Action Games are one of the things the Nintendo Entertainment System is genuinely for. The ones worth playing start with The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man 2.
The machine that set the rules. Almost every genre convention people still use was either invented or standardised on the NES, usually under severe technical constraints that forced the design to be tight.
This is one of its strengths. Side-scrolling platformers and action games built around one perfect verb, and arcade-derived difficulty that respects memorisation. Levels teach without a word of text because there was no room for text.
Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.
Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.
The Legend of Zelda is the usual first answer, and there are 9 in the library we cover.
Yes — it is one of the things the machine is known for, and there are 9 in the library we cover.
A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.
No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.
From the games this site covers on the Nintendo Entertainment System, matched against hand-mapped gameplay categories rather than a storefront's genre tag. A page only exists where there are at least four, which is why some console and genre combinations have no page at all.
Or browse the whole Nintendo Entertainment System library.