Home Game Poll vol. 1 (1984-1992): Nominate the best NES, Master System, etc console games ever (Nom deadline: September 8th)

Sega:
Action Fighter
Kung Fu Kid
Mickey Mouse Castle Of Illusion
Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap
Fantasy Zone

Are we allowed Game Gear games? Defenders Of Oasis was Game Gear only.

someone said that but, yes, definitely

sega master system:
ultima iv
fantasy zone

yes!! to the first, yes ish to the second

master system games i suspect i am mainly nominating because of nostalgia:
sonic chaos
psycho fox
alex kidd in shinobi world
castle of illusion starring mickey mouse
columns
rocky
golvellius: valley of doom
teddy boy
miracle warriors
operation wolf

probably not, really, master system games, but games which had a definite console presence that should be noted that happened to have master system versions:
enduro racer
r-type
rampart
rampage
shadow of the beast
smash tv
speedball / speedball 2
spy vs spy
ys

master system game that fucken rools:
wonder boy iii: the dragon's trap

er:
snail maze

lol xpost

feel like after the 2600 et al the 3rd gen systems weren't that big over here. the Master System got a little UK traction and the NES got more or less none, most mid-80s gaming was home computer based. only when the Megadrive and SNES launched did consoles get back serious market share.

so most of these games i know thru emulation or versions on home computers that aren't eligible. i did have a Master system briefly in the 90s. dunno that there's much here i can honestly vote for, don't feel inclined to check out a lot either - until the 4th gen i was strictly a Spectrum kid.

CTRL + F, folks. It's your friend.

I think Game Gear is pretty firmly 4th gen.

i think they had a moment around the time mid-80s kids were in primary school

also, rampage

xp to NV, from my point of view the nes and the master system were the most lusted-over items and any kid who had one was never short of friends. might be a generational thing. i definitely remember being blown away by my friend's Sega MS and playing Kung Fu Kid, Shinobi and Sonic all the time at his house.

CTRL + F, folks. It's your friend.

I think Game Gear is pretty firmly 4th gen.

― Those Jorts Are Upsetting (Old Lunch), Monday, August 10, 2015 2:16 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It came out at the same time as the Mega Drive, but it was still 8bit and pretty much a portable master system.

OTOH, the Atari 2600 wasn't really something I was aware of, whereas most people pre-3rd gen console were Atari/BBC Micro/Spectrum.

xpost Right, but the same argument could be made about the Game Boy. And that's surely opening a whole can of worms.

Golden Axe Warrior
James "Buster" Douglas Knockout Boxing
TransBot

xp but the gameboy was its own thing whereas the game gear used pretty much the same engine as the master system and shared roughly the same games, save for a couple of others. you could even buy a converter that let you play MS games on it.

I am having a severe PTSD flashback to one of the water levels in that first TMNT game

Super Monaco GP

Will can make a final ruling, but based on memory and looking through a list of what was released for Game Gear, the bulk of it came out in the mid-'90s and a lot of them were unique titles and repurposed Genesis games, so I'd still have a hard time considering it 3rd gen.

apparently 3rd gen must have happened while i was doing O-levels and moping after girls

it's possible. I was obsessed with video games up through and including the Super Nintendo, but lost all interest once that machine's title got usurped by the PSOne, which was quite a step on in terms of environment and gameplay. I still get confused by FP shooters and the like because those didn't really exist on third/fourth-gen consoles in any major way.

TransBot

srsly bro?

Nah, Game Gear is a no-go for this one. It is pretty firmly entrenched in that early-90s 4th gen plus I'm thinking there may be need for a portables poll that's separate (mostly thanks to the Game Boy existing for like 20 years?), and that could pretty handily cover every portable console up until smartphones.

fair enough, although i will say that i don't remember even having seen a master system until the early 90s.

I think my aunt gifted us the Master System we had in like '87 or '88. But, tbf, it was similar to playing my neighbor's ColecoVision inasmuch as it's the only time I ever remember directly encountering that particular platform.

(Just realizing that this is the same neighbor who also had the only CD-i I ever encountered.)

CD-i! Hah!

i def remember the nes being prominent a lot earlier than the master system, but maybe that was a uk thing. with a lot of these consoles, the earlier games would be a lot simpler to start with - the first games my friend had were things like Action Fighter which was a fairly straightforward shooter. But Mickey Mouse Castle Of Illusion really felt like a step-up in terms of quality, and soon afterwards the Sonic games came out for the Master System. I got a Game Gear in around 91/92? Played it to death, and it seemed to have a slightly defter engine than the MS.

there was no Sonic on the Master System afaik, strictly Megadrive/Genesis depending what side of the Atlantic you were on

oh my bad, jeez what was the point of that?

intellivision is being robbed. :(

― rushomancy, Sunday, August 9, 2015 9:14 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Intellivision is getting a 1st+2nd gen poll eventually if there's enough interest. Not robbed. :)

yeah there was def sonic and sonic 2 and all those on the MS. Its legacy ran on well into the Megadrive days, so often two analogues of a game would come out at the same time on each machine. I seem to recall there even being a Mortal Kombat on MS but maybe it was a hoax.

There were MS and GG versions of Mortal Kombat, MS only Street Fighter II

only games i truly associate with the Master System are Alex Kidd and a movie tie-in of Dracula. and i've just remembered a cool RPG-ish thing sent in ancient Japan that i'm googling now

If I were to open this up to computer platforms, how much of a can of worms would that be? MSX and Spectrum seem like the most likely candidates. But then do I have to include C64, Amiga, fucking everything in DOS until 1991, etc.?

Britishes, which of these machines fits best into the poll? I am willing to be convinced to put them in

C64 and Spectrum, maybe the Amiga and BBC, nothing else

those are all 8 bit machines iirc?

sorry i meant Amstrad, not Amiga

Amiga and ST feel like 4th gen

There is not much from a DOS perspective. You basically have LucasArts/Sierra graphic adventures and that's it. Wolfenstein 3D was the first computer exclusive w any power to it and that came out in 1992. That's from a US DOS perspective, I hear the Spectrum and MSX and various other machines had a much greater profile elsewhere.

Alex Kidd is the only MS game I remember playing but my recollection is that NES was big w/ my born in the mid-80s crowd, thanks to Mario and that utterly hellish TMNT game plus the less hellish ones that followed

Separate poll

ironically i don't know if introducing those early home computers spreads the nominations too wide? and the Spectrum at least had a ridiculously extended lifespan for games, well over 10 years iirc

I'd probably have dozens of C64 nominations.

I see that it was released for the Master System and Game Gear but I don't remember Castle of Illusion on anything but Genesis. And PS3 (even though it's a just weird nebulous pseudo release that doesn't seem like it'll ever be available again if I let my PS+ subscription lapse).

like really Spectrum and C64 feel like they've got more in common with consoles than true PCs, but including them is maybe too UK-centric and distracting from the core of this poll

We had a BBC Micro because we were posh. I loved it.

The fuck is an MSX?

Castle Of Illusion was such a great game on both MS and Megadrive. The music itself was excellent, but it was also the first game I remember playing with hidden walls and secret rooms.

Yeah, I think separate poll makes the most sense. Otherwise things will place lower or higher depending on which side of the Atlantic the most votes come from.

And MSX is the home computer Konami made games for before they were like "oh right famicom, lol"

UK-perspective-xposts: I saw a Game Boy before I saw any of the plug-into-TV consoles and the Game Boy was only available here in late '90; I'd seen the NES/Master System listed in the Argos catalogue before that but nobody I knew had one until '91

iirc the UK missed out on 3rd gen until it was more or less over: the NES wasn't a big deal here in the 80s, as Nintendo didn't have a European branch then and were distributed here by Mattel, who were good at shifting those Donkey Kong handhelds but didn't know what to do with a full console system. The Master System came out much later and didn't do much for a while but apparently did better in Europe than anywhere else, because of Nintendo dropping the ball over here - but I still only really remember seeing Master System games in the shops from around '90, when the Mega Drive came out here and the Master System was rebranded into the cheaper Master System II

Around that time Nintendo finally discovered Europe and the NES became reasonably popular long after its Japan/US peak. I do remember SMB3 drawing a crowd at parties in the early 90s and being all point-missingly "pfft, Elf on the Amiga has much better graphics!" <facepalm.jpg>

anyway I guess Acorn/BBC vs ZX Spectrum vs C64 was the main thing in the UK; Amiga/ST feel like 4th gen, can't believe the Amiga is 30 years old now, so far ahead of everything else in '85 that it feels like nobody knew what to do with the Amiga for at least another few years. wondering if PC games can be split into generations by graphics card (Hercules/CGA/maybe Tandy and EGA vs VGA) but of course there were EGA games long after VGA came out. happy with separate poll tbh

huh I had always thought that MSX was Master System in the way that people would refer to the original PlayStation as PSX

i remember that NES spinny-robot disc system thing being advertised on TV a lot in the 80s, to the point where it wasn't really obvious that it was actually an add-on to a games console.

The side-of-the-Atlantic thing will obtain no matter what, it seems like - comments upthread would seem to suggest the Master System (which I basically didn't even know existed, as a US kid) was a bigger deal in the UK than the NES was. And no matter what poll ends up having them, Spectrum is going to be a UK thing and PC games a US thing. Maybe C64 and Amiga straddle that divide; the C64 was effectively my main "gaming machine" in this era, even though we also had an NES!

I've already offered this spiel on the other thread, but for the record I do think it makes sense to get "computer" games in alongside these, unless ILX really has enough interested parties that a series of "computer" polls wouldn't be too short of votes. As before, I think it makes sense to base the years of the poll on console "generations," and then apply the same years to computer games, rather than trying to match up the computer generations ("Apple II goes with Atari, Amiga goes with Nintendo...").

There is not much from a DOS perspective. You basically have LucasArts/Sierra graphic adventures and that's it.

This is mostly true, though I'd always rep for Commander Keen, et al., not to mention other things that played to the hardware strengths of PCs. MUDs and RPGs especially. I could see this both ways though - - - does it make more sense to compare Ultima V to Final Fantasy I, or to Skyrim?

I used to read that guy religiously, going back to like, 1999/2000 or so. Evangelion Thumbnail Theater, all that stuff. He must be the king of unfinished or now un-archived projects, so many loose threads. Clearly struggling between the 'blog' and the 'kitchen sink website' as formats. As it is so much of the recent stuff is virtually un-browsable; maybe that's an incentive to buy the books. I do like that he's picked up the print volume as a format, and zeroed in on a few recurring obsessions (the "Metroidvania" genre in particular).

The only thing is, and this is hardly unique to that site, but there's also a real tension between what's brilliant about the insight and what's popular with most of the readers. I feel like a lot of projects like this burn themselves out screencapping everything and basically let's-playing every single step of the game, like a walkthrough but every sentence has to be written snappily and with nerd panache. Sometimes that's fun to read but sometimes it's just flab keeping us from a really taut single medium or long-form essay about, in this case, the anatomy of the particular game. Part of me loves the idea of a 14-article series on Zelda II, or 27 parts on Super Mario Bros., but I suspect some of the strengths of the insights actually get buried in all that coverage... which nonetheless I'm sure is very popular. This is by no means unique to Parish, and he has a way better ratio than some other blogs I could name, but you kinda wish his experience in print journalism would have helped him internalize some checks on excess. OTOH he's writing about what he loves so, y'know, more power to him!

Sticking closer to content, one thing I wonder about is the tendency for most of the games to assume that they're really well-thought-out masterpieces and that every little move is just incredibly amazing, or just brilliantly effective, or just perfectly calibrated. That's another common tendency in this kind of writing and it's exhausting, but I think it also starts to seep into the argument; he has a general predisposition towards games that 'teach' their mechanics through gameplay, and a good eye for ways games do this in subtle ways that also flesh out the story or atmosphere of the world. But I feel like, and I should have examples for this, but sometimes it starts to feel like every single thing you do in a game is a planned little teachable moment; every jump you have to make early on is there to train you for a more complicated jump in World 7. And yeah, sure, in general I buy that but this was also just an era of games being hard as fuck and throwing you in the deep end, and sometimes stuff wasn't really telegraphed all that well but the games were still fun for it. I dunno, I'm not explaining this well and it's not a reason not to read his stuff. Maybe it would be better to say that his essays for their emphasis on this theme have forced me to think for myself about what makes a good difficulty curve or how much of this stuff is necessary for a good game.

BTW: What is the best world of Super Mario 3?

Without knowing Castlevania II's secrets (ie without internet help), you won't be able to win. It's not the game's difficulty but the fact that you need a Nintendo Power or the prodigy kid down the street in order to progress in the game. I mean you would have to be pretty damn lucky to find/solve the secrets on your own.

Nobody I know bothered to play all the way through Link II. I wonder if it had any bitchy secrets as well

the tendency for most of the games to assume that they're really well-thought-out masterpieces and that every little move is just incredibly amazing, or just brilliantly effective, or just perfectly calibrated

Well given memory limitations everything was more or less meticulously thought-out, from level design to song length to character art. The designers themselves have admitted as much, the famous example being Mario's design was due to the limitations of pixel art, his moustache and hat being added to fix animation problems that cropped up with the tiny resolution they had to work with.

Nowadays there really aren't any limitations so less consideration probably goes into it. If you can only include X amount of art/music/gameplay, it is going to be the absolute best you can come up with.

But yes there is probably some projection/fandom in there largely coloring things.

Also I may be confusing this (with DOOM?) but I seem to remember them saying the first stage of Mario was built at the end of development, after they had figured out the tools, and thus were able to use more deliberate planning irt what the player would encounter and how they would likely respond.

Sure, I just think it gets taken to this level of "and here's yet another example of the unfailing inexhaustible genius of the designers" and it just becomes unreadable after a few paragraphs. Definitely talking more about the game design/challenge/information stuff here than the pixel art stuff. Obviously, there's more care at all levels in the classics than the far, far more numerous dudfests... s'what makes them the classics!

Zelda II is profoundly flawed but in the end, basically playable and satisfying in its way. If the first one had never existed it'd probably be pretty well remembered as an ambitious if incompletely-worked-out action RPG. I can think of only two totally baffling points that really scream "Nintendo Power, take me away!" which is basically zero compared to Castlevania II. Will be stunned if anyone ends up voting for that one...

Thanks for responding to that

I never understood the love for Zelda II. All I can remember is getting it and being like WTF, this isn't Zelda. But I was 9, so maybe I'd feel differently now.

Yeah it's pretty fun.

CVII is really fun too when you have a walkthrough. Killer music. The bosses are piss easy but I don't mind that after the nightmare bosses in the first game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rsycfDliZU

zelda 2 the first game i ever beat. dark link an all-time end boss. (his cameo in ocarina is kind of misplaced and random.) a genuinely difficult game, probably less forgiving than the first (definitely meaner: ganon's digitized chuckle on game over) and the last zelda game to be hard at all. its dangerous places (the forests, the pitch-black caves, the big mess of rocky maze in the southwest, the town where people are bats) are stressful and frightening in ways no death mountain has ever been, and a combination of nes-memory restrictions on text and a number of NPCs hugely increased from the first game meant even the non-hostile townspeople (health-restoring hookers aside) seemed standoffish and terse. the rare game i remember (vividly) as a hostile place, remote from help, instead of as a beloved playground. it's also weirdly colorless, simultaneously too simple and too fiddly to be a working platformer, and (alone in the series) reliant on dedicated, mindless grinding without any of the monster or spell variety that's supposed to entertain you when you're doing that in FF games. so it probably deserves its reputation in comparison to the likes of zelda 1 and link to the past, but in the post-twilight-princess era of nintendo's long enslavement to ocarina of time it definitely shouldn't be called the series' worst anymore.

I had a great idea for the upcoming Zelda game the other day. You start the game with a sword, shield, bow, boomerang and bombs
http://i44.tinypic.com/2z8ce9u.png

tbf the last Zelda game was in thrall to Link To The Past rather than Ocarina (and was all the better for it)

Myself and a few other guys are using Minecraft to build a working 3D remake of the original Zelda. Not sure how you guys feel about Minecraft, though.

i'm trying to think of the most recently released game that has as much content as SMB3, with no save system.

Kid Chameleon (Genesis, 1992) had over 100 stages and no saves. Stages had multiple exits that lead to many paths through the game.

those videos on graphics were really cool, thanks - somehow got this far in my life without knowing that stuff. wild about the 'color cells,' amazing how well the artists knew how to camouflage the boundaries. super cool.

high-fives to dlh. love this - "the rare game i remember (vividly) as a hostile place, remote from help, instead of as a beloved playground." totally. I AM ERROR. it's a bleak and ugly sort of hyrule you're saving here, not unlike the transylvania of castlevania ii but a lot more playable. i also think it should get credit for the dungeons, which are sometimes really irritating, and are nothing on the high-concept ones from link to the past, but again, legitimately hard, and considerably more varied than CV2's mansions which really all feel like the same place (and don't even have bosses!). and of course, the 'big rocky maze' - which IS death mountain! - thrown at you way too early in the game, super punishing. these mean motherfuckers, man:

http://www.nintendojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Zelda-Daira.png

I'm on vacation so I don't have the master list handy. But I can post it on Tuesday. If anyone thinks some hang is missing, nominate it I won't get mad if it's a dupe.

Am I missing anything?

Atari Commando
Atari Dark Chambers
Atari Desert Falcon
Atari Donkey Kong Jr.
Atari Food Fight
Atari Galaga
Atari Mario Bros.
Atari Tower Toppler
Atari Xevious
NES 10 Yard Fight
NES 1943: battle of the midway
NES A Boy and His Blob
NES Adventures of Lolo
NES Adventures of Lolo 3
NES Bad Dudes
NES banana prince
NES Base Wars
NES Baseball Simulator 1.000
NES Baseball Stars
NES Bases Loaded
NES Batman
NES Batman: Return of the Joker
NES Battle of Olympus
NES Battletoads
NES Bionic Commando
NES Blades of Steel
NES Blaster Master
NES Bomberman
NES Bubble Bobble
NES California Games
NES Castlevania
NES Castlevania II
NES Castlevania III
NES Cobra Triangle
NES Commando
NES Contra
NES Crisis Force
NES Crystalis
NES Deja Vu
NES demon sword
NES Destiny of an Emperor
NES Double Dragon
NES Double Dragon II
NES Double Dribble
NES Dr. Mario
NES Dragon Warrior
NES Dragon Warrior II
NES Dragon Warrior III
NES Dragon Warrior IV
NES Duck Hunt
NES Ducktales
NES Ducktales 2
NES Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball
NES Earthbound Zero
NES Excitebike
NES fantastic dizzy
NES Faxanadu
NES Fester's Quest
NES Final Fantasy
NES Friday the 13th
NES gargoyle's quest ii
NES Gauntlet
NES Ghosts 'n' Goblins
NES Golf
NES Golgo 13
NES Goonies II
NES Gradius
NES Gradius 2
NES Gumshoe
NES Hogan's Alley
NES holy diver
NES ice climber
NES Ice Hockey
NES Ikari Warriors
NES Impossible Mission
NES Jackal
NES Karnov
NES Kick Master
NES Kid Icarus
NES Kirby's Adventure
NES Kung Fu
NES Legacy of the Wizard
NES Lemmings
NES Life Force
NES Little League Baseball: Championship Series
NES Little Nemo: The Dream Master
NES M.C. Kids
NES Mach Rider
NES Maniac Mansion
NES Marble Madness
NES Mega Man
NES Mega Man II
NES Mega Man III
NES Mega Man IV
NES Metal Gear
NES Metal Gear II
NES Metroid
NES Mike Tyson's Punch Out
NES Mission Impossible
NES NARC
NES Ninja Gaiden
NES Ninja Gaiden II
NES Ninja Gaiden III
NES Nobunaga's Ambition
NES Otocky
NES Over Horizon
NES Parodius Da
NES prince of persia
NES Pro Wrestling
NES Rad Racer
NES Rampage
NES RBI Baseball
NES RC Pro Am
NES RC Pro Am II
NES Recca
NES Rescue Rangers
NES Ring King
NES River City Ransom
NES Rockin' Kats
NES Romance of the Three Kingdoms
NES Rush n Attack
NES Rygar
NES Section Z
NES Shadowgate
NES Smash TV
NES Snake, Rattle & Roll
NES Solar Jetman
NES Spy Hunter
NES StarTropics
NES StarTropics 2
NES Strider
NES Super C
NES super dodge ball
NES Super Mario Bros
NES Super Mario Bros 2
NES Super Mario Bros 3
NES Super Spike V'Ball
NES sweet home
NES Swords and Serpents
NES Tecmo Baseball
NES Tecmo Bowl
NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I
NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II
NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
NES Tetris
NES The Adventures of Rad Gravity
NES The Immortal
NES The Legend of Zelda
NES The Legend of Zelda II
NES Tiger Heli
NES Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage
NES Track and Field
NES Ufouria: The Saga
NES Ultima Exodus
NES Uninvited
NES Urban Champion
NES Wall Street Kid
NES Willow
NES Winter Games
NES Wizards and Warriors
NES Yoshi
NES Yoshi's Cookie
NES Zanac
Sega Action Fighter
Sega Alex Kidd in Miracle World
Sega alex kidd in shinobi world
Sega Altered Beast
Sega Batman Returns
Sega columns
Sega enduro racer
Sega fantasy zone
Sega Ghostbusters
Sega Golden Axe Warrior
Sega golvellius: valley of doom
Sega James "Buster" Douglas Knockout Boxing
Sega Kung Fu Kid
Sega Mickey Mouse Castle Of Illusion
Sega miracle warriors
Sega operation wolf
Sega Phantasy Star
Sega psycho fox
Sega rampage
Sega rampart
Sega Revenge of Shinobi
Sega rocky
Sega r-type
Sega Shadow Dancer
Sega shadow of the beast
Sega Shinobi
Sega smash tv
Sega snail maze
Sega sonic chaos
Sega Space Harrier
Sega Speedball
Sega Speedball 2
Sega Spy vs. Spy
Sega Super Monaco GP
Sega teddy boy
Sega TransBot
Sega ultima iv
Sega Wonder Boy in Monster World
Sega Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap
Sega ys
Sega Zillion
Sega Zillion II: The Tri Formation

Nes Balloon Fight
Nes Donkey Kong Jr
Nes Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy
Nes Guerilla War
Nes Wizards and Warriors II: Ironsword

Those are going to be the final nominations unless someone else adds to it in the next ~3 hours, going to start the new thread around 7pm Eastern! (also sorry it took me so long!)