NES John Elway's Quarterback Cartridge

Anytime Tim Tebow was getting crap from John Elway, he should have just held up this game and not said a word. If he did want to say some words, it should be "this game sucks and you look like an idiot." I really don't remember a redeeming feature about this game, except it was some how fun in the arcade, probably because of Elway's joystick or something.

NES Tecmo Super Bowl Cartridge

No 300+ plays to choose from. No tricky control to master. Just pure unadulterated football with real player names. One of my roommates and I used to play cooperatively, with one of us playing defense and the other offense (we didn't want to get winded playing both ways). Strangely, I don't remember which side of the ball I was better at. 

NES Bases Loaded Cartridge

Upon further review, I am going to have to change the worst NES baseball game ever to Bases Loaded, simply for the fact that the reverse angle on hitting had to be the dumbest idea ever. Plus, after replaying some good old RBI Baseball, I realize now that the hitting was near perfect. Let me recount why I was considering RBI Baseball as the worst NES baseball game ever. While it did have actual player names, there were only 8 teams and did not include the best minor league team of all time, the Pittsburgh Pirates. There was no season mode, no playoffs, basically no replay value. Still, I rode Boston to as many wins as Theo Epstein did. The worst part of the actually game play was not being able to dive for balls on defense. And having the ball clunk off your head once in awhile. All baseball games for the NES had the curious situation of a defender being about twice as fast as a base runner. Suddenly these guys get out to the field and become the Flash? As you can see, I paid $0.79 for this used copy. Just checked online and that investment has lost be $0.78. Lame. You know what else sucked about Bases Loaded: it only said "JALECO" on the end of the cartridge, so when you had all your games nice and organized on a shelf, you couldn't tell what game this was.

NES Baseball Stars Cartridge

Ah, Baseball Stars, how do I love ye? Let me count the ways. All those years wasted playing RBI Baseball...until I was introduced to Baseball Stars in, of all places, college. We ended up having a pretty sophisticated Baseball Stars league between all the dudes on our dorm floor: celebrating after each victory; licking our wounds after each loss. This was, of course, after we kicked all of the ladies out for the night and finished playing quarters, beer pong, and/or [insert drinking game here]. Next to NCAA Football on the PlayStation and NHL '98 on the Sega, Baseball Stars was probably the game I played the most during the "best years of my life". OK, so I played a lot of Quake on the computer as well, but that was solo play, if you don't count playing online with other players and being in a clan (Low Ping Boozers forever!). Baseball Stars was unlike all of the other baseball games in terms of look and feel, then came the value-added extras that enabled said dorm floor to bond over something else besides studying moderately hard. How the cartridge battery was still able to retain data after 10 years was pretty much a miracle to me; I should have wrote my thesis on how the power problem could be solved using old NES game batteries. Thus, we didn't even need to use the original, somewhat silly teams since we could create our own, thereby leveling the playing field. On top of that was the ability to make player moves and track the most amazing stats until the ladies came back in the morning. This game was just light-years ahead of the competition and is as close as it comes to the perfect sports game. The sequel can best described as the Ghostbusters II of the gaming world: really no reason for them to exist in this world or another. Nevertheless, the varnish is too strong on the original to be tarnished by any association with sub-par second acts. Thank you, Baseball Stars, lowering my GPA and teaching me what is important in this world.