Earlier this week, we paid homage to Nintendo's Family Computer (also known as the Famicom, or the Nintendo Entertainment System to our North American readers) in celebration of its 30th birthday. We talked about how the hardware began, about what made it tick, and about how Nintendo and its fans have kept the memory alive, but one thing we didn't spend a lot of time with were the games themselves.

To remedy that, several Ars staffers are offering up their thoughts on their most well-remembered Nintendo games. They don't make the hardware anymore, but we expect to keep enjoying these games for at least the next 30 years.

Ice Hockey

Simplicity is beautiful. So although it’s not the most feature-laden game, Ice Hockey spent more time in my aunt’s NES than any other title. Whereas many of today’s sports games lose their playability within a year due to ever-changing rosters or out-of-date features, Ice Hockey never seemed to age. And if it did, the game improved. (Playing as USSR or Czechoslovakia is cool these days, right?)

Ice Hockey didn’t have many rules: no icing, fight losers go to the penalty box. There were six teams to choose from but they differed in aesthetics only. The game was won by creating a line-up of four players by rotating three distinct player types—thick/powerful/slow, slender/weak/fast, or all-around average. Holiday tournaments between family members became an exercise in self-awareness and game planning. Playing the younger cousin who loads up on speeders hoping for a constant fast break? Two Mario-looking fatsos anchoring your defense will do the trick. Bad at aiming that loaded slapshot? The tiny guy (and his easier wrap-around ability) is the right play. Ice Hockey was every bit the strategy game Tetris was, except it came with Zambonis and blood on the ice.

Ice Hockey arrived in 1988, and it wasn’t long until Tecmo Super Bowl brought both league and player licenses to sports games. While the trend of generic players didn’t catch on (unless legally obligated like the NCAA), Ice Hockey still made an impact. Maybe Vince Vaughn lets Gretzky off easy in Swingers if not for hockey video game fights starting here. And who knows if we’d have FoxTrax or whatever NBCSports/Versus used if Ice Hockey didn’t make puck handlers glow. Hockey continues to be an infinitely playable video game sport (from Wayne Gretzky 3D Hockey to NHL ’14), and that trend starts here. —Nathan Mattise

Double Dragon

It’s hard to believe that when I was a kid my parents let me play a video game that involved picking up random objects—including oil drums, whips, and baseball bats—and engaging in street fights with whoever challenged me on my path. Still, Double Dragon, which was released in 1988 (when I was six-years-old), remains a fond memory for me, as the pinnacle of the beat ‘em up genre. Sure, there’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Contra (both also favorites), but Double Dragon remains pretty uncomplicated as an entry point into the side scrolling combat world. You walk through and beat up dudes—that’s pretty much it. (Although sometimes you do fight ladies—and even now I still feel conflicted about laying the smack down on virtual females.)

There’s even some challenging bits, like at the end of Mission 1, where you have to fight a boss on a treadmill for no reason whatsoever. (Pro tip: just knock him off into the pit below!) Of course, it all becomes worthwhile once you reach Mission 4 at the end of the game and have to fight shirtless emo dudes in a mysterious skull-laden catacombs area. Oh yeah, and you totally get to make out with Marian at the end! After 25 years, this game still is fun to play. —Cyrus Farivar

The Battle of Olympus

Nintendo mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto recently stated that of all the games he's made, the only one that disappointed him was the 1987 title, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Lovers of Zelda II (like my colleague Andrew Cunningham) may cringe at that statement, but instead they should play a game that in some ways was a blatant ripoff of Zelda II, and in other ways a vast improvement over it. I'm talking about The Battle of Olympus, a Nintendo Entertainment System game published by Broderbund in Japan in March 1988 and in the US in December 1989.

Zelda II coupled excruciatingly boring top-down travel with pretty good side-scrolling dungeon action. The Battle of Olympus—occasionally referred to as The Adventure of Link in Greece—is played entirely as a side-scroller and could be dismissed as a copy of Zelda II if weren't so much more fun.

The Battle of Olympus takes the player, Orpheus, through ancient Greece as he attempts to rescue his lost love, Helene, from Hades in the underworld. The difficulty is high, but the superior battle mechanics make fighting monsters more fun and less frustrating than in Zelda II. You may die often, but it rarely feels cheap.

Zelda-inspired exploration and item-gathering ensure that The Battle of Olympus has more to draw the player in than simply slaying monsters. There are even moments of exhilaration reminiscent of the original Legend of Zelda, such as when Orpheus gains the Sandals of Hermes, allowing him to walk on the ceiling, or when he buys Poseidon's Ocarina and uses it to summon a dolphin that can be ridden to new lands.

Orpheus interacts frequently with the gods and fights monsters familiar to readers of Greek mythology, like the Hydra, Cyclops, Centaur, Minotaur, Cerberus, and Hades. But there's always a Zelda feel, with cryptic messages from the people you meet: "I've heard that there is something hidden high up in the trees," one non-player character says, while another advises, "Never hit the pavement of the third pillar by the seashore."

Don't hate me for dissing Zelda II. I've played every Zelda title, beaten nearly all of them, and I may well be the most obsessive Zelda fan on the Ars staff. But if you want to play the one true side-scrolling Zelda—it's not Zelda II, it's The Battle of Olympus. —Jon Brodkin

Dragon Warrior

I was 11 when I first set foot as an unknown and forgotten descendant of a great hero into Tantegel Castle, standing before King Lorik, learning about the evils of the Dragonlord. 23 years later, I can remember as I took my first tenuous steps into the great wide world carrying my bamboo stick as I came upon my first slime. I also recall with amazing clarity the feeling I got as I put the Axe Knight, who guarded Erdrick's Armor, to sleep and was able to beat him after about 50 tries. (Similarly, I remember my father being totally confused as to what I was sooo excited about). Up until that point in time, video games had been mostly twitchy affairs, dodging ghosts, collecting coins, and "running" on a big pad with odd red and blue circles in it. Dragon Warrior changed all that for me.

In Dragon Warrior, strategy ruled the day with each encounter, forcing you to decide upon a course of action. (There were only four, so it wasn't deep strategy). It was thought and attention to the story that allowed one to advance, to level up, and then to rescue the princess–and then to realize you were only half-way through the game.

For many players in the US, this was the first introduction to console role-playing games (Final Fantasy didn't arrive until one year later). No complex character sheets, in-depth rule books, Cheetos, or Mountain Dew were required to dive into this manner of story telling, although the latter were considered good form to have on hand. The simplified format opened up the RPG genre to a whole new audience and undoubtedly helped hook many newcomers to that type of gaming. While the story would seem trite and cliché by today's standards, the original Dragon Warrior wrote the first book on console RPGs and put the game company Enix on the map. (Enix's later corporate cohort Square would break new ground and introduce what would much later become the other half of RPG story clichés in its epic Final Fantasy VI.)

With the NES turning 30 this week, I still vividly remember the feeling of awesomeness that was brought about by this simple new type of video game many years later. —Matt Ford

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

I've long been a proponent of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, despite the gallons of Haterade dumped on it every day by the Jon Brodkins of the world. For people not familiar with the game, it occupies a position in the Zelda pantheon not drastically different from Super Mario Bros. 2's position in the Mario franchise: it's the NES sequel that gets less love than the original game or later follow-ups, the title that contributed a few elements to later games' DNA but doesn't have the same support from critics or gamers. Why, even Shigeru Miyamoto mentioned the game in passing at this year's E3 as the one that disappointed him the most.

In spite of it all, this is a game I'll still defend. I bought the Virtual Console version for the 3DS after reading Miyamoto's comments, and while it's entirely possible that I just need to take my rose-colored glasses off, I still think it's a lot of fun.

The overhead exploration from the original Zelda is still a part of this game, but it's a much smaller component of the gameplay this time around. Run into a monster on the world map or enter one of the game's caves, towns, or palaces, and Zelda 2 becomes a sidescrolling action-platformer that requires precise jumping, swordplay, and resource management. Experience points and a leveling system bring an RPG flavor to the game, decades before shoehorning RPG elements into everything became the norm.

It's not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination. Same-y towns filled with inscrutable NPCs make it difficult to figure out just where you're supposed to go next. Grinding levels and magic potions can be tiresome and frustrating. The game is also unapologetically difficult, as only old-school video games can be. For those willing to forgive its flaws, though, it remains the most adventurous title in the Zelda canon this side of Majora's Mask. —Andrew Cunningham

Bionic Commando

"I'll talk about the person I met when I was young…"

Thus starts the intro to Bionic Commando, a 1988 NES platformer based on a 1987 arcade game. Loosely cast as a sequel to 1985's Commando, Bionic Commando has the player assume the role of the spiky-haired Captain Ladd Spencer, whose distinguishing capabilities are his awesome extendable bionic arm, and his inability to jump. The game was one of the first NES titles I owned, and it blew my mind. The main gameplay hook was that players had to grapple their way over obstacles with their bionic arm—you could swing from things to avoid enemies or soar over pits, but the thing that stuck with me the hardest was the awesome and awesomely-disjointed story, such as it is.

You, Captain Spencer, are sent into enemy territory to rescue Super Joe, the titular hero of the game's nominal prequel, Commando. The game's structure is somewhat non-linear in that the levels can be played in a variety of orders, although some ways work far better than others. The "enemy" is a weirdly fascist bunch of guys called the "Badds," who sure do look and act an awful lot like Nazis. The game's disjointed story is revealed as the player intercepts and decodes radio transmissions at various points throughout the level, and the dialog is filled with typos and hilariously mangled, mistranslated English.

The best part, of course, is at the end when the player finally rescues Super Joe, and encounters The Badds' resurrected leader, "The Master"—who looks like Hitler. After you blow up Hitler's The Master's super-weapon, you get to fire a rocket launcher at his head, and his head violently explodes.

To 10-year old me, this was basically the greatest thing I'd ever seen, and the broken English and typos gave it a magical, mystical feeling. Of course, years later when the Internet came to town I learned the truth: the Japanese release of Bionic Commando actually had been all about blowing up Nazis, and the US release had had all of its Nazi iconography and names stricken out and replaced with generic images.

But they didn't pull out the part where you blow up Hitler. And that's why this game is awesome. —Lee Hutchinson

Listing image by Digital Spy