NES/Famicom



"The fun cartridge machine!"

Basically Famicom is Japanese version of your NES. It got two worth mentioning add-ons that were forerunners for future gaming trends.

First one was Famicom Modem. Even if it's quite primitive for today standards it allowed gamers to go online which was pretty revolutionary at the time. It was never used for online gameplay but provided content such as game reviews and previews, cheat codes, news, weather forecasts or even banking transactions and stock trading. Famicom Network idea was later expanded in SNES Satellaview.

Second add-on is rather short lived Famicom Disk System. The biggest issue at the time was with saving your game progress. First generation of cartridges were ROM only and lacked battery-backed memory which was too expensive at the time. Famicom Data Recorder introduced by Nintendo allowed to save content of few games on cassette tapes but it's manufacturing cost was too high. That's how FDS was born. Games that were released for it had a save feature also FDS had additional RAM memory and could generate better sound. Games came in two ways. You could buy pre-written disk or get some blank disks and go to one of those Disk Writer vending machines and choose games by yourself. You could use the same disk and rewrite it again. A lot of games that were released for FDS were cheaper re-releases of cart titles. Many of games that were released first for FDS were later ported to cartridge format when battery-backup memory get less expensive. Outside the Japan they usually came with implemented password system. Game prices were the reason why FDS retained some popularity even after Nintendo abandoned this technology in a favour of more reliable cartridges. FDS even had it's official mascot, Disk-kun (Mr. Disk or Disk Boy in English).

These are the games that didn't quite make it out West, but are still worth checking out. Whether you own a clone system, an actual Famicom, a converter for your NES, or maybe just looking for ROMs, here's the list for you.