There are thousands of games, new and retro, out there. How can you even try to choose which ones are worth your while? We are going to go through this matter in this blog post. I am trying to give you some perspective once again. This fact has been in my mind lately. I just recently got to see one particular game that was somewhat interesting. It was a NES game and it was a Turtles game also. The game was “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 2 – The Arcade Game”.
I started playing. I figured that many Turtles games, especially some of them from that 16-bit era, are really nice games. This was a game from the 8-bit era. When you are playing video games on a NES you’ll always get these limited options on how to control the main character in the game since there are only so few buttons. This seems to be the baseline when you are playing NES. There’s nothing new here. Nintendo actually corrected this matter with their release of SNES.
But what I realized was that the game was actually a bad one. I didn’t feel like trying to even think about trying to beat it. You only get to try to hit an enemy and jump with also some movement involved and that’s how the game tries to build up a challenge. The graphics are poor and while music is nice for a NES game it cannot compete with some games like this on some newer systems. I stopped playing the game, I had spent maybe half an hour playing it.
This is the reality. Every game that has been released isn’t going to be a good game. You do want to think about what games you are going to be playing. Finishing a video game does take usually ten hours or maybe even some tens of hours. Some games can give you hundreds of hours of time to play. I have spent several hundreds of hours playing NBA 2K games. Also if you are into role-playing-games you get to spent almost certainly some hundred hours while playing them. How do you make the choice of what to play after you finish a game? Does every game have to be a great one if you are going to play it for a long period of time?
We can approach this matter in a certain way. There have been thousands of games released since the beginning of the era of video games. There have been many games available in arcades. Also home consoles and personal computers have lots of games. If there are thousands of games how many of them are still today good choices to choose a game that you actually want to play? You can try to find some games that are appreciated in the gaming community. This includes games that have received good reviews and games that are recommended to you by other gamers. Maybe they are your friends online or in real life.
What about “hidden gems”. There are some games that aren’t so well known but are still offering you some value if you choose to play a game like this. These games can also be recommended by someone. Also you can by yourself try to find games that interest you. This is where it comes as a handy fact that games almost always have a genre of some kind that you can think about while trying to choose what to play. You can be interested in a genre and find a new game to play.
How many games are there actually? First matter that comes to my mind is that PS1 and PS2 have both over 10 000 games in their game library. I think NES has maybe 900 games. Sega Mega Drive has about 1000 games in its game library. There is a huge amount of games available for PC and also for any modern game console. This amount of games is also increasing all the time. You get a sense of this fact that there are loads of games available.
I don’t really know how many good games there are out there. I mean those games that really are going to interest you so that you want to try to beat them. If we think about NES and all of those games that were released for it I think there are just maybe from 10 to 20 games that can actually give you a nice experience in the year 2026. Of course it depends on what games you like to play. Also you have to remember the nostalgia. Games that you played in your days of your youth can bring you joy if you decide that you still want to play them.
Older games aren’t necessarily games that you should play. In overall they are poorer in graphics, audio matters and also in their basic design. Sometimes it is better to choose a remake of the game. This can offer improvements in many ways. Older systems do offer nostalgia and some perspective of how games used to be. Just be a bit cautious when considering about getting into some of these games.
