Tecmo Bowl for the NES. I have been playing it for well over 20 years and I always beat any team versus any team usually by not letting them score at all and racking up an insanely high score myself but that is part of the fun. I love throwing 105 yard passes for a touchdown. I play it on an NES emulator now.
Best system dollar-for-dollar
The Sega Dreamcast, and nothing else is in the same county. It’s the only system that I never regretted a single penny I spent.
Let’s start with the variety of games, which even the undisputed king of the 32-bit era, the PS2, was only barely able to eclipse. Serious sports. Arcade ports (all far superior to the PSX). Fun sports. Quirky puzzles. Fighting. Quirky sports (e.g. Sports Jam, Hydro Thunder). Wrestling. First-person shooters. Role playing. Music. Action. Platformers. Racing. Heck, point to just about any genre you can name, it’s been covered by the Dreamcast.
It came along at a time when non-online rentals were still commonplace (instead of being the sole property of Blockbuster video), so it was easy to try them out at a bargain price. And, having arrived two years before the PS2 (and three years before 99.99% of the planet could get a PS2), it was the only big boy on the block, so the games were everywhere.
Everything about this system was a bargain. The system came with 4 ports, so zero extra for those 4-player slugfests. Most of the games cost around $40 tops, and there some truly wonderful titles (like Sports Jam) that could be had for about $20 brand spankin’ new. Peripherals? $25, tops, for a Gameshark. $16 for a top-of-the-line joystick, which is about what a replacement drum pad will set you back now.
Near the end, the prices plummeted to Atari levels. I spent one dollar for NFL 2K., and $5 for games like Silent Scope and Street Fighter 3 Double Impact weren’t uncommon.
I’m still sad to this day that the system had to perish. I freely acknowledge that it can’t hold a candle to the X-Box or PS2, much less the current generation of systems. At what it did and was designed for, it was awesome, and for prices that are display case money today. Look at the handhelds. Of course they only have a fraction of the power of even a Wii, yet they’ve never been more popular. They’ve maintained their niche. I don’t see why the Dreamcast couldn’t.
I’ll do my favorite Super NES games next.
Dreamcast was usually superior to PS2 for arcade ports. PS2 is overall the best system ever, but DC is the arcade king.
Marvel vs Capcom 2, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Hydro Thunder, Power Stone 1 and 2, Capcom vs SNK 2, Virtua Tennis, Guilty Gear X, Ikaruga.
These are all awesome arcade games which are perfect on Dreamcast.
PS2 attempts to play some of them (such as MvC2 and Crazy Taxi) but has worse graphics, slowdown, missing frames, and longer loadtimes. Even XBox couldn’t match DC for some of these.
Later this year PS3 is finally supposed to get a solid port of MvC2 (they are basing it on the DC version instead of the PS2). A little late, but still a great game.