Revenge Of The 80's presents The 50 Greatest NES Games Of All Times (According To Us) Part One

You may be asking why in the hell I decided to write about this now. Well, this is how the whole thing started. My younger brother has a Wii and he brought it over to our house (where Buc & I live). As you all know, you can now download old games from old systems and play them on the Wii. Well those of us that are computer savvy bastards have been playing emulators on our computers for years now so that’s nothing new to us. We’ve also been playing old ass Nintendo games that we owned back in the 80’s and 90’s for years now...eventually it would happen that’d we’d begin having these long heated debates about which ones were the best...Nah, dead all that. It goes even deep than that, son.

The year is 1988, I’m in the lunch room at school sitting at the table with a bunch of my boys. Some of them are beatboxing and banging on the table while the rest of us are nodding our heads and waiting to jump in as one of us freestyles. That is, except for my boy Kevin whose reading a Nintendo Power. He’s just eating and reading until he read something that irked him and jumped up and said “I’m sick of this bullshit, man!” and spit chicken nugget bits all over the place. “What is the problem?” I asked Kevin slowly because I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what could make a dude wild out while reading a Nintendo Power (I mean, did they say Rakim was wack cuz they coulda got a smack for that...I ain’t no joke!)?
Then Kevin spread out the Nintendo Power in the middle of the lunch table on the Top 30 Power Rankings section of Nintendo Power and pointed out the game Kid Icarus. “Why the fuck is that game in the Top 10?” He asked. “Have any of y’all played it or own it?” The 13 of us looked around at each other and said “No”. “Then who’s voting for the shit?” Asked Kevin quite angrily. This argument and many like it would spark off bi monthly as issues of Nintendo Power would drop (and monthly when rap album reviews would come out in The Source or Rap Pages). Even to this day my friends and I argue about which game was iller or which games just straight sucked. It all culminates in this blog about our 50 favorite NES games of all times acoording to myself and my circle of friends. Let’s start it off:

50. Adventures Of Bayou Billy
If it wasn’t for the fact this game was so goddamn hard it would’ve been ranked higher. Shoot, drive, fight, take a blood test, hold your nuts and cough...damn!

49. Gun. Smoke
I loved this game because it was so simple. B made you shoot left, A made you shoot right and then you just dodged bullets with the D pad. No R1, R2, L, R , X or Y buttons. Shoot and move, shoot and move. Brilliant.

48. R.B.I Baseball
There were only 10 teams, but it actually had a license from MLB so it had actually player names...too bad it could only fit like 6 letters on the screen at once. You had to GUESS you were batting with Jose Canseco.

47. Legend Of Kage
One of the illest old school games ever. Running through the forest, jumping from tree to tree, throwing shuriken and having swordfights in the air was the shit! I loved blocking stars with the sword and cutting enemy ninjas in the air so they fell out the sky slowly. Never beat it though, not even close....I was having too much fun jumping and slashing to even TRY to get something accomplished.

46. Godzilla
This was one of the later games were you used Godzilla and Mothra to destroy city after city and beat the shit out of other monsters in the Godzilla world. Slept on hard.

45. R.C. Pro Am
I used to love this game. I kept trying to pick up weapons on the road and hit those zip strips. One of the few racing games I ever liked.

44. Blaster Master
This game was ahead of it’s time and it mixed genres. It went from shooter to puzzle game to RPG. Straight up classic.

43. TMNT 2: The Arcade Game
Admit it. The first one sucked. It looked like crap and all those kids ran out and bought it and played it like it was hot. Damn, Nintendo had us like Deebo, huh?

42. Gradius
One of the best side scrolling shooters ever, but it was harder than getting a damn home loan. We used to go over a friends house that was good at it and watch him beat it all sitting around like he’s performing a damn surgery or something. Classic game, though.

41. Life Force
This shooter from the same company (Konami) was so easy a caveman could beat it! That’s why it’s ahead of Gradius on this list. This game helped boost my self esteem after I died playing Legendary Wings on the first screen repeatedly.


40. Jackal
You’re a jeep with a machine gun and you have to blow shit up and avoid getting blown to shit. I’m down with that! Press Start!

39. Super Dodge Ball
This was one gully ass game. The way you could get a running start, jump charge up and throw a dodge ball that would have a dude fly off the screen and bounce off the wall was ill. People slept on this Tecnos game hard.


38. Rush N’ Attack
You’re a dude infiltrating a Russian weapons compound armed with only a knife against a whole army armed to the teeth with guns and rocket launchers....Bet! This game was hard as fuck, too. I never got past level 3. I couldn’t trade it to save my life, either. It was still dope.


37. Wizards & Warriors
This game was mad hard, too. All of those damn jumps get to be too much for me. Hands get all sweaty and then you die on your last man and blame the controller for not working...classic.


36. Double Dragon
Okay, I know that when we reminisce about things from our childhood, we tend to think that things were better than they actually were. Double Dragon didn’t look shit like Double Dragon in the arcade. It didn’t even have two players! You could only play 2 player in the VS. mode (which got more burn then the regular game in most households). Why didn’t we rise up in revolt against Nintendo as kids...Oh yeah, I forgot... that Deebo mind control shit.


35. Ghosts N’ Goblins
It was a cool game, but I was never good at it. My boy Kai used to be nice at it, though. Seeing a little pink dude throwing spears at the devil always struck me as weird.


34. 1942
This game was ill! An old school shooter where you just kept pressing the fire button and dodging...Of course when the NES Max and NES Advantage controllers came out all these games all got mad easy. Thank God.

33. Rolling Thunder
This was one of the best arcade translations ever made for Nintendo. Tengen was known for doing a good job on their titles. The shoot, duck, jump game was raised to a new level with this one. Codename: Viper bit hard but this was the original.

32. Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode
We loved this game because we had all read the manga and seen the Golgo 13 movie “The Professional” back in the days. The graphics weren’t even that good looking back on it now but we thought it was ill at the time. I always died on the undersea level because I kept going to the wrong place. Nintendo Power was mad late with the walkthrough.



31. Gauntlet
No game booklet needed. The Warrior’s slow. The Elf is fast. The Wizard is gonna get killed mad quick and the Valkyrie is straight. You see something, shoot it. You see food, eat it. You see money on the floor, pick it up, pick it up. Killl everything else and look for the damn exit. I used to get cramps in my hands from playing Gaunlet so much.


30. 1943
It was 1942 but with better graphics, more weapons and more enemies.


29. Ikari Warriors
This joint is in the Gully Game Hall Of Fame. Two dudes with armed only automatic weapons and grenades crash land on an island and slaughter an entire army all by themselves. Who left those tanks there unattended? Let hop in those, use them and shoot them to shit with ‘em. Oh shit, I’m hit! A B B A. Oh shit! I’m back from the dead with 99 grenades! I’m gonna lob some while I’m still flashing and invincible. We played this joint to death for years. Ikari Warriors 2 was asschecks compared to this.

28. Major League Baseball
It was the best baseball game available for the NES during the early years. Nintendo Baseball straight up sucked. While you could use every team, no one had names so you had to guess who you were hitting with again on some ol’ “I think this is Wade Boggs!...Oh no, it’s Dwight Evans.” shit.


27. Faxanadu
This was one of the best RPG’s that Nintendo made during the later years. It was kinda hard but I beat it after a long ass time and I got one of the wackest game endings ever. The dude just walks out of town...that’s it (below).

I played this shit for a month straight for THAT!^ Fuck you, Nintendo! Nah, nah, I’m buggin’...I didn’t mean it. I just be gettin’ mad sometimes, you know. Mind control.

26. Bionic Commando
Another game that isn’t much like the original arcade version is Bionic Commando. It turns into a shooter/RPG and became a huge hit anyways. I sucked at it but my friends used to love it. I’d swing my ass into a hole all the damn time...yeah, this is fun. Whoo Hoo! You play now *Passes controller to the left*

Tomorrow I break down the top 25 NES games of all times according to myself and my tight knit circle of lifelong friends. Don’t you wish you were friends with a blogger now? One.