Yup! Marcus Allen was no slouch.
I think that’s what makes a game seem to be easy: having it and liking it enough to play it for hours at a time for months on end with 30ish years intervening to make you forget how long it took to get good at it. My favorite game was Ninja Gaiden. I remember it being easy as I could finish it without difficulty (Without continuing, maybe. It’s been too long to know if that’s accurate, though.). However, I don’t remember how much I had to play it before I reached that point. Based on the internet’s opinion of the game’s difficulty, it must have been a lot.
I also had Gradius. I remember playing it a lot, also. I believe the furthest I ever got was the stage with the statues. That was not an easy game.
You and I have different definitions of easy. I never made it through world 8 despite having a gazillion lives. I don’t think I could now. But I was never particularly great at video games. I think I’ve finished all the other Mario games I’ve played, but not this one.
99 heal potions. You should be like level 8 or 9 when hit the Marsh Cave, if you have the potions it’s really no problem at all.
Astos is probably the most reset-able boss in the game. But even if you don’t hit with MUTE on the first try, you can still FAST your tanks and bash him to death. The only question is whether you’re a perfectionist and like all your party members to level up at the same time. 
LawMonkey - The trick is not to die. No, I’m not being facetious here, that’s really all there is to it. Get those options ASAP, get a shield ASAP, and from then on keep a box on the shield powerup at all times. If you do bite it, snap up a speedup or two on the double and keep alert. Too simplistic, you’re thinking? Well, this is the type of game that’ll let you get away with it. The firepower is never all that thick, and you can always get a capsule if you really need it. Hey, I’ve gone the distance at least ten times without any code nonsense. Certainly easier than Contra, that’s for sure, and WAAAAAAY easier than anything else under the name “Gradius”.
Yookeroo - Wow…really? No, honestly, those are words I never thought I’d actually read. You have to make two dashes, one under a hammer brother and one under Bowser, and you’re home free. Everything preceding is just choosing the correct sequence of pipes. I guess this could trip up a novice, but even then there were resources that could show you how if trial-and-error was too grueling.
I…damn. I honestly don’t know what to say here. I mean, at least 80% of today’s games are absolutely going to tear my spine out (and the 16-bit era was even worse), so I have absolutely no basis for comparing the relative difficulty of, say, Tekken 6 and Super Street Fighter 4, but I figured at least I knew what qualified as a cake walk. Huh. So many standards, so many types. No wonder the industry is struggling to find its legs now.
Yeah, I ALMOST beat Life Force without the Konami code by using this exact method. It’s a game you either go through without even dying once, or not at all, pretty much.
Though honestly, I feel that sidescrolling and top down shooters have gotten HARDER since the NES Era, not easier, so this is one place where “Nintendo Hard” is a lie. (Aside: I never liked that phrase. I didn’t really have that many memories of games being brutally difficult from back then, and the fact that the original Castlevania was really hard was Konami’s decision, not Nintendo. Actually, most of the games I remember from that era were games that felt hard at the beginning, but were really easy with enough time put in. So, y’know, games that rewarded mastery.)
For what it’s worth, games like Tekken 6 and SSF4 don’t really have objective difficulty in the same way that ‘traditional’ single player games do. No one cares about arcade mode, they has an adjustable difficulty slider that basically determines how not stupid the AI is (and sometimes how much it ‘cheats’) and any sort of ‘execution difficulty’ is strictly limited to whether you decide you even want to play that character or do that combo or whatever. That said, as a rule, for any modern fighting game, getting to a “competitive” level is WAY HARDER than almost any NES game ever.
NHLPA 93. There was a maneuver that you could do- a sort of S-curve where you’d skate slightly past the goal on the outside, then loop up in front of it and back toward it.
The opposing goalie would always move to the opposite side of the goal for some reason, and as long as you didn’t get spastic and fire the puck somewhere crazy, it was a guaranteed goal. Didn’t matter who you were playing as, or what team you were playing. I suppose it was a glitch of sorts.
**Super Tecmo Bowl **was pretty easy, especially if you were playing as Bo Jackson.
Ah, I think I was misinterpreting what you said, markdash. When you said “without ever dying”, I thought you meant “never visit the Clinic or cast the Life spell, and never reset due to death”. But barring extreme luck, it’s impossible to get past Astos or the Eye without doing at least one of those. Allow either of those, though, and yeah, you should be able to get through without ever seeing a TPK.
Ultima: Avatar was definitely easier, though. Even if you did TPK, the King would just revive your party, with 400 GP for your troubles. And you’d never TPK in the first place unless you were stupidly driving yourself to endurance, because he’d also full-heal you for free any time you asked. Towards the end, you could almost always one-shot enemies, or at worst two-shot them, while they could do 10% of your life per hit, tops, and you never needed to see most of the overworld (due to moongates) or the dungeons (due to going in via the Hythloth access to the altar rooms). It was a bit of a grind to build up the gold for some needed items (the Sextant, the Key, and the Wand), but it was never a hard grind, just a slow one. You could even get money by dying: Buy a sword, die, rez, get 400 GP, repeat, then sell all the swords once you had enough.
NHLPA '93 was a great game but it was on Genesis and SNES not NES
My younger brother had all 3 consoles in the 1987-1991 time frame; it’s hard to keep what game from high school was on which console.
Defender of the Crown is short and easy once you have the basic skills mastered, sword dueling, jousting and castle defense.
Bo Jackson dominated the original Tecmo Bowl too.
GrenElf - Funny story about Defender of the Crown. When I first played it (on the computer, then the NES), it struck me as not only flat-out impossible, but absolutely torturous. Battles were constant nail-biters, jousts were exercises in frustration and misery and failure, don’t get me freakin’ started on swordfighting, and worst of all, bad stuff was CONSTANTLY happening to me. “Lose half your gold! Lose a territory! Lose your catapult! Lose half your gold! Lose half your income! Lose half your home castle garrison! Lose half your gold! Are you picking up a pattern here yet!”
What I eventually learned was that this game had zero margin for error. It was possible to win if you always succeeded in every task. Win every field battle (or retreat ASAP if you’re attacked by a superior force). Win every joust. Complete every raid. Fight off every siege. Demolish every enemy castle wall. And don’t let up for a moment, or those Normans are going to revive and counterstrike faster than Nick Fury providing cover fire for Wolverine. Each success was one step forward; each failure was fifteen steps back, unless the game got really merciful and decided to make it only ten steps.
You can see where I’m going with this. While the tasks weren’t complicated and I eventually got pretty good at most of them, I never got anywhere near 100% picture-perfect success. There would always be a lance that got a little off-line, or a surprisingly tenacious guard, or a few stray shots with the crossbow, and the Normans were right back to sweeping across the map like wildfire.
Simplistic, yes. Easy, never in a million years.
And now you truly know I wasn’t kidding about Rush 'n Attack. 
One of the easier games I owned was Bionic Commando. I think there were maybe one or two jumps that were a bit tricky, but I remember there were enough extra lives to make it not too difficult.
I agree on Bad Dudes as well; it was way easier than the arcade version.
See, I don’t get this at all. Compared to most of the games you mentioned, the vast majority of games are easy. You can retry as many times as you want, without having to start all over. Your health automatically replenishes under cover. You have Easy mode on every game.
Those are the reasons I’ve never beaten an NES game. I was really hopeful I was going to find some games that were as easy as those that came after it in this thread, for my emulator collection. So far, only Kirby seems to come close.
Nothing like the 16-bit games, which are generally much easier. The problem there is just bad games.
Wait, what? The industry is more successful now than it ever has been, with everything from AAA titles that approach Hollywood film in their production and plotting to an absolute flood of casual games for handhelds to frickin’ Minecraft, which I believe is played by literally every human being on the planet under the age of say, 14.
If it’s struggling to find its legs now, I tremble for any other form of entertainment once it gets its shit together.
BC was easy if you knew what you were up to. Enemies dropped bullets, which gave you health bars, and in the overhead stages, certain “miniboss” type enemies would drop pseudo-Nazi eagles, which gave you continues. None of this was explained in the manual or anywhere else, as I recall. So the trick was to find a spot in the first level that kept spawning enemies and use it to get a few bars on your health meter, then make sure to hit an overhead scrolling stage for the continues ASAP. Once you did that, you were pretty much home free.
Still a great game, though… you nerd.
I’ve always thought Contra was easy, and its sequel Super C even easier. Once you get the spread shot gun, unless you didn’t know the layout and ran into spikes or something, its not that hard.