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?