This is a thread I had been meaning to post a while back, and I was reminded of it while looking at fusoya’s NES-a-day thread. There were approximately 750 games released for the NES in the US, and I’m not sure how many are still memorable. Shall we try to build a list?
I’m holding off on contributing for right now because I’ve been thinking about this lately and probably remember more now than I would otherwise.
Heh, I actually went through every single game released in the US a month or two ago; an artist-buddy of mine was trying to decide which NES game he wanted to draw up some art for so we went through the list together. I’ll throw down a few off the top of my head that I was a big fan of, instead of naming off all the ones I can remember:
(links are to art my friend has done for that game)
Bubble Bobble
Wrecking Crew
Joust
River City Ransom
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!!
Dragon Spirit
Final Fantasy (of course)
T&C Surf Design’sT&C Surf Design’s Wood, Water, & Rage
StarTropics
and quite possibly my two all-time favorites:
Tecmo Super Bowl
Baseball Stars 2
The games I had, from memory:[ul]
[li]Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I & II[/li][li]Castlevanias I, II (“Simon’s Quest”), & III (“Forgettable subscript”)[/li][li]Megamans I, II & III[/li][li]Contra[/li][li]Kid Icarus[/li][li]Metal Storm[/li][li]Karnov[/li][li]Bayou Billy[/li][li]Rygar[/li][li]Kabuki Quantum Fighter (I only remember this one because the other thread reminded me)[/li][li]Super Mario Brothers I, II, & III[/li][li]Bionic Commando[/li][li]Legend of Kage[/li][li]Punch-Out[/li][li]Bad Dudes[/li][li]Doubles Dragon I, II, & III[/li][li]Ice Hockey[/li][li]Tennis[/li][li]Stryder (Strider?)[/li][li]Zeldas I & II[/li][li]Ninjas Gaiden I, II, & III[/li][li]Dragons Warrior I, II, & III (there’s a lot of “I, II, & III” on this list, huh?)[/li][li]Batman[/li][li]The Goonies[/li][li]Excite Bike[/li][li]Rad Racer[/li][li]Faxanadu[/li][li]Metroid[/li][li]Tetris[/li][li]Gradius[/ul][/li]
…and they say I wasted my youth. 
Oh, yeah, StarTropics was a good one. We rented it, though, and some jerk had removed the special paperwork you had to put in hot water (or something like that) to find the frequency to set the radio to, so we were unable to complete it until we bought our own copy of the game. Grr…
The game I found most memorable was an obscure little game called Athena, where you played a chick (presumably Athena) wandering through sidescrolling levels and battling various bad guys with various weapons and helmets and crap. It had a bunch of stuff like wings hidden in obscure maze-like locations…
Anyway.
[QUOTE=recessiveMeme]
[li]Castlevanias I, II (“Simon’s Quest”), & III (“Forgettable subscript”)[/li][/QUOTE]
Dracula’s Curse.
So, so many. I still have my original carts, and I’ve recently bought a bunch of old favorites off of Ebay. I was never one of those kids that actually owned a lot of games - I still think they’re expensive now at $50 each, so I can’t even imagine what that was like for my parents in pre-inflation 1988 - so I got maybe one game a year or so. But between renting games and trading with friends and so on, I played hundreds.
Favorites:
Baseball Stars - the best baseball game on the NES. Basically a baseball RPG.
Maniac Mansion - I just played through this again last year, and it holds up 100%. Hilarious, wonderful, weird, engrossing game. It makes me sad that this whole genre of games has all-but vanished from the modern scene.
Faxanadu - A really underrated side-scrolling RPG based on quasi-norse mythology.
Dragon Warrior III and IV - the best RPG’s that the NES ever saw. They came out SO late over here (around '92) that they never made a big splash, but they were absolutely killer. I re-played them last year, and MAN, are they hard.
Star Tropics - already mentioned. Great action-RPG game with a totally weird story and unique tropical setting.
Crystalis - probably the best action/adventure/RPG game for the system. Like Zelda on acid and steroids at the same time. Compelling game-play, great story, huge world. Really legendary game.
My brother and I had a NES and a SNES, and I sold the systems and all our games on eBay last year. We made a tidy profit, too, but I feel like we might have gotten even more a few years ago. This is what we had:
NES with Zapper gun and NES Advantage joystick
Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt
Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. 3
Legend of Zelda
Zelda II: The Adventures of Link
Metroid
Dragon Warrior
Dragon Warrior II
Dragon Warrior III
Dragon Warrior IV
Final Fantasy
Ultima: Exodus
Ultima: Quest of the Avatar
Tetris (the Nintendo version, not the superior, unlicensed Tengen version)
Bubble Bobble
Contra
Karnov
Wizards and Warriors
Pac-Man (the unlicensed Tengen version)
Double Dragon
Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
Deja Vu
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out
Operation Wolf
Jeopardy
Metal Storm
Kabuki Quantum Fighter
World Class Track Meet (with the Power Pad)
Some of my favorite games that we didn’t have:
Bionic Commando
Strider
Mega Man 2 (I played all six NES Mega Man games, but most were too hard to be much fun.)
Ninja Gaiden
Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins
River City Ransom (“Barf!”)
Galaga
And a few of the worst games ever:
Superman (made by a company called Kemco-Seika; absolutely horrible!)
Burgertime (never understood why it was supposed to be fun.)
Captain Comic (made by a Christian-themed company called Color Dreams; this 2-D platformer was pretty pointless.)
Most of the ones I can remember offhand have already been mentioned. I do have one more to contribute, though:
The Magic of Scheherazade
I don’t know how popular this game was, but I found it to be really enjoyable.
LilShieste
Loved the Dragon Warrior games. Also the first Final Fantasy.
What I can remember, not already mentioned:
Klax (IT IS THE NINETIES AND THERE IS TIME FOR KLAX)
Little League Baseball (a mediocre baseball game my brother had)
Back to the Future (nigh on impossible)
Back to the Future II and III (one game, two movies)
Track and Field (Power Pad!)
Ironsword
Wizards and Warriors (these two were in the same world)
Q-bert
Dr. Mario
Jaws
The NES was what my life was all about for…let’s see…three years? I spent so much time playing those games…
Was Strider the one where you had the deadly yo-yo? Whatever that game was, it rocked my world.
Also, Blaster Master deserves a place of honor on any such list. I still every few years have a dream based on Blaster Master.
Daniel
Lode Runner
Super Pitfall
What was the game with black funny shaped cartridge, it was a racing game like Pole Position.
Ooo, and what was the game in the movie when they showed the Power Glove for the first time, and what was the movie for that matter?
No, you’re thinking of Rygar. Strider was the one where it looked like you were attacking with some sort of arc. 
The Wizard. I envied that kid.
LilShieste
“I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad,” famously uttered The Wizard’s Lucas. The game he played was Rad Racer.
I could sit here all day and name off NES titles, but a few that have been missed:
Super C (sequel to Contra)
Lifeforce (sequel to Gradius)
Shadowgate (the game the engine for Deja Vu came from)
Double Dragon 2 and 3
Mega Man 4, 5, and 6
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3
Gauntlet 1 and 2
Afterburner
Alien Syndrome
Rolling Thunder
Shinobi
Vindicaters
And how about some release titles?
Gyromite and Stack-Up (the two games that use R.O.B.)
Balloon Fight
Kung Fu
Hogan’s Ally
Ice Climber
And the creatively named Baseball, Golf, and Pinball.
The girl in that movie was Jenny Lewis, who grew up to become the gorgeous redheaded singer of indie rock band Rilo Kiley, as well as embarking on her own alt-country solo career.
I can remember all the games I had like it was yesterday.
My NES was given to me by my uncle, who was 12 when I was 7. It came with the following games:
Bionic Commando (Frustrating side scroller where you have to use your extendable bionic arm to jump from platform to platform. I don’t think ever I got past the first level.)
Rush’N’Attack (a side-scrolling game where you played a commando who parachuted into a Russian base armed only with a knife, and who died if he walked into an enemy. I’m convinced to this day that the music in the second level was directly plagiarized from part of the guitar solo on Steely Dan’s Reelin’ In The Years.)
Super Mario Bros. (Duck Hunt not included.)
R.B.I. Baseball (I don’t think I played this game even one time, but it had a really cool black cartridge.)
Jaws (Had awesome intro music and great gameplay. Only loosely based on the film, you played as a scuba diver who had to shoot undersea creatures with a harpoon gun. Every few levels, you got to play a bonus round where you could massacre hordes of sea anemones.)
Later, my dad took me to ToysR’Us and bought me Super Mario Bros. 3, which I thought was the most badass game of all time. Shortly thereafter, though, my parents decided that I spent too much time playing the NES, and prohibited me from playing it. By the time they rescinded this policy, I had long since lost interest in NES after playing my friends’ Super NES.
Nobunaga’s Ambition 1 and 2
Ghengis Khan
Shingen the Ruler
Romance of the Three Kingdoms 1 and 2
Snake, Rattle, and Roll
Cobra Triangle
Dig Dug
Karate Champ
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Pool of Radiance (possibly the best role playing game ever)
Excitebike
Paperboy
Goonies 1 and 2
Willow
Batman 1 and 2
Darkwing Duck
ShatterFist
I’ll stop now.
I hated Bionic Commando when I rented it as a kid. Couldn’t get very far at all due to the odd arm-swinging instead of typical NES-game jumping. But I revisited it a couple years ago on an emulator and completely fell in love with the game. It’s ridiculously fun once you get used to the controls – easily one of the great NES platformers of all time, with a unique gimmick.
As long as we’re talking about people who got a start in films, one of Lucas’s friends (I don’t know which one) was played by Tobey Maguire, who later grew up to be…Tobey Maguire. Or Spider-Man. Either one’s pretty good.
That would explain why everythime I try to remember the movie, Pinball Wizard comes to mind.