Mega Man 2 (1989)
i spent a ton of time playing mega man 2 as a kid, and i'm pretty sure i know why -- it has to be in my top 3 hardest games i've ever played with any consistency. when i was like 8 years old, i guess that's something that i liked. i liked the challenge of trying to beat something that was truly difficult, just to say that i had done it.
the mega man games were fun because they were simple. combine the simplicity of "keep mashing the fire button until the enemies die" with a kid's imagination of creative bosses and mechanical environments and you (apparently) have a hit on your hands. the different worlds in mega man were different, each stage almost felt like you were playing a different game. it varied a bit from mario games, where levels in each world could get a bit repetitive after a while and cause you to lose a bit of interest. it helped that you could go through the stages in whichever order you desired, meaning you could use the weapons gained from the bosses you beat on other enemies, possibly in a different fashion every time you went through the game.
while i loved the game so much as a kid, i have to say that enjoyment was somewhat short lived. i remember playing some of the sequels that followed the game and they were still good games, but capcom just kept churning them out, year after year. once the SNES came out, they still kept pushing the games out, even branching into the X series all the way to the PS2. in my opinion, the games just kinda ran out of gas after the first handful were made. once some solid 3D work starting to be done on games, the side-scrolling simplistic shooters just didn't cut it as much anymore.i tried out a PS2 copy of the mega man anniversary collection and damn if i didn't just hate it. i went back and tried to enjoy mega man 2 and found the game way too damn hard. i dunno if it was cuz of the PS2 controller (face it, NES shooters just don't need that many buttons) or that i'm much older and don't have the patience to keep dying and trying over again, but i just couldn't see much appeal in it other than reliving the classic music. i guess there's just no replacing the original, especially decades later.
Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
as young as i was at the time, i remember 1990 and the ramping-up to the 3rd iteration of the super mario bros. series as being a big deal in the relatively juvenile gaming world. there was that cheesy movie the wizard that served as a bit of a preview for SMB3 for american kids, so we were all anxious to play it.
once it came out, it basically didn't disappoint. the original SMB was already seen as legendary, but SMB3 was really miles above the first from just 5 years prior. SMB2 was seen by most as being just too weird and unique to be considered especially memorable, so SMB3 felt a bit like returning to mario's true roots. the game was vastly more wide-open than the previous in the series, so there was plenty to do. particularly novel at the time were the different suits mario could wear for different purposes. the ability to take off and fly and reach upwards in the stages changed the dynamic of the side-scroller genre a bit as well.the beauty of SMB3 was that it launched in 1990, when everybody who was ever going to get a NES had gotten one by that point, and so the game was a huge hit. it felt like at the time everybody had it and played the crap out of it until super mario world (and the rest of the early SNES games) came and blew everything out of the water.
that rounds out my NES favorites. next time i'll get into my personal favorite console of all-time, the Super Nintendo.
--j
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