Welcome again to the 1980s, an era of great political and cultural change and importantly for us, changes in the entertainment we played and watched. But does any of this media that people have great nostalgia for hold up to someone who wasn’t there? Last time we judged the animation, this time we judge the games.
The 1980s saw video games grow up from a niche market that shop owners thought was going to be a passing fad, to a massive industry that would one day rival the might of older industries like film and music. It saw the 1983 video game crash, the golden age of the arcades, the rise of Nintendo and the beginning of the bit wars.
But like with animation, today I am here to see whether or not these games are still considered good by someone who was born in 1993, aka, one of the dreaded millennials your era likes to blame all the time. Because of the sheer amount of games made in this era, I have decided to split this review up into three parts. Part one will be the Nintendo Entertainment System’s games, Part two will focus on the arcade games and part three will be Atari, Gameboy, Sega & PC games.
Before I start, I played most of these games using the Wii’s Virtual store. I had bought a ton of these games ages ago because I was interested in seeing what they were like. All the rest were done via PC emulators which didn’t quite give me the same experience. Sadly, I couldn’t play the NES Batman or the TMNT game and if you’re wondering where Tetris is, that will be on the Gameboy reviews.
I also used no glitches, no exploits (no warp zones for example), and no save states. Nothing that would give me an unfair advantage.
So without further delay, let us begin and review the top NES games of the 1980s, which sadly means I can’t talk about my favourite NES game (guess which one that is).