Recommended by @Gare for this list.

I think many people are familiar with Little Samson and how even back in the day when retro games were far cheaper, it was ridiculously expensive. This is mainly due to it selling very poorly, only to receive a cult following years later. Sorry Mom, but I think I’ve gotta join the cult on this one.

Little Samson isn’t overtly revolutionary, unlike many beloved NES games. For this game, I think many would agree with the description of “Wonder Boy III combined with Castlevania III.” Certainly, this game takes a lot from the former (Multiple controllable characters, a few RPG elements) and a bit from the latter (Linear stages with a few branching paths, switching characters in-level). However, I think that misses a lot of why this game really works for me. To me, the biggest strength is how well the game is designed around pretty much any combination of your characters. The titular Samson is the all-rounder, the Dragon can fly but attacking and defense is sub-par, the Golem is slow but has the best attack and defense, and even the mouse, while very frail, is also very agile and can be surprisingly effective against some bosses. This isn’t everything that these characters can and can’t do, but it demonstrates the main choices a player will be making. You could fly over many gaps with the Dragon but abusing it too much could cause the Dragon to die which would result in you losing it for the level, inevitably causing problems down the line. The Golem can take a ton of shots before dying, but it also is the only character that can walk on spikes, so is it worth it to use it as a tank all the time instead of waiting for an area with spikes? Which character should I heal or increase the max health of? No matter what though, the level design feels well made for any character(s). What ties this together is that every character goes away permanently before being restored on a game over, which honestly makes replaying levels a little more fun, as your new try at a level will most likely be different from the last. It also creates a natural requirement for players to use each character to the fullest to succeed.

Every character goes away, that is, except Samson himself. He will always be playable. Honestly, I think this was a bit of a missed opportunity. This means the strategy is always to switch to Samson if your other guys are low on health, especially on boss fights. It also means that one of the strengths of the mouse, running on walls and ceilings, is basically null and void as Samson can do these as well and you might as well just use him instead in most cases. It’s not that bad, especially since the revival potions kinda negate the issue, but I do think the game would be better if Samson was treated the same as the other members, although a few challenges would need to be tweaked to compensate.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that this game has an easy mode! It’s far from the best implementation of a difficulty mode in a game (That goes to Armored Core: For Answer and Wario Land 4), but it is well made overall. There are some distinct but not ridiculous tweaks to enemy placement, health, bosses and more. Usually, I wouldn’t care about this kind of thing, and while this game is far from the hardest NES game, it’s difficult enough (Especially near the end, which seems to be a rule for NES games) that I think this option was a good idea.

This was a late NES game, and it’s one of the prettier games on the console. The backgrounds look really good, and the animations are pretty smooth for the NES. This game was released two years after the SNES came out, but I feel it’s still worth mentioning. However, it seems the music took a hit as a result. There aren’t actual stage themes here, but character themes. If you’re playing as Samson, you’ll always hear his singular theme, and the same goes for every other party member. The music itself is solid, but not enough to stave off the repetition.

Overall though, this is undoubtedly one of the best games of the 8-bit era. Is it worth thousands of dollars? Uh… maybe if I was a millionaire, I’d shell out that kind of cash. Although, I did win a bet with @Gare, who said he’d give me a million dollars. I gotta collect soon… anyway, 9/10, definitely closer to an 8 though.