Good Nintentions: A 30th Anniversary Tribute to the Nintendo Entertainment System by Jeremy Parish
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you’re looking for a pretty thorough cataloging of NES games, this is a great resource. Most games have at least a brief couple of sentences about them, and many have a couple pages.
Some of the best material is near the end of the book. There’s a section about games and other items that capture the NES spirit without actually being of the NES era (Axiom Verge, Shovel Night, Retro Game Challenge), a couple short pieces about some outsider, weird material like Worlds of Power books and so on, and then a section that’s simply memories of people playing NES, which was easily the best part and made me think that this was the real heart of the matter. There are lots of things that collect the facts and rumors about games, their development and inspiration, but not quire enough material that collects player experiences. I’m a lot more interested in hearing the story of how someone beat Dracula as a kid than hearing about parallax scrolling or something like that.