Games/Nintendo Entertainment System
The Nintendo Entertainment System is the first experience I had with video games that I can remember. I don't remember exactly which year we got the NES, but I believe it was sometime around 1990. It came with the game Super Mario Bros.
Even though I don't remember the date, or even the year, I remember quite clearly the day we got the console. Or rather, I remember clearly the evening it was brought into our house. I particularly remember a scene from the game in level 3-1 from that night. Our brains are amusing like that.
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Games we had
We never had many games for this console. My parents didn't believe in buying lots and lots of games. They were expensive, after all. Games are still expensive, but now I can buy them myself, so it's not like I can't get tons of games anymore. These days, though, good games are an extreme rarity.
Super Mario. Bros
As pointed out above, this was the very first game I had, and unless you bought the NES very late in its lifetime, it was probably your first NES game too. I never finished this game. My dad finished it though, and I watched him do so, but I never finished it myself. I got very far though, I think I got to Level 7-3 or so, but that's about as far as I got.
Many years later, in the golden age of the Gameboy Color, my sister got this game for hers, and I borrowed it, and finished it. So, I can't say I never finished Super Mario Bros., but I can say I never finished it on the NES.
Super Mario. Bros 3
I don't remember the order of which I got the rest of the NES games we had, but we had this one. It's hard to pick a favorite, but out of the games we had, I'm sure this was my favorite NES game. It's hard to give reasons for why, as my “reason” is nothing more than emotional footprints from times long gone. However, I can say that I loved this game because of its vast and varied content. You had eight worlds, all of which had plenty of levels, and you had tons of different power-ups, and different levels of difficulty as you played along. There is a reason why this game became the best-selling video game to be sold separately from a system.
Ducktales
I was never an avid fan of Duck Tales, although I did watch it occasionally on TV as a child, and it was amusing enough. The game, however, I've played and completed so many times that I cannot even give you an estimate of the number.
Not that the game is extremely superior, but it had very good re-playability. The order of which you completed the levels were (almost) entirely up to you, (See, there is one level you cannot play until you've finished another) playing the game was fun — in particular, jumping around on Scrooge's cane was amusing.
R.C. Pro-Am
I got this game from my older cousin after he got his SNES, I believe. As a child, I never realized that these cars were remoted controlled ones. Never occurred to me. My friends and I would play this game every now and then, we never got far — as soon as we got the upgrade to faster cars, we would start losing. Since these old games didn't let you save and restore games, we would lose quickly, and thus lose interest in improving ourselves, because getting to that level again took hours for us.
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants
Like with R.C. Pro-Am, my friends and I never got beyond the first level in this game. First, as we didn't know English at the time, we never fully understood what we were supposed to do in the game, and second, when we finally got to the second level, we would die almost immediately, I believe in a shopping mall, because there was a jump we never managed to make.
Never really played this game much, it got boring fast.
Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf
My dad has always been a fan of golf, although he has not liked all golf games. This game I don't know what he thought of, but I found it to be a pretty horrible game. Never really played it much farther than the first hole, if I even made it through there.
My dad borrowed this game from a friend of his. His friend never saw the game again. This is why I'm including this game in games we owned. Unless my grandmother has thrown out her NES yet, it's still at her place. If you wonder why my grandmother had a NES, it was to keep us kids entertained at family dinners and other gettogethers.
NES Open Tournament Golf
I believe this was the first game I saw that had a battery to save data between plays. In this game, you could rank up as you got better and better; in the image on the right, the rank on the pole in the center of the screen says “B”, this would change to “A” and then “S” as you got better. It would even remember this rank between plays. With all other games I had seen, if you turned off the game, you had to start from the beginning.
This was probably the game that my dad played the most on the NES, although it's a close run with Super Mario Bros. 3.
Back then, I wasn't able to read English, or at least I didn't understand it well. In the options screen, you had the choice to delete all stored achievements and whatnot. So, on occasion, blissfully unaware of what I was doing, I would delete my father's progress. He got upset, of course, but I wouldn't admit to doing it—I didn't know I was! I wonder if he would've played the game longer if I hadn't kept screwing up his score from time to time.
Games others owned, or games rented
These are games that although we didn't have them at home, they were so important in my gaming life that I'm still including them on my games list.
Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers
Including Super Mario Bros. 3, this game was owned by my grandparents. As mentioned above, they had a NES to keep us kids entertained at family dinners and other gettogethers.
This game was particularly good for that purpose, because it provided simultaneous two-player control. Although we were typically four kids at our grandparents, we would play two and two, typically, each pair would play one level each. We never finished this game, though, because by the time we were old enough to get that far, we were too old to keep playing this game. We did get pretty far at times, though.
The Legend of Zelda
I didn't play this game that much, but I enjoyed watching this game immensely. This game is extremely charming, and for the time, it felt very vast. You had an enormous world map to explore, as well as numerous castles and caves. The game was also somewhat non-linear, in that you didn't necessarily have to complete the levels in the order they were supposed to be completed in; my friend and I e.g. used to do world 1 and 3 from the beginning of the game, thus skipping level 2 until later.
Willow
This is a movie made into a game, one of the few good ones at that. I never actually played this game much myself, but I enjoyed watching others play it. It's the first RPG I ever saw, and although it didn't occur to me at the time, that would become my favorite game genre.
Games I played or saw, but that don't deserve a real mention
- Super Mario Bros. 2 — a slightly amusing, but overall terrible game that I feel doesn't really belong in the Super Mario universe.
- Star Wars — I never was much into Star Wars at the time, the only reason I was exposed to this game was my neighbor, who was a total fan of the franchise.
Final words
There you have it. The games I played on the NES. Of the games I've mentioned, my top three favorites were Super Mario Bros. 3, Duck Tales and Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers.
