1984 Ranked

When George Orwell wrote 1984, he was dreaming of Excitebikes

List items

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  1. 1942

  I played 1942 at a dive bar over a piping hot plate of cheese fries while my Dad drank with his friends, which is how the developers intended

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  2. Excitebike

  This game was the primary inspiration to Rob Zombie's smash hit song, Dragula

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  3. Marble Madness

  Insensitive piece of shit video game. My niece DIED of the Marble Madness, you godless freaks

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  4. Duck Hunt

  Duck Hunt is almost exclusively remembered for including a dog that would laugh at the player if they did poorly, but it's genuinely pretty weird that this was a Nintendo game. Can you imagine if, today, Nintendo released a light gun peripheral for a hunting sim? They really were just making whatever back then.

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  5. Karate Champ

  Karate Champ portrays the epic struggle between Undiscernable Ryu and Blurry I-think-that's-Ken

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  6. Ice Climber

  Like many millennials, I was introduced to the tertiary Nintendo characters through the Smash Bros. series. In my experience, tertiary Nintendo characters who have lived on as Smash Bros. characters but not as leads in their own titles do so for two reasons: 1. because Nintendo is a bizarre company who continually fails their own fans and developers by not supporting series that deserve better (see: Mother), or 2., because despite the fun Smash Bros. cameo, their just wasn't that much to the original title (see: Kid Icarus).

  Ice Climber fits more in the second category than the first. While this game is a serviceable enough arcade game for a few minutes, maybe, there's precious little here. In fact, the core premise of Ice Climber is...kinda bad!

  The idea is that this is a vertical platformer in which the player uses a hammer to destroy vertical barricades to get to the top of a level. However, all of the surfaces in the game are icy. Put more simply: Ice Climber is slippery. The player is given a great deal of control over the verticality of a jump but quite a bit less control over the horizontality of a jump. You're intended to struggle with leaping either too far in a direction or not far enough in that direction.

  If that sounds frustrating, that's because, yes, it's fuckin' annoying as hell! Ultimately, Ice Climber levels are so short that it doesn't exactly matter - this is pretty transparently a time-waster kind of arcade title. But, all respect to the ice climbers, there's a pretty good reason why Nintendo hasn't revisited this game in a serious way.

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  7. Underwurlde

  Ya can't just add a U and an E to legitimize your faux-satanic adventure title, ya jerks!