Genre: Soccer

Developer: Tose
Publisher: Jaleco
Year: 1988

Basic Idea:  Learn to kick diagonally

Review: My favorite soccer game for the NES, though that still doesn’t say much.  The controls are fairly fluid, if flickery when too many players are on the screen.  There’s only one kind of shot, but you can hook or slice it.  Tackling on defense is nice, but perhaps too easy.  Same with headers. Goalies can dive well.  The bizarre thing is the perspective, which is a bird’s-eye view and diagonal.  It’s fine while heading north, but it’s difficult  heading south.

I realize this is a lukewarm review, but I have played it a lot and still have an affinity for it.  You can pick any country you like and do an accurate world-cup tournament, or do a state-side bracket tournament.  The harder teams are insanely hard, but the game is winnable and it’s nice to have a challenging computer opponent.  You can also play against a friend, or with one in the aforementioned tournaments.  Not the best co-op game, but it’s nice to have it.

Shootouts are kind of fun if they happen.  There’s also a bizarre shooting side-game one can play against a friend where you have five attempts to score goals, one-on-three.   It’s not bird’s-eye view, which means you’re playing a completely different game.

Anyway, yeah.  That’s number 68!

Genre: Baseball

Developer: SNK
Publisher: SNK
Year: 1989

Basic Idea:  Pay your players to give them better stats over time, or just play with the ladies.

Review: This is often considered the best baseball game on the NES.  While it has a lot of flair, there’s too much wrong with it for me to rank it higher.  I was told once I tend to end my critiques on down notes, so I’ll try to do the opposite here.

Despite mostly solid game mechanics, this game has one major no-no that is present in way too many baseball games; when a ball is hit to the outfield, you actually don’t get to see your outfielder until the ball is almost there.  While the game helps you out a little bit in this regard, I have no desire to make last-second adjustments when the screen finally zooms to my outfielder.  This also is occasionally a problem in the infield.  On line drives, I want to try and dive and catch them, but the ball is usually past the infield before I can see where my infielders were located.  Second, the players generally make weak-ass throws.  Can-of-corn pop-ups caught by the shortstop in short-left often lead to runners tagging up from third and scoring.  Finally, you cannot retreat to the previous bag if you’ve already touched the next one, making for easy double-plays.

However, the game has so many good qualities that help it make the list.  Play control is incredibly fluid, perhaps the best of any baseball game on the system.  It is also the only game (well, sort-of) on the NES where your player can climb the outfield wall and try to rob a homer.  Not sure I’ve ever done it, but it’s possible.

What really made the game popular, though (I think), is that you can create your own team that can grow better over time (similar to the system in Tecmo Super Bowl III for  the SNES).  Every time you win a game with your crappy team, you get money which you can spend on improving different attributes of your players.  While against the computer this is more or less an exercise in level-building, against a friend it can get competitive.  The game does save your teams and your stats, which should be silly to mention but in 1989 battery back-up was still pretty rare.  Unfortunately, the season mode only lasted 25 games.  While most groups of friends don’t have the patience to play longer seasons than this, it would have been nice to be able to play a regulation season.

There is also a built-in team of lady players.  They pretty much suck, but it’s a nice touch.

Genre: Strategy

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1990

Basic Idea:  Destroy viruses by dropping the right color pills on them, Tetris-style.

Review: There has been about forty-eleven clones of Tetris (I’m probably underestimating), but this is still one of my favorites.  The head-to-head mode is great fun, perhaps better than the  H2H on Tetris.  The graphics and music are kind of meh, but since it’s just a strategy game, turning the music off is fine.

Genre: RPG

Developer: Tecmo
Publisher: Tecmo
Year: 1992

Basic Idea:  Help Robin Field become the best soccer player in the world.

Review: Yes, I said RPG.  There is zero action in this game.  Every decision on the soccer field is done on a turn-by-turn basis, with your typical Tecmo action shots.  During each turn, as it were, you have a decision to make as to what you’ll do with the ball (or how you’ll choose to defend).  There is a strategy to learn that is logical, but eventually becomes frustrating as it seems nothing you do is successful once you start facing the harder teams.  Between each game, your players stats improve based on how they played in the previous game.  There’s also some corny pep talks.

Genre: Hockey

Developer: Pax Softnica; Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1988

Basic Idea:  Play in a sandlot league that has some anorexic and morbidly obese members.

Review: Nearly everyone who has played the NES has played this game, as its easily accessible and pretty hilarious.  I feel it’s overrated, but still the second best hockey title for the system.  For those uninitiated, the game is pretty basic hockey with decent play-control.  The hilarious part is that you get to select the weight of your players.  The skinny guys are extremely fast but fragile and weak shooters.  The fat guys are powerful, but move like turtles.  The medium guys are somewhere in between, naturally.  There actually is a strategy in picking your team, so it does provide some variety.  It’s also tempting to try to pick a fight, as a bench-clearing brawl might happen.

Not exactly great hockey, and very boring against the computer, but it’s a pretty fun game against a human opponent.

Genre: Platform Adventure

Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: Nihon Falcom
Year: 1987

Basic Idea:  Guide a family (including their pet) through a sprawling dungeon in order to get a big sword and kill the dragon.

Review: A fascinating role-playing game that requires an immense amount of playing and patience to succeed with.  The awesome part of the game is that there are four distinct areas of the dungeon, and only one family member is capable of getting through each one.  As each has different abilities (magic, high jumping, block-cutting, invincibility) the game has plenty of variety.  And if you get stuck with one section, you can trade places and work on another.  There are shops where one can restore energy or purchase upgrades.  The music and graphics aren’t great, but they aren’t terrible either.

What is frustrating about the game is the occasionally difficult play-control and unpredictable enemies. It’s nothing that is a deal-breaker, but when you’re trying to figure out how to advance to the next section, dealing with these frustrations can inhibit enjoyment.

Probably not worthy of a play today as the game’s rewards are not great enough to offset its length. But looking back it’s a fairly solid NES title, and even more impressive considering the year it was released.

Genre: Racing/Shooter

Developer: Rare
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1989

Basic Idea:  Pilot a loaded for bear speedboat to save some people or something.

Review: Another unique idea from Rare, Cobra Triangle is easy to learn but hard to master.  Each level is short and may involve racing, mine disposal, enemy attacking, guarding swimmers, or jumping waterfalls.  The design is straightforward but succinct and colorful.  The game would most certainly rank higher, but the difficulty is not gradual and downright maddening at times.  Guarding the swimmers is extraordinarily difficult and can lead to controller-throwing, power-buttoning frustration.

Definitely worth a play or two.  I would have likely found this more satisfying had I owned it as a kid and had the time to master some of the insanity.

Genre: Racing

Developer: Leland
Publisher: Tradewest
Year: 1991

Basic Idea:  Run tiny little cars around and around…

Review: There were six games for the NES that were based on professional racing, five of them sponsored by a particular racer.  Nigel Mansell, Michael Andretti, and Al Unser Jr. put their names on awful games. Ivan Stewart’s Super Off-Road was fun in the arcade but kind of meh on the NES.  And Days of Thunder was as bad as the movie it was based on.  This little gem, however, has almost no resemblance to actual racing but is easily the best of the six.  While you do need to make pit stops, the game plays more like Super Off-Road with way better controls.  The perspective is bird’s eye view, or perhaps a plane’s eye view, as the cars are itty bitty.

Between each race you can improve your car with the money you’ve won.  The first time through the game is pretty easy, but the difficulty ramps up after that.  There’s also a two-player option, which I haven’t played but I imagine would be pretty fun.

Genre: Shooter

Developer: Natsume; Dynamic Planning; ITL
Publisher: Milton Bradley
Year: 1989

Basic Idea:  Memorize more crazy enemy patterns before fighting the easiest bosses in shooter history.

Review:  This space shooter ain’t much easier than Gradius, requiring significant amount of pattern memorization.  However, it has my favorite power-up of any shooter I’ve played on the NES: homing missiles!  When you acquire this power-up, you can shoot like crazy while focusing on avoiding enemies.  Unfortunately, if you get killed, you usually have to start from the beginning of the level, which is all kinds of cruel.

As mentioned, the bosses are insanely easy.  They’re quite powerful, but for the first five bosses, you can find a safe zone where you can’t be hit and fire away.  Even the final boss isn’t that difficult after you learn the strategy.  At least the part that comes after the final boss is pretty sweet (and appropriately difficult).

Genre: Soccer

Developer: Technos
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1990

Basic Idea:  Play soccer with the guys from River City Ransom.

Review: I think every game Technos made had the same cartoonish blocky guys, sports or otherwise.  Somehow, it always seems to work to a degree.  This game was made for the 4 player-adapter, though I never played it that way.  It’s basically arcade fun, with the ability to play on different surfaces (stone and ice, e.g.) and hurt other players so badly that they’ll be removed the game, giving you an advantage.  There’s also diving headers and bicycle kicks!

If you’re going to go silly, you have to go all the way, and Technos did that while still providing reasonable enough control to make play smooth.  Nintendo World Cup did for soccer on the NES what Arch Rivals and Base Wars could not for their respective sports.