NES game reviews

Opening night 3am online.  Retail $.  Seems the N.Am business day waits for the Pacific time zone to make things fair or whatever.  
I took a stab at 2:59-3:00am refresh, was available, carted it & paid.  Refreshed again for fun, they were unavailable.  I was like daymn, that's tight.

I'm not as zoned in for the SNES Classic because I think I mentioned earlier, I've already logged so many more hours playing what I want - I was older with more personal buying power.  The nostalgia payoff for the NES was far greater.
I'm still gonna be online to try, but I'm not losing sleep on it.

I hack added 30 more titles I wanted to the 30 Nintendo already included, nice round number... didn't feel like being a completist whore because I'd never play most of them at all ever.  Several greats on majority of all time lists, which I never before played because of childhood.  (I was never interested in logging emulated RPG time on my desktop with my XBOX controller)

30 odd years of Nintendo Golf & I finally accomplished a -13 under 59!... no save cheats bc wtf is the point.  
Crazily enough, shooting a 58 now feels doable... fml.

Kirby's Adventure A-
2016 was my first experience with it & it's great. Reminds me of SMW2 Yoshi's Island with its marvelous design & visuals. Eating up enemies to re-use their powers is a lot of fun & inventive. I guess what keeps it from higher for me is its gameplay & sounds tilt a bit childish. Still, very highly recommended.

Life Force A
Even though I've yet to defeat it, including K30 code, this thing is NES beastmode. Top notch visuals, sounds, playability, & most importantly difficulty-fun balance. SNES shooters introduced slowdown - not here. LF has some spectacular level design & graphics, easily some of the finest of its entire gen. It pretty much looks & feels like Contra in space with a ship.

Metroid A-
Great gaming experience, alas Super Metroid now ages this one more noticeably than most series. I never grew up on this one, not least none of us owned it, & renting it didn't give ample time to explore & get on with things. Still, quite inventive, large scale for its era. What I appreciate most about the Metroid franchise is whenever I'm playing, it feels as if the game itself wants me to succeed. Even with difficulty, Metroid never feels like it's trying to punch me in the face &/or spit out my controller. That's surely the Nintendo dna of it at work.

Monopoly A
What can I say, I love a great board game & I've always loved Monopoly. Monopoly is a game I've played around online since as far as I can remember. I gave this game/rom a shot first online as well & it's great fun. The only drawback really is you can't see on the primary screen everyone's portfolio, they're instead posted in a type of side menu. For its time there are still fast play options, & both easy & harder AI opponents.

Annnd of course I shoot the magic -14 under 58 at halftime when I don't even f'n care...

Ninja Gaiden C+
Points off because I scuk at this series, with its jumping, cheap hits, & difficulty. Points on for unique design & creative gameplay. This game is in a league with Battletoads for too difficult to even bother much with. Shame that.

Pac-Man B+
Legendary classic, still lots of fun to play for short sessions.  NES translation is spot on, sights & sounds as close as can be.  I'm slowly getting better at it, not all that much though.  Good times.

RBI Baseball A+
Hands down in my own top 3 for the NES. Masterpiece of a game, I was lucky enough to be gifted it the same 1987(?) Christmas we got our Action Set. Still extremely re-playable. 1987 is one of the greatest MLB stat seasons in history, this game pays off perfectly from that.
I've played the Arcade rom, & while it has crazy HOF rosters, the creators seemed to screw with ppls skills - both good & bad.
I could discuss RBI in an entirely separate thread for days.

RBI Baseball 3 A-
Personal biases on full parade here. RBI 3 is not only nostalgic, it's essentially got the rosters of every team/player from my childhood baseball lore & card collecting golden age. It was released in the prime of my youth when pro sports was in that fountain of impressionable awe era - when my friends & I both followed and played the sport like crazy.
85, 89, & 90  Blue Jays is euphoric bias for me.

River City Ransom A-
Awesome plain & simply. Always remembered this game from my youth (rental) as a sort of early Grand Theft Auto - beating up ppl for money to use in the game. Fun graphics, tight gameplay, nice payoffs.

Side Pocket B
Added because I like video game billiards & this was the NES' best one. Plays more like a puzzle/strategy game than pure pool, points for shooting balls in order, select pockets, etc, + finite number of free shots remaining as the levels increase. Another fun title for short session gameplay; there's enough platforming genre in my catalogue already that I didn't add more (if I want a Mega Man fix, MM2 is more than enough).

Super Mario Bros. B+
Excellent debut game for the era & pretty much rescuing the video game industry as we know it. Key was sound conducive gameplay and exponential difficulty, never completely throwing up dead ends. I beat it last fall, saving as I went; I wouldn't have played much more without that feature. I suppose some more 1up opportunities would make this more accessible & enjoyable, & yet we're talking about the most basic platformer of all time.

Super Mario Bros. 2 B+
For all its Doki Doki Panic lore, SMB2 really impressed me as a brighter, more accessible sequel.  Even as a kid around 1988, that was an instant impression - that we wanted better, not just more of the same.  SMB2 Japan would've felt more of the same aged gameplay, with only more difficulty to drive ppl mad. As it is, SMB2's graphics are some of my favs for the NES. I love playing as any/all of the 4 main characters, & really dig no pun the more varied gameplay. One of the easier games to defeat, & some challenges are cheap, keeps it from more for me.