When I was in high school I had a buddy that got dumped by his girlfriend and spent like two weeks so depressed he wouldnt leave his room. Two days into that stretch, I came over to play Tekken, only to find his Playstation had bitten the dust in a tragic being-thrown-against-the-wall accident. Desperate for something to do, he pulled out his old Nintendo, and started sorting through the cartridges. He was firing up Punch-Out! just as I left, and when I stopped by again a week later he was capable of beating every opponent, including Tyson, in one sitting, start to finish. After seeing it happen, I can only say that it inspires both awe and terror in equal measures. Like watching as someone memorizes a phone book.
Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar, developed by Origin Systems, ported to the NES by Pony Canyon, December 1990, estimated 5 hours?
Considered (along with 7, which I sadly have never played) to be the best western RPG ever made, and I have a hard time denying that claim. This was one of the most unique games ever made - after all the shitstorming that Ultima 3 brought Richard Garriott (you basically couldn’t beat it in a timely manner without a ton of theft and murder of the townspeople), he set out to make something to redeem the series. The goal of this game was to collect enough virtue points to be dubbed the Avatar. You gained virtue points by doing heroic deeds (fighting every battle–you got Sacrifice virtue points if you died, giving money/blood to the poor, being honest when paying blind shopkeepers, answering townsfolks questions with the heroic answer, etc) and lost virtue points for being an asshole (stealing from homes, attacking villagers, running from battle, etc). Aside from becoming the Avatar, there was an unwritten checklist similar to in Exodus of things you needed in order to enter and complete the final dungeon. Once again, the NES version is far superior to the original PC game, and Pony Canyon really did an excellent job this time around, since it is way more polished than Exodus. The only complaint is the translation, since you need to be very careful with how you answer yes/no questions in this game, and some of them are flat out WRONG (hint-when you reach the stone room in each dungeon, ALWAYS answer yes even if it sounds like answering yes will get you kicked out).
I spent a ton of time playing this game when I was a kid too. Thank goodness for Nintendo Power doing a very thorough review of the game, as they covered just about everything, and there’s a LOT to do in this game (and you need to learn the 8 virtue venn diagram really well, since they come up over and over). I came THIS close to beating the game in the summer of 1991. I was literally on the last floor of the last dungeon after playing the game for MONTHS when my home suffered a power outage, and when the power returned, my saved games had all been erased. It was truly the low point in my video gaming history (although having the same thing happen to me in Final Fantasy after I threw a controller at the NES was almost as bad). I finally went back and beat this game for real 10 years later in college, and this is my second time beating it. I read an interesting strategy which I wanted to try out. DON’T recruit any characters to join you. I played through as Iolo the Bard, and let the other 7 characters stay in their town. The reason this works is because enemy groups are determined by how many characters are in your party. With 1 character, you’ll never face more than 4 at a time, where with a full party of 4, you’d be fighting 12 monsters (and would have to worry about buying equipment for the other 3) and made the game much longer. First I hurried to collect enough $ to buy the key and the +1 Bow (I did a couple of town treasury raids, as I would make up the virtue points later). Once I had those, I started making the rounds to the shrines in order to get avatarhood, which got me the strongest sword, armor and 99 MP. Then it was off to the dungeons. This strategy works really well, even though it isn’t how the game is “meant” to be played.
So Ultima 5: Warriors of Destiny is up next. I’ve never played this one, so I expect it to take a while. I’ve also heard that Pony Canyon really screwed up the NES port this time around, and that I’m better off playing the PC version, but I’ll see how it goes…
I just found this thread. I’m crushing on it pretty hard, no lies.
I used to think I was awesome at NES games, but in many cases it was just the game genie. But not always!
I still have 150+ cartridges I amassed over my childhood, with such gems as Action 52, the original Mega Man, and North and South.
I’m presently playing Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom in the wii ware. I own the cartridge, but I wanted the wii so I could shut the game down and not have to reload from the last password screen.
I haven’t beaten it, and frankly I hate that game. The only thing left to do is consult gamefaqs, and figure out the convoluted storyline that the game developers thought I would get on my own, somehow…
Wow, they weren’t kidding. Ultima 5 on the NES is AWFUL. The gameplay is similar to Ultima 6 (which has one big world, rather than an overworld and various towns with a separate battle screen) but that just does not translate to the NES well. If I do play through this, I’m gonna have to guide dang it.
I think I’m gonna take a break from Ultima (and 8 bit RPGs) and branch out for a while.
It’s peculiar that they would alter it from the original in that manner. The NES port did come out after Ultima VI, though, so I suppose they might have wanted to use the more modern model, and then did a terrible job at implementing it.
I think the big reason that Ultima 5 didn’t translate well to the NES is because this is the first Ultima game which used a mouse cursor. The NES interface is d-pad to move characters, and press the b button to switch it to the cursor (meanwhile you can’t move your characters). It’s a very ugly control scheme. I also don’t think that the NES could handle the size of the overworld in that game, since unlike games like Zelda where it loads one screen at a time, this game tries to keeps the scrolling continuous, resulting in some SEVERE lag. That works fine for Ultima 3 and 4’s overworld since there’s very little going on, but in 5, the towns are implemented into the overworld, rather than stepping on a town icon in order to load the town map, so things are very busy.
Pony Canyon/FCI has a very strange run with their NES games. Some were excellent (Ultima 3/4, Zanac/Gun-Nac, Dragonstrike), while others were beyond bad (Heroes of the Lance and Hydlide are two games I am going to put off playing for as long as possible)
My new job is gonna have a lot of down time for playing video games. I need to get back into this…
Pro Wrestling, Nintendo, 1986, 20 minutes
I had so much fun with this game as a kid, I think I rented it about 5 times. Definitely the best of Nintendo’s “black box” games (Super Mario Bros aside). For being an early NES game, it really had a lot of features - different characters to choose from who all had unique moves (I used Star Man), a number of different types of moves - punch, jump kick, body slam, throwing the opponent outside the ring, running and bouncing off of the ropes, illegal moves which can only be done when the ref isn’t looking, climbing onto the corner pole and doing a drop-knee, etc. And a lot of humorous features, like being able to knock down the ref, both opponents running into each other and falling down, and my favorite - rolling out of place when the opponent is trying to jump onto you so that he gets hurt instead. My only complaint is that this game doesn’t have an energy meter, so you never really know for sure if the opponent has been drained enough to pin him for 3 seconds, so there’s a lot of trial and error with that.
Note that the only way to BEAT the game is to defeat every other character in the game, and then you have to keep “defending your title” where it just cycles through the other characters forever. A winner is you!
Followup on Pro Wrestling - it turns out there actually IS a definitive ending to the game. You need to beat each opponent 3 times, and then you face off in the world championship match against the Great Puma, who is this east Indian guy (Great Tiger’s brother?) who has the special moves of every other character in the game. I beat him by luring him outside the ring and knocking him down at 18, and then climbing back in, and then I got one of those craptacular NES-style ending screens. The whole game takes about an hour to finish.
This project has been on a long hiatus, but I am bringing it back! A couple weeks ago, I was watching the Angry Video Game Nerd episode on Ikari Warriors, and when they got up to the part where you get a tank, I started thinking of how much better Iron Tank was, since it was like Ikari Warriors but with the tank the whole game, and I had an urge to play it, but I wanted to be able to play it with an advantage controller (which is like a big arcade stick made for the NES). I also started reading up on new refurbishment methods for NES front-loaders, including being able to replace the 72 pin connectors with more sturdy ones, and being able to disable the lock out chip on the motherboard, which was an anti-piracy tool but most gamers remember it as the cause of games to blink or randomly reset when it malfunctioned. So I purchased one of these, and a couple of games, and I am now gaming like an 80s kid again! I’m going to slowly start building up my cartridge collection too!
Iron Tank, SNK, 1988, 2 hours
One of my favorite games when I was a kid. It’s a very fun game - you operate a tank during the Normandy invasion. The control scheme gets a bit getting used to, since you use the d-pad to control your movement in 8 directions (overhead view), but your cannon can also face in 8 directions, and you must hold the B button to rotate it - this way you can fire forward while moving in reverse, or fire diagnonally which is a strategy which makes the game a bit easier. And man, this wasn’t an easy game. I played through with no save states, codes or cheats, and it’s a good thing you get unlimited lives because some sequences I had to play over and over, just like in the good ole days! Another cool thing about this game is that it has multiple paths from the beginning to the end, with a choice of different stages, similar to Castlevania 3, so has some good replay value.
Glad to see this thread resurrected.
And then the thread died again? Too bad, I was another one glad to see it poke its head up a second time…
You could always, you know, dig up a NES game for us, and give it a fair shake! It’s not cheating. 
I got sick of that fucking zero punctuation guy, so perhaps there’s a niche to be filled!
It didn’t die, I was on vacation for the last 2 weeks. As we speak I am looking through ebay and nintendoage for some additions to my collections.
I haven’t gone through this lengthy thread to see what you have and haven’t played, but…
If you’re looking for a dumb game to master in a long weekend, I LOVED North and South. A civil war RTS on an 8 bit system, and it’s actually way better than that sounds.
For something a bit more hefty, Castlevania II was a favorite as a child. The Adventure of Bayou Billy was the first game I got with my NES, and also features exciting (optional) Zapper levels!
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Toho, 1988, 35 minutes
I know you’ve all been waiting for this one. This game gets a really bad reputation, and it deserves most of it, but I’ve played far worse NES games. It’s a side scrolling action game where you play as Dr. Jekyll, the most hated man in town, who is just trying to get to church while everything and everyone is trying to kill him (kids with guns, bird literally shitting on you, opera singers throwing deadly notes at you, deranged cats and dogs) and if you take enough damage, you transform into Mr. Hyde who plays a mirror image demon world. You need to kill enough zombies (you can punch with B, but if you press Up+B he will shoot bouncing balls) in order to transform back into Jekyll. You can also collect coins from killing enemies, but I was never able to figure out what they were used for. A pretty dull game, but not too difficult once you get the hang of it.
Bloody hell. You’re still at it!
6th anniversary coming up soon!
I should break out some NES games too. Recently, I made a CD of 8-bit music and I got all nostalgic about some of the games. Not sure which ones I’ve already played as part of this thread though, gotta look it up again. I really want to beat some Mega Men and Ninja Gaidens, but I think I always play that…
In honor of the remake, I’d like to suggest Duck Tales as your next game. This game is balls full on charm and pretty fun to boot. The only thing that confused me when I played this years later was some kind of a wall you couldn’t get past in the haunted mansion. I think you had to beat some other level first.
And this wasn’t an NES game, but you might want to try the fan-made **Mega Man vs. Street Fighter **game that game out recently. Its basically a Mega Man game but the bosses are all Street Fighter characters. A real throwback treat, even some of the music and stages are similar to old MM games.
Also, there was a game I remember famously voted as the worst game on the NES. I think it was Dragonlance: Warriors of the Lance, based on the books. I remember this game because I used to be a huge Dragonlance fan and was excited to play the game, but it was every bit as horrid as people made it out to be.
They’re remaking the ducktales game?!?