Board 8 > What is the most technically impressive NES game?

(+) Yeah! (+)

"Technically impressive" means best use of technology on the system, not the best game.

Gimmick! is pretty advanced. It might not appear that way because of the way it looks, but for an NES game it does a lot of really impressive stuff.

Probably something late like Kirby's Adventure or Battletoads.

Kirby's Adventure
Gimmick
Bio Force Ape if you want to count that

Kirby's Adventure or Battletoads are up there for sure but another extremely impressive one is Crisis Force - a shmup powerhouse of graphics with parallax scrolling, pseudo 3D, and absolutely impressive set-pieces.

Recca

Super Mario Bros is extremely technically impressive. Its the max use of the native hardware; everything more advanced than SMB uses chips with extra power in the cartridges

Not the actual winner for this category but still very notable

I'm not knowledgeable enough about NES hardware to know the real answer but to me as a layman it's Punch-Out

Not sure what the answer is, but it's definitely not Kirby's Adventure. Looks pretty but that framerate chugs when more than two enemies are on screen. It is in no way a technical success.

Batman: Return of the Joker looks really impressive. Could almost pass for an SNES/Genesis game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Ivxnpbd5Y

tazzyboyishere posted...

Looks pretty but that framerate chugs when more than two enemies are on screen. It is in no way a technical success.

Well mainly in the "graphics" category. The topic didn't specify which technology.

Also, there was a port of Elite for the NES. A 3D, open-world video game on the system is pretty nuts:

https://youtu.be/8ipzZD7Bjhk?si=IINIE0veU-GYocSq

I don't think it's appropriate to condense "technically impressive" to a single aspect for the sake of the question posed. I'm genuinely curious on people's thoughts, so I was just offering a counterargument to that choice.

Always thought the Ninja Gaiden games looked really nice and the cutscenes were pretty good. Not sure I fully grasp the question though

tazzyboyishere posted...

Not sure what the answer is, but it's definitely not Kirby's Adventure. Looks pretty but that framerate chugs when more than two enemies are on screen. It is in no way a technical success.

It pushes the system. I suppose you can can say it's impressive it runs or unimpressive that it doesn't worked better.

My first thought was Kirby's Adventure. I would imagine there's probably something more impressive I just don't know about.

Does this include Famicom? Because these are all Famicom:

Lagrange Point
Joy Mech Fight
Daiva Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia
Master Takahashi's Adventure Island IV
Championship Lode Runner

So the tricky thing about this question is that as far as the base hardware of the NES is concerned, Super Mario Bros. really is the peak accomplishment. Any game doing anything more advanced than that is using expansion chips included within the game cartridge itself to do things that the base console cannot do. You usually see these referenced when it comes to Japanese games having extra audio (like Castlevania 3, Gimmick, Lagrange Point, etc) but even something like Super Mario Bros. 2 or Contra is using one of these.

Hm, would people be interested in a topic series for this for every system?

Duck Hunt

Mario 3

I typed all that and completely missed that Jakyl had already said the exact same thing

to actually add something to the thread: this Sesame Street game is impressive for the amount and quality of voice samples it uses. Way less fuzziness than something like Double Dribble or Cowabunga
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kNtPfXq3dwM

Little Samson

Mario 3 is my reaction, tbh, but mostly because I see how far the series came from SMB1.

Most people dont even think about this, but probably the biggest technical accomplishment of Mario 3 was having simultaneous horizontal and vertical scrolling while also having an unmoving status bar at the bottom of the screen

WazzupGenius00 posted...

I typed all that and completely missed that Jakyl had already said the exact same thing

to actually add something to the thread: this Sesame Street game is impressive for the amount and quality of voice samples it uses. Way less fuzziness than something like Double Dribble or Cowabunga
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kNtPfXq3dwM

Its good information to spread! Its why they briefly thought it was time to move on to the Famicom Disk System for extra power and the ability to save game states, before quickly realizing that no, cartridges with enhanced chips and battery-backed saves were in fact superior

One of the very few times gaming companies ever aborted a platform and reverted to the last generation of hardware, although funnily enough Nintendo would do it again with the Virtual Boy and the Game Boy

The only other example of this I can think of off the top of my head is Atari aborting the 4800 and reverting to the 2600

some excellent calls here, agree with ones like recca, little samson or lagrange point+joy mech fight for sure, and sunsoft stuff like gimmick (and to a slightly lesser degree journey to silius and hebereke) is very impressive in its own right too. the ones i have to also throw in the ring are these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8hNT5C8rqc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQBiMjBGfPo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AvC-hUnV4g

(metal slader glory is kind of the best of these three, but considering the nishimura kyoutarou game (the 2nd link) and jesus were before 1990 i think they're worth talking about too)

recent stuff like 8bit steins gate or that one joke game from koshiro (both of which i think are legit runnable on hardware) are cool too

i hope og gameboy is next (and separate from gbc just so i have an excuse to pick something specific if perhaps predictable)

Counting romhack/homebrew stuff, Celeste Mario's Zap & Dash has some pretty advanced mechanics.

Super Mario Bros 3 was honestly the first thing to come to mind for me. The free-scrolling levels are kind of a major technological breakthrough, and the game manages to display quite a lot of visuals at once while rarely being subject to severe slowdown, it runs pretty well. Not to mention the game's just chock full of content.

Zelda for sure for abolishing the password system

technically the answer to this is going to be something much, much more modern. Blade Buster for example released in 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypy4GWrC0wY

not exactly the answer you may be looking for but if you want to see the absolute limits of the hardware there certainly are a couple games and developers that have done unique things with NES hardware. found another video with a bunch of examples here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KLhFNmmgUo

firefdr posted...

Zelda for sure for abolishing the password system

I want to give Zelda 1 an honorable mention for being maybe one of the least buggy games I've ever played. There's a few glitches you can do here and there, mainly screen-scrolling stuff and walking around in the UI, but there's essentially no way to severely break the game at all, which is shocking for an NES game. Almost NES game can be completely broken somehow, but Zelda 1, there's nothing. Hell, that makes it the least broken Zelda game in the series, since every other Zelda game is busted as all fuck!

UF8 posted...

some excellent calls here, agree with ones like recca, little samson or lagrange point+joy mech fight for sure, and sunsoft stuff like gimmick (and to a slightly lesser degree journey to silius and hebereke) is very impressive in its own right too. the ones i have to also throw in the ring are these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8hNT5C8rqc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQBiMjBGfPo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AvC-hUnV4g

(metal slader glory is kind of the best of these three, but considering the nishimura kyoutarou game (the 2nd link) and jesus were before 1990 i think they're worth talking about too)

recent stuff like 8bit steins gate or that one joke game from koshiro (both of which i think are legit runnable on hardware) are cool too

i hope og gameboy is next (and separate from gbc just so i have an excuse to pick something specific if perhaps predictable)

I already have a pick for Game Boy

As much as Kirby's Adventure doesn't deserve it on the whole, that one room of Butter Building where it manages to give a scrolling effect at about 3:00 below is probably my favorite individual setpiece on the console:

https://youtu.be/CjyI2OrlD0U

Otherwise I feel like Punch-Out and Joy Mech Fight are the games that best trick the NES into working to run games that they otherwise shouldn't. Both are incredibly fluid, have massive sprite sizes, and actually manage to play well (arguably better than a lot of the 16-bit offerings released in the same era in JMF's case).

TMNT3 looks pretty great

That helicopter in the rooftop stage is a technical feat for sure. I remember some emulators wouldnt display it properly for a while.

MacArrowny posted...

TMNT3 looks pretty great

I thought of this. Soundtrack/sound design is also top tier. It was near the end of the NES lifespan, but still.

I mean hey, the most technically impressive stuff probably WILL be towards the end of the lifespan

Which is why I wanted to shoutout Zelda 1 because they released it in 1986-1987 and while it's not *wildly* ambitious on a technical level, it's relatively ambitious for a game of its time and it's like perfectly made somehow

I mean, compare it to the other Disk System launch game, SMB2j. Its ambitious! Kind of funny that Miyamoto completely outshone the sequel to his masterpiece

Wanglicious posted...

technically the answer to this is going to be something much, much more modern. Blade Buster for example released in 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypy4GWrC0wY

not exactly the answer you may be looking for but if you want to see the absolute limits of the hardware there certainly are a couple games and developers that have done unique things with NES hardware. found another video with a bunch of examples here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KLhFNmmgUo

I have you tagged as "showers in underwear"

Just fyi

Anagram posted...

Hm, would people be interested in a topic series for this for every system?

still hoping for this to happen tbh

Anagram posted...

Hm, would people be interested in a topic series for this for every system?

No. the only thing that can come is arguments.

Yeah look at all the terrible arguments this topic spawned

do you want that on your conscience Anagram

I would be interested in a topic series.

Was Super Spy Hunter mentioned