

Clearly ripping off the Ninja Turtles craze and mashing it up with the game play of Double Dragon, Battletoads did introduce some fresh gameplay mechanics, including vertical scrolling stages that featured cylindrical backgrounds rotating in pseudo-3D. This innovative beatemup from Rare was one of the most impressive games on the NES. Creative use of graphical techniques to create 16-bit-like experience.Large sprites with impressive animations.

All these little elements come together to create one “dreamy” gaming experience. Even the intros to each level were nifty. If all that wasn’t enough, the game has smooth animation as well. There is also some nifty parallax scrolling in the tower stages of the game. There’s one level that takes place in a forest and you can see an ocean in the distance. In relation to most other NES games, the backgrounds in Kirby’s Adventure are superb. The backgrounds’ graphics may be The biggest strength of the game. The attention to detail incredible as Kirby’s character animations are about as good as they get on the NES. Kirby himself is a beautiful vibrant pink, the worlds he passes through are delicious lime greens, ice blues, chocolate browns – the rich colors do not attempt to emulate 16 bit, but instead try to make 8 bit as beautiful as possible. It is the aesthetic equivalent of painting the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice – the beauty is that of working within the limitations. The graphics stretch the 8-bit format to its absolute limit. Rather than make some piece of trash as the last great NES game, the makers polished it and polished it until you can almost see your face in it. Kirby had an advantage on Mario 3, however, as it was the largest licensed NES cart at 6 Mbit (and it shows). It’s a cute and fun-filled game that, like Super Mario Bros 3, looked like an early SNES game with a smaller color palette. Kirby was another one of those games that came out for the NES as many Nintendo fans already had started building their SNES libraries. Below, RadarScope1 and racketboy team up to review some of the most demanding NES games in terms of hardware resources Kirby’s Adventure With the Famicom / NES hardware remaining popular and active on the retail scene for over a decade, game developers had a lot of time to perfect their programming techniques and squeeze every last bit of power out of the iconic console.

However, if you dig deep into the library, there is a surprising amount of games that maxed out the NES hardware to produce some impressive graphics and sound (See the rest of our Games That Pushed The Limits series). Thinking back to most of the games you played on the NES, it’s easy to remember the 8-bit library as being simple and possibly even primitive. The Games That Pushed The Limits Of The NES
