The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Based on a recommendation I received, we’ll change things up by actually not discussing a game or series like in earlier posts…
Let’s discuss the 8-bit era of gaming. What is your favorite game of this generation? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Animal Crossing, Age of Empires, Super Mario, Deus Ex, Stardew Valley, The Sims, Half-Life, Earthbound / Mother, Mass Effect, Metroid, Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
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I kind of feel a lot of 8 bit era games haven’t aged the best. But there are a few that I love. Of course smb3 is really outstanding. That game is timeless and really showed how well Nintendo can make games. While I may personally prefer smw, smb3 was in my eyes the first to perfect the side scrolling platformer.
Mother is another game from the era I enjoy a lot. It hasnt aged as well as smb3, but it’s still a fun game to look back on. I feel the game was a bit ahead of it’s time, and with a few gameplay changes I think it would still be worth playing for any jrpg fan today
I’ve been watching Jeff Gerstmann work through and rank the NES library over the past year, and I agree with your sentiment. It seems like there are only like 10-20 NES games that actually hold up, and the rest of the library is either “good for the era” or absolute garbage.
I’d argue that is true of any generation, a few games are must plays and endure as such, then there are many that are just okay even at the time and then a bunch of crap it’s hardly worth playing.
The “floor” for how bad a bad game can be has gone up as the generations have gone on. There’s always a few stinkers, but most PS2 games are objectively better than like half of the NES library.
Better by which objective metric? Amount of content? Total size of game code and data? Got to disagree with you otherwise.
Like, half of the NES library is games riddled with bugs, or they are licensed games where the devs barely knew what they were doing so they just cranked out a piece of software that barely qualifies as a game. I’m not talking about the games that we remember. If you remember an NES game, even if you remember it as bad, I am 99% certain it isn’t one of the dogshit games I’m thinking of. I’m not talking about like, Excitebike or Bubble Bobble or whatever. Those are classics, even if they’ve aged poorly. I’m talkin games like, Fester’s Quest, or Mickey Mousecepade, or Jordan vs. Bird: One-on-One, or Time Lord. Games where just playing them feels bad.
But there are games that have the same problems today, they just look better because they have higher resolution assets but as still riddled with bugs and control issues.
I think the difference is that in the 8bit generation yhe majority of the game were bad relative to each other. The peak of the bell curve for 8bit was between mediocre to kinda bad games.
While there are more games in later generations, it feels like the console manufacturers took more control and regulated what was published. Bad games happen now because of shitty business decisions and bad story writing. You dont see garbage being published just because you can.
The only flaw of SMB3 to me would be that this game needed save games reeaal bad.
Lol that’s fair! Been a while since I played it without save states
Also, I made the picture for this post myself from the different Wikipedia entries using GIMP. It was quite a headache 😅.
What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.
To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.
I personally have almost zero experience with this generation, though I realize it’s historic value. So many great game franchise originated here: Super Mario, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Zelda, Metal Gear, Mega Man, Mother…
I’ll give a shout-out to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, which I got to know by watching a YouTube video on the world record history for this game. I then played some of it myself on my Switch and was actually quite impressed with the almost puzzle like gameplay!
I also played Super Mario Bros. While I respect it for being the first, I thought it was quite ridiculous at times (the way to progress in the final world was so stupid).
Still have to sink my teeth in the others!
My favorite 8 bit game was The Little Samson. So few people know about it but it was an incredible game for that time.
It came out in 1992, at the end of the NES lifecycle. The SNES was already out and many people were only interested in games on that platform. This is why end of life games like Little Samson did not sell as well as they should have, and consequently, only had one small production run. That, in turn, is why these games are among the most expensive and sought after by collectors. There are just way less of them out there! I would love to have a Little Samson cartridge, but I don’t have $3000 to spend on a Nintendo game lol
I still play the original Castlevania games at least once a year.
I think they’re masterpieces, but there are so many incredible classics. I even recently found a site online where you can play the Commodore 64 Nightmare on Elm St.
Glorious.
Og castlevania is awesome, I gave it a try in an emulator after playing Bloodstained:Curse of the Moon (made by the original developer, and very reminiscent of castlevania)
Back then i only had a few games but among all my friends we had a pretty good collection. As an adult playing on a retro console I’ve started to go through a lot of the games i never tried or didn’t own and only played a few times.
While I’d say the total NES library is a majority of garbage games (publishers just figuring out how to make games, not how to make good games) I think the big thing i noticed is that the good 8bit games look and feel drastically different than the garbage ones. When you learn the history of the games then it makes sense.
The quality of the sprites, the extensive design of menus, transitions and other interactions, the storyline and dialogue. Even with only 8bits and crappy resolution the output for many of the good games actually looked and played well back then and even now. But I’d say about 90% of the NES catalog was garbage back then and still is now.
Generally I’m a fan
The game Overlord on the NES had the best intro music of the generation, IMO. It was a port of Supremacy from Amiga and other PCs. The Commodore 64 version had really great intro music too! (I love SID music and warez chip tunes) The Commodore intro melody was later used in a Machinae Supremacy song.
I really enjoyed the game StarTropics too. It had real world tie in stuff with physical media (anti-piracy, but it was neat), and I enjoyed the music and story. The second StarTropics had graphics that blew my mind, everything just looked so smooth.
The NES was epic for its time, but nowadays those controllers make my hands cramp after minutes. Thank God for the modern big curvy controllers.
Some classics of that time might be of interest to the contemporary gamer, although I think you need to have some kind of historical curiosity for it to be worthwhile. The tools of the times were rudimentary to an extent that hurt what the devs could do even more than the capacity of the consoles imho. I mean, they were flipping bits in assemblers.
The audio though. 8-bit music is fucking stellar. The energy contained, the catchiness, it’s amazing.
As for recommendations: The Guardian Legend is my pick. Cool scifi action-adventure/ shmup hybrid.
Elementary school ystael spent a lot of time on Pinball Construction Set on the C64. I think I always turned the physics up to max speed minimum friction, so scoring on my tables was more about flailing and blind luck.
My favorite C64 game, though, was one I didn’t get to play often because I had to borrow it from a friend. (Didn’t know about cracking yet.) That was Ultimate Wizard. The platform physics were kind of terrible compared to Mario, but I loved the way each level was a tiny puzzle-maze, with different treasures moving different blocks when you grabbed them, and one magic spell - just one on each level, out of ten or so - to help you deal with the enemies. And my favorite thing in every game: a level editor! No, my levels weren’t good, they were awful. But I loved laying out the little bricks and skulls and fires anyway.
It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!
The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.
H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.
It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.
