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ZRofel
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Re: Console of the Month (Jan 2023): NES

by ZRofel Sat Jan 14, 2023 1:43 pm

When I was a little kid I remember borrowing my uncle's Atari 2600, which I really enjoyed. But the first time I saw an NES in action playing Super Mario Bros., I was totally blown away. For me, the NES was definitely the start of my love of video games. Like a few other folks on here have said, the scrolling, multi-level games of the NES felt so different from the single-screen, arcade-style games that had come before (and also very different from the complicated, menu-driven games that existed on PC, that just felt too confusing to me as a kid). NES games felt easy to jump into, like an arcade game, but they had a depth that kept pulling me back in. I always wanted to see what was around the next corner or what was in each new level. Games felt like real adventures, not just exercises in reflexes and accumulating points. My favorites at the time were all the usual standards: Super Mario Bros. 3, Mega Man 2, Mega Man 3, the Capcom Disney games, etc. I did really like Startropics too, as the whole thing with the letter totally blew my mind at the time. I was visiting a friend the first time he reached Chapter 4, and together we actually figured the letter puzzle out in the real world, retrieving the letter from the box and gently wiping it with a damp sponge. I remember it being an incredibly exciting experience, actually having to do something in the real world to advance in a game. Monster Party was also a perennial favorite, as I feel like everyone I knew owned it, so I ended up playing it a lot when I visited friends. I liked how creepy and weird it was, while also being relatively nonthreatening. I had a soft spot for two crap games, Yo Noid and Bible Adventures, as well. For some reason, as a kid I was obsessed with the Noid, so as soon as I saw he had a video game, I had to have it. While it's not great, it's actually not terrible (and I know it's actually a reskin of some middling Famicom title). And despite not being fantastic, the Noah's Ark section of Bible Adventures was actually pretty fun as a kid. Plus a lot of my more heretical friends found it hilarious that there was a video game where Baby Moses could wind up drowned in a river, or snakes could leap out of trees to kill Noah, so I ended up playing it a lot when friends visited. And as my brother was a huge Ninja Turtles fan, I spent a lot of time playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Manhattan Project with him while we were growing up. We never owned the arcade port, for some reason.

The end of the NES era is also when I first started to get into game collecting. After the SNES and Genesis launched, I noticed that a lot of NES games were being sold off cheaply to clear out room for the new 16-bit stock. While the SNES is probably my favorite system of all time, and I, too, was certainly more than excited to jump into 16-bit gaming, even as a kid, I thought to myself, "But a lot of these NES games are still really fun. And they're cheap now, so even my kid budget can afford them. I should snag a bunch of the good ones I missed when they were new." I bought some really awesome stuff like Metal Storm and Dragon Warrior IV very cheaply around that time. Once the SNES really hit its stride I got really into RPGs and lost interest in a lot of the more simple action games on the NES. My parents eventually forced me to give my NES away to some younger relatives, though I made sure to ferret away most of my favorite games like the aforementioned Metal Storm and Dragon Quest. And as a happy epilogue to that story, a few years ago those same relatives gave me everything back in essentially the same condition I'd given it to them.

Years later, after graduating college, I really got into game collecting, and since that was shortly before the massive video game price spike of the late 2000s, I had at least a brief window where I was able to go around and really build my NES collection. Despite spending my childhood playing the NES, a lot of the games that I now consider my favorites are ones I didn't wind up owning until I was an adult. VICE: Project Doom is probably my favorite of all the "dark" NES action games, supplanting even the excellent Ninja Gaiden trilogy and the NES Batman games. River City Ransom is an absolute blast to play, though I don't get to play co-op as often as I'd like these days. Monster in My Pocket, based off those little, rubber figurines from the '90s, is a really fun, fast-paced brawler/platformer hybrid that looks fantastic. Some great boss fights in that one. Gargoyle's Quest II is a fantastic adventure game that, while not quite as beautifully grotesque as its SNES sequel, Demon's Crest, may be the better balanced of the two games. And even though Mega Man 2 and 3 are still my all-time favorites, I think 4 and 5 are very solid entries in the franchise too. My collection is somewhat tucked into a corner now, but I'll share pictures of it at some point.

When I was a kid, there were a lot of NES games I remember spending a lot of time playing but that I never owned. It just felt like all the other kids I knew owned them, so I'd either play them every time I visited someone, or I'd end up frequently borrowing them from multiple people. So while they were never mine, it felt like I could essentially play them whenever I wanted to. The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game and the Batman game based on the first movie are definitely two I felt that way about. Similarly the aforementioned Monster Party. Astyanax, Commando, Little Nemo: The Dream Master, and Hydlide were another four that just felt like they were everywhere when I was a kid. Did any of the rest of you ever have that? Games that you didn't own, but were just kind of ubiquitous to your social circle? Conversely, were there any games that you wanted to play that you just couldn't find for some reason?
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Syndicate
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Re: Console of the Month (Jan 2023): NES

by Syndicate Sat Jan 14, 2023 2:09 pm

The NES is without a doubt one of the most important consoles ever released and the first one I remember trying to get my hands on as a kid. I fondly remember all of the coverage of the system in EGM, Gamepro, and even in one issue of Newsweek. However, no matter how much I begged my parents never did get me one. Thankfully I was able to get some NES time in through family and friends, I still remember trying out Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, and Track Meet. Super Mario Bros was especially game changing, and I always had a great time with it, even though to this day I still can't finish the game. Super Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda, Strider, Bubble Bobble, Balloon Fight, Mega Man 1-3, and Rushin' Attack are some of my favorites though are nowhere representative of all the awesome games that are available in the NES library. I usually get my NES fix through mini consoles and emulators. Though I don't have any real desire to add NES stuff to my collection, there are still a lot of games I really want to try out one day like:

  • Battle of Olympus
  • Kid Icarus
  • Metroid
  • Gradius
  • Clash at Demon Head
  • Metal Storm
  • Low G Man
  • Guardian Legend
  • Journey to Silius

...I still sort of feel like I missed out on a lot not having a NES, maybe I'll add one to my collection someday or get brave enough to mod my NES Mini.
The.Ming
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Re: Console of the Month (Jan 2023): NES

by The.Ming Tue Feb 07, 2023 11:34 pm

"The NES is without a doubt one of the most important consoles ever released"

I don't think anyone could argue that.

I played on the Atari 2600 during it's initial run in the early 80's. It was a Christmas gift to my older sister; our father got tired of watching my sister spend ungodly amounts of money at the local arcade. (It changed nothing; she still spent money there chasing the Centipede high score, which she got a few times.) Since I'm her only sibling - though ten years younger - we ended up playing against each other on it. While there were good games for it, I remember some of the games were utter and complete garbage. Then the industry crashed, and the Atari ended up in a closet, then lost.

Five or so years later, I come across the NES in my cousin's house. He had just one game (or two, depending on how you count it); the Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros cartridge. Five minutes later, and I was hooked. After a lot of begging, I found a Nintendo Entertainment System Power Set under my family's Christmas tree. My sister - at that point an eighteen year old just out of high school - kicked in with her own gifts: Elevator Action and The Legend of Kage. I still have my original Power Set (the box is long since gone, the Power Pad is a bit worn, and I swapped out the console's original pin connector some years ago) and those two first games my sister bought me. But the fun I had playing the NES games, either on my own or with my friends; it was awesome. Contra, Life Force, Bayou Billy, P.O.W., Ring King, Ikari Warriors. We'd try to beat each others' times in Excitebike, and try to build a track that would be utterly impassable and dare everyone else to try and beat it. We played Super Mario Bros 3 and couldn't believe how good the game was. (We were much less impressed with the Power Glove, but that's another story.) Mega Man gave me a hell of a hard time until I figured out Guts Man's conveyor belts - only to be obliterated by the Yellow Devil. We still talk about playing those NES games to this day. If we have a chance, we play them. They're memories my friends and I will always have, even all these years later; even after we've gone through high school, college; gotten married and have families of our own.

These days, that original NES is still in my setup. I don't use it too much, however; I do most of my NES gaming on a Retron5, and I have a NES-101 hooked up to an old school RCA TV so I can use the Zapper, or just indulge in gaming like it's 1999 again. But it's there, and I do use it now and again. I usually play through the Mega Man series about once a year. Castlevania is a game that I've always loved playing. SMB2 is just plain outlandishly fun. Other favorites that I keep coming back to: Metroid, Off-Road, R.C. Pro Am, Gun.Smoke, Rushn' Attack. If I feel like torturing myself, I'll play Ninja Gaiden and just wait until those damned, blasted birds do me in. I just bought Popeye; I'm trying to round out my collection of black box NES games now.

You'll get no argument from me. It's a great console, and I like to think it always will be.
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Ziggy587
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Re: Console of the Month (Jan 2023): NES

by Ziggy587 Sun Feb 12, 2023 11:00 am

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I'm parting with some duplicate Blu-Ray and DVD movies. Check out this thread if interested.
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