Genre: Platformer

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Year: 1990

Basic Idea: Beat that pesky Red Falcon again in this sequel to Contra.

Review:  This game is universally lauded, and indeed, there is nothing really wrong with it.  It’s a worthy sequel to the incredibly famous Contra, but I don’t think I’ve ever played this and didn’t think I’d rather be playing the original.  Nearly everything is identical, but the graphics and play control feel slightly less crisp to me.  Also, it’s much more difficult, making 2-player mode less fun as there’s a good chance you won’t make it through, even with the (now) 10 man life code.

Still, you can’t ignore this game if you at all like the Contra empire.  However, you can safely avoid Contra Force, the third game for the NES (released after Contra III for the SNES).  That one was a brutal effort by Konami to cash in and it fails on most levels.

Genre: Platformer

Developer: Absolute Entertainment
Publisher: Absolute Entertainment
Year: 1989

Basic Idea: Give your pet blob jelly-beans and make him your bitch.

Review:  An amazingly creative game that would easily be Top 20 if it had a ton of polish.  There’s some plot about the King of Blob World doing bad things and you have to help your pet get there and destroy him, blah blah.  The game is essentially one enormous puzzle, searching out the jelly-bean that will turn your blob into a rocket(!) and send you to his planet.  To find that mysterious jelly bean, you must traverse an enormous cave with the help of your blob and 12 different kinds of jelly beans at your disposal.  Each bean can turn him into something different.  A trampoline, an umbrella, a jack, and a blowtorch are just a few of the things you can transform your pet into to help you.  Determining what to use and when can be great fun.

Unfortunately, the game struggles in a few areas.  You can put yourself in walking dead situations without realizing it.  For example, one problem may be solved with more than one jelly-bean, but by using up a particular bean, you cannot progress in another area.  Hit and fall detection is not perfect either.  You can’t save the game, so note-taking is necessary.  It’s not a terribly long game if you know what to do, but knowing what to do can take a long time to figure out.  Finally, the end-game is pretty banal compared to the rest.

Still, it’s great to have a game that was not derivative of anything ever done in a video game.

Genre: Puzzle

Developer: Irem
Publisher: Irem
Year: 1990

Basic Idea: Kick ice cubes!

Review:  Similar in style to Adventures of Lolo (but not as complex or interesting), a solid puzzle game with enough variety to keep things interesting.  Your job is to access magic pouches by kicking around ice cubes, and you can use your freezing breath to turn enemies into your own weapons.  The game doesn’t get quite difficult enough to be satisfying, but there’s nothing terribly obnoxious about it either (except maybe the music).  However, it’s brain surgery compared to Angry Birds.

Genre: Platformer

Developer: Tamtex
Publisher: Irem
Year: 1991

Basic Idea:  Flip gravity

Review: The selling point of this platformer was that at any point you can decide to reverse gravity and walk along the ceiling.  This allows the game to have several intricate puzzles that require simultaneous strategy and quickness.  The boss battles are interesting.  It gets a bit mazey at times, but I enjoyed the challenge.  Unfortunately, the game gets it a bit too hard as it goes along, but at least there’s many continues and a password system.

The game is a little hard on the eyes; it’s colorful, but the colors often clash.  The music is also a bit too techy for my tastes.  The game is worth at least one play, though your mileage may vary.

Genre: Gambling

Developer: HAL
Publisher: HAL
Year: 1988

Basic Idea:  Play keno, roulette, slots, blackjack to try and become a multi-millionaire.

Review: Gambling games are a tough bet to begin with, as it’s hard to get much thrill out of playing with fake money.  Vegas Dream sidesteps this common problem a bit by adding a threadbare plot and interactive cut scenes throughout the game.  About every five to fifteen hands/rounds of whatever game you’re playing, some random person will come up to you and ask for money/a date/gambling partner/your help and it’s up to you to decide if you want to or not.  Often times, you’re getting conned and lose some money out of the deal.  But there’s plenty of lucky strikes as well where you can make extra money.  You might even have a shotgun wedding!  Playing with a friend can be fun if you enjoy a friendly competition for fake money or fake wives.  26

This game could have been improved significantly by adding a wider variety of games and interactive scenarios (especially ones that relied on more than random chance).  However, it’s still my favorite gambling game, with the possible exception of Poker Night at the Inventory by Telltale.  The sequel for the SNES, Vegas Stakes, does add craps and stud-poker (and more casinos), but some of the charm was lost.

Genre: Platformer

Developer: Tokai; Sunsoft
Publisher: Sun Corporation
Year: 1990

Basic Idea:  Avenge your father’s cliché death at the hands of terrorists and pretend you’re not fighting Terminators.

Review: From the same people who brought you Blaster Master comes possibly the best game ever based on the Terminator movie.  It can be hard to tell, though, since they lost the license to the movie and had to quickly change the plot and the main character before releasing it.  Thankfully, nobody plays platformers for their plots.

There’s nothing extraordinary about this game.  The graphics are good, not great.  The music is upbeat.  The weapons are fun and the robot/cyborg enemies creative.  The boss battles are fun. The difficulty curve is very fair.  There are much better platformers for the system, but if you’re looking for a new one that isn’t frustrating, this is a good bet.

Genre: Shooter

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Year: 1988

Basic Idea:  Single-handedly take on the entire Japanese empire

Review: 1942 is a pretty mediocre shooter, indistinguishable from every other shooter on the market and with awful sound to boot.  Its successor is a tremendous improvement in every way and one of the best shooters on the system.  It’s one of the few shooters where your plane can actually get hit and not instantly explode; you can upgrade your shields as you go to improve this.  Not only that, there are several awesome weapon upgrades, including a five-way shot and a smart bomb.  You can also fire a powerful shot from your cannon if you’re willing to let it ride for a bit.  Also, in addition to continues, there is actually passwords provided at various points.

There’s not much negative to say about this game.  The graphics are nothing exciting, but they’re fairly well-detailed.  It can get a little monotonous after a while.  There’s also no 2-player mode, unfortunately.  But for what it is, it’s a worthy play.  In fact, a must play if you’re at all a fan of shooters.

Genre: Platformer

Developer: Tokai
Publisher: Sun Corporation
Year: 1988

Basic Idea:  Jump in a hole to save your radioactive pet frog.  Or, more accurately, blow up a bunch of stuff in your tank.

Review: I’m tempted to call this game overrated, but being as that I have it in my Top 100, that would be a bit whiny.  It’s a very creative game, with mostly excellent play control, which is usually a slam dunk.  Traversing the overworld in your tank, jumping and shooting all the way is pretty fun.  And I love that there’s overhead adventuring a la Zelda in some sections and the boss battles.  I have no complaints about the way the game plays.

But there’s two major problems that keeps this game out of the top fifty for me.  First, the game seems like an endless maze after a while, requiring extensive backtracking which I don’t think any gamer has ever leapt for joy about.  But the worst crime of the game is the inability to save or get a password.  If I was blown away by the game, I think I could forgive these things and plow through.  But since I wasn’t, I never had any desire to complete this.

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.