Best NES sports games – Excellent blasts from the past

If you want to rediscover your inner child, the best way might be to boot up these classic NES sports games.

You’re feeling nostalgic. You want to play the best NES sports games. Or maybe you just want to read about them until the clock hits 5.30 and you can stop pretending to work on that deck. But how well do they really hold up today?

8 bits of information isn’t much. But within those narrow margins the Nintendo Entertainment System’s greatest creators conjured worlds for an early generation of games to lose themselves in. And in that landscape, a games industry where the rules weren’t close to being drawn up yet, the sports game genre took form.

Playing these 8-bit sports games is, let’s face it, an exercise in nostalgia. They haven’t aged like those artful 16-bit sprites that came after them, their controls are often stiff and their level of interaction very basic. But within their cartridges lie parts of our childhood. And that’s enough, isn’t it?

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If you want more retro sports goodness, check our list of best Sega Genesis sports games. Of course, we have a list of overall best NES games too.

10 best NES games ever

The Nintendo Entertainment System saved the Western games industry, and these are the ten best games on the console.

If we’re to be brutally honest, there aren’t too many NES (that’s Nintendo Entertainment System, in case you didn’t know) games genuinely worth going back to play in 2022. Yes, there are plenty of genuinely good games, and a bunch of nostalgic ones. It’s lovely to see how the genres we enjoy today began. But, for the most part, you’ve played better games since.

If you’re going back to the NES today, maybe with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, then we’ve listed the ten best games you need to revisit, limiting selection to one per series, with a minor exception. The NES has some incredibly nostalgic games to enjoy, but these are still good whether it’s your first or thousandth time.

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If you want to see more lists of classic retro games, make sure to take a look at our list of best SNES games and best Sega Genesis games for the ultimate 16-bit showdown. For more Nintendo, make sure to flick through our list of best Nintendo 64 games.