Zombie Nationġ991 - Meldac of America/Live Planning - Purchase It even included a tilt function, although that didn’t seem to do much. Considering that the NES had little to offer pinball fans, it actually wasn’t such a bad game. Pinball Quest also includes three pure pinball games without RPG elements. If you don’t have enough points to purchase the item you want, you can attempt to steal it - but fail, and you’ll be knocked back a level. Use your ball to defeat enemies and advance, while purchasing upgraded flippers and bumpers from a shop between rounds. Pinball and role-playing are two genres begging to be made into a hybrid, right? The RPG mode of Pinball Quest consists of several multi-screen pinball games. The baseball and fighting mechanics are both rudimentary, but fun enough to warrant playing the game. If you knock enough robots out of a game, you win automatically. If you manage to beat a robot enough times to destroy it, it is out of the game permanently. If you play a season, you can purchase upgraded weapons between games. BaseWars has four different robot types, each with their own skills and special attacks. Have you ever wished that baseball had a bit more to offer, like robots for players, and death matches to decide close plays? Well, BaseWars is the game for you. If the spinner lands on a book, though, you’ll have to take a Bible quiz - just to remind you that you’re playing a religious game. A spinner tells you how many spaces you can advance, and most of the time you end up playing an inane mini-game that requires you to do something like collect vegetables while throwing hammers at evil symbols. Bible Buffet has to be the oddest game ever released by this company, though. Wisdom Tree made a name for itself making Mario and Zelda clones with religious overtones for kids with overbearing parents who wouldn’t let them play the originals. I seem to remember what when Nintendo Power mentioned this game, they wrote that it would have a Ouija board component as well, but that’s nowhere to be found. Following this, Taboo predicts your winning lottery numbers - unless you live in a state that didn’t have a lottery in 1989, in which case you’re out of luck. You enter a question, and the game predicts the answer for you with a virtual Tarot card reading. This “game” does just two things, and you can see everything it has to offer in about ten minutes. No list of the strangest NES games would be complete without a mention of Taboo: the Sixth Sense. You can find some of the weirdest games ever released for any system on the NES, and these are my top ten picks. Games were not called “cartridges” - that reminded people too much of the Atari 2600 - instead, they were “game paks.” Nintendo’s gamble paid off, and the NES became such a mainstream success in the United States that before long, game makers were releasing titles for nearly every conceivable niche. The system was shaped like a VCR, and even operated like one. Nintendo made many calculated decisions when releasing the NES in the United States to make Americans think of the system less as a video game console, and more like an interactive VCR - something that was practically standard living room equipment. The NES arrived in the United States at a strange time while it was obvious to Nintendo that video games were not going away any time soon, the video game crash of the early 1980s left many Americans feeling that games were a fad whose time had come.