EVERYTHING IS PIXELATED: The top 127 games from the third generation of home video game consoles (Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, Atari 7800)

Welcome to the first volume of the Home Video Game Console polls on ILX! This time around, we nominated and balloted against the third-generation consoles: The NES, the Sega Master System, and the Atari 7800 had games nominated (sorry, SG-1000, Casio PV-1000, Super Cassette Vision, Zemmix, Dina, Atari XEGS, Action Max, View-Master Interactive Vision, and VTech Socrates... no nominations this time). The top 127 have been compiled and will be rolled out here over the next ~2 weeks. Enjoy!

(Real trial by fire for me last night, making 26 of these images. I hope I have the endurance to do the other 100 to the same level. And I hope you don't think they're as hideous as I do after making 26 of them.)

127 - Gradius (NES) - 2 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/gYMpqMw.png

robbed

i dunno man, have you played the NES gradius? it's not great

127 - RC Pro Am II (NES) - 2 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/l5sqN6B.png

i enjoyed NES gradius, but it was plagued by bad slowdown issues (not nearly as bad as Lifeforce, but still pretty bad)

Scrolling shooter games like that were, inexplicably, never my jam on NES; I don't know why exactly. Maybe just too fundamentally action/arcade in orientation without the kind of depth I was already reaching for. I would get fascinated by the screenshots in Nintendo Power when the graphics were great (e.g. Life Force) but the games, even the good ones, would get maybe one rental out of me.

Pretty awesome box art though.

(p.s. HURRAH FOR THE POLL!)

124 - Ikari Warriors (NES) - 4 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/LWeuTYG.png

124 - Space Harrier (Sega) - 4 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/uHLalw1.png

i bought a usb controller just for this rollout. v excited :D

i threw this one a vote. i haven't played it since i was very little, so my affection for it might be partly attributable to nostalgia. but i do remember it being a fun game for 2-player co-op. my dad, at the end of each level, would shout "HEMORRHOIDS! HEMORRHOIDS!" as the victorious shirtless ikari warriors hobble=stepped off the screen with their legs spread wide open. i had no idea what that meant at the time but i thought it was really funny.

sorry, that was a blurb for ikari warriors. xpost

124 - Tiger Heli (NES) - 4 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/2aCSMxc.png

Space Harrier kinda blew my mind when I was a kid.

Out of curiosity, how many ballots were there?

I voted for Ikari Warriors ! but it only got one vote. HMMM

I cut Gradius for Lifeforce (spoiler!) but I loved Gradius too. what's the definitive version if not NES? arcade?

this is a good start; i have varying degrees of love in my heart for all those
BOLD CLAM: SHMUPS will not place in the top 20

Never played Space Harrier, but we had the gimmicky NES knockoff, 3-D World-Runner. It had a peppy soundtrack and some kinda trippy walking-on-the-moon physics as you would leeeeeeeeeap over vast pits. You could also play it in a 3D mode with blue-and-red glasses, which I'm sure we tried at some point but which I can't remember at all. Not in any sense a good game, though.

i was the lone vote for tiger heli. it's the only game on my ballot that i first played as an adult. it's nothing remarkable, it's just a really solid twitchy shooter. it also reminded me of how much i used to enjoy playing games for points. i could never beat a game like tiger-heli (at least without cheating for extra lives or something), but setting a personal top score and then trying to beat it was a game within a game that made it more approachable for me. kind of sad that playing for points has pretty much disappeared from games.

I voted for Ikari Warriors ! but it only got one vote. HMMM

oh shit, my mistake! i thought i voted for it, but i didn't. in the end, i subbed out ikari warriors for a very similar game that hasn't placed yet.

I loved Ikari Warriors because it was a rad co-op game at a time when that was rare.

Obv Commando will be much higher : no that was NOT a glitch that typed that

If you dig games like Tiger-Heli, Desert Strike etc., let me recommend Firehawk, an obscure unlicensed game which should scratch the same itch pleasantly. It also has pretty awesome music (though only over the titles and between levels, oddly); back around 2000 an old buddy of mine cut it all together as "The Firehawk Saga" and it's, thankfully, still online here: http://slaughtergate.tripod.com/bootblitz.html . His "Dragonfly King" (based on Chakan The Forever Man) is also super great.

123 - M.C. Kids (NES) - 6 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/EnRqPmg.png

i'm going to start rollnig these out faster than this haha. this is going to take all day and i have ot make more of these damn images at some point

Never played M.C. kids. that title screen is weird: <1UP 2UP>

what's the story with 1UP/2UP as shorthand for 1 player or 2 player, for a few years there in the 80s?

from wikipedia:

The story begins with the titular M.C. Kids, Mick and Mack, reading a book where Ronald McDonald was showing off his magical bag at a picnic in the meadow.

ronald mcdonald you are under arrest

in the end, 20 ballots! hit the number i wanted :)

hopefully the 4th gen one gets even more (whenever that is... in 2016 probably)

xxpost hahaha

ummm nothing to say about MC Kids, but RC Pro-Am II is probably better than RC Pro-Am I. I voted for Pro-Am I because of name recognition.
This series would have been a lot of fun if I knew about it as a kid. Back then 2-player games were all the rage. Alas, I didn't play it until I was in my 20's.

I totally support a fast rollout of all these "was one person's 18th place pick" entries, sorta doubt we're ever going to develop a rich multi-post discussion of fucking M.C. Kids.

good to know.

120 - A Boy and His Blob (NES) - 8 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/6EocrHm.png

re: MC Kids: I do like how the McDonald's swoop implies a jumping high-five

said it on the voting thread but A Boy and His Blob sounded SO AMAZING in nintendo power. like this super unique concept that would have all this really creative puzzle stuff going on. in practice it was nearly unplayable and really unpleasant to look at. but still, kudos to them for trying something different. david crane is an under-sung game designer with some really important credits to his name - pitfall and little computer people especially. and ABAHB still has that early 80s "one-man show" feel to it, which i think is neat.

120 - Winter Games (NES) - 8 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/nA96rdL.png

^^ highest box art quality : in-game graphics ratio maybe ever

xpost i remember the nintendo power coverage very well, and i agree, it sounded amazing. i never got a chance to play it though.

120 - Wizards and Warriors (NES) - 8 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/HVl4sfC.png

played the shit out of all the "games" games on C64 without ever getting any good at a single one of them. it was just fun making the people move around and hear their little quantized feet-stomping noises as they ran, and the digital cheers and such. doubt i ever got the hacky-sack guy to actually get the sack up in the air even once. my sense is that the NES ports were sometimes decent and sometimes disasters in terms of control, but yeah thankfully they held on to the BADASS box graphics.

I cut Gradius for Lifeforce (spoiler!) but I loved Gradius too. what's the definitive version if not NES? arcade?

I had the SNES version. There are some incredible 16-bit versions like the PC Engine CD one that are next level.

Going back and playing NES Gradius I was struck by how polished it seemed compared to other console shooters at the time. Yes the flicker and slowdown but also really precise controls and that ultra smooth scrolling NES was famous for.

MC Kids is a great SMB3 knockoff.

xxp
hacky sack was in Winter Games too? wasn't it California Games?

yeah i was talking about california games sorry - they all kinda ran together in my head as i think we had all of the major ones except 'world games.'

haha i was the lone wizards and warriors voter and now i have no complaints at all with lone-voter games making the rollout. wizards and warriors is not really a great platformer - it's repetitious and kinda stupid, but there are some GREAT tunes (first level tune, you're-about-to-die tune) and i was really taken by the vibe/environment. the first (forest) level goes a long way towards establishing this cozy medieval adventure feel, lots of shit is happening, you're finding cool shit in chests. then it seems like the next three levels are in alarmingly same-y caves before anything happens again. the one thing that reeeeeally sucks is waiting and waiting for an enemy to drop the particular potion you need to make a particular jump - that's bad design and they should have caught it the first time through playtesting.

you can tell they were going for a ghosts n goblins or castlevania thing, with this 'journey' (love any game where you see an overall mini-map of the levels and how they connect, after you beat each one), but just didn't have the chops to pull off CV... but thankfully they made it less arbitrarily punishing than G&G - you could rent it, beat it, and enjoy renting it and beating it again. given that the same cartridge could hold really fully-fledged adventures it's unquestionably kind of a throwback, but it would have been a top-tier home-computer game in 1987, where the competition was instead dark castle.

117 - Batman: Return of the Joker (NES) - 10 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/iGMtpxo.png

117 - Kung Fu (NES) - 10 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/Ps4qy8c.png

haha Kung Fu, man I sucked at that

117 - RBI Baseball (NES) - 10 points / 1 Vote
http://i.imgur.com/kctHDoc.png

never played kung fu till emus - but i knew it, not from nintendo power but from its predecessor (?), this wonderful, big, full-color, screenshot-ridden tome:

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/nintendo/images/a/ab/PlayersGuide.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090701191944&path-prefix=en

real range of games in there tbh - everything from first-generation "this could be an atari 5200 game" cartridge-filler to some of the signature epics of the system. the comparatively slow build of the NES's north american success - released for christmas 1985, but the "action set" bundled with mario bros/duck hunt and the zapper wasn't until 1988! - plus the delay versus the famicom itself meant that things that really felt like "launch titles" to most kids my age (zelda, castlevania) were actually mature games released halfway through the system's effective lifespan. and then the imperial-phase games seemed to come right on their heels. it was just such a bonanza of high-quality stuff, with these much, MUCH more basic games sitting right alongside them on the shelf.

anyone ever watched a game of RBI baseball?

As a life-long sports abstainer, the ____ Games games are pretty much the only sports games I ever played (barring a recent half-hearted attempt at learning what football is from playing Madden). They were a ton of fun.

Hey Mordy, which USB controller did you get? I recently bought a Super Nintendo one and am quite pleased.

meant to say it before but that is super crazy about that Pac Man intro/The Pretty Things rip

New game: ILX Plays: Mike Tyson's Punchout for the NES

Time for the OG:
ILX Plays: The Legend of Zelda for NES

Every time we went to Phar-Mor to rent games, I would bee-line to the video aisles with my meticulously kept want list notebook (culled from Nintendo Power and game magazines read at the local waldenbooks) and grab my two games that I was allowed. Mom usually picked out the movie.

when i was home for Thanksgiving, I found this in a pile of old papers. It's hysterical and comprehensive. There's a "2" to "9,000,000" desirability rating system (Earthbound gets a 10). The notes to my mom include:

As a rule, games without books are acceptable. Repeat: Games without books _are_ acceptable.
Remember our motto: "Any game is better than no game"

oh man. that post makes me so happy.

i think about that forksclovetofu phar-mor post whenever i see him sharing ilx spotify playlists

"Any game is better than no game" haha not a bad motto

what had a 9,000,000?

did you find more of these papers? can you scan them?

i think about that forksclovetofu phar-mor post whenever i see him sharing ilx spotify playlists

i think the "9,000,000" rating is tongue-in-cheek; there's nothing rated that in the book.
i may regret this but you're my people, so I'll scan in the rating system. It's SOOOOOOO dorky and sadly revealing but i don't mind.

lol, oh shit: i DID rate a game nine million and it was pre-release ALIENS VS PREDATOR

innocent little me never knew it was never gonna be on NES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t7AXJu-_ic

my hype for this:

9,000,000

wow, there's lots of high rated pre-release hype games in here.
Hellraiser got a "20"!
http://lostmedia.wikia.com/wiki/Hellraiser_(Unreleased_1990_Video_Game)

you can feel free to append this mentally after every post you see from me forever.
http://i.imgur.com/KqTRX4f.png

so many display names i can't pick one

CAN WE POLL THIS

voting 20 easy

i am transcribing now

so good

that is everything

Forks' video game rating sytem POLL

yes i fucked up spelling system

yes i set the poll end for the wrong day

sorry

so many display names i can't pick one

― Worth Taking from Little Kid (Will M.), Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:52 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^

we wanna do another group game play?
Who's up for river city ransom?

im down but it's going to have to be this weekend.

Fourth-gen is live

this is a cool video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVuB1ZASrGw

nice

so i ended up loading a bunch of "always been curious about that" NES and Gameboy games onto our NES Mini for late-night and weekend-morning gaming. it's been really fun to actually dip in and try so many of these titles that were just names and Nintendo Power screenshots to me at the time, or even completely unknown. my patience for old-school difficulty (and in particular for clunky controls/mechanics/cheap-feeling deaths/limited continues) is NOT what it was when i was age 8-12 though... i've ended up deleting a lot of them after a cursory try-out, whereas once upon a time, if i'd rented one of em, i would have just kept bashing away til i got good. i was thinking i'd go through the list and post about them but now i wonder if it's a little self indulgent. but it's such a fun activity and a nice way to close the book on decades-old curiosity, i really recommend it if you have a Mini and the time to go through Hakchi tutorials.

the other thing that's surprised me is how primitive the look and feel of so many of the games are. it's not that anything looks different than i would have pictured it if you'd asked me to picture it - every sprite of Mario 3 is burned into my memory. but there's a certain dinginess to the NES palette that i think was overriden by the magical experience of the games themselves (or the powerful glow of the CRT screen perhaps). but like, Mario 2 i would basically have remembered as being about as colorful and saturated as Super Mario World or Sonic, and it just isn't. that's okay, it's still a great achievement in pixel art. but other games really made me aware of how close in generation and capabilities the Famicom was to the other 8-bit systems of my youth - the Commodore 64, the Apple II, etc.... at the time they felt so different!

yeah post about them!

Mario 2 (Doki Doki Panic) is murderously hard. I lived with a friend for a couple of months a few years ago when my first marriage was ending and we would smoke weed and play Mario, Mario 2, and Mario 3. We could easily beat the other two, but couldn't master 2.

DONKEY KONG (Gameboy) is one of the real surprises so far --- first three levels are basically classic arcade Donkey Kong, and then it keeps going with more stages and gradually adding new elements (e.g. "now there are levers that change the direction of the conveyor belts" "now there things you have to carry to a spot so you can stand on them") in a way that makes into a genuine action-puzzle game. somewhere in between Lode Runner and a kind of Flash game sensiby. lotta nice sprite animation in there. hasn't really gotten particularly brain-teasing yet but maybe it'll get there...

oh yeah the game boy donkey kong was fucking amazing, i miss playing it

otm, forgot how much i loved it. the difficulty level gets seriously high

if you get off the first level you're gamer of the year imo

i'll say also that one whole huge category of these things is what could be called "spiral notebook games"... where i think it's pretty plausible that if i'd somehow owned these games in 1990, i would have put in the work - and enjoyed the work - of mapping out their incomprehensible worlds, and keeping track of which town has a guy who would trade an ORB for a STATUE. i can practically smell the three-ring spiral notebook, with draggles of loose paper sticking out of the distressed spirals from sheets ripped out to do other things.

basically, these are all games where the minute-to-minute play mechanics range from "playable" to "pretty good," but where at age 39 i'm just completely uninterested in keeping track of not-different-enough areas, typically connected by self-similar passageways or by an absolutely overwhelming number of dark rectangle "press up to go in" doors. i don't think any of these are BAD games, but i just can't see myself playing them. if they had an automap, i'd do it! this bunch includes:

The Battle of Olympus - Zelda II clone but harder)
Clash at Demonhead - base gameplay is a little more primitive but i always wanted to like this because of the anime aesthetic
Faxanadu - great "PC RPG" look, but actually the control/hit detection in this is probably a step below "playable"
The Goonies II - such an ambitious thing, i'm sure it's really satisfying to progress but it's SO overwhelming with the doors and shit right off the bat
Metroid and Metroid II: Return of Samus - i LOVE Super Metroid, was really cool to see how close MII was to that. my kingdom for an automap!!!

Link's Awakening didn't grab me right out of the gate, but i might stick it out with that one - automap, baby! haven't yet taken a serious crack at Willow, would like to hope that passes muster. So far, as far as these action/adventure/RPG hybrids go, Crystalis has been the most enjoyable one to crack open and explore. was always curious about it, always had it mixed up with StarTropics. there some odd and janky design decisions, but it's basically fun to go around killing stuff and raising your level. i just hit this really annoying snow/ice area though and the mapping is becoming a problem - everything looks the same and i really can't remember which passages i've checked out and whether there's anywhere i haven't yet been.

another kind of huge category is "mid/late-period NES platformer with cool concept/gimmick/weapon, but just too unforgivably hard." this includes a ton of acknowledged classics and things that placed in this poll, and again, if i'd had them back in the day, i'm SURE i would have banged my heads against their impossible opening levels enough to get baseline good and then enjoy the rest of the experience. a lot of them really do have super cool ideas, like the different characters in Little Samson i did this with Blaster Master, so i'm sure i would have done it with, oh, let me see, Astyanax, KickMaster, Little Nemo, Little Samson, Power Blade, Shadow of the Ninja, Shatterhand, Strider...

just below this are earlier NES platformers that i remember being curious about back then, but which just feel way too primitive for progress to be satisfying at this point. a lot of them have cute art or intriguing gimmicks, but just don't play well at all, like they just have not internalized any of Mario's lessons about jumping or momentum or how a platformer should "feel." e.g. Athena, Legacy of the Wizard. Milon's Secret Castle and the Adventure Island games would be in here too but i already knew that sucked.

also off on the side: the Wizards & Warriors games, which are all sort of objectively bad. i played the shit out of the first one on rentals as a kid - just loved the aesthetic and the world i guess, because the gameplay's really frustrating and stupid! but it's still way, way more enjoyable than the sequels, where i'm glad to say that my tweenage self was not wrong: they are nigh-unplayable!

W&W has one of my favorite early soundtracks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9eZvd_74qQ

oh yeah i love all those tracks, even the maddening "low on health" music. they have very headsticky basslines, especially.

another one that i've really enjoyed picking back up is Castlevania III, which i'm sure i've posted about before. we owned I, so III's expanded scope really blew me away on rentals even tho i knew i'd never master it all. i haven't delved too deep so far (it is, of course, hard as hell) but it feels good and satisfying --- and the built-in emusave capability of the Mini means no fucking around with passwords, otherwise a huge obstacle to pick-up-n-play gaming. FYI Grant sucks and is not worth the detour into the clocktower and back.

actually Sypha sucks too, i should probably start over and seek Alucard but beating the level with the auto-ratcheting vertical scroll and those flying skeleton pseudo-sine-wave bastards has me on too much of a high.

also --- this was from the ghost ship level --- one pleasure of old school gaming that remains the same qualitatively if not quantitatively: on the nth attempt to get through a hard-ass level and a hard-ass boss, you finally nail it, you're tearing the boss up, your life is running down but you're doing it, then they reveal a new attack or new form that you haven't gotten to before and it's like OH SHIT but you're so in the zone that you STILL BEAT THEM, hell yeah.

In the Japanese version, Grant is easily the strongest companion, because he can throw knives for free. In the American version, Sypha is probably the best, especially with the ice spell. Alucard is probably the weakest in both versions.

huh, didn't realize! i really struggled to make sypha help me out on the ghost ship, which is the first stage after you pick her up. hmm. i'll give her another go.

Was the ZX Spectrum not a part of this generation? Or is that not even considered a video game console? Or did it just suck?

nah that wasn't a console, it didn't have cartridges and controllers and that kind of thing

i probably could have counted it but it was basically a home computer, and the computer game poll is a thing that is too overwhelming to even figure out a way to split up so i haven't tackled it! someone else can put a bell on that cat's collar

If I were to do it (which I'm not) I'd do it for all non console games - any platform (speccy, c64, amiga, st, pc) as long as it's never appeared on a console. too broad?

Maybe remove pc, but then not sure how much interest there would be for those remaining four. (I'm in tho)

or at least limit to an era of pc

yeah no pc games would feel... purer.