A Lovely Harmless Monster – Blog

My top 24 NES games list is very weird

Published on

I finished Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt for the NES today. Heck of a game. It'll be in the next batch of Game Badges, and its rating will be 4❤️/5. It's messy and unpolished, but its foundation is a rock-solid platform adventure game.

Well done, Pugsley!

When I posted about finishing it, I remarked that it's "probably a top 10 or 15 NES game for me". But I wondered how true that was, so I looked at my master list and picked out every NES game. Of my 175 game badges, 24 of them (counting Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt) are for NES games.

Once I had all the games, I arranged them in rough order of preference and got a list:

  1. Super Mario Bros. 3
  2. The Guardian Legend
  3. The Legend of Zelda
  4. Megaman 2
  5. Kirby's Adventure
  6. Super Mario Bros. 2
  7. Gargoyle's Quest 2
  8. Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt
  9. Ducktales
  10. Contra
  11. Super Mario Bros.
  12. Hello Kitty World
  13. The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
  14. Donkey Kong Jr.
  15. North & South
  16. Jeopardy
  17. Arkista's Ring
  18. Donkey Kong
  19. Gauntlet 2
  20. Dizzy the Adventurer
  21. Spelunker
  22. Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom
  23. Dragon Warrior
  24. Hook

This is kind of a bummer of a list! The NES was the most formative video game console of my life and I haven't even finished enough of its games for a top 25. A shocking number of them I played for the first time in the 2.5 years since the start of Jeff Gerstmann's NES game ranking saga.

There are several more that I've played, enjoyed, and would almost certainly rank high on the list if I was able to finish them. You see, here's the thing: NES games are hard and I have ADHD. I have no doubt that games like Rygar, Little Samson, Crystalis, Faxanadu and The Battle of Olympus would be all-timers if I managed to see them through to the end.

I'm trying! I've started no fewer than three new games of Faxanadu since watching Jeff play, and it undoubtedly kicks ass, but I keep getting stopping because I get lost and scared. Clearly I need to step up my game; I may have given Hook one heart because I'm a freak, but there's no universe in which it should appear on a top 25 list. I have fun stomping the computer in Jeopardy, but #16?? That seems like a little much. A Dizzy game in the top 20? Nothing against Dizzy, he seems like a stand-up egg, but there are so many more deserving games that should be in that spot. I'm sorry, 1980s Uncle Nintendo. I'll try to do better.

Thoughts? Leave a comment

Comments
  1. Lisa — Mar 29, 2026:

    If this blog's implementation does not spoiler this, then spoiler warning for Faxanadu. :racoon: has watched a walkthrough but I don't know if all their readers have!< 20 is a lot of games! I didn't have top 20 nes games as a kid, I didn't have 20 cartridges. My top x NES list where x is >= to the games I had access to were first the games my family owned, (minus X-Men NES), then games I had heard of watching Captain N. Sesame Street makes my top 10 NES games for music and victory dances and the rubber ducky PIPES knockoff mode. As a little kid I banged against the starting areas of long games a lot, and only watching my cool Uncle RPG play some of them clued me that games could have depth beyond the Sesame Street one. I have completed some of them now. Ultima 3 is much smaller than I remember. I had spent so much time grinding for so little benefit. Oh I bought more food than I would ever need whooptidoo. There's better uses for gold: You have to buy your stats! Glitch character is a neat unique thing for the NES game though. Faxanadu is less painful if you use a password generator to start at high level (with no plot items that would be cheating) because you also start with more money. Like start max level and when you run out of money get a new mantra password and restart from there. I actually only got as far as the village of Trunk(?) >where the music got terribly off key and there's obscuring stuff in the foreground and monsters were encroaching into houses, or people in houses had mutated. (Environmental storytelling!)< I think you should count games you have not beaten, if you have gotten far enough into them to have some mastery. I've never beaten Marble Madness, but I was very skilled at the first 3 levels.

  2. mattbee — Mar 30, 2026:

    Sorry the blog implementation didn't play nice with your post. It's hard to predict what this implementation of markdown can and can't do.

    My main issue with Faxanadu is that I'll psyche myself out: I'll set off exploring and be doing quite well, but the farther I go without finding another town, the more intimidated I get. I really don't want to die and lose all my progress, so I "take a break" and don't end up coming back to it. If there was a "warp myself back to town" item I think I'd be fine. I think it's a game that would actually benefit greatly from drawing a map; that way even if I die, I have some tangible measure of progress. The world will seem a little less overwhelming and scary every time I set back out. I'll try that the next time I take a swing at it.

    I do count games with no proper ending if I feel like I've mastered them sufficiently, like the Donkey Kong games and Gauntlet II. I believe Marble Madness is another arcade-style game that just loops a few levels over and over while getting more difficult. I could never wrap my head around the controls for that one though.