The Big N's amazing 1980s home console reinvigorated the videogame market with classic, genre-defining games including Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. These powerhouse efforts were complemented by a robust library of third-party titles. For all of these reasons and more, NES was recently named the best console of all time. We celebrate 100 of our favorites in the pages that follow with our list of the best games for Nintendo's killer system.
100 best nes games download
How did we pick the games? We had two conditions: they had to be released in the U.S. and they had to be fun. Whether or not the game was a blast to play is how we decided the order of our beloved NES carts - so don't be surprised if you see an important or influential title below something we loved to play over and over and over again
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a smash phenomenon in the late 1980s. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before a videogame followed the television show and toys. Developed by Konami and published by its subsidiary Ultra (a ghost publisher created only so that Konami could publish more games per year than Nintendo allowed), TMNT proved to be a fun, challenging game with crisp graphics and compelling gameplay. The great thing about TMNT was its ability to let gamers use all four Ninja Turtles at will, even though it was only a one-player action game. It also had multiple fields-of-view, from top-down navigation to side-scrolling sequences, the perspectives were mixed up considerably at a time when games were usually from one outlook only. Unfortunately, this game didn't satisfy everyone. Many gamers wanted a port of Konami's arcade beat-'em-up of the same name instead, but had to wait until 1991, when a port of the arcade classic came to the NES under the TMNT 2 moniker.
Back in the day of the NES, the now-common occurrence of franchise flooding was seldom a problem. And for the most part, franchises that did flood the NES were of a high quality. Cue Dragon Warrior III, the third game in the long-running RPG series from Enix, a game that came only a couple of years after the original landed stateside. A hit among the new RPG crowd that was developing around Nintendo's 8-bit console, Dragon Warrior III continued with conventions set by, of all games, Dragon Warrior II. In the original Dragon Warrior, the hero was on his own. Fighting enemy parties that never consisted of more than one enemy, the original was about narrow-minded preparedness. Dragon Warrior III continued to open up both the gamer's party and the enemy parties to more than one per side, creating for the first time in the series a real feeling of strategy. RPG parties with role characters, like healers and fighters, were brought to the forefront of Dragon Warrior III, and just about every J-RPG made ever since.
Mega Man is one of the few franchises on the NES that made it to four games. The fourth game in the franchise had little to offer fans that was different, other than a new cast of interesting Robot Masters, a new character (Eddie) and a new ability for Mega Man to exploit (charging your arm cannon). But when something isn't broken, you shouldn't attempt to fix it, and Capcom released what was in essence the same experience from the three earlier titles in the series. And guess what? No one complained. What was most interesting about Mega Man 4 was its ability to tell a deeper story than what was told in the past three iterations in the series. Capcom seemed to remove Mega Man's classic foil, Dr. Wily, in lieu of a new creator of evil robots, Dr. Cossack. But when it's revealed that Wily is indeed behind Cossack's deeds, Mega Man is forced to trek through not one end castle, but two, a trend that is kept up in Mega Man 5 and 6 as well.
When I lived in New Hampshire, there was a videostore that rented NES games well into the PSX era. I was lucky enough to rent Mega Man 4 over and over again before buying it later on. Being the first Mega Man game with tangible secrets within, Mega Man 4 got a lot of playtime when I was a youngster. But the Balloon Adaptor and Wire Adaptor didn't elude me for long, as useless as they were.
Out of all of the great games on our list, Kickle Cubicle is one of the few titles I never got to experience until I was an adult. Constantly being outsmarted by the likes of The Adventures of Lolo, Kickle Cubicle proved to be an entertaining, action-packed alternative that was a little friendlier to all of us puzzle-stupid gamers.
Over a decade before the name Tony Hawk first began to become synonymous with skateboarding videogames, Electronic Arts was innovating on the NES with the impressively diverse Skate or Die. The game, presented in a manner similar to Epyx's popular California Games, came to the Commodore 64 and the NES. Skate or Die brought gamers several different skateboarding events including downhill races, freestyle ramp competitions and a joust match fought in a drained swimming pool. Then, Skate or Die 2 came along and trumped its predecessor in many ways, offering a full storyline adventure in addition to the standalone skating events as well as adding in the "Double Trouble" half pipe, a massive structure that spanned two full game screens and let you pull off highly stylish (for the time) vert skating tricks. Skateboarding continues to be a sport explored in new and unique ways in video gaming today, with EA recently revisiting the concept with Skate and Tony Hawk's series adding the new Ride peripheral, but Skate or Die got it all going.
One of the major debates among NES aficionados is the sheer amount of ports that appear on the console, and how many of them are inherently sub-par to their arcade counterparts. One of the counter-examples to this argument is Mario Bros., an NES port that's not perfect when compared to the 1983 arcade original, but one that is about as close as can be expected, with smooth gameplay and crisp graphics that do the original proud. However, Mario Bros. was eclipsed by Super Mario Bros. almost immediately upon release in the United States. Why would you buy Mario Bros. when you can buy Super Mario Bros.? Nonetheless, the two games were quite different from one another, sharing their main stars and nothing more. Old-school arcade gamers have found and will continue to find a lot to love in any iteration of Mario Bros., but new gamers beware! This isn't the Super Mario Bros. we oft talk about as one of the most groundbreaking games to ever be released.
It may be hard to believe, but at one point Zombies were a greatly underrepresented class of brain-dead enemy in videogames. Thankfully, Zombie Nation arrived in the latter days of the NES to smash the zombie barrier. The protagonist of this peculiar game is the disembodied noggin of a samurai, who packs some serious cranial power. It goes down something like this: an extra-terrestrial force named Darc Seed has zombie-fied the world, oh and there's some kind of stolen sword involved or something. You take direct control of the samurai's giant head in a sort of side-scrolling shooter that's too deliberately loony not to check out. Zombie Nation pushes the NES graphical capabilities more than any other shooter on the system, with lots of moving enemies, building destruction and a steady stream of pixilated chaos. Brazenly over-the-top, Zombie Nation is one of the few NES titles that doesn't take itself seriously.
Featuring a half-and-half game design that blends two distinct types of gameplay into one excellent whole, The Guardian Legend is one of the most influential games in the history of the gaming industry. You play as The Guardian, a female cyborg warrior tasked with preventing Earth's impending destruction via a collision with a rogue alien world, Naju. The Guardian must thwart the planet's demise by setting off Naju's self-destruct sequence before it reaches Earth. Gameplay is balanced between controlling The Guardian in humanoid form during overhead exploration and shooting sequences and faster-paced forced-scrolling shooter sequences where she transforms into a fighter jet and blasts, and among other things, gigantic robotic alien crustacean creatures. The Guardian Legend's developers went on to craft several more classic shooters on platforms beyond the NES, and modern game makers like the creators of Sigma Star Saga at WayForward Technologies continue to laud the game for its innovations in genre-blending.
What stuck out most for me about Double Dragon II was how varied the game was. It was much harder than the first game, which I liked, and even though I played through it a couple of times, it didn't leave me with a "been there, done that" feeling that so many other games did. Oh, and they advertised this sucker like crazy in comic books at the time (no, really).
Natsume may be completely stuck in the rut of cranking out nothing but Harvest Moon sequels these days, but back on the NES the developer had some unique and inventive adventures like Abadox, Shadow of the Ninja and this game, Power Blade. It was essentially a late generation Mega Man-esque science-fiction platform/actioner at its best. You played as a sunglasses-wearing muscleman equipped with a cybernetic boomerang, blasting his way through alien-invested futuristic environments on his way to restore the compromised integrity of the Master Computer, and your hero looked an awful lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is also one of those games that might not have been given a lot of attention if it weren't for the influence of the magazine, Nintendo Power, which featured it on the cover of its April 1991 issue. You'll find a few other games that got thrust into the limelight the same way on this countdown, like VICE: Project Doom. We're glad it did, because it's still a blast to power up our blades today.
Out of all of the games on the list, Journey to Silius might have one of the most interesting histories. Created by Sunsoft, which was at the top of its game in the late 1980s with classic release after classic release, Journey to Silius was originally supposed to be a licensed Terminator game. Evidence of this is all over the place, from the enemies to some of the music. But when Sunsoft had the license stripped at the last minute, it made due with what it had, and with limited editing, Journey to Silius was released. Thankfully, Sunsoft didn't throw this game into the dumpster after losing the Terminator license, because Journey to Silius is one of those seldom-played but everyone-should-play-it NES gems. Its fast-paced 2D action style made it a game preferred by those with quick reflexes, and its arsenal of weaponry, which can be chosen from a Mega Man-like menu, gave the gameplay variety, with certain weapons working best against certain enemies and bosses. Journey to Silius wasn't experienced by many gamers in its time, but it has more than earned its place on our Top 100 for its smooth gameplay alone. 2ff7e9595c
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