There are a lot of lists out there of the "best" games for the Nintendo Entertainment System and all of them are of course left a lot up to the individual writer's opinion. It is extremely subjective. Basing the "best" in terms of sales would be a bit unfair since a lot of that comes down to marketing and doesn't necessarily mean that the game was good. Take E.T. on the Atari 2600 for example: That game sold like hotcakes because of the movie hype but it is generally considered to be one of the worst, if not THE worst game of all time on any console.
The usual suspects on these lists is the Mario games, Zelda, Metroid, and of course Castlevania (I can still hear the song that plays when you die for the 11,000th time) but I think it is a bit of a crime to not include Mike Tyson's Punch Out, because this game was so different than any other game on the NES yet is is just such a brilliant title.
One thing to keep in mind is that when this game was released Mike Tyson was a phenom. He was almost god-like in his fame and since we didn't have the internet or (for most of us) even access to his fights he retained an aura of untouchable fame that couldn't really be captured by most other athletes.
We didn't really know what to expect when firing this game up, I thought that we might be able to play as Mike Tyson, which of course is not the case but instead you play as "Mac" who is so small that he really don't look like he belongs in a boxing ring.
Just like in any game, this one starts out extremely easy, especially in the first fight against "Glass Joe" who has a record of 1-99. You would have to be truly asleep at the wheel to lose against Joe, because you can block or dodge any of his telegraphed punches. He is also extremely easy to KO.
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By the way Tyson admitted in an interview that he couldn't beat Glass Joe
Then, as you would expect the game gets progressively more difficult until you are facing a champion on a certain belt.
There were only 3 tiers, and there were a couple opponents that you would face a number of times. One of them is Glass Joe, who has improved a great deal since the last time you saw him and I thought this was a great twist in the game design. You go into that match with the same strategy as the first time and Joe would put you on your ass, quick.
You kind of just had to feel out the next opponent and figure out their "tells" and also that timing associated with it. The first fighter to give me a really hard time was "Great Tiger" because he would do this thing where he would fly around the ring so quickly and while it seems so simple then I finally figured it out, I kept trying to dodge this rather than block. My reasoning as a young kid was that blocking normally didn't work very well in all the fights leading up to that as any "power move" that your opponent had - and this was clearly Tiger's power move - would go right through your block.
Some of the fights ended up being crazy difficult, including and probably especially the fight against the big man himself, Mike Tyson.
Mike's tells were extremely slight (he would wink for one of them) and then the timing on the dodge that you did after that would have to be extremely precise in order to avoid massive damage. I don't know how many times I had to do this match before I eventually won, but it was a lot of them.
While I don't remember exactly, I want to say that you had to play this game all the way through as there was no savegame feature. The entire notion behind savegames was a new concept back in those days. Maybe there was a password - I don't remember.
Anyway, this game was fantastic and I do on occasion revisit it to have a play. There have been some remakes but I never got into those because the first game didn't need great graphics to be incredible, it was already perfect.
If you want the ROM to try out on your PC you can get it for free HERE