Category: NES

  • Contra (NES)

    Contra (NES)

    (Review archived from July 29, 2015) After finishing Sonic, I started up Contra on a whim, as I hadn’t played it for a while. I had forgotten how short this game is (even by the standards of its time)! Any time spent with Contra is time well spent though. One of the things I love…

  • Mega Man (NES)

    Mega Man (NES)

    (Review archived from January 27, 2015) Mega Man was the first game that I ever heard about via word of mouth. Bear in mind that this was before the internet, before orchestrated video game advertising campaigns, and largely before journalistic media coverage of console gaming was officially a ‘thing’ (this would have been somewhere around…

  • Rygar (NES)

    Rygar (NES)

    (Review archived from January 22, 2015) Many of the hidden gems on the NES have gone on to gain notoriety in such a way as to call their ‘hidden’ status into question. Some of these games, like River City Ransom for instance, have transitioned from being hidden gems to well-known, bona-fide classics. For the most…

  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES)

    Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES)

    (Review archived from December 5, 2014) It’s been quite a number of years since I played through this game, but it’s one that I’ve always been fond of.  The first point people tend to make about this game is how different it is from the first game (and indeed the entirety of the rest of…

  • The Legend of Zelda (NES)

    The Legend of Zelda (NES)

    (Review archived from November 18, 2014) For me this was the game that started all.  I received a shiny new NES console along with this game on a fateful Christmas morning in 1987 in the form of a gift from my Mom.  I had never really been bitten by the arcade craze partly due to…

  • Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (NES)

    Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (NES)

    (Review archived from November 2, 2014) Here we come to the absolute pinnacle of the Castlevania trilogy on the NES.  This game is famous for pushing the NES to the absolute limits of its hardware, and it was long considered a benchmark for NES emulator accuracy due to its demanding nature.  This truly is an…

  • Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES)

    Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES)

    (Review archived from November 2, 2014) This is without a doubt the most unusual entry in the original NES trilogy, and in some ways this was the first Castlevania in the genre that would eventually take its namesake, the ‘metroidvania’ genre (Some would say that Symphony of the NIght is the first definitive entry, but all the…

  • Castlevania (NES)

    Castlevania (NES)

    (Review archived from October 26, 2014) Ah … here we have a true classic.  After playing Symphony of the Night, I had the urge to take it back to the source where it all began.  Famous for its punishing difficulty, this is the one that started a legacy in gaming.  I’ve beaten it on a…