Review by gamer8r

"Would be the greatest system ever, but it's so flawed and unreliable..."

Ahh...the NES. The reason video games exist today. If not for this system, the whole industry would have ended in 1984, but a little company called Nintendo took a huge risk, and is now a household name

okay, it may not look like the sleek, black systems of today, its big, gray, and clunky, but it doesn't look bad. The controllers are easy to work (but with two buttons how hard can it be), but this glorious system gets MANY points off for it's HUGE design flaw that makes it hard to impossible to run the games. Stores were nervous about adding video game consoles to their inventory because they weren't selling, so Nintendo decided to make it look more like a VCR. It loads from the front, but that isn't the problem. The massive, crippling flaw with the NES lies in it's interior design. The cartridges and system collect a lot of dust, and the system is very sensitive to it, meaning lots of cleaning cartridges to make them work. Oh, by the way, if your games don't work, people probably tell you "blow on the contacts in the cartridge". Please, no matter what you do, DO NOT blow on them. This causes the contacts to corrode, making the game even harder to work. The NES itself also suffers from a flaw with the connector that you plug the cartridges into. The pins slowly wear out and begin to bend backward, meaning that the problems that you'll have getting games to work will get progressively worse until finally it doesn't work at all, and you need to either install a new connector, take your NES apart, and replace it (PLEASE, if you don't know how to do this, have someone who knows how do it for you), or get a whole new NES, which probably isn't worth it because that one's probably worn out too. When I got my NES a few years ago, it didn't work, but it pays off to just buy the part. I also have some trouble with the cartridge holder getting worn out, and so the games don't go down far enough. I don't know if you can find that part.

games: 10/10
WOW!! how many games can you make for one system? There are thousands of games out there. Now I'm not absolutely positive about this, but I remember hearing something about the NES having more games than any system ever made. Now, the quality of these games depends on the programmer, but the games get a 10/10 because of the huge library. Now, here's another flaw, the save feature in some of the games. Those games that do have a save feature (don't worry, there aren't many) are VERY sensitive, they are CONSTANTLY deleting files. The battery in the cartridges eventually wears out, and needs to be changed. Now, I'm not going to rave about this, but think how annoying this is. You've been trying to beat, say, the legend of Zelda for a month, and you're almost there. Just as you're about to win, the system crashes. The screen freezes, and you need to reset. You may think "okay, no problem, I just saved", only to find out that all of the saved information on the cartridge has been completely erased. Before I got my new connector, I had to stop playing the game after about ten minutes.

capabilities 8/10
Now again, the quality depends on the game, and some of these games have pretty horrible graphics, but some of them (Shadowgate, for instance) are pretty amazing.

overall 8/10
This is a GREAT system, but the annoying problems you'll have bring it down. You'll also need some space to store these games, the cartridges are huge, but I guess it takes up less space than one of those big cases for the new disk systems like Gamecube.

I definitely suggest that you buy one of these, despite the flaws. I have heard about a top-loading NES that wasn't supposed to have all fo the problems with cartridges, but heard that it overheats easily. I don't really know because all I have is the front loader, and that's what I'm sticking with.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10 | Originally Posted: 08/26/04

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