Every NES Game Retro Review CHALLENGE

Hello, friends and Hive Gamers! How have you enjoyed the All Time Hive? I recently cashed out some of my blog earnings to reward myself with some Black Friday shopping from GameStop.

I've been away for a while; haven't been playing much in the way of games. Mostly just raising my Tamagotchi and working through my Axie scholarship. Having solved the original 1997 Tamagotchi toy, I figure it's time to move on to another project. So I'm going to start one I've wanted to do for a long time, even if it's one I very well may never finish.

The Nintendo Entertainment System was born in October 1985, and so was I. My father bought one around the time I was born to play with on his own, a fan of arcade games himself. Before I could even talk I was mashing buttons and amused by how the images on the screen reacted to me pushing things on the controller. Before I was even in kindergarten, I could clear the original Super Mario Bros. (with a LOT of retrying and using the Warp Pipes, of course!)

For a while, I collected NES games, and had about 200 of them, which is a bit less than a third of the 715 software titles officially licensed and released for the platform. Something I've always wanted to do was play every game released on the console, and today with emulation, I don't have to go around buying up every single cartridge and accessory to do so (though I might need to buy me a ROB to play some of them).

The Challenge

My goal in playing all of the games is to write a review for every title -- I don't necessarily have to finish the game; however, being me, I am going to damn well try to finish every single game. I think to write a good review, you need to not only finish a game, but see everything the game has to offer.

I also want to play the games blind at first, experiencing the same way I would have as a kid. Read the manual, pop the cartridge in, and go. I'll do a little bit of research to learn more about the history of the game, read the manual if I can find it online, and jump in and see how far I can get.

I'll do my absolute best to clear the games without using any kind of help, but if I get really stuck, I'll resort to using guides, and in the worst cases, I may even use some minor cheating (like savestates) if I feel like I'm spending way too much time and effort on a particular game. But for the most part, I want to do everyone on my own accord.

To chronicle my journey, besides reviewing each game here, I'll be keeping a Backloggery account active to show my progress.

One nice thing about The Backloggery is that it has a "Fortune Cookie" feature that chooses a game from your backlog at random, and you can set up various parameters to choose from certain types of games or whatever. So I'm going to be using that to generate my first game.

However, I also will gladly take requests for what games come next! If you have a particular NES favorite or something you've always been curious about, let me know, and I'll get to reviewing it earlier rather than later. I'd rather start out strong reviewing interesting games rather than my Cookies throwing Sesame Street and seventeen different soccer titles at me. And of course I might choose to do some of my own favorites.

Now, with 715 software titles, if I take a week to really get the most out of every game, it's going to take me like 15 years to complete this project. Some games will take longer than a week, I'm sure, but many games I'll be able to knock out in a day, some even more than one in a day. There's a lot of software that is extremely simple, and some titles that are reprints or collections that will automatically get knocked out while playing the original titles.

How far will I actually get? Well, I hope to see everything, but this is a lofty project, and it will be fun going into it even knowing I very well may never see the end. But I'm going to try anyway, and with requests and Cookies, I hope to play and learn about a lot of games that I have never tried before and revisit some old favorites along the way. Even if I can't complete the challenge, it will sure be a hell of a lot of fun.

Rules

Game list includes only the officially licensed 715 software titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System, so no Japanese-only Famicom games or unlicensed games; however, this does include software from all regions where an NES was released.
I will, in some way, see every game to its end. I will try my best to do it on my own accord blindly, then using guides, then finally using minor cheating to get through. But I want to experience the games the way they were intended to be played.
For games without a clear ending, I'll try to see everything there is to see in the game (acquire every food item and see every intermission scene in Pac-Man, for example).
"Repeat" software titles do not need to be played, obviously. (So after playing Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, the dual-titled cartridge gets marked off, too!
Titles from series will be played in order, unless one is a reader request. So if I Cookie Castlevania III, I'll play the original Castlevania first. This also won't apply to games that are only vaguely related but not direct sequels to one another (like the Bart Simpson games).

For now, we'll be taking the first game from a Cookie.

And we got Arch Rivals. I think this is a basketball game with a fighting hook that I used to own but never played. I'll go look up some stuff about it, find a ROM, and get started!

I definitely want to try some requests and play everyone's favorites, so if you have a game you want to see reviewed, drop me a comment and let me know! I'll do my best to play the heck out of it.

Master List

I'll add the posts here as I make them.