I guess it depends on how you define good. Is something actually good if you'd rather play almost anything else than it? If you fill the top 777 slots with SNES games instead of NES then just how good are NES games...?
I think if I was legit compiling a list of 777 favorite games of all time and it wound up consisting entirely of SNES games, the bigger question would be "how good is skykiii's grasp of reality?" I mean 777 is close to being the SNES's entire library so invariably it would have to include crap like Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls and the million of forgettable beat-em-ups....
..... I should probably apologize to people who had been trying to forget that there was a bad Double Dragon fighting game based on a goofy-fuck cartoon, but I won't....
Such a SNES list would also likely include all five Super Bombermans. Which... they aren't bad, but Bomberman at this point was especially a franchise that suffered from "played one, played them all." People like to say that about things like Mega Man, but at least with MM I can justify that there's new challenges, stage layouts, boss patterns to figure out... Bomberman doesn't even have *that*. So literally the best one is just gonna be whatever one you have the most nostalgia for.
The way I see it, SMB3 is the only great NES game, one you could hand to someone today and if they like the genre they'll like SMB3. You're not handing Adventures of Lolo to anybody but NES kids, basically. The only people who like it already like it, and probably grew up with it.
Honestly I don't quite agree. Fun is fun no matter the era. The only limiting factor with, say, Lolo is just whether you like that kind of puzzle-solving game.
Actually, not to being Playing With Powerlevel here, but... I've actually had a few experiences where people had reluctance to get into an old game, but then wound up loving it. Especially among kids, who tend to not be all that picky despite what the internet often claims (in reality it tends to be adults who are picky). Among older people, well... I have a cousin who now makes games of Archon and Pocky & Rocky a regular thing.
Funny you mention Mario 3.... we're actually getting back to the original purpose of this topic now, but... yeah these days I consider that one kinda overrated. I still like it, its not dogshit or anything, but its weird hearing people repeatedly say its the best game on the NES.
I mean, just compared to other platformers.... Mega Man 2 has you fighting a giant mecha dragon, Ninja Gaiden has screen-filling demons, Gargoyle's Quest has that over a river of fire and you're playing as a gargoyle with limited flight capabilities.... and somehow, the best of the best is a game where most of the boss fights are the same "bop them on the head three times" copypasta?
I mean that's a simplistic take, sure. but that's kind of a microcosm of the larger problem... Mario 3 to me really doesn't stand out much in any way. Sure there's some parts I have nostalgia for but when you consider it has like 100 levels (and yet the game is designed so you can easily skip most of them) and I can only remember some of them for some stand-out gimmick (big world or any level where you have to run from that giant fish for example).... its like.... I could see this being generally beloved, but "best on the NES" I have to take issue with.
It is unfair to say there's no "good" NES games though, I suppose... He didn't say "great" or "perfect", so "good" leaves more wiggle room. And you make good points, a console's identity is more than just its best games. Even bad games can be good memories.
Not to mention sometimes like..... well, the problem with "quality" in general is it tends towards certain absolutes. That James Rolfe "all games should play like X" thing I brought up before.
But just for an example of how that can go wrong, its one reason I don't play sports games... and why I'm not a big fan of the afformentioned Bomberman games. Super Bomberman was good (naturally, first one was the one I have nostalgia for) but I lost interest in the sequels when I found out they're literally just the same game. It's also why I don't actively seek out things like Baseball games or Basketball games. Actually not long ago I did play a lot of different baseball games and after awhile they started to just run together, even when they had a gimmick like that one where everyone is a robot.
To a lesser extent this is kind of a problem with shmups. Those though can benefit from the Mega Man "well I haven't seen this exact set of challenges before" thing, but if you play too many at once it can be weirdly easy to fall into a rut of "aren't these all basically the same?"
It's at that point you start to genuinely appreciate oddballs like Alien 3 or the various game adaptations of Hook (the 16-bit versions being genuinely good, the NES one... less so). Sure, Alien 3 might've been a better game had it literally been just Contra with Ripley in place of Bill Rizer... but I've beaten Contra.
In fact that's one reason I was willing to throw the Atari 2600 under the bus. That console had a problem of literally re-selling the same game under different titles, sometimes with just minor sprite swaps, like that Tazmania game that became an Asterix game.
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