For every Mario there are a dozen great NES games nobody talks about. Rental shelves and magazine coverage decided what a generation played, and plenty of excellent cartridges simply never got the space. Some of the best things on my shelf are the ones people skipped:

  • Little Nemo: The Dream Master, Capcom's gorgeous platformer where you feed candy to animals and then wear them, each one a different traversal power. It's adapted from the 1989 animated film, which is itself adapted from Winsor McCay's newspaper strip from 1905, making it one of the oldest properties on the console.
  • The Guardian Legend, a brilliant hybrid that switches between top-down adventure and vertical shmup. Compile made it, the same studio behind Zanac, and the shooter sections are as good as anything else on the system.
  • Adventures of Lolo, a sublime block-pushing puzzle series. It's HAL's work before Kirby, assembled from the best rooms of their Japanese Eggerland games, which is why the difficulty curve is so unusually clean.
  • Snake Rattle 'n Roll and Solar Jetman, two slept-on Rare gems. Solar Jetman is a thrust-and-gravity game with a tether, and it is much harder than it looks.
  • Snake's Revenge, the Western-made Metal Gear sequel Kojima didn't make, though the story goes that a colleague running into him on a train and mentioning it is what prompted him to start Metal Gear 2. It's good.
  • Bucky O'Hare and Clash at Demonhead, colorful, tough, criminally overlooked. Bucky is Konami at full strength, with four rescuable characters you swap between like TMNT did.
  • Wario's Woods, the last licensed NES game released in North America, in 1994, and the only one that ever carried an ESRB rating.
  • Mendel Palace, the very first game from Game Freak, made by Satoshi Tajiri and scored by Junichi Masuda before either of them had thought of Pokemon.

Throw in Kickle Cubicle, Marble Madness, Cobra Triangle, Solomon's Key, Solstice (with a Tim Follin soundtrack that has no business being on this hardware), Conquest of the Crystal Palace and Yoshi, and you've got a stack that deserved far more love than it got.