Jump to:
Games // System Specs

Nintendo Entertainment System

"The purpose of poetry is to express the ineffable"

- Robert Frost

Gaming has always been somewhat quirky, but it is undeniable that what games do "click" with the public, do so in a way that remains virtually undefinable, and usually is not replicatable by subsequent reiterations of the same game. That is not to say that developers did not try to replicate their success, and they often times succeeded in even multiplying their profits in sequels and updated versions of the successful title. However, comparing Video Games to art is tenuous at best, and over the years the creativity and innovation would be squashed by the felt needs of business and marketing to have the biggest seller of the season.

This trend was not limited to software, but also included hardware, and it was an exclusive trend. By 1988 several of my 10-something year-old friends were buzzing about the Nintendo Entertainment System and had been given one by their parents. My lower middle-class family had owned several different Atari age consoles by then, and I had played and become bored with relatively good games like Adventure, Combat, Enduro, and Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600.

At the time I had no idea that these consoles my family had acquired were the droppings of any "great crash," and to this day I have never known anybody who ever stated anything that would lead me to believe there actually was a massive fall out of the Video Game Industry in the United States. In fact, it may have been between 1983 and 1985 that I had ever encountered an Atari 2600, and I had never heard of an Atari 5200 or a Colecovision until the advent of the Internet.

Even though all of my friends owned one, I had not felt an urge to pick up a Nintendo Entertainment System myself, and one way or another the idea of asking for one for Christmas or a Birthday never occurred to me. However, one evening early in 1988 my foster brother casually mentioned to my parents that he was leaving for "the Arcade."

I had never heard the word before, but for some reason my interest was piqued and I jumped up to ask him what he was talking about. Upon a brief description, my apparent excitement had convinced him to get permission to take me with him. The trip, to say the least, was phenomenal. I know that I played almost every game in the Diversions Game Room that night, but I only remember one, Sega's After Burner. The game was so fast and smooth, the joystick pulled and quaked when I crashed, and smoke trails from missiles were flying everywhere. Almost immediately I was throttling up the afterburner to make it all happen at true full speed, and I was hooked for the rest of the evening. It was the first time I had ever played a video game and actually been hooked by it. Great games like Super Mario Bros, Contra, Lifeforce and the like on the NES had held my interest, but none had completely innundated my senses the way After Burner did.

Later on, in 1989 I did end up purchasing a Nintendo Entertainment System, along with Zelda II, Bases Loaded, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ninja Gaiden. Yet, the time I spent with the console was relatively short lived, as it simply didn't have games of the speed and graphical prowess of arcade titles I enjoyed playing. I continued to play the major releases, like Dragon Warrior, TMNT 2: The Arcade Game, Wizards and Warriors, and Bionic Commando at friends houses. I always got my fill of whatever title my friends were playing after a few visits, or a weekend at best, and therefore never felt the compulsion to spend my hard earned, child laboring, dollars on the title I had already either completed or grown bored of. Unlike my friends, the NES was not my first console of choice, as I had previously saved up and purchased another 8-bit console that was offering something demonstrably different than most of what the NES had to offer.

Sega Master System

After that brief evening in the game room I knew I had to get a game console, and had acquired the lawn mowing job to make it happen as soon as possible. By the summer of 1988 I had saved up enough money to purchase my first game console, and I was determined to get the best one out there. By then I had seen several television commercials for a console none of my friends had, the Sega Master System, which had very cool looking arcade conversions of After Burner, Thunderblade, and Space Harrier. Some of which I had played in arcades, others I had not, but I was nonetheless impressed that another console existed that could actually handle such conversions. I vacillated between the NES and the SMS for weeks until I had earned the final dollars needed to actually make the decision. When the day arrived I actually told one of my friends that the console of choice would be the same NES all of my friends already had, for the reasons that Robocop had been announced, and it seemed like it had more games overall.

It wasn't the first or the last time that I said I would do one thing, and ended up doing another, but it would be one of the few times I would never regret changing my mind on the spot. As I was brought in to the general electronics store called The Federated Group of San Antonio, I discovered I could actually compare both the NES and the Sega Master System right next to one another. This was something that was not available at the time anywhere else, as most retail stores in the city didn't even carry the Sega Master System, even though it had been less than two years since its initial launch. This would be the first time I had ever played Space Harrier and Quartet, two games which remain favorites of mine to this day. Ironically, it was the Sega Scope 3D glasses which tipped me over the edge towards the Master System, but I never owned the peripheral during the system's lifecycle, even though I was tempted many times by Space Harrier 3D and its mighty $70 price tag.

I did walk out of that store with a Sega Master System, along with Hang On/Safari Hunt and the requisite Zillion "Light Phaser", Quartet, Wonder Boy, and After Burner, the game that had hooked me into buying a console in the first place. I had no idea that doing such a thing would be the object of such scorn over the years, nor would I care until some years later. At the time I had the best system on the planet and my favorite game, all as my first major purchase.

From then on I was hooked on arcade/action games, and was basically on a quest to find the next, most advanced videogame. I was not disappointed to pick up titles such as Zillion, and find its sequel Zillion 2: Triformation to be an entirely different gameplay style. In fact, on the Master System, one could expect each release to be something completely different from any other game, and still be at least a good game on its own. That is, of course, not to say that there were not bad games on the SMS. In fact, being an 8-bit system, the Master System actually didn't handle any of its arcade conversions anywhere near faithfully, and I always found that somewhat irksome. This caused me to purchase a Sega Genesis in 1989, mere months after its release, for the simple pleasure of playing games like Golden Axe and Ghouls N Ghosts, which actually featured the exact gameplay of the arcade originals.

TurboGrafx-16

At the same time as the Genesis' release, NEC released its own 16-bit console, the TurboGrafx-16, which featured many superior versions of Master System games that the Genesis did not have available to it. As 1990 rolled along I found the time and the income to save up for a TurboGrafx-16, and eventually sold both my NES and my SMS to purchase one. I regret ever selling any console I've owned from this era, and have since gone back and collected them and the games I originally owned, and played at friends houses. Nevertheless, had I not been able to sell my SMS and NES, I likely would have remained just as ignorant of the great games on the TG16 as most people were and are today. Similarly, a year-and-a-half later I sold my TG16 in order to purchase the Sega CD, which is also very underappreciated, and a good add-on for the Genesis.

That is not to say that the Turbo didn't have its day in the shade. Keith Courage was nothing but a disappointment, and I never did pick up the game I actually bought the system for, R-Type. The Legendary Axe and Ninja Spirit are among my favorite games, and if I had been a little bit more open to RPGs and space ship Shooters, I would definitely have been in gaming heaven. Bomberman offered unique multiplayer simultaneous gameplay that wouldn't be matched before Doom LAN parties in the mid 90s, and games like Bonk's Adventure, Legendary Axe II, Bloody Wolf, and others definitely made the system worth the purchase.

Yet, as time went on, heresay and the game magazines cried out in unison against the TurboGrafx, right down to accusing it of not actually being a 16-bit console. It is true that many of the TG16's games feature gameplay little improved over 8-bit titles in the same genres, this is actually indicative of the fact that the system was released in 1987 in Japan, and was a direct competition to the Famicom (Japanese NES), and not the later released Megadrive, which would become the Sega Genesis in the US. This is just about when hype and the gaming media started functioning in full force, and the demise of any console not endorsed by the public at large, along with the media incidentally, would soon follow. Regardless of what great or good games were actually available for the Sega Master System and the TurboGrafx-16, and their technical superiority in hardware, it was the NES that achieved over ninety percent domination of the US game market, and most of the 3rd party exclusive titles. Whether or not this eventuality was caused by Nintendo's monopolistic licensing contracts, preventing the same game made for the NES to be made for another platform, or the blind brand name following that would eventually lead the Playstation 2 to its success is something worthy of further study.

Conclusion

People were not trying out different consoles before their initial purchase, as I did. San Antonio rental stores never carried Master System or TurboGrafx games, and that meant the only way to try them was to buy them or borrow them. Since I was the only kid in my school to have either, I know for a fact that nobody else bothered to play anything but the Nintendo brand console. This remained true in San Antonio, even during the Genesis' biggest years I only knew of two or three people who owned one. Even the Sega Genesis was not supported by the rental Industry until years after its launch, while the SNES was available for rent a month before its initial launch. This, when combined with hype and 'letters' in game magazines supporting the popular console, made for a market which was exclusive, and a monopoly for Nintendo.

For whatever reason the Video Game Industry remains one of the few in which consumers will not shop for their products, but rather only buy what everybody else is getting after little or no research. Despite this, all three of these game systems have available for them some of the best video games the Industry has ever produced. Moreover, the early 90s brought with them the increasing viability of importing titles from other regions. This is especially worthy of note for the Sega Master System, as its support in Europe was much greater, and many superior ports of NES games exist which will play on a stock US Master System. The TurboGrafx-16 could also be made to play imports with the purchase of a rather expensive game card adapter to play Japanese cards, and Turbo CD games were never region locked in the first place. With that said, the importing Industry would not become a serious matter soon enough to be practical for the average consumer, and thus the system with the most games wins. Actually, the system with the most games wins in sales every generation, regardless of whether most of its games were even worth looking into.

Annual games

These lists are representative of what came out on each console on a yearly basis that people considered worth mentioning for unique gameplay, or highly polished gameplay. Both lists were checked by whether two or more reviews on sites like gamefaqs.com mentioned unique or particularly highly polished gameplay. As such, these lists are not definitive. They are comparable to each other only because they were made in the same way, from reviews on the same site, and from exposure to Usenet gamers.

Looking at the lists as a race to which console got the most "good", "fun", or "best" titles is not the way they are intended to be looked at, and is a flawed way of thinking. These are not lists of games that you will think are great, these are not lists of games that everybody does or should think are great, these lists do not have every game worth noting on them, and these lists have games many may feel are not worth noting on them. To the later two of which I say E-mail me and let me know what you think about the game in question, and why I should add it/remove it.

// Year 1 // Year 2 // Year 3 // Year 4 //Year 5 // Year 6 // Year 7 // Year 8 // Year 9 // Year 10 //