Listosaurus Rex

I stumbled across this enormous list of The 100 Best NES Games Ever. It is quite comprehensive and excellent, featuring blurbs from several writers about each of the games. Here is their top ten:

1. Super Mario Bros. 3
2. Final Fantasy
3. The Legend of Zelda
4. Mega Man 3
5. Mega Man 2
6. Bubble Bobble
7. Contra
8. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
9. Battletoads
10. Super Mario Bros

Kudos to them for being different from pretty much every video game site on the net and picking something besides the original Mario Bros. as their number one.

The site has a bit of a hardcore gamer spin to it, as opposed to someone like me, who’d classify himself as a “casual emulator” of NES games. The inclusion of the maddeningly hard Battletoads in the top ten is proof alone of that. But I think you have to be a bit hardcore to produce a list as extensive and detailed as theirs.

As someone who can really only list a couple dozen NES games off the top of my head, I think this list is an excellent resource at beginning to delve into the substantial library of old Nintendo gems. I plan to go scan some ROM sites tonight and check some of these games out.

Particularly cool is that they have plenty of little-heralded games up near the top with the big-name classics like Zelda, Mario, and FF. At #11 they have TMNT 2, at #17 they have something called Maniac Mansion which I’ve never heard of, at #28 a Duck Tales platformer which I never knew existed, and at #27 the generically-titled but awesome-looking robot-baseball game Base Wars. I look forward to trying all of these hidden gems out.

Funny, comprehensive, and well-done, this list is worth a look. You just might want to set aside an hour if you want to read everything they’ve written. Here’s the link again.