Famicom/NES recommendations (please!)

[Hirst]

I never had a NES back in the day, I only knew one kid who had one and he was a right weirdo. Last thing I heard about him was that about ten years ago (as an adult) he got arrested for blasting an air rifle into the street from his bedroom window. I blame a combination of bad parenting and Duck Hunt.

I did later pick up a Famicom of my own, but the problem is that because of this lack of exposure to the system, I don’t have a great deal of knowledge about interesting games on it other than the usual received wisdom – the big heavy-hitters like Mario/Zelda/Metroid/Mega Man/Contra/Castlevania and then the same dozen or so “hidden gems” repeated over every American YouTube channel – Kid Dracula/Shatterhand/Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa and so on. All good suggestions but it’s a system where – all regions included – you’re staring down the barrel of about 1400 titles. There’s got to be more!

I’ve been on and off watching a lengthy video of every Famicom/NES game ever which shows about 15 seconds of footage of each game and picked up the odd interesting-looking prospect but it’s tough going as – to be fair – some games you can’t really show how good they are in that time.

As a result I wondered if my colleagues here knew any good games from their years of experience, especially Famicom-exclusive ones that aren’t mentioned often. I’m open to pretty much anything except mahjong games, because I just can’t wrap my head round it. Famicom Disk System ones are OK too, haven’t got one but that’s easily remedied.

[Cepp]

I love my NES, it's my favourite system along with the PSX. I'll try to avoid the big games for you although you may have heard of some of them if you're looking at hiden gems videos:

Faxanadu: Awesome sidescrolling action RPG
Kickle Cubicle: Very cute and fun puzzle game where you push blocks of ice around stages while dealing with enemies. I feel this gets overlooked a lot and its really bloody good. I've been playing it since I was a kid.
Kabuki Quantum Fighter: An action platformer from HAL software. Quite short, not too hard and really fun. You're a CIA operative who enters the virtual world and fights as a Kabuki? It's strange but it works.
Rollergames: Bit janky this, its from Konami's Ultra line so kind of a B/C tier title. Doesn't stop it from being a lot of fun though.
Power Blade: Another action platformer, well worth paying and it has a sequel too!
Journey to Silius: Worth playing for the soundtrack alone which is one of the best on the system/full stop. Platforming takes a little getting used to but once you adjust you'll have a great time.
Dragon Warrior 1-4: With the caveat that 8-bit RPGs are grindy AF, these are all really fun.
Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu: Fun gameplay and massive sprites.
Shadow of the Ninja: A little overlooked due to Ninja Gaiden (which you should also be playing), this is a really fun action platformer from Natsume.
Boulder Dash: This is the version to play imo.
Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers: Absolutely fantastic platformer from Capcom. My favourite of the Disney platformers. Can be beat in about hour if you just want to do a quick bit of gaming.
Nintendo World Cup: Football involving Kunio Kun characters. It's ridiculous and great.
River City Ransom: If you haven't played it, play it.
Conquest of the Crystal Palace & Crystalis: Have to admit I havent played these yet. I picked them up a while ago but both have a good reputation.
City Connection: Bloody hard but really fun. The kind of arcade title you pick up for 15 minutes and see how far you can get.
M.C Kids/Mcdonaldland: Heavily inspred by Mario 3 shall we say, its a great little game in its own right.
RC Pro AM: I ignored this for the longest time but its a good rvial to Micro Machines.

There's more no doubt, expecially if you include fan translations like Just Breed, Sugoru Quest and Sweet Home but this is just off the top of my head. The Marios, MegaMans, Micro Machines, Zeldas and so on are all worth a punt as well of course.

[phillv85]

The ones I always end up playing are

Gun Dec
Metal Storm (just got a re-release it looks like)
Bucky O’Hare
Golgo 13
Hokuto no Ken

[Hirst]

Perfect - a lot of ones on there I'm not familiar with, that's exactly what I was looking for! I'm also a huge fan of River City Ransom, excellent title. The improved GBA port is brilliant too.

[Leon Retro]

Crisis Force: An excellent shooter from Konami that really pushes the NES hardware.

Contra: This classic run-'n-gun game is still a lot of fun.

Contra Force: Similar to something like Contra III, this is well worth owning.

Gun-Nac: A crazy shoot 'em up that's really fun to play through.

Heavy Barrel: A really good top-down run-'n-gun game.

Parodius: A great version of Konami's classic shooter that's well worth playing to see the redrawn graphics and different features.

Salamander/Life Force: This classic shooter stands up really well.

Shatterhand: Top quality action game with impressive graphics.

Super C(aka Super Contra): A great follow up to the original Contra that's a lot of fun to play through.

[fuse]

Nice, this is the thread that I probably should've started when I went looking for Famicom games a while back. I'm still waiting on my hardware to actually play things on, so this is more to do with what I went hunting for rather than actual recommendations based on play, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for a few more of these that others are listing.

I tend to gravitate towards shooters when trying out new systems, and on that front there's things like 1943, Salamander, Gradius 1/2, Fire Shark, Star Soldier etc.

Sweet Home was one that I was keen to grab given its relevance to the origins of survival horror stuff. I'm not expecting it to be the most friendly for non-Japanese speakers, but I'm willing to bash my head about it for some time.

Gimmick! is the one that I want but have no intention of owning any time soon - it looks amazing, but unfortunately it's not happening unless someone gets the decimal places wrong on an eBay listing.

[CAPCOM]