My Top 10 NES Memories

July 15th 2013 marked the 30th anniversary of the Famicom, better known here in the UK as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Here is my tribute to the console that kicked off my gaming habits.

No. 1 – Getting Hooked

The NES was not my first console. I remember when as young as 5 or 6 when my dad came home one day with an Atari 2600, which even my mum and dad would have to admit to enjoying. I remember having to get my mum to do the crocodile levels in Pitfall, and she was a beast at River Raid. In 1991 however, the floodgates opened.

We’d moved house just over a year previously, and my first friend on our street owned a magical grey box that played Teenage Mutant Nin-sorry Hero Turtles, my favourite (and probably everyone else’s) show of the time. I was hooked on that and Punch Out! so I knew I had to get one for myself. That very Christmas it happened; the family’s very own Nintendo Entertainment System, complete with Super Mario Bros, and 3, and TMHT. I’ve never looked back since. Except for Turtles – that game is awful. The below video will explain.

No. 2 – Playing till your fingers bled

Ok, so it never went that far. But those arrows embedded into the NES D-Pad really hurt after a while, particularly when holding ‘right’ constantly in Super Mario Bros. Quite often I would be left with an ‘arrow’ imprint on my thumb – ouch!

No. 3 – It came with TWO pads!

Almost unheard of today when buying a new console (except a bundle of course) was the fact that the NES came with two controllers (well, mine appeared to anyway). Even better, I don’t remember ever having to replace either of them, or even swap them over because player 2 was less worn. These babies were built to last, and proved to be simple but effective.

No. 4 – Blowing the cartridges to get them to work

No surprises here – I’m sure we’ve all had to do it at some point – and it did appear to work. Dust would easily gather in the 13cm x 12cm cartridges, even more so if left in the console for long periods of time and unused. The last thing anyone needed was these to fail – not only was the game present on the cart, but also the beloved save data.

No.5 – Playing Zelda II and hating it

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is a bit of an oddity. It’s the only Legend of Zelda game in the series not to have ‘Legend of’ in the title, but it’s more of an oddity due to the gameplay it delivered.

The combination of top-down map travelling and side scrolling within areas was an odd mixture, hindering not only any sense of fun, but also held back by the console limitations at the time. It just didn’t work.

Trying to jump and attack at the same time was horrendous. It looked bland, had very one-dimensional dungeons (just caves really), and Link looked like the one from the cartoon show. I think that was nail in the coffin for me.

Even Shigeru Miyamoto, the producer of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, admits this is probably his worst work.

“I wouldn”t say that I”ve ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The casino online Adventure of Link”

In the same interview, Miyamoto elaborated that if not for constraints on the hardware of the time, Zelda II would have been more of the intended vision, and less of the blueprint that it ended up being. Maybe this one is worth a remake, Shigsy?

No.6 – Completing Super Mario 3 for the first time

I wasn’t a great gamer when I was younger; certainly a case of practice and persistence paying off. Something else the NES provided for the home were games that could actually be finished without taking over your life or eating all your money like the arcades did. So naturally I was chuffed to bits when I finished my first – and arguably my favourite – Mario game.

I was 10 years old. I had gone through eight worlds of escalating challenge and danger, and defeated the final boss at the first attempt. The stages of world eight were ten times tougher than Bowser himself, but no way was it anticlimactic. It was an achievement.

No. 7 – Blades of Steel

Blades of Steel. What a game. It’s hard to explain how much enjoyment I got out of this Ice Hockey game, so much so I’d class it as phenomena. I’ve seen a mention or two on Twitter for Blades of Steel as their NES memories also, so I know I’m not the only one who enjoyed it.

Its secret? The fights – getting rough with the opposition leads to the ref actually sanctioning a fight! The game view then changes into a scene from Street Fighter: both players have energy meters, and both are left to go at it until their bar is depleted. And it’s fantastic stuff. A complete gem and the ice hockey isn’t bad either.

No. 8 – Meme generator

Oh the memes. In today’s world we may be inundated with countless, often hilarious, self-made videogame memes, but the NES was a meme generator of its own. Mostly down to mistranslation from Japanese to English, but no less amusing. Here’s a selection below.

No. 9 – Luigi’s Bicycle legs

Super Mario Bros 2 was completely different to the original, with the focus on picking up items and enemies whilst stood on them, instead of the usual squashing from above. Also different was picking your characters, the most radical being Luigi, who could jump super high, but as he does so his legs move as if running in the air. Known as the ‘Flutter Jump’, which Yoshi has taken further by adding a brief moment of additional flotation, it showed that Luigi was no longer just a clone of Mario.

This summer”s New Super Luigi U brings back Luigi’s flutter jump, with the levels themselves being modelled around it.

No. 10 – R.I.P. NES

Hardly a positive memory, but still something I’ll never forget. After 4 great years, the NES had been hammered. Loads of games had come and gone, hours and hours of glorious gaming enjoyed, all brought to a halt when my NES had finally had enough. Being a teenager at the time, in what was now a booming video game market, I had already moved onto the next generation with the SNES. But the NES always had that ‘one more go’ factor for me, so it was to my dismay when it would no longer turn on.

The NES was a great console. Or ‘is’ I should say, with many still sampling its pleasures to this day. Its importance can never be understated, same as its impact on the videogame world was unprecedented. Some of my most favourite games came from this platform, so rightly so it is celebrated. Happy Anniversary, NES!