[ijdgaf]

It's funny, truthfully I'm not all that big a fan of NES games in the first place. I find it hard to adjust to not having certain improvements which came along later (saving in cartridge [Zelda excepted], multiple game saves, using the D-pad to navigate menus rather than select, etc).

But for whatever reason, SMB3 just doesn't do it for me. It's just a bit too scattered and unfocused for my tastes. None of the extra upgrades are all that fantastic in my opinion, and the level design is just so bla compared to other games in the series. It's fun, but not as much as the original. Or 64. Or NSMB. All in my opinion, of course, which is very much an outlier.

LoZ deserves a place at the top of the NES heap simply because it was just so ahead of its time. It was sort of the GTA3 of its day, as I see it. The game provided a go anywhere, do anything feel that had never been seen before, and wasn't really significantly revamped until GTA3 15+ years later. It truly created a whole world and crammed it into a cartridge. That's damned significant.