The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Based on a recommendation I received, we’ll change things up by actually not discussing a game or series like in earlier posts…
Let’s discuss the 8-bit era of gaming. What is your favorite game of this generation? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Animal Crossing, Age of Empires, Super Mario, Deus Ex, Stardew Valley, The Sims, Half-Life, Earthbound / Mother, Mass Effect, Metroid, Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
I kind of feel a lot of 8 bit era games haven’t aged the best. But there are a few that I love. Of course smb3 is really outstanding. That game is timeless and really showed how well Nintendo can make games. While I may personally prefer smw, smb3 was in my eyes the first to perfect the side scrolling platformer.
Mother is another game from the era I enjoy a lot. It hasnt aged as well as smb3, but it’s still a fun game to look back on. I feel the game was a bit ahead of it’s time, and with a few gameplay changes I think it would still be worth playing for any jrpg fan today
I’ve been watching Jeff Gerstmann work through and rank the NES library over the past year, and I agree with your sentiment. It seems like there are only like 10-20 NES games that actually hold up, and the rest of the library is either “good for the era” or absolute garbage.
I’d argue that is true of any generation, a few games are must plays and endure as such, then there are many that are just okay even at the time and then a bunch of crap it’s hardly worth playing.
The “floor” for how bad a bad game can be has gone up as the generations have gone on. There’s always a few stinkers, but most PS2 games are objectively better than like half of the NES library.
I think the difference is that in the 8bit generation yhe majority of the game were bad relative to each other. The peak of the bell curve for 8bit was between mediocre to kinda bad games.
While there are more games in later generations, it feels like the console manufacturers took more control and regulated what was published. Bad games happen now because of shitty business decisions and bad story writing. You dont see garbage being published just because you can.
The only flaw of SMB3 to me would be that this game needed save games reeaal bad.
Also, I made the picture for this post myself from the different Wikipedia entries using GIMP. It was quite a headache 😅.
What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.
To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.
I personally have almost zero experience with this generation, though I realize it’s historic value. So many great game franchise originated here: Super Mario, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Zelda, Metal Gear, Mega Man, Mother…
I’ll give a shout-out to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, which I got to know by watching a YouTube video on the world record history for this game. I then played some of it myself on my Switch and was actually quite impressed with the almost puzzle like gameplay!
I also played Super Mario Bros. While I respect it for being the first, I thought it was quite ridiculous at times (the way to progress in the final world was so stupid).
Still have to sink my teeth in the others!
My favorite 8 bit game was The Little Samson. So few people know about it but it was an incredible game for that time.
It came out in 1992, at the end of the NES lifecycle. The SNES was already out and many people were only interested in games on that platform. This is why end of life games like Little Samson did not sell as well as they should have, and consequently, only had one small production run. That, in turn, is why these games are among the most expensive and sought after by collectors. There are just way less of them out there! I would love to have a Little Samson cartridge, but I don’t have $3000 to spend on a Nintendo game lol
