After a friend recently purchased a used NES console, we were inspired to go back and rediscover the Top 10 Nintendo Games that defined that era in our lives.
10. Excitebike. It featured all the excitement of motocross racing coupled with an absurd propensity for tumbling down hills. We mastered the art of timing our A and B button jumps and reveled in the fact that this game actually featured a level builder where you could create custom tracks. Of course, once the console was turned off, you lost your creation and had to start over again the next time.
9. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.We learned how to time our moves in a fight with Mike Tyson long before we had been introduced to games like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. It was a huge deal if you could even make it past all the other fighters to get to Mike Tyson, but if you could knock him out, it was a legendary feat.
8. Final Fantasy.This was our first experience ever with role-playing games (RPGs) and even today, with all of the impressiveness of the World of Warcraft, nothing has ever quite come close to replicating the way we so completely lost ourselves in the world of Final Fantasy.
7. Duck Hunt.For the very first time, a taste of the video arcade at the mall came to live in our homes.With a functioning gun that pointed at the TV and really worked, we reveled in shooting pairs of ducks as they made their way skyward, lest we be teased by the giggling dog. There was a clay disc shooting mode, too, that never got used. Why wouldn't you rather shoot a duck?
6. Mega Man 2.There were many reasons that we loved this game, but the biggest was an ingenious feature that circumvented Nintendo's inability to save. Once you reached a certain point, you could get a code that could be entered on turning on the console to jump forward to that point in the game. A number of games were released in the Mega Man series, but this one got the most amount of our attention and time.
5. Duck Tales.Not only was Duck Tales the best Disney cartoon that ever aired on network television, but the video game also managed to capture the spirit of the show in video game form. And the game itself was a blast. With five different destinations for Scrooge to travel, including the Amazon, Transylvania, the African diamond mines, the Himalayas and the Moon, we spent hour upon hour beating this game.
4. Tetris.Quite possibly still the best puzzle game ever created, we even got our parents to kill hours on this one. Blocks of various shapes would drop from the top, and your mission was to turn and arrange them into solid lines to make them disappear. The further you progressed, the quicker the speed became. And we're pretty sure that brainy kids in Asia still play this game as part of their elementary geometry schooling.
3. The Legend of Zelda.If anything fully encapsulates what it meant to have no life outside of gaming, it was Zelda. The world of Zelda was better than the real world, and we spent summer vacations falling asleep playing it only to pick it back up first thing in the morning. We're sure that outside, the days were beautiful and there was a wide world to explore, but not nearly so wide as the world we were exploring in our family rooms.
2. Star Tropics.This game was ridiculously underrated, and as a result, we almost never discovered it. It began with islands, archaeology and submarines, but eventually turned into a story of alien abduction and rescue. It was played Zelda-style, but swords were traded for cooler weapons like yo-yos and slingshots. If you never played this one, you missed out.
1. Super Mario Bros. 3.No other game truly represents all of the original Nintendo years quite like Super Mario 3. The Mario Brothers were the flagship of Nintendo, and while our very first Nintendo gameplay ever was Mario 1, the game was truly taken to its most amazing heights ever in its third incarnation. Even as adults, we still love to play this one all the way through to the end. (No warp whistles!)
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