TOP NES

Whomp Em NES Cheats

#2: Final Fantasy

Released In: 1990 Developer: Square Publisher: Nintendo

      The world is in a sorry state. The earth is rotting, the sea rages, the wind has stopped, and darkness covers the land. Prophecy foretells that four Light Warriors will one day come to save the world. You take on the role of those Light Warriors. To return order to the world, you must defeat the four Elemental Fiends and in doing so, relight the four ORBS that you carry. Then you must travel 2000 years back in time and defeat evil at its roots.

Syd Lexia: If you're going to play the original Final Fantasy, play it on the NES. The GBA remake, Dawn of Souls, is a complete piece of shit containing badly renamed enemies and a significantly lessened difficulty. The Marsh Cave, which was the first real challenge of the NES version and required you to stock up on pure potions and heal potions, was about as hard as murdering preschoolers in the GBA version and classic enemies like Wizard and Green Ogre now go by inferior names like Piscodemon and Ogre Chief. But forget about that. Instead, let's bask in the awesomeness of the original... I remember the first time I made it to Melmond... The town had no Clinic or Item Shop and I was charged with the task of destroying the Vampire who had been attacking the town. I entered the Earth Cave and found it to be a frustrating maze filled with vicious enemies including Giants, Iguanas, and Cobras. When I finally made it to the Vampire, he kicked my ass. I was forced to spend several hours amassing more gold and experience so that my characters would be strong enough and well equipped enough to prevail. Then I made my way to the Vampire again and this time I was victorious; I was psyched. Then I discovered that I was only HALFWAY THROUGH THE EARTH CAVE. Thankfully, the Lich that I encountered at the end of the Cave was no match for my FIR3.

Valdronius: This game is the cornerstone of the greatest video game series of all time; that accolade alone warrants top honors. Even without the dozen or more Final Fantasy games that followed, the original is still a great game. Here you are presented with hours and hours of gameplay, leading a party of your own design, through battles and bosses and dungeons. You must restore the four elemental orbs and restore peace to the world. Square’s first installment in the Final Fantasy franchise has a huge map to explore, lots of weapons and armor to find, and tons of enemies to kill. It was not without shortcomings, however. Wasting attacks on creatures that were already dead was very annoying. Also, when I played through the game, I didn’t know how to upgrade my character classes, and it is never hinted at in the game. So I was stuck using second-rate weapons and armor, right up until the end of the game when I actually defeated Chaos. Despite these minor annoyances, Final Fantasy is still one of my all-time favorite video games.

Rycona: This is the first game I ever played and it taught me a lot about many things, directly and indirectly. If it weren't for this game, I might be a very different person today.

greeneyedzeke: This game harkens back to a more innocent time, when characters had short names and casting magic spells didn’t necessitate watching twenty-minute long CGI sequences. And there was no J-Pop to be found anywhere in the original Final Fantasy. Square may have mishandled the franchise in more recent times, but the original NES incarnation is still a classic.

The 100 Best NES Games Ever

      When I registered SydLexia.com in October 2004, I had several major projects in mind that I did not have the resources or time to complete at the site's launch. One such project was the Mortal Kombat Fatality Fest, which was eventually completed in April 2005. But the project I've really wanted to undertake since before I even had a website is a comprehensive list of the 100 best NES games ever made. I haven't seen this done anywhere, as most magazines and websites tend to favor doing "Best Video Games Ever" lists, where they have every video game ever made at their disposal. I'm not particularly interested in doing that and it's been done so many goddam times that there's no real point in doing it again. Besides, it's not very hard to come up with 100 really good video games when you have thousands to choose from. Actually, maybe it is; I've seen Halo on way too many of those lists. Still, I thought it would be more interesting to stick to one console, and there's really no better choice than the Nintendo Entertainment System. With the notable exception of the PlayStation 2, no game console has ever had both the game selection and the monopolistic strangehold on the market that NES had. With a total of 775 games (668 licensed and 87 unlicensed) released for it in North America, the NES certainly had no shortage of games, nor did it have any shortage of good ones. With that pool to choose from, I knew it wouldn't be too hard to find 100 decent games.

      Unfortunately, I also knew that I couldn't undertake the project on my own. To come up with a list of that magnitude, I would need to form some sort of coalition. When the site launched. I simply did not have those sort of connections. But by the time site's first anniversary rolled around, I did. And so, in November of 2005, this Top 100 NES Games project began. And now, here it is a year later and the article is just launching. I don't know why you're not seeing until now. Part of it is laziness, part of it is coordination problems, and part of is just that project of this magnitude takes a long time to complete. Through out the course of this list, you will see comments from several people, let me introduce them to you:

greeneyedzeke of 2D-sprites and PlutoIsAPlanetDammit. His comments appear in green. Rycona of Use-Bombs. His comments appear in cyan. Valdronius of Valdronius.com. His comments appear in blue. Dr. Jeebus of SydLexia.com His comments appear in purple.

Also joining us is DarkMaze of Dark Maze Studios and Press Start. His comments appear in red. DarkMaze was invited to comment on the games, but he was not involved in the voting.

My comments appear in white.

      The rules for voting were simple. Each player picked 100 games and ranked them from 1-100, with 1 being their top pick and 100 being their lowest. In order to be eligible for inclusion a game had to be available in North America and have received a commercial release. Therefore games such as Adventure Island IV, which was only released in Japan, and Earthbound Zero, which was never officially released, were not valid picks. Players were also required to vote on a game based on its merits as a Nintendo game. So classic games such as Donkey Kong and Pac-Man which debuted in the arcade and did not arrive on the NES until years later will not necessarily appear on this list.

      This list also has some known limitations. None of us have played every single game released for the NES in North America, but I have come fairly close in recent years. Since we all voted for games they actually played, the list is somewhat biased in favor of the types of games that each of us personally favored. Here are some of the known biases:

Dr. Jeebus favors puzzle games. Valdronius and Jeebus favor strategy games. Jeebus, greeneyedzeke, and I all played a lot of games based on movie and TV licenses. I heavily favor games published by Capcom, Konami, Nintendo, and Taito. Being brothers, Dr. Jeebus and I had to share an NES. As a result, we have played most of the same games. Everyone involved favors RPGs, but I seem to like them the most. None of us are especially huge fans of sports games.