What memories do you have with your NES or do you have and use one still?
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The Goonies II was probably my favorite game.
Good times!
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I played a lot of Super Mario Bros 2 after school. My dad was a lot better at getting the cherries for extra lives, so I asked him to help me out. I’ve got fond memories of us working together to beat the game.
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We got a NES as a shared Xmas present one year and we played the hell out of that thing. Weirdly, we never actually owned some of the biggest games for it, like Legend of Zelda or Metroid. We relied on rentals for the most part.
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We never had an NES. Somehow my mom ended up buying us an Atari 7800 (with two whole games!) and that was my 8 bit world. A lot of my friends had NESs though, and I got to play the occasional bit of Metroid or Megaman.
Oh, best memory was when we were visiting with some family friends on vacation and they rented Super Mario Brothers 3 before it was out in North America. It was a Famicon cartridge with an adapter to make it fit in an NES (the Famicon was a top loader like almost every other console and the carts were about half as tall and had a different pin-out).
These days I have an NES Mini Classic and at one point I had it hacked with all the officially released games on it. The maximum NES cartridge size was 256KB and the NES Mini Classic had 512MB, so you could fit all the games like that.
Looking forward to getting an Analogue Pocket, which uses an FPGA to emulate the hardware of older consoles. Newer firmware releases let you download 3rd party FPGA cores (like for the NES) and play them off the SD card.
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I got it one Christmas, with the Advantage joystick, Super Mario, Zelda, and Megaman 3. I played that thing to death, replaced a part and played it to death again and found the repair impossible.
She sits now in a place of honour, a monument to herself.
I still play the games via emulation, even use the Advantage from time to time.
There’s still something about that grey plastic box though, maybe one day she’ll rise again?
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I have an 8 bit NES that still works, with the duck gun. I think it’s in a box somewhere with a Sega Genesis and a SNES. Sadly, that’s where my console gaming experience stopped.
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Alas, the NES gun will not work with a modern TV. The way it works relies on CRT blanking.
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I played that Genghis Khan game for hours.
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…I’m one of those people that is too young to have been around for the NES but I have to ask: where do you think you’re getting off to implying that the NES is portable?
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I have a ton of great NES memories… playing Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man, and so many other great games that went on to be long-lasting franchises.
I still have my top-loader NES hooked up to a 9-inch Zenith TV:
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Oh, it was definitely a function of that era. Portable meant that it was possible for a single human (maybe two in some cases) to lift and/or carry an item.
For example, a portable TV didn’t necessarily mean a TV you could watch on the go, just that it wasn’t a 200-pound console behemoth and could theoretically be used at a new location.
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Anyone else remember those display units they had at Sears (is Sears still a thing?) that had a small selection of games on them? Every time we went there I’d be entranced by it, especially Zelda. I’ve never been sure why we never bought that game, but it may have started my love of open world, “just wander around doing stuff” games. That’s pretty much all I want to do these days. Screw your silly cinematic story and expensive voice actors! Let me see how many odd corners of the world I can get to while I ignore whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing.
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I never had my own NES, but my best friend who lived down the block had one and we would play it almost every day. I remember the two of us plus a third friend spending something like a week playing Dragon Warrior to completion one summer. You couldn’t save, so we had to leave the NES on the whole time and hope his parents didn’t notice. Thankfully, it was on its own TV in a playroom.
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We had a “portable” Apple //c. The battery weighed a good 15 pounds. The monitor was like a third the height of a normal monitor.
It was basically useless as a portable computer.
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There was a PC game called Thief that was great for this.
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The first game I can think of like that was an Apple II game that was way ahead of its time called Empire I: World Builders. You started the game choosing whether you wanted to be a miner, missionary or homesteader, then you flew through space and kept finding planets and kept looking until you found a habitable one to land on, and then you could either do your assigned job or just wander around the planet meeting people and fighting enemies. You could even do unexpected things like kill shopkeepers and steal their wares, and then have to avoid the village law enforcement.
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Nope. And wow were their appliance service death throes ugly, they started contracting everything to Dolt Bros.
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