Arguably the most beloved console of all time, the Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly abbreviated as NES, is now well over 25 years old. With over two thousand games produced worldwide for the legendary hardware, the NES, despite its age, has an eternal staying power. As retro gaming continues to grow in popularity, more and more gamers flock to Nintendo’s first home console to get their gaming fix.
To help these gamers out, I’ve decided to focus my energy to create a comprehensive top 100 NES and Famicom game list. Yes, there are already plenty of NES top 10’s, top 25’s and even top 100 lists all over the net. So why should you care about my top 100 list?
My aim here was to make a unique list that goes beyond simply my picks and my thoughts about them. This list was carefully crafted based on my experience of well over seven hundred individual titles for both the NES and Famicom. My criteria for this list was based on three factors – Overall appeal, uniqueness, and how well each have aged.
This list will include every kind of software ever written for the hardware, whether it be NES, Famicom, unlicensed, prototype, homebrew or Hong Kong original pirate – if it was sold in some forum, it’s fair game for this list. The only type of games I have excluded are hacks of existing games. While many of these are incredible, I may at some point in the future write a separate list for these alone.
Of course, with a system like the NES which saw well over 700 titles in North America alone, there can never be a true definitive top 100 that will be universally true for all players. The bottom line is this list is merely a collection of my opinions, so feel free to disagree and tell me what you’d add in your list instead. For those who may be interested in tracking down copies of the games I mention, I am including a general price range for loose carts and what I am calling the NES difficulty meter.
Since many NES games can be a real test of player’s patience and skill, I am ranking every game on its overall difficulty using a simple scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is brain dead easy and 10 is….well, Battletoads. A 5 on this scale means it’s average difficulty with perhaps some challenging elements, but nothing the average gamer should get stuck on for too long.
I’m also including many links to videos and other online information sources. Links are indicated by orange words. Please open these links in a new tap/window so you don’t have to navigate away from this article.
So without futher ado, I hope you will enjoy the Top 100 NES/Famicom Games List!
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Arguably the most beloved console of all time, the Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly abbreviated as NES, is now well over 25 years old. With over two thousand games produced worldwide for the legendary hardware, the NES, despite it age, has an eternal staying power. As retro gaming continues to grow in popularity, more and more gamers flock to Nintendo’s first home console to get their gaming fix.
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