Simple two player high score games

[DRW]

I'm looking for some NES/Famicom games that can be played by two players simultaneously.

I'm thinking about some small, simple, infinite-loop high score games. Like "Mario Bros." or "Balloon Fight". Not something with an actual goal like "Contra" or "Bubble Bobble".
Where you can compete with each other for score, but where it's not your goal to actively defeat the other player. (So, no games like "Bomberman", "Soccer" or a fighting game.)

And I'm looking for games with typical "standard" gameplay. No puzzle, sport, "Breakout"- or "Pole Position"-like games or anything that's too bizarre. I'm thinking more of a game where you control a character in a sideview or top-down level and where there are opponents and stuff.

Do you know any of these?
Famicom-only games are also welcome.

I already know:
"Clu Clu Land"
"Ice Climber"
"Ms. Pac-Man" unlicensed version

[Kasumi]

I don't see how Bubble Bobble is different from Balloon Fight or Mario Bros. Defeat all enemies, get to the next level. Are you hatin' on it because it has a credit roll? Does it have too many levels? Too few? The exclusion seems arbitrary.

Ice Climber counts despite its goal of scaling all the mountains?

Is Snow Bros. too goal oriented like Bubble Bobble?

Does Donkey Kong Jr. Math count? It's almost like a sports game, you're not exactly competing for a score, and "defeating" by making the other player get killed doesn't help.

Joust must count if Balloon Fight does.

Marble Madness is probably not top-down enough, nor standard enough.

Does Smash T.V. have too much of a goal?

I mean... no sports games is one thing, but no anything that's too bizarre? What's that mean? How much of a goal is too much? I really, really don't get these lists. It seems like it'd be so much easier for you to just find a complete list of two player simultaneous games and run down it for such a narrow guidelines.

[tokumaru]

A day in DRW's life: "I'm bored, I want to play some cool NES games I have never played before. Let me think of a type of game I like, and then I'll introduce all these arbitrary limitations based purely on my personal taste and see if those suckers at NESDEV can come up with some good titles for me."

Hey, I'm all for discovering new games, and when a console has so many games as the NES does, the chances of there being some obscure gems are pretty high, but requesting lists with these ridiculously specific and arbitrary requirements? Is this really the best way to look for new games? If you have time one day, maybe you should grab one of those complete ROM sets of 6000+ files and open one by one and take note of whatever catches your attention. With newer games this would be a bad approach because there's so much crap before the actual gameplay starts, but it might just work for the NES.

[tepples]

Perhaps what DRW is really trying to do in topics like this and the later Homebrews with female characters* is prove the existence of an accidental gap conspicuous by its absence from the NES library. The way to prove a negative is by exhaustion, and asking people familiar with a wide variety of games exhausts the library.** If a gap is discovered, the next step is to figure out whether it's caused by hardware limits or biases of licensed developers' imagination.


* That topic led me to this bump.
** And our patience.

[DRW]

O.k., fine, I'll tell you why I asked these questions:

I wanted to have a good variety of various different games in my collection.

I'm not the kind of guy who buys 10 nearly identical space shooters. One is enough for me. But it should be the one that fits best for me. And since "Gradius" is too dependent on items (especially the speed item) and since it doesn't have unlimited continues and since the bosses are very boring in there, I needed another game. And "R-Type" just doesn't exist for the NES.

Similarly, I want to have a good variety of settings. "Mario" and "Zelda" play in fantasy worlds. And "Mega Man" plays in some fictitious future where advanced robots exist. And all three have these comic book graphics.
So, I wanted a game for my collection that plays in our normal real world in the present day (well, present day when it came out) and where you don't have to fight monsters or aliens or robots and a game that looks serious and not like a cute comic.
Today's games have a huge collection of everything, but sometimes, it's hard to find specific topics in NES games. And even if you find them, it's not always guaranteed that you like the game.

I finally discovered that the whole GoodNES collection is actually available for download, so I stopped asking and indeed looked through basically every game in existence.
There, I found games like "Cross Fire", where you play a soldier in the real world, even with named cities and countires, and fight against other soldiers. And I know now that there's no NES space shooter that matches my taste better than "Over Horizon".

And now that I've seen all of these games, I see that there really isn't any good game with a female action hero. All of the characters in the good games are either men. Or the woman is just part of a group where the main character is a man again. Or it's a genre that doesn't interest me (like "Legend of the Ghost Lion", a turn-based RPG, which is totally not my taste).

Now, if there was a complete list of homebrew games, not including one million tech demos, believe me, I would search for the game myself. But if there isn't, I have to ask other people if they know of a good game with a female action heroine that isn't hidden in a space suit or that is a movie character or some five year old child.

[tepples]

Thanks. Now that I can see where you're coming from, I understand it's a little bit of both: you want a broad sample of games to play, and you want to demonstrate accidental gaps when you can't find one.

As for a catalog of finished homebrew games, unfortunately, I'm not aware of anyone who has done that sort of curation. Nintendo did so for licensed games, and the gaming press did so for unlicensed games released prior to 1997. (I set January 1, 1997, as the boundary because it's after Sunday Funday but before the relase of NESticle.) If you want to restrict it to games sold as unlicensed NES Game Paks in 1997 and later, NintendoAge.com (no affiliation with Nintendo) might be able to help you with that.

EDIT (2021): The NintendoAge community has since moved to Video Game Sage.

[DRW]

I don't want to demonstrate anything. Since I'm aware that my rules are very specific, this wouldn't work for a general analysis anyway. After all, there are games, for example, with female characters ("The Krion Konquest", "Layla", "Legend of the Ghost Lion", "The Guardian Legend"), just that I don't want these specific games and am still looking for something else. So, demonstrating a general, objective status wouldn't work anyway.

About NintendoAge: But this would require to ask on a forum as well, right? They don't have a general list, do they?

[tepples]

If you search first, you may not have to ask. See currently available and sold out homebrew and aftermarket price guide.

[DRW]

Thanks. I looked through the links. Unfortunately, I didn't really find anything.