(ThyBlackMan.com) Growing up as a kid living on Jackson St. at the time, I would often come home from school to play video games, specifically Nintendo Entertainment System aka NES games and they bring back old memories from my childhood because I used to absolutely hate blowing the NES cartridges to actually make the game work because I would sometimes end up with a cut or two on my lips and would sometimes use alcohol to clean the cartridges to get them to actually work.
Here are the top 5 of the toughest NES games that I’ve ever played.
1. Werewolf – The Last Warrior: Back in the day, this game was definitely the toughest NES game that I’ve ever played because even though the first 3 stages were easy, but in stages 4-5 is where the game got much tougher as you had to jump so high to keep progressing in the stage and avoid getting hit by enemies that 
wanted to take you out very quickly. I actually credit this game for creating my fondness of the supernatural because I remember after beating the mid-boss at the beginning of the first level of the game and picked up the red “W” icon and transformed into Werewolf, the cutscene was definitely so badass I loved it so much. That cutscene is actually one of my favorite all time video game cutscenes.
2. Ninja Gaiden – I was a real big fan of the original Ninja Gaiden on The NES growing up because unlike the arcade and Sega Genesis versions which were basically beat ‘em ups, The NES version was much better because you can pick up various types of weapons like the traditional shrunken to the flame shield that protects the player from being harmed for about ten seconds. The first three stages were easy, but stages four through six were what made this game among the toughest NES games that I’ve ever played because there were so many death traps to avoid and not to mention avoiding getting killed by bosses like The Jaquio. This game is often credited as the first game to actually present the storyline with cut scenes and this has been emulated by many other gaming companies for the past three decades now.
3. After Burner – I remember playing this game so often back in the day and this game was so tough that it often gave me fits and the things that made this game so tough was that starting in stage 3, you had to avoid an enemy missile that was behind you from hitting you by either speeding up or doing a 360 turn to make the enemy missile miss hitting you and then starting on stage 10, you had to immediately shoot down enemy fighter ace jets that fired between 5-6 missiles at you at one time and I tell you, if you didn’t shoot down those enemy fighter ace jets quickly, you’d be shot down and crashed on to the ground.
4. Top Gun: The Second Mission – This game was so tough to beat when I would sometimes play this game because starting in stage 2, there were many death traps in the second portion of the stage in the form of stone pillars and also in stage 3 in the form of heavy thunderstorms and if you didn’t use your wits to avoid the clear and present dangers in front of you, you would definitely die and potentially get a “Game Over” One of the most difficult challenges to this game was safely landing the fighter jet on the warship because if you messed up on that part, you would also die from that as well.
5. Contra – Back in the late 1980s, Konami decided to create a run n’ gun game that was not only fun, but also tough. Konami decided to use the name “Contra” which is actually a play off of the real life Iran-Contra Scandal that almost took down notorious war criminal and white nationalist in Ronald Reagan. This game allowed you to choose from various weapons from the straight shooter, the three way shot, to the most powerful weapon in all of The Contra series in the laser. What made this game so tough was the fact that there were so many death traps in all the stages of the game from wall turrets & cannons in stage 1 shooting at you from all sides to alien mothers shooting alien babies out of their mouth to one hit kill you in stage 8. This game is definitely one of the best all-time NES games.
The Conclusion – Even though I don’t have an NES now doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped playing NES games because I still to this day enjoy playing those classic NES games that I grew up playing like Super Mario Bros and Tecmo Super Bowl via my computer.
Staff Writer; Kwame Shakir (aka Joe D.)