Aging Gracefully: An Argument For The Timelessness of the NES

Something of an internet debate (or brushfire, depending on your experience and point of view), has cropped up recently, due mainly to the poor choice of wording (or outright inflammatory opinion) of this original Kotaku article. In the article, which is reviewing (and mostly praising) the recently released SNES Classic retro console, the writer makes the claim that "most NES games are not worth playing" these days, as, in his words, they have "aged poorly". Thus the debate was sparked, with some people siding with the opinion, claiming that "he's not wrong", and others arguing against the notion, or even outright offended by it. You might even be thoroughly unsurprised to learn that a majority of the folks along these so-called "battle lines", seem to take a side according to when they likely "grew up" in the history of gaming. Meaning that those arguing in favor of "NES games not aging well", are largely people who either played it later in life, after having "grown up" with later consoles (such as the Playstation, N64, Xbox, etc.), or have never played it at all. And those defending the console, on the same token, are largely those that grew up playing it, and were directly impacted by its games.

Now anyone that knows me through Retro Revelations, or through the related Youtube channel, knows that I'm a huge fan of retro gaming, most especially, the NES. As related through this original piece, written the year I started the blog back in 2012, I grew up with the Nintendo Entertainment System, even though I got it late (1990). I had, of course, played video games, and even previously owned a console (Atari 2600) in my 80s childhood, but it wasn't until, at the age of almost 9 years old, when I finally got my own NES, that I legitimately fell IN LOVE with gaming, and became fairly obsessed with it. So from that perspective, you can rightly say that when it comes to this issue, I am of course biased. However, that's also fairly moot to point out, because quite frankly, especially when it comes to something like entertainment, EVERYONE is biased. Opinions are biased and subjective, that is the nature of opinions, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is, to put it nicely, completely full of shit.

But, that having been said, I am here today to offer a defense for the NES and its game library. Not that it should NEED a defense. But considering there is a strong enough sentiment among online gamers, that this sentiment "isn't wrong", I think that some well-articulated, well-informed defenses SHOULD be made, and I intend to be among them.

The Game that "Saved Consoles".

The original masterpiece.

The birth of an icon.

Above, are pictures of the three games that most gamers would point to as being the "Holy Trinity" of not only the NES as a console, but in the grand picture of things, Nintendo's game franchises on the whole. These three games, not only had the largest hand in making the Nintendo Entertainment System THE console to own in the 1980s, but they also deserve every bit of praise and credit they receive, for "shaping the face of modern gaming". Granted, there were games with similar elements that preceded these classics, but it is undeniable that Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid, both refined what had already come before, as well as innovated what had yet to be seen in gaming.

Super Mario Bros. was not only THE game most deserving of credit for "saving the home console industry" in North America in the mid-80s, after the infamous market crash of 1983, but it also happened to be the first TRUE "side-scrolling" game, and the first TRUE "platformer" to boot. It was one of the first games to have a more concrete structure of "levels" and "worlds", with each world having a "final boss" that was more than just a regular enemy. It also helped to innovate the notion of "power ups", permanent items that made you stronger until you got hit. But what's more, it presented the idea of adding permanent power-ups that layer on top of one another, with the Super Mushroom and Fire Flower. It helped evolve the concept of "Extra Lives", and rewarded the player for gathering coins, not just with a high score, but with extra lives every 100 coins gathered, giving you a reason to be greedy about those coins. It presented a refinement of in-game control mechanics and physics, in everything from the direction a mushroom would fall depending on where you hit the block, to mid-air direction changes during a jump, or swimming physics in water levels. It represented a fairly massive and robust step forward in video gaming, from the simpler arcade and PC and Atari style titles of the early 80s, and helped to basically establish the cornerstones and foundation for what the vast majority of video games would come to be, even today.

Then of course there's The Legend of Zelda, a game many credit with being the first "open world adventure" game. Again, there were games before Zelda, that attempted to give you a similar experience. But Zelda was THE first game of its era, to give you such a rich, large and varied world, and such an open-ended quest, where, a few limitations not withstanding, you could truly approach the game however you wished, and go wherever the hell you wanted, even places you shouldn't. Zelda also contributed to the evolution of power-ups, by giving you permanent items you could equip, similar to a role playing game, and switch out as needed to tackle different obstacles. The land of Hyrule was rife with hidden secrets to be found, and the game by its very nature both encouraged and rewarded exploration of its world.

The one that often gets lost in the conversation, of course, is the original Metroid. Not as big a hit as Mario or Zelda, and spawning a franchise that, while popular, continues to this day to not be AS popular or AS successful as Mario and Zelda. But that bears nothing on the game's own innovations, and its own impact on the evolution of gaming. Metroid deserves just as much credit, in a lot of ways, as Zelda, for pushing the envelope of what a game world could be, and innovating the notion of "open world" exploration. Metroid was more rigid than the free-flowing Zelda, in that it presented you with more of a maze to navigate, and memorize, and backtracking to previous areas once you had obtained new items was a must. But it also allowed you, in a "side scrolling" dimension, to travel not only horizontally, but vertically, in a game world that for its time was just as massive as Zelda's Hyrule. And when it comes to power-ups, Metroid brought its own innovations, as it took the concept of "layering" even further, giving you upgrades to Samus' weapons that you could stack up and switch out. But perhaps the one thing Metroid brought to the table more so than its compatriots, was atmosphere and aesthetics. Not only were the graphics, in their own way, "more detailed" than Mario or Zelda, but in Metroid, the game combined graphics and sound, and level design, to create a very claustrophobic and lonely, even frightening sense of isolation. You were Samus, alone on this hostile, dangerous alien world, with death around every corner. And the player could really FEEL that, in a way that perhaps no previous game had ever quite accomplished.

The biggest stand-alone game of an era.

The game that once again changed the face of gaming.

Of course, we're not here just to talk up the innovations and merits of old classics. We're here to offer a rebuttal to the accusation that "These games haven't aged well." To that end, I would say that the first thing one needs to keep in mind with something like this, is that a little thing called perspective. One of the arguments in favor of NES games not aging well, is that while games like Mario 1, Zelda, and Metroid, ARE classics, that they have iterations on future consoles that "do it better". So when keeping things in perspective, from one point of view, YES, naturally, Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, and Super Metroid, for example, "do it better" from the standpoint that they do what any good sequel SHOULD do, which is build upon and add to the previous experience. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't be terribly good sequels, especially on newer, more powerful hardware. Super Metroid, most especially, I myself am fully willing to state takes everything the original (and the often forgotten Game Boy sequel) did, and does it BETTER, for sure. BUT, also keeping things in perspective, you simply CANNOT look at a game and judge it by what LATER games on more POWERFUL hardware did. That is absolutely pointless. When looking at older games, the only sober way to approach them, is to judge them on their OWN merits, keeping firmly in mind the TIME these games originally released, and what they brought to the table back THEN.

From THAT perspective, I find it almost impossible to understand how anyone could look at Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, or Metroid, and claim they "haven't aged well." Does Super Mario Bros. have less level, enemy and power-up variety than its sequels? Does it have "worse" controls or physics than its sequels or other later games that were inspired by it? Of course! Why? Because it came out in 1985, and in a lot of ways, was the very FIRST game to ever truly attempt a lot of the things it does. So naturally, OF COURSE its sequels and other later games would build upon that and IMPROVE upon that. If they didn't, they wouldn't be worth much, would they? But that's not the point. The POINT is, that Super Mario Bros., taken on its own merits, judged for what it is, with a mindfulness of WHEN it came out, is in fact still a very good game, a "timeless" classic that is fun, functional and addictive to play. By THOSE standards, the only standards that should matter when judging a game, regardless of how old it is, then yes, I would in fact say that Super Mario Bros. "has aged well". VERY well, in fact.

I would take that even further, however, by bringing up my next, possibly more controversial point. Looking at the pictures above, of Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Mario 64, both great games, very innovative and even amazing for their respective times, one thing stands out to me like the proverbial "sore thumb": one of those games looks like it has "aged well", while the other hasn't. Purely on graphical terms, I will state that quite frankly, sprites 100% DO age better over time than 3D polygons. Old 8-bit and 16-bit console games, as well as 2D PC and arcade games from that 80s/90s era, absolutely look better NOW, than early 3D games did. Granted, Playstation and Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 games, for their time, were amazing, because of their newness and spectacle. But it needs to be pointed out that the same thing could be said for Atari 2600 and Intellivision games, for their OWN time. And they both, if we're being fully honest, share something else in common: looking at them TODAY, pardon my language, but old Atari games and early 3D games are, simply put, fucking ugly.

Gorgeous for 1996. Not as much now.

By comparison? The best looking games of the NES, or Master System, or SNES, or Sega Genesis, etc., graphically hold up today, because they STILL look good! Have BETTER looking 2D sprite-based games come along? Of course, such is the nature of hardware evolution. But the fact is, there are games from those 8-bit and 16-bit eras, that absolutely have "aged well", even just graphically. There are games from those consoles that are still, in 2017, beautiful to look at. It's a hell of a lot harder to look at, say, Pilotwings 64, or Panzer Dragoon, or Virtua Fighter, or Final Fantasy VII, or Ocarina of Time, and say with a perfectly straight face, that yes, those blocky-as-hell, lacking-in-detail polygon models STILL look good. Frankly, if I'm being honest, they NEVER really looked GOOD. It's just that we didn't have BETTER 3D graphics to turn to at the time, so FOR their time, they had great graphics.

But it isn't just about graphics. Super Mario 64 is an amazing game, a masterpiece, and a landmark achievement of game design. It is, in its own way, the only game really deserving of the kind of credit that Super Mario Bros. gets, as far as laying foundations and innovating an entire genre and generation of games. SMB1 set the table for every side-scrolling game that would follow it, and in the same way, SM64 created the blueprint for 3D gaming, and set a standard that, honestly, most other 3D games of its generation, or even several following generations, failed to ever truly live up to. Having SAID all that, again, the discussion is "has it aged well". And while I would say that Super Mario 64, AS a 3D game, compared to most other 3D games, it HAS aged well for sure. I would also still argue, that Super Mario Bros. 1, and certainly Super Mario Bros. 3, as games judged purely on their own merits, have aged "better" than Mario 64. Part of that is personal bias, as while I love many 3D games, I simply have never liked 3D polygonal games as much as I do 2D sprite-based ones.

But part of that bias is also rooted in fact, that fact being that to this day, the BEST 2D sprite games, tend to play better, tighter, smoother, more functional, than the BEST 3D games. Something about polygons, and the physics and mechanics of 3D game engines, always feel very "floaty", which leads to looser, less precise controls, more "bouncy" mechanics, poorer hit detection, etc. etc. Just by the nature of 2D pixel art games, they can be, as the saying goes, "pixel perfect" in their mechanics and execution. That doesn't mean they always are, that's entirely up to the developer. But the BEST ones give you a very tight, precise level of control. 3D polygons simply cannot duplicate that. A perfect example of this, would be the New Super Mario Bros. series, which are fun and great games, but compared to their fully 2D predecessors, they simply do not function or play quite as well. There is a learning curve there, getting used to "floaty" Mario, versus say Super Mario Bros. 3, which by and large allows you to "turn on a dime", so to speak.

Galaga on NES.

Bump n Jump on NES.

Double Dragon II on NES.

But even in the realm of 2D sprite-based gaming, circling back around to the very root of this argument, the Kotaku reviewer was making the claim that while NES, in his estimation, DOES have some good games, "most of them aren't worth playing", because in his estimation, you can get better games on the Super Nintendo. For one thing, that is an absurd point to make, essentially stating that "Super Mario World exists, so there's no reason to go back and play Super Mario Bros. 3". That's apples and oranges, because they're two different games. And even considering that Super Mario All-Stars exists, outside of (somewhat) more complex and colorful sprites, honestly, I always preferred the NES originals to the remade SNES versions of those Super Mario Bros. games. Mario 3 especially, on NES, flat out PLAYS better, as the controls feel tighter, whereas the All-Stars version always, to me at least, felt like it was "slippery", similar to how Super Mario World itself feels a bit looser in it's run-and-jump mechanics than SMB3 did. Plus to me, I just prefer the graphics and sounds of the NES original. Kind of like I prefer Mega Man on NES, versus the remade versions from the Wily Wars on Sega Genesis. But that is somewhat besides the point.

The POINT is, that while the Super Nintendo, obviously, has more powerful hardware, and more buttons, and can produce bigger games with higher capacity cartridges, higher fidelity graphics and sound, etc., YEAH, the 16-bit games are going to, at least on paper, be able to have more to them. But still, "better" is a very loaded, highly subjective word. I know people personally that would claim that SNES games are objectively "better" than NES games, but I think there is far too much subjectivity at play to really back that up. I suppose, from a certain perspective, it all depends on what you want out of a game, or what you're looking for in your gaming experience. If more complex and more colorful sprites, or more channels of audio are your thing, if a "richer" presentation is what you consider "better" gaming, then yes, I'd say the SNES is for you. But personally, I think it boils down to what kinds of games you like the most. If you like quality ports of classic arcade games, or if you like side-scrollers, platformer and action games, NES is your ticket. Hell, if you like puzzle games, sports games, and shooters, NES is also right up your alley.

The SNES also has those types of games, for sure, and depending on your tastes (especially with shooters) you might prefer what SNES has to offer. But I would personally state that those genres are NES' strong point. If, on the other hand, you love RPGs, or fighting games, or beat em ups, or perhaps even racing games, SNES might be more to your taste. I personally cite the Super Nintendo as being THE console for RPGs, as most of my favorite RPG games of all time are on it, such as Final Fantasy IV-VI, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Illusion of Gaia, etc. The NES has its share of RPGs, more than most probably realize, such as Final Fantasy 1, Dragon Quest/Warrior 1-4, Crystalis, Faxanadu, Zelda II, Legacy of the Wizard, and some solid ports of PC classics like Ultima, Bard's Tale, Times of Lore, Wizardry, D&D, etc. Again with keeping things in perspective, role playing games, especially console ones, didn't really hit a boom and come into their own UNTIL the Super NES and Sega Genesis. But as stated, unless your biggest issues are graphics and sound complexity, NES vs. SNES really boils down to what types of games you like best.

Crystalis.

Journey to Silius.

Contra.

The suggestion that "NES games haven't aged well", is a very simplistic statement for a complex issue. Because there are so many different parameters to consider, not simply "they're old". If your entire basis for judging games is "new games are better than old ones because they're newer", then I'm afraid you're making a very poor argument. If you're going to insult the NES because "it's old", then you're also insulting the Sega Master System, or old arcade games, or old PC games. Not only is it a poor argument, but I would also suggest that in a lot of cases, it is flat out incorrect. This is the part of the article where I really dig in deep, and make a controversial statement that some will inevitably disagree with. But here it goes.

I think, personally, that the NES library, overall, holds up better today, than the N64, or Gamecube, or Wii, or Wii U libraries. And by saying that, I don't mean to imply that those consoles DON'T have good or even great games. Of course they do. My statement, my opinion, is that the sheer number of good-to-great titles on NES, not only outweighs, but has outlasted, the best games on those later Nintendo systems. Me personally, I would even put the NES library up against the SNES (even though SNES is my second favorite console of all time), or Sega Genesis, or Sony Playstation, but those are more complex arguments to make, and again, it really comes down to what kind of games you like best, and what gaming experiences you're looking for. I AM, however, fairly confident in stating that NES' library holds up, in my opinion, better than Nintendo's own later 3D consoles.

The NES definitely has its share of stinkers, and I know this from experience. I rented them as a kid. I played Action 52, and Defenders of Dynatron City, and Empire Strikes Back (not horrible but I didn't enjoy it), and in my adult years I've played many more besides, thanks to the internet. The thing is though, if you look at the history of game consoles, EVERY system since the Atari 2600, that was the top seller of its generation, had the highest amount of crap on it. Why? It's simple really: everyone wants a piece of that pie. There is a bigger risk involved in trying to put your crappy shovelware game onto a console with so-so sales. But a TOP seller? The chances are much more likely that someone will be fooled into buying your game, the more consoles owners that are out there.

That doesn't change the fact that the NES also had an overwhelming number of anywhere from decent to outright incredible titles as well. So many iconic franchises made either their first appearance, or first FAMOUS appearance, on the NES, including but not limited to:

Super Mario Bros.
The Legend of Zelda
Metroid
Contra
Mega Man
Castlevania
Ninja Gaiden
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Double Dragon
Dr. Mario
Battletoads
Final Fantasy
Dragon Quest
Adventure Island
Bomberman
Kirby
Star Tropics
Punch Out
Tecmo Bowl
Kid Icarus
Gradius
Bionic Commando

The NES was also, along with the Colecovision before it, one of the first consoles to have ports of arcade games that actually provided you with SOMETHING close to the original arcade experience. There were a lot of really good ports on NES, so for fans of classic arcade games, the NES was more than just the "Mario Machine", it also allowed them to play their favorites at home. Games like Pac-Man, Pac-Mania, Galaga, Elevator Action, BurgerTime, Gauntlet, Ghosts n Goblins, Rampage, Heavy Barrel, Legendary Wings, Marble Madness, Prisoners of War, 1942/3, etc. And in some cases, such as Bump n Jump and Double Dragon, the NES ports, in certain ways, were actually superior to the arcade originals!

One of the best Licensed games ever.

The NES is ALSO seemingly known, thanks mostly to internet videos like The Angry Video Game Nerd (of which I'm a fan), for its lesser licensed games, such as the aforementioned The Empire Strikes Back, or Back to the Future, or Jaws, or Friday the 13th. But for every licensed clunker out there, NES also had a good or even GREAT licensed game, such as Batman, Tiny Toons, Bugs Bunny, Duck Tales, Rescue Rangers, Bucky O'Hare, Little Nemo and Monster in My Pocket. The system also has a ton of more obscure, but pretty great "hidden gems", such as Totally Rad, Monster Party, Shatterhand, Kickmaster, RC Pro Am, Snake Rattle n Roll, Big Nose the Caveman, Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, Adventures of Lolo, Arkista's Ring, Conquest of Crystal Palace, Xexyz, Rygar, and Little Samson.

The question of course remains, "Okay, you've pointed out all of these games, but DO they still hold up? HAVE they aged well?" And my PERSONAL answer to that question is, "YES, they have." It again comes back to subjectivity, and what you personally want out of a gaming experience. But judged solely on their merits, not on games of other eras or more powerful consoles, I think the Nintendo Entertainment System has plenty of games that really do still stand the test of time. Part of my feeling that way absolutely IS nostalgia, because this console was one of the most crucial parts of my young (and shitty) life as a kid. But if I ever have children, I'm going to sit down with them, and have them play NES with me, before they get into more modern games, and I'm willing to bet, that they will get just as much out of these games, and have just as fun playing them, as I did.

And ultimately, I think that's the true test of whether games "hold up" or not, is "Are they fun to play?" For some gamers, especially ones who grew up with modern games that are much more "forgiving" (or straight up hold your hand), they may not like the challenge a lot of NES games provide. But overall, I think that the very BEST NES classics, and there are many on that list, are still fun to play, and they're something you can go back and play and enjoy, at any time. Which, quite frankly, is more than I think you can say for a awful lot of modern games.