it and memorized the game you could actually beat it in a weekend and so that was always super awesome now I really love the Robin Hood movie I thought that Kevin cner was super cool he had like really cool hair but then also he was like really good at the bow and arrow and me and my brothers we always like to play bow and arrow and that guy was just like super good and so we always wanted to be Robin Hood but in addition the game was pretty decent it would follow the whole story of the movie but then also it had several different gameplay Mechanics for the most part you play in a top- down kind of perspective and you've got a sword and you can kind of Slash people the mechanic itself is pretty difficult and it's really an unfair game but then also there were other gameplay elements for example there was a dual mechanic so when you got into certain boss battles you had to fight like kind of like fencing and so that was kind of cool but then also during some bigger moments in the game it would zoom out a bunch and it would be kind of like a gauntlet Style game at that point and in this mechanic you would take control of one character and then you would fight as many enemies as you could but if you got hit and died then you would have to take control of a different character and then you would kind of keep going until you had all of your characters dead and the Hope was that you would kill all the other characters before your last character died and so yes this is a game that's very difficult but I really enjoyed it because you could play through it in a weekend and it was also tied to one of my favorite movies at the time so it's definitely worth checking out okay next up is a game that's like super mysterious to me this game is called shadow of the ninja and this is a game we owned but I don't remember actually buying it I think it's something that maybe our parents bought us and I'm not sure why they bought it maybe it was on sale or whatever but it turns out this is actually a pretty rare game and it's a sidescrolling ninja type game so very similar to ninja giden and also very difficult but the cool thing about this one is that it had unlimited continues and so you could kind of power your way through it and then later on we also learned that there are cheat codes you can look these up on the internet now today and it actually will allow you to start on any level that you want and so that did make the game a lot easier to play now the game itself looked very good but it also had really smooth gameplay and it also had a leveling up mechanic you would start out with a sword but you could level that up and the more you level it up the longer the sword would get and so it would get easier and easier to kill the enemies in addition you had an alternative weapon which was kind of like a sickle attached to a chain and so You' throw that and it had a much longer range but it wouldn't work very well in close quarters and so you kind of had to be strategic about which weapon you wanted to use on which level anyway this is a game my brothers and I played all the time it also had Co-op which would make the game easier and so this one is definitely near the top of my list and favorite NES games of all time and I definitely recommend checking it out if you want to play an action game on this system now on the opposite side of action is our next game which is called shadowgate This is actually a port of a Macintosh game from back in the day there was a whole series of games called Mac adventure games which include Deja Vu as well as shadowgate and then another one called Uninvited and those games were originally in black and white but when they moved it over to NES it had full color and there were not a lot of point-and-click games on the NES but this one plus Deja Vu and uninvited were three games that worked really well in the system and these were also very immersive games because they were in a first-person perspective which was really rare on the n s now the gameplay mechanics itself was not very easy to use you can imagine you have to use a d-pad to move the cursor around so it's a very slow and plotting experience especially compared to something like the Macintosh which had a mouse however my brothers and I spent a lot of time playing this game this is a game that we owned and it was one that we would bust out when we were like super bored we were done playing like the action titles we wanted to get further in shadowgate and so just by hook and crook we figured out how to beat this game over time it had a hint mechanic but the funny thing about the hints was that in the beginning it would tell you some very clear hints but by the time it got to like the end of the game they weren't helpful at all and so you really had to figure it out again this is like pre- internet and so we would like ask our friends or we would like you know just use the rumor mill but eventually we figured out how to beat this game I don't know how we got past the Sphinx but somehow we figured that out anyway this is a really interesting game to try if you want to play an old school Point click adventure in a first-person perspective it's not a very fast-paced game at all but if you're looking for something that's just kind of quintessentially 1980s this is a really good choice now I've always been very fond of shadowgate but it's a game that I have not replayed since back of the day and it's also never really compelled me to play the other games in the series so I've never played Deja Vu which is like a detective story and then also Uninvited which is like a horror oriented version so maybe at some point I'll play those games but for now I'm just going to kind of treasure those memories and then move on from there okay next up is Super Mario Brothers 2 which is my all-time favorite NES game and also still my favorite Mario game and I think we should start by talking about the other games first we'll start with Mario 1 now when people bought the NES most of the time it came with Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt we however bought it very early in its life cycle and so it wasn't an option for us we ended up getting gyromite which came with Rob the robot and this was a puzzle game that was pretty terrible but this was the only thing we had it also came with duck hunt so we played that a lot but essentially Mario Brothers was a game that we only saw at other people's houses it wasn't a game that we actually owned and so when it came down to it this is just a game that I wasn't very familiar with I never really really played the first Mario Brothers instead everything changed when Mario Brothers 2 came out in fact this was the very first game that was shown on the first cover of Nintendo power and man this game looked amazing and so when that first came out we bought it right up I think all of us like my brothers and I we all asked for this game collectively for our Christmas present that year and it was amazing and there's a million reasons why I love Mario 2 so much number one you can choose between four different characters which is a really new innovation back then but then also there's no timer on the screen and so there's no like ticking clock as you're playing so you can kind of take your time and explore which is kind of amazing in addition the game is just really weird you probably know the backstory but this game was not meant to be a Mario Brothers game instead it was a game called doy DOI Panic that was released in Japan specifically like for one Festival but when Mario 2 came out in Japan which was like a harder version of Mario 1 they thought that the American audiences wouldn't like it and so instead they changed out all the skins and put Mario into it and then released that as Mario 2 in the US and this game was super popular to the point where they re-released it in Japan and called it Super Mario Brothers USA anyway I just really love this game and the fact that it was just weird and just had lots of secrets to it and you also had like a jackpot thing at the end where you could earn extra lives just by using a chance game and so this was a game that me and my brothers basically memorized I knew every little nook and cranny in this game we could beat this game in like 30 minutes no problem we always use like the warps so that we could get through the next levels and of course we mostly used Princess Peach because she had the float mechanic which gave you a huge Advantage now she was kind of weak so she couldn't pull the items very quickly but all the same she was super essential in a lot of those games where you kind of needed to avoid a lot of bullets and things like that so anyway I'm not going to talk too much about Mario 2 because you probably already heard it but yeah this definitely deserved a place on my list in fact it's at the top now later on Mario 3 came out and a lot of people will say that objectively that's a better game and I agree in some ways it's definitely a huge upgrade from Mario 1 but for me I liked Mario 2 better just because it was just a little bit better of a playthrough for me it didn't have that timer and then also I could choose all my different characters but yeah Mario 3 is amazing too you know you have like the raccoon tail suit and then also the Tanuki suit you know those things are kind of amazing but for me I would still argue that Mario 2 is my favorite okay next up we have a sports game so this is Techo Super Bowl and honestly this is probably the primary sports game that we played as kids number one this was an officially licensed game and that was pretty rare so you could actually play as the actual teams and the actual players and so it was always great to play as your favorite football star because for me this was like Heyday of NFL you know you had like Barry Sanders and John Elway and you know Joe Montana and so that stuff was really awesome in addition this is a very complex game you could play through a whole season as your favorite team and it was multiplayer so you could have multiple players playing at once so I would be the 49ers every time but if someone else wanted to be like the Seahawks or the Cowboys they could do that as well in addition you could change out the roster yourself so you could change out your players some of them would get injured so you have to change them anyway but then also attract all of your stats and so if you wanted to compete with your friends to see who could get the most passing or rushing yards you could do that and that was pretty awesome and so many times my friends and I would sit down and be like okay let's play through a season of Techo Super Bowl together over a weekend we each would pick our team and then see who could win the Super Bowl and of course the gameplay was really great too you had a bunch of different plays you could choose from and you could customize that as well so really the sky's the limit when it comes to playing techmo Super Bowl in fact this game is so popular that they still do continuous roster updates so you can get these ROM hacks where you can play like the 2022 or 20 23 season of this game and so this is still one of my favorite sports and football games of all time I still will play this I actually will turn on cheats or use safe States and so I try to get a perfect game where I get 99 to zero against the computer and it's a lot of fun and I always play as the 49ers and I'm mostly just passing from Joe Montana to Jerry Rice it's the perfect combo okay next up is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 the arcade game there were actually three Turtles games released for the NES now the first game came out before the arcade game and it was very different this was a sidescrolling game and it was super difficult it had a top- down like World element to it as well but when it came down to it this is a game that we would rent all the time because we had Turtle Mania we love the show and all that and so we wanted to play Turtles games but at the same time this game was just way too difficult for us so it was a game that we played a lot but kind of hated now when the arcade game came out this kind of blew our minds the graphics were amazing it looked just like the cartoon to us and so this was a game we threw a bunch of cords at any time that we could now later on the NES Port came out and it's kind of a sorry Port compared to the arcade game in the sense that the graphics are much worse but most of the other gameplay elements are still there and so we loved playing this game and we played it all the time and to be honest we didn't really notice the difference in graphics it was just kind of amazing that we could play the arcade game at home without having to throw a bunch of quarters into it now later on Turtles 3 came out and I think most people would say that objectively that one is the better game but for us Turtles 2 was just amazing it was an arcade game that we could play at home that was a very rare thing back then anyway if you have the option now to play the turtles arcade game I would recommend playing it on Arcade but still the NES has a soft spot in my heart okay and the last game on our list is going to be Wizards and warriors this is also a game that we owned and we had a love and haate relationship with it again a very difficult game but it had some pretty cool mechanics to it and a lot of variety when it came to levels and believe it or not this game was developed by Rare this is a company that would later on make like battle toads and all the other games on the Nintendo 64 but at the time this was one of their very first games that they had ever developed and there actually three games in this series but I only really played the first one the second one actually had Fabio on the cover which is kind of amazing and the third game came out really late in the life cycle and so that was a game I never even saw until later on now Wizards and warriors is a platforming game and has a lot of jumping to it in fact there's a lot of verticality to this game in general the core mechanic of this game is that you have to jump from the bottom of some sort of tree or whatever and get all the way to the top of it meanwhile all these enemies are coming at you and so it becomes very difficult process this game also had some role playing elements to it for example example you would find a key that would unlock chests that you would need for later on and so each level had a layer of complexity to it and you basically had to memorize the entire map and like I mentioned this game was very difficult in fact back in the day we never beat this game we got pretty far but we never got to that final point of actually finishing the game nowadays it's a lot easier because we have cheat codes but back then man this was a really hard game however it was one that we owned and so when we were really bored much like with shadowgate this is one that we would bust out and so we would try really hard and we memor urised a lot of this game as well now I wouldn't call this a must-have title for the NES but all the same if you're looking for a good challenge this one's pretty fun and like I mentioned it's got some pretty deep gameplay mechanics to it as well so if you're looking for like an 8 bit version of Elden ring this one's pretty fun okay so that's really about it for this video I wanted to go over my favorite games and this video got pretty long but I hope you enjoyed this walk through memory lane and the amazing thing about the NES catalog is that I only scratched the surface for example I didn't even talk about Zelda or Kirby those are also awesome some games but just didn't quite make the cut for me so let me know what you think about this type of video in the comments down below do you want to hear more about NES games or other systems and also what were your favorite NES games I'd love to see your top 10 or top 15 list as well as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 99,571

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Id: Bso6qJWb7R4

Length: 33min 30sec (2010 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023