Board 8 > Jeff Gerstmann has taken it upon himself to rank every NES game

(+) Yeah! (+)

Intro is correct, he needs to start sprinkling in more of the sports and strategy games, the patrons have frontloaded too much of the good stuff

there's talk about next week's episode being an all football episode for the Super Bowl

I guess we'll see

bomberman seems kinda low tbh. didnt seem good sure but close to the robocop zone? and paperboy over trog also questionable

I am not done the episode yet, but yeah the order of games played should have been thought out a bit more thoroughly before this started lol

Letting people choose will just leave you with them wanting to see the great and terrible stuff first.

Should have just done release order or alphabetical order instead.

I dunno much about Robocop but Bomberman does indeed deserve to be fairly low. It's a dull, monotonous 50-level game whose one level design is kinda too big for your initial state but can't really challenge you later on. It got ranked around where Yo Noid, Yoshi, and Renegade are and I'd definitely rather play those over NES Bomberman but none are very impressive examples of their genres. Bomberman being far enough below Kid Klown that it'd basically be in another tier checks out for me.

(Street Fighter 2010 being below all those games is the real bad decision.)

The original Bomberman is pretty whatever, imo, it's simple and not that interesting. The Bomberman games that people actually remember as being good are the ones with multiplayer, and this one doesn't have multiplayer.

Once you get the powerup that makes you immune to bombs, the rest of the game is just going through the motions as you instantly detonate bombs every possible frame

if the game cut the first four or five levels and just started you with those levels powerups it would be a lot better

26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hy-BQ9nRJk

00:00:00 - Intro
00:05:25 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
00:37:25 - The Adventures of Dino Riki
01:03:30 - Flight of the Intruder
01:21:14 - Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers
02:15:08 - Sky Kid
02:32:40 - Swamp Thing

tmnt and rescue rangers AND another dino game what a week

Swamp Thing seemed no good!

Glad to finally see TMNT

I didn't get around to beating it until about 7 years ago

as a kid I made it to Shredder like twice, but died both times

bring out Leo and Don for dealing damage

Raph and Mike only use when I need to rush through an area of enemies just to take damage and heal them later

couple rooms where you can spawn pizza refills as you go in and out, just grinding everyone back to health

50% of the time screw up on this screen
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/ae4911cd.jpg

i never actually played the first tmnt game. or maybe i did and it was so forever ago i forgot. i know i watched my cousin play it and he made it to that fucking water level as you do

wasnt expecting dino riki to be a shmup. was expecting it to not be good. dinowarz destruction of spondylous still the best dino game

love me some chip n dale. too bad he couldnt get past that last section

haha oh wow swampthing. of all the games released in 1992 that is apparently one of them. those are some game design decisions made right there. and why a sproing noise for his jumps.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/7aad16d7.jpg

Imagineering just kept reusing the same sound effects in every game they made. Though that's a different jump sound than they usually used, it's still a sound effect I recognize from Bart Vs. The World.

So much for the all NFL for the Super Bowl week.
How do you do 2 big hitters in one week instead, I don't know.
I just know the end of this series is going to be a grind lol

I remember when Gerstmann once told us all that Anime Is For Jerks that changed my life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cZrjELizNo

00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:42 - The Legend of Kage
00:25:50 - Golf
01:00:27 - Shatterhand
01:27:45 - KickMaster
02:42:10 - Gyruss

Any day where you play Shatterhand and Kick Master back to back is gonna be a good day

We're still front-loading too many good games though. Shine I need you to nominate a Koei simulation game or something. We need Jeff to play L'Empereur

shattered and kickmaster those are some games ive never heard of and i feel i missed out on.

gyruss i know ive heard that tune and seen it but i dont remember the how or where or when.

and how many sports games are on the nes anyway. really hope we dont end up with several episodes of just sporting it up but uh spending over an hour on kickmaster isnt really helping here

Theres a chance we get a remake of Shatterhand somewhere down the line herea group of the original development team at Natsume Atari (not to be confused with Natsume Inc, the former US branch which split from the company in 1995 to become its own publisher)(also not to be confused with Atari, whom they are entirely unrelated to) came together to form TENGO PROJECT and have remade a bunch of their old titles with more detailed pixel art, improved gameplay, new levels/characters, etc. So far they did several of their SNES games (Wild Guns, The Ninja Warriors Again, Pocky & Rocky) but now theyve moved on to NES and are about to release a remake of Shadow of the Ninja. Shatterhand could very well be next after that.

Shatterhand looked cool so I just played Shatterhand and it is cool

But the last level is very long and hard in a frustrating way, and this game doesnt have a save or password system so tragically I will not be finishing Shatterhand

One thing Jeff didnt find that might helpif you collect the same letter sequence (btw it is a and b, not l and b) while you still have the robot from the first set active, you will transform into a robot yourself, during which time you cannot be hurt (getting hit reduces your invincibility time though)

28
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4yYUoL22oM

00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:14 - Dr. Mario
00:35:35 - Double Dragon
01:08:05 - Space Shuttle Project
01:37:05 - M.C. Kids
02:36:26 - Where's Waldo?

havent watched yet but yay mc kids! big fan of that and hey it gets an hour here so i think itll be somewhat high on the List

Dr. Mario was the game my mom was best at

In the middle of watching still, but the absolute fucking DISRESPECT for Dr. Mario is sickening. That's a great game! The few times a year I turn on the NES Mini, I'll inevitably find myself playing Dr. Mario for an hour.

Yeah Dr. Mario is a premiere puzzle game, but I get the feeling it might be difficult if you're color blind? At least that would be my excuse if I was playing the way he was.

Dr Mario does not have enough going on to be interesting or fun. Its not quite Yoshi levels of boring, it at least has a couple of advanced techniques you can go for but theres not much to it. I think most people who are big fans of the genre rank this one pretty low.

IMO Dr. Mario is really only interesting if you speedrun it. If you speedrun it (or play it vs) it's hellllllla interesting. The problem with it as a casual puzzle game, imo, is that it naturally gets easier as the level goes on, which is sort of weird. After you've cleared like 25% of the viruses, the rest is just cleanup - everyone gets to that point at the end where there's just one virus left and a bunch of garbage and it's just cleanup but you're not in danger of losing. Puzzle games feel like they should get more difficult as time goes on so this feels like a weird aspect to Dr. Mario where so much of it is cleanup.

I LOVE Dr. Mario though because I speedrun it, and that completely changes everything because now really efficient and clever usage of your pills MATTERS, and the time's still ticking no matter how many viruses you clear so the lack of danger doesn't matter.

Dr. Mario is purely a competitive game. The single player is only about honing your skills toward multiplayer. The people who don't love it, just aren't mentally inclined toward puzzle games, and there's nothing wrong with that. I know plenty of people who can't play fighting games, puzzle games, or rhythm games.

watched!

dont think i ever played the first double dragon. cant remember if it was 2 or 3 but it was one of those. and that fighting game >>

space shuttle project is uh fascinating? i like the weird intensity of it but it didnt look especially good.
"remember when the space ship blew up?"

mc kids ranked way too low tbh

aw yeah wheres waldo thats the stuff. congrats to ghostbusters for no longer being a bottom 10 game

AVGN tackles the current #8 game on 8bitnintendo.science

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrlJKhutYvI

Jeff is right about the level design sensibilities of Western game developers during this period but I think M.C.Kids is one of the least offensive versions of it. The levels are big, but not horribly mazelike as often happens in Euro platformers.

I thought M.C. Kids looked about right. The sheer ambition is enough to compensate for some of the jank and put it a bit above most of the mediocre/totally unambitious/janky-in-their-own-right Japanese sidescrollers (Strider, Clash at Demonhead, Totally Rad, Kid Klown, Wacky Races, Little Mermaid) but once actual quality stuff starts popping up, it's out of the running pretty quickly. I can see a reasonable argument for it over Tiny Toon Adventures and can see why some wouldn't like Little Nemo in particular (not sure M.C. Kids is the game you'd want to champion in response though), but M.C. Kids shouldn't be on par with Shadow of the Ninja, Journey to Silius, or Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu.

I'll give it this: I do think it's better than Rygar.
Also Monster Party, which runs mostly off "what the hell is this thing?" and basically belongs in the mediocrity pile.

Dr Mario

Sometimes he confuses me lol

First he said it was released late in the NES cycle in 1990. I don't know why he keeps saying 1990 is late as most NES games were released in the 90s lol. There are two puzzle games that were pushed at the end of the NES but Dr. Mario isn't one like he claims.

Then he said "If they made a sequel". It did get a sequel. A couple actually! And they did have other modes. He should know that lol

You have to look at it through the eyes of a professional reviewer by 1990 the NES was old news because by 1989 people like him had already left behind the NES and moved on to the Genesis

It's the same with him calling Late 1994 old for the SNES because Saturn and PS1 were out in Japan and he had moved on to those by then. He always refers to DKC1 as a Late SNES game.

The Famicom came out in 1983, its hard to say that a game in 1990 isnt late in the systems life. Theres just an unusually high amount of games for it in the late period. (Though looking at the PS4 now, maybe not all that unusual anymore.)

Yeah 1990 is late, SNES released that year, Genesis already out. It's about when better hardware was out.

Jeff is live right now with his Game Scent

how will games smell!!?

29
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrAd8ONtwco

00:00:00 - Intro
00:11:47 - Ninja Gaiden
00:57:15 - The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
01:23: 23 - Wario's Woods
01:45:55 - Jurassic Park
02:08:49 - Casino Kid
02:35:40 - Treasure Master

With whom did father have a duel and lose?.. For what reason did he fight and die?E Even I don't know for sure.

The day after he disappeared, in father's room I found a letter addressed to me. It said "Ryu, you had a father, but your father's dead"

its fine to not like Warios Woods, but like half of his criticisms of it were fucking nonsense

casino kid and treasure master both had some good ideas there but yeah not lookin good

that bugs bunny game has the feel of something thats been reskinned but i dont think it is

Man, that ranking of Wario's Woods is wild. Wario's Woods is good! Vaaaastly better puzzle game than Yoshi, too, which he only put just below it. Wario's Woods and Dr. Mario are my biggest disagreements with him on this list so far, even more than putting Rygar in the top 5 or Ninja Gaiden at 17th.

Im blaming it on the Game Scent

The NES Jurassic Park is probably my favorite Jurassic Park game on consoles. I played the arcade rail shooter like 2 years ago and it was probably the best

also the most important part we also get an energy drink ranking to start the video

Catching up on last week: Warios Woods is no Yo! Noid is one of the most deranged things to ever come out of Jeffs mouth

God I can't believe he put Wario's Woods below Yo! Noid, an actual shit game, lol. Like I know the difficulty of doing a huge list like this, it's so dependent on your mood day to day, but jesus CHRIST, Yo Noid?

Man I dunno. Like, he liked Krazy Kreatures but is it really almost 100 spots better than Wario's Woods? I think Wario's Woods is like kinda straightforwardly the better game.

Man I dunno. Maybe I'm just built different. I'm really good at this type of puzzle game and he just seems really flustered by Wario's Woods. I don't really find it flustering at all.

Not an NES game, but here's your annual Jeff Gerstmann checks out the roster of the newest WWE game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw5t9AFsbME

Paratroopa1 posted...

Man I dunno. Maybe I'm just built different. I'm really good at this type of puzzle game and he just seems really flustered by Wario's Woods. I don't really find it flustering at all.

yeah I dont get it either, Ive played the game since I was a kid and never had an issue with it (the SNES version, but I assume it basically plays the same)

also I think he was too generous to Yo! Noid which makes the list a little weird. Noid is bad.games below it should be bad, but he didnt seem to think Warios Woods was outright bad so something funky is happening with the Noid placement

Maybe we get Dragon Power today in honor of Toriyama