Friday Top 5: Favorite NES Games Not Made By Nintendo

In case you haven’t heard – and if you haven’t, then my blog is probably not going to be of much interest to you – this Fall marks the 25th of anniversary of the release of the NES in America. As such, everyone who has their own little corner of the internet devoted to video games is marking the occasion by making lists of their favorite NES games. What kind of message would I be sending if I acted like I was too good to participate? However, I quickly realized that my top 5 NES games would pretty much be three Mario games, one Zelda game, and Little Mac and Samus battling for the fifth slot. So, in an effort to make things a little more interesting, I decided to exclude anything developed by Nintendo and make a list of my 5 favorite non-Nintendo NES games. I’m not saying that there are necessarily going to be any big surprises in this list, but at least it evens out the playing field a bit.

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#5- Super Dodge Ball“Hi!”

 

While I feel that I was less socially awkward and a tad more willing to be active and play outside than your typical grade school game nerd, there was one stereotype that certainly applied to me in a big way - my fear and dread of dodge ball day in gym. But as it goes with a lot of other things that I don’t like to do in real life I somehow loved it in video game form (see also: pretty much every activity in Animal Crossing).

Not unlike most of the games on this list, it was fun playing it solo, but multiplayer is where it really shined. As a head-to-head experience, Super Dodge Ball was hard to beat in a pre-Street Fighter II world. At its most basic level, it was your average game of dodge ball: Two teams throw a ball back and forth, and if the ball hits you without you catching it, you’re out. In order to keep matches long-form, the catch-it-and-the-thrower-is-out rule was smartly abandoned. In this game, though, getting hit doesn’t just send you to the sidelines: it KILLS you! Of course, that death comes in a cute, Japanese cartoon kind of way – you just turn into an adorable little angel who slowly floats towards the top of the screen.

The other major twist that was added to spice up the real-life game of dodge ball was the addition of special super-powered throws, a few of which were unique to certain players, with a handful of others shared across the rest. One flattened the ball into a player-controlled rocket that barreled through any player in its path. Another froze the ball in mid-air at the center line for a few seconds before plowing directly into a player of its choice. One particularly interesting one had the ball coast over to the other side in extreme slow motion, but the pace of it made it a little tricky to time your catch, and it was also the most powerful throw in the game, sending you off screen before you came crashing back down to earth.

Each team was based in a different country and, not surprisingly for a game of its era, they were chock full of stereotypes of that country’s culture and people. The US team was way overpowered (especially if the mighty Sam was on your squad), clearly designed to be the player-controlled team in single player mode but making for some hilariously unbalanced multiplayer contests.

At the end of the day, though, it’s almost a moot point trying to extol the virtues of this game to anyone else, as there are only two types of people in the world: Those who loved Super Dodge Ball, and those who never played it.

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#4-Double Dragon II: The Revenge“Roar of the Twin Dragons”

Beat-em-ups were at their creative and commercial peak in the 16-bit era, both in the arcades and on 16-bit systems, but the genre did have a presence on the NES, and the best of them was Double Dragon II. Yes, River City Ransom is a classic thanks to it’s open-ended structure and quirky anime tone, but the action itself was a little weak and couldn’t hold a candle to the visceral thrills of Double Dragon II.

The original DD for NES was a solid game, but the sequel improved upon it in every way – especially with the inclusion of co-op. It’s hard to imagine it now looking back on it, but there was a time when Double Dragon II was a rough, gritty game that made you feel like a badass out of an R-rated 80′s action flick as you used chains, baseball bats, and a wicked spinning cyclone kick to take down all manner of thugs as you traversed areas that represented various cliches of machismo: a heliport, a lumber yard, a factory, and the woods. Like the best NES action games, it was the kind of game that I could run all the way through one day and happily start it again the next, and feel just as exhilarated as I did the first time. My favorite home console-specific brawler of all time is Streets of Rage 2 for Genesis, but I’m pretty confident in saying that this would take the #2 spot. It may not see an HD remake anytime soon, but I can still pop in this game from time to time and have a blast with it – well, except for those annoying jumping sections…

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#3- Baseball Stars“What Is A Wren?”

It’s sort of ironic that I more or less retired from sports games completely once they started getting too complex sometime around the second season of the last generation, when one of my all-time favorite sports games is one that was actually way ahead of its time in its complexity. In Baseball Stars, the number of on field moves at your disposable surpassed the average baseball game at the time (on the NES, anyway), especially on defense: you could jump for high line drives, slide to snag pop-ups, even climb the wall to prevent low home runs, all with idiot-proof ease. Aside from that, though, the action was pretty straightforward fare for a sports sim of the time, albeit a really well-playing one.

Where Baseball Stars left its peers in the dust and went unrivaled for years to come in video games period was in the custom player and team options. You could create an entire team from scratch, naming each and every player – even choosing their gender, something that other sports games two decades later still don’t do!

Your team started out as a club full of scrubs, and you had to play games in order to earn more money to improve your team. You could up your existing players’ stats with the cash, but they couldn’t be fully maxed out – to get real superstars, you had to buy brand new players (which you could then also change the name of if you wanted it to match the player you had to fire to make room for the new star). This lent an almost RPG-like vibe to the game, as you basically had to “grind” by playing single-player games to up your stats and improve your players. Of course, the real fun was if someone else was doing the same on your cartridge, so that you could pit your teams against each other. It gave you a sense of ownership over your players and your team that just taking an existing pro team through a season can’t replicate.

So if there aren’t real teams, then who do you play solo games against when you are going head-to-head with a friend? How about the “Ghastly Monsters”, a team of players named after classic movie monsters, or the all-girl “Lovely Ladies”, or the “Ninja Blacksox” with their insanely fast baserunning that had stolen bases being a threat on almost every pitch. It was cool to see so much personality given to the dozen or so team in the game to make up for the lack of any real-life MLB teams – and to a kid like me who didn’t watch baseball anyway, they were good enough for me.

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#2- Mega Man 3“In the year 200X…”

I spent many years feeling like something was wrong with me for favoring Mega Man 3 over it’s fan-favorite direct descendant, but I’ve come to learn that there is actually a small but vocal subset of gamers who give the edge to MM3 over MM2. Personally, I feel it’s almost six of one, half dozen of the other as to which game is technically superior – both games take the promise of the foundation laid by the solid but flawed original to its full potential, before the series went on to have three entries too many on the NES. The overall quality of the core Mega Man series’ post-NES career has had its highs and lows, but most fans agree that the peak was MM2 and 3.

So why do I give 3 the edge? First, there’s Rush, your robotic dog helper. His transformations may have been rather limited and very specific to select situations, but it still gave the game just a hair more gameplay variety than part 2. Second, you have to fight versions of all of MM2′s bosses in MM3, and the coolness of that speaks for itself. Lastly but probably most imporantly, though, it was my first Mega Man, so despite going back and playing 2 after the fact, Mega Man 3 just got to me first so it had a bigger impact…which, I would imagine, is the reason that so many of the people who played them in order favor 2. Had Mega Man 2 been significantly better than 3, this would’ve only ended up being a small part of the decision, but since I don’t believe that it is, it’s actually the key to the decision. Either way, you can’t go wrong: Two amazing action games with some of the most creative level, enemy, and boss designs ever seen in a game, 8-bit or otherwise, accompanied by music that is instantly recognizable within the first five notes. Not everybody has the patience or digital dexterity to handle a (good) Mega Man game, but for those that do, it’s gaming nirvana. There are few purer examples – not named Mario – of what exemplified all that was great about the NES era than Mega Man.

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#1- Contra“Up Up, Down Down, Yadda Yadda Yadda”

I know I’ve already covered this elsewhere, but it’s hard to get over how absurd it is the many dozens upon dozens upon dozens of hours I have poured into a game that is probably only about an hour long. To this day, I am in awe of what an incredibly well-crafted game Contra is – you get the sense that 85% of the development time was devoted specifically to tuning and balancing everything until it was absolutely pitch-perfect, which it is. The controls are flawless, the soundtrack is one of the best on the system, the level design is second-to-none, the weapons have a depth and a variety that were years ahead of their time, and the difficulty is brutal but never feels impossible or cheap. Even details that would’ve been quick throwaway decisions in a lesser game and maybe have even been left to randomization, like the frequency of the weapon drop pods and what was in each one, were clearly given a serious amount of consideration and were tweaked until they got it just right.

This game would’ve still been one of the best action games of all time even without the co-op, but with it, it’s untouchable. Going to a friend’s house for the night and playing Contra from the moment we finished our pizza until our parents yelled at us to go to bed well until the AM hours was the perfect way to spend a sleepover for the kids of the Nintendo Generation – one of the last generations of children who got to have childhoods that were untainted by cell phones, chat rooms, and age-inappropriate clothing.

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