Oh so you finally made the NES thread? Awesome! I can already tell that I'll have many posts in this thread.
I was born in '88 (actually the same day that Contra came out in Japan!), but the NES was still my first console because my father had bought one for himself a few years prior. The funny thing is that everyone I knew back then also only had NESes for some reason. So it was like I got to live the NES era anyway, only later. Borrowed a lot of games from my friends and vice versa. Sadly when I eventually started renting games they had stopped renting out NES games and it was only Mega Drive and SNES.
I've never had a lot of money to spend on games, so I've never had a ton of games for any system. But the NES/FC is the one I have the most for currently. Around 85 games at the moment. Mostly carts. I'll try to get photos sometime this week. Some highlights in my collection are Hammerin' Harry, Devil World, Ufouria: The Saga and Mr. Gimmick. All of them were released in Europe but not in the states. Mr. Gimmick is the most expensive game I've ever bought for any console.
I have some Famicom-only games to recommend as well! These games should seriously be considered for any collector:
- The Goonies
- King Kong 2
- Wai Wai World
- Wai Wai World 2
- Kid Dracula
- Twinbee
- Famicom Wars
...huh, most of them are Konami games. Now that I think of it, most of the FC games in my collection are Konami games.
The Wai Wai World games are really great. They're like Konami's all-stars games, having characters, stages and gameplay from a bunch of popular Konami games. The first one is a bit difficult to play because there's some Japanese in it, but nothing you can't get by with a FAQ or something. The second one is much more straight-forward and can be played easily without knowing any Japanese at all. The second one is also much easier. A warning to PAL gamers though; the second game has graphics glitches on PAL machines. It doesn't draw the whole play area so it's kind of impossible to play on PAL machines.
The Goonies is a great early platformer that was oddly never released in the west except for on those Playchoice-10 arcade machines.
King Kong 2 is an odd but fun top-down action game. Surprisingly deep. Well maybe deep is the wrong word, but it has a lot of areas to explore and bosses to defeat etc. It's pretty cheap as well.
Kid Dracula has already been mentioned here, but it needs to be repeated again. It's a great game. Getting a bit pricey though, but not too bad. I guess a lot of people have heard about it and want it. I still haven't bought it yet though... should do that soon. I think this one also has some graphics glitches on PAL machines, although it's still playable.
Twinbee is a fun and cute shoot 'em up, but the cute graphics are a bit deceiving because it's REALLY hard! lol. At least I think that game was never released in the west.
Famicom Wars is the first game in the Wars series from Intelligent Systems. Holds up surprisingly well, although some things are not as good as in the later games. Still, it's a fantastic game that me and my friends have spent hours playing. It has Japanese text but it's actually pretty easy to figure out.
Some other FC-only that are fun:
Hi no Tori - Platformer. The graphics look pretty dull but it's actually pretty fun to play. Some decent music too.
Tetris 2 + Bombliss - It's downright criminal that this was not released in the west. If you like Tetris games you should have this.
Super Xevious - The FC-only sequel to Xevious. Need I say more?
Magical Taturuuto-kun: Fantastic World!! - Pretty fun platformer that is a little remeniscent of SMB3, although not THAT good lol. But still good.
Other than that I have bought a couple of Namco games in those hard cases simply because of the cases. They're just so cool and look great together. Most of the games are actually pretty fun too, like Super Xevious, Family Pinball (which was released in the west under another name I think but the FC version features Namco characters like Pacman etc.), and Wagyan Land (which is kind of hard to play without knowing Japanese because of the boss battles unfortunately).
I've probably forgot some games. If anyone knows other FC-only games worth owning please recommend them!
Regarding FC -> NES converters, I have one from NTDEC that has worked with all the carts I have so far without any problems. There's also the Honeybee adapter which is probably good, but also probably overpriced since it's a known brand of converters. I think in general any converter will work fine because the FC/NES is not as complicated as the SNES for example. So I think any converter will work with most games.
Edit: Oh and if you want to play FC games on your NES, you NEED to remove the region protection in the NES by cutting one of the legs on that lockout chip. I think most collectiors have done that already but it's worth mentioning. If you haven't it's really easy to do. Even I could do it!
Edit²: Thought of another FC-only game!
Gradius 2. I'll never understand why that wasn't released in the west. I guess it's because it uses one of those VRC chips that Konami had and they couldn't be bothered to reprogram it to Nintendo's MMC chips. It's really fucking awesome. Much better than the first one in every way.