I can’t contribute much here since I didn’t own one. Around 1988 I played a fair amount of NES at a friend’s house, but the whole time I sneered with the superiority of the computer gamer. Seriously, I couldn’t get excited about The Legend of Zelda when I could be playing Ultima V or Legacy of the Ancients. Having (somewhat) sloughed off that snobbery over the years, I propose…
Super Mario Bros.: Yeah, it was great. I would even have conceded at the time that it was ‘pretty good.’
R.C. Pro Am - So much fun.
Contra - Great co-op arcade port.
Rygar - Wait, did I play this on the NES, or only on the Lynx?
Super Mario Bros. 2 aka Doki Doki Panic - I get the feeling that this weird reskin/hybrid is The Mario Game We Dare Not Speak Of nowadays, but at the time I enjoyed it. You do spend rather a lot of time pulling shit out of the ground, though.
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out - I sucked at it, but I knew it existed!
Man this is an impossible task. I could easily do 20. More than one Mario game for sure, same Mega Man. Could easily put Marble Madness, Kirby, Punch Out, Top Gun, Silent Service, Excitebike, Donkey Kong, Contra, Metal Gear, Castlevania (the first cut, really).
This was my formative years, man! You can’t expect me to limit it to 10!
Darkwing Duck is still good – for anyone who isn’t familiar it’s mechanically very similar to Mega Man.
Super Mario Bros 3
RBI Baseball 3 - I’m sure it doesn’t hold up today, but playing with real and historical championship rosters was so cool at the time.
Mega Man 2
Little Samson - I wish carts for this game weren’t so expensive; it’s a great platformer that plenty missed out on because it released post-SNES launch.
Zelda 2 - Don’t care if everyone else hated it, this was my first Zelda game and I played the hell out of it. Probably would have been better received if it wasn’t titled “Zelda”
Vice: Project Doom
Castlevania 3
Shatterhand
Contra
Ducktales
It’s really hard to get this down to 10 without leaving a bunch off and I’m sure this would change by the month depending on what genres I’m in the mood for at the time. Honorable mentions to Final Fantasy, Adventures of Lolo, Mendel Palace and Kabuki Quantum Fighter this time around.
Same as you or @Gordon_Cameron, I jumped back in the console band only later, with the NEC PC-Engine, and discovered the Sega Mastersystem and NES slightly later. Most of the NES games, I discovered through emulation, but it is very hard to limit one’s self to 10 games, as it is one of those platforms that seem to have been blessed by an unusual high proportion of good games.
My list would be in no particular order:
Zelda, how original.
Otocky, a crazy musical shoot’em up. Really more of an oddity, but wow!
Quarth. Ah, if only they had given you a gun in Tetris… Quarth got you covered!
Summer Carnival '92 Recca, a manic shooter on an 8-bit console known for its display issues, built for their yearly summer contest by the guys at Naxat. It is just mindblowing.
Nekketsukoko Kunio-kun Dodgeball, a dodgeball game with the River City Ransom cast. Much fun, especially in multiplayer.
Battle City, a more elaborate and cooperative version of the Atari 2600’s Combat, which often degenerated into a death match.
Metroid, absolutely fell in love with the atmosphere of this one.
Super Arabian, my single screen action game of choice for the platform.
Gun-Nac, an incredible shooter, as usual with Compile.
Super Pitfall - probably a bad game, but the map was so overly huge, the feel of discovery was awesome. Why is that thing named Pitfall though?
But my absolutive favorite is Musashi no Ken, the improbable adaptation of some minor Aikido anime. The single player part is crazily, stupidly, insanely difficult and impossible, so never play it for that, but the game sports an awesome multiplayer mode, acting as a simplified fighting game that is both hilarious and extremely satisfying.
NES years I was mostly too busy chasing girls, but I definitely remember some late nights with River City Ransom and Super Mario Bros. 3, if that’s the one where he turns into a raccoon. That game was awesome.
During this era, I had an Amstrad 6128 CPC. A friend of mine had the Spectrum, another had a Commodore 64, another had an IBM PC. Out of all of them, I thought my Amstrad had the best graphics. But I had to admit, the Commodore 64 had the most and best games. Also at the tail end of that era, I visited my second cousin and he had a NES, and Zelda. And I was floored. There was nothing like that for the Amstrad, Commodore, Spectrum or IBM PC that I’d seen in that era. (I’m sure now that I was probably wrong, right?) But yeah, I played through Zelda that summer when visiting, and I came away VERY impressed back to my Amstrad, slightly disappointed in my own computer.
Zelda just seemed so simplistic to me compared to the flood of 8-bit RPGs that was around at the time on the C64. I know, apples and oranges, but I really was unimpressed when I saw it. Oh well… it must have been good for something!
It is absolutely tied: the Amstrad CPC 6128 is notoriously known for being bare of about any sort of RPGs, excepting a couple (litterally) of French efforts. Games like Ultima were just absolute sci-fi and would have been the same sort of shock if I have had the luck to have a friend with a Commodore 64 (I saw my first one about 10 years ago!) - and if I had spoken English back then, which wasn’t going to happen for another 10 years anyway.
Incidently, I remember reading as a kid a French book (without any picture!) about all those computer RPGs: it was detailing the Ultimas, Wizardry, Phantasie… I read it over and over, fascinated that I was with those…
