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Yesterdays: MY Favorite Nintendo Games Part 2
By: mickyarber
Like so many of us here on RetroDaze, a great many hours of my youth was spent playing Nintendo. Saturday afternoon, after school, most of the night on Friday nights....you know, anytime available was spent with that gray and black controller in my hand.
Of course, not all games live up to the hype we place on them in our minds, and some games far exceed the level of enjoyment we thought we were going to get from them. Some games we played only a handful of times, and some games we kept going back to time and time again.
This is the second part of a four part series of articles I'm doing on MY favorite games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. This is by no means a ranking of the 'greatest' or 'best' games. It's simply my top 20 favorite games to play, in no particular order, along with some of my memories of each one. I hope you enjoy, and I hope you check out the other three parts of this series as well!
Check out Part 1 of the series here
Contra
Released in 1988 from Konami
Is this the best shoot 'em up game the Nintendo ever had? If not, it made a heck of an attempt to be. The big lure to me for this game was the co-operative aspect for two players. My cousin and I loved to team up, put in the code to give us each 30 lives, and set out to beat this game on Saturday afternoons. We usually succeeded and celebrated with high fives and pizza slices. This was the ultimate game for two friends to play together and strive to win together. Until a special gun became available and you both tried to be the first one to get to it, and then argue about who got the last special weapon. Or, when one player ran out of lives and stole one form the other. That was a small price to pay for such a fun time though.
The gist of the game was a simple one. An alien race had landed on Earth and two special forces type men went to snuff them out. Along the eight levels of play, you could pick up several types of special guns to assist in the battle. A lot of obstacles stood in your way like exploding bridges, rotating guns, alien creatures, and other assorted challenging terrain to overcome.
This title has become one of the most loved games of all time, and with good reason. It was super fun to play, had the cooperative mode, and the storyline was interesting. This gets one of the highest ratings I could give a game.
Alpha Mission
Released in 1986 from SNK
The great space saga known as Alpha Mission.....or Space Invaders knockoff. This was a cool game where you had a space fighter and the ability to upgrade it's weapons and defense systems in the course of the game play. Once you earned more weapons, you could switch back and forth between them. At the end of each level was a boss, and that boss was only beatable by one of those special weapons....and you had to figure out which one and select it before you got to him. It was hard in the beginning, but soon it became one of those games that I would sit down for an hour and a half and run through the whole thing for fun.
I got Alpha Mission on the same night I got my Nintendo. When we went to pick it up, all my local Hills department store had were the Nintendo systems without any games. So my Dad let me pick a game, and I picked Pro Wrestling. While there in the store, he decided he wanted to pick a game and he chose Alpha Mission. While he only played it once, I'm glad he picked it up because as noted earlier, it became one of my favorite games to kill time with.
Where In Time Is Carmen San Diego
Released in 1991 from Konami
This game was all about the learning. It came with a complete desk reference encyclopedia to help you along with this game. It would give you clues to where and when the bad guy was hiding, and you had to track him or her down. To do that, you would often have to refer to the encyclopedia to decipher the clues. You only had so much time to complete the case, and if you made a wrong time jump, you could kiss the bad guy goodbye. You slowly worked your way through the rogues gallery, until you were on the trail of the chief baddy herself, Carmen SanDiego.
I could sit and play this game for hours. I loved the aspect of tracking someone through time and around the world. And I found that after I was done playing the game, I was left with questions about the places and time frames I had visited, and would pull out the encyclopedias to find more info. I thoroughly enjoyed this game and probably learned quite a bit from it as well.
Genghis Khan
Released in 1989 from KOEI
Probably one that a lot of you have not played before. Like Defender of the Crown that I covered in the first part of this series, this was a strategy based, land conquer game. But with way more detail. Instead of the 4 or 5 nations you had in DOTC, this one had like 40. And you had so many different types of resources to manage, deals to make with other nations, army's to recruit and train, treaties to negotiate, food to be produced and rationed.....it was enough to make your head spin. Then when you went to war, you were a General and had to plan all facets of the battles, make sure recon was being done, and troops were where they were supposed to be, and actually doing some fighting yourself. This was a game that could take months to master, and even longer to conquer. It's still one of my favorite strategy games.
I picked this game up at a local year round garage sale. I used to get used games there for $5.00 each and one Saturday I went in and the pickings were slim, but I wanted a new game to play that afternoon, so this was the pick up. I was far from disappointed as it turned out to be quite fun and challenging. For several straight Saturday's, I probably played this game for 4-6 hours at a time trying to "win". I don't think I ever did, but I had a lot of fun trying.
CastleVania 3: Dracula's Curse
Released in 1990 from Konami
After my first foray into the Simon Belmont universe with Castlevania 2, picking up this game was a no brainer. In this version, you had the ability to morph between several characters, each with a different unique ability. The graphics were better this time around, and the action seemed more intense. Fundamentally, this was probably better than Simon's Quest. But something about it just keeps it from taking a higher spot for me.
I think because I like Simon's Quest so much, I unfairly compared this title to it. The two games were fundamentally the same, but for whatever reason, I couldn't get into this game as much as it's predecessor. Now that's not to say that I didn't enjoy it, because I surely did. I spent many hours on this bad boy, but was never able to reach the end.
That wraps up the second part of this series. Ten games down, ten more to go! Be sure to keep an eye out for Part 3 where I talk about Mario, The Goonies, and some sports titles!
Mickey Yarber is a freelance writer and lover of all things fun from our childhoods. He has a blog where he shares childhood memories of tv shows, toys, movies, games, cartoons, food, school days, and a host of other things. Stop by and check him out at:
And be sure to follow me on Twitter at @yesterdayville
Vaporman87 Posted on Jul 21, 2015 at 05:12 PM
Konami getting plenty of love from you in these lists Mickey. Rightfully so. Contra, Castlevania... they're true classics. Can't speak for Carmen SanDiego, but it must not have been too bad to make your list.
I can remember being at my grandmother's house playing the NES with my cousin who was living there at the time. Using the extra life code and the both of us blasting our way through the baddies. Good times, those. I'm surprised Contra didn't resonate through the decades in the same way that games like Metal Gear did. Perhaps one day a new Contra series will take things to a whole new level and revive interest in it's history.
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