Sunsoft/Namco

September 1987

Action

1-2 Players (alt)

So you think you've seen it all in shooters, right?  You might just change your mind after you play Sky Kid.  In this arcade conversion, you'll pick up a single bomb and drop it on an enemy target, while dodging rival biplanes and other threats hoping to knock you out of the sky.  The outdated visuals make it hard to appreciate the game's refreshing originality.

Taito/Software Creations

September 1989

Shooter

1-2 Players (alt)

The bad guys come at you hard and fast in this overhead view shooter with a World War II setting.  Sky Shark may stack the odds against you a bit too much... the constant onslaught of enemies and unrelenting showers of bullets often blend into the game's minimally detailed backgrounds, making it that much harder to avoid them.

Nintendo/Rare

August 1987

Sports

1-2 Players (alt)

You know you've got guts when you ski down a hill named Mount Nasty... and are willing to do it in a skintight uniform that leaves nothing to the imagination!  Anyway, in Slalom, you send a round-rumped skiier down snowy trails full of bumps, pine trees, and other hazards.  Your goal is to reach the bottom of the mountain before time expires.

Acclaim/Beam

September 1991

Shooter

1-2 Players

Everything's taken to outrageous extremes in Smash TV, the futuristic game show where the only consolation prize is a body bag.  You'll gun down hundreds of goons with a large assortment of weapons scattered throughout the piles of cash and stacks of gold bars.  The game may have lost some of its luster on its way to the NES, but the crowds of relentless foes are still intact.

Nintendo/Rare

July 1990

Action

1-2 Players

Few games are as delightfully surreal as Snake Rattle and Roll.  Rare's weird action game takes some inspiration from Marble Madness, but adds plenty of its own ideas.  To finish each round, you'll have to feed your silly serpent brightly colored orbs, adding segments to its body and eventually making it heavy enough to tip the scales at the end of the stage.

Ultra

April 1990

Action/Adventure

1 Player

Snake's back to put Metal Gear out of commission for good in this NES exclusive sequel to Konami's groundbreaking stealth action game.  The original Metal Gear has many devoted fans, but few people would be willing to give Snake's Revenge the same kind of respect.  The game's biggest flaw are the many situations where it's impossible to escape detection.

FAST FACT:  Snake's Revenge isn't a genuine sequel to Metal Gear, but rather a spin-off created especially for the NES.  The official Metal Gear II was released for the MSX2 computer in Japan.  Konami offered the less hardware intensive Snake's Revenge as an alternative to Americans interested in Snake's continuing adventures.  The official Metal Gear 2 was not released in the United States until it was offered as a bonus in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence for the Playstation 2.

Kemco

April 1990

Sports

1-2 Players

Snoopy and his desert cousin Spike challenge each other to six different competitions in this unorthodox sports title that's silly, but not really spectacular.  Kemco's done an excellent job of reproducing Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz' distinctive artwork, but the oddball events won't make much of an impression on you if you've already played Track & Field II.

Capcom

November 1991

Action

1-2 Players

There's snow doubt about it... Snow Bros. is one of the best of the handful of games inspired by Taito's brilliant Bubble Bobble.  Although the NES version is lacking the 16-bit sheen of the arcade game, it's still got all the sadistic fun of packing peculiar enemies into snowballs, then sending them bouncing around the screen as deadly projectiles.