In fairness, Contra WOULD be in my top 10 NES games, but would it be above Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man 2? I think not! I will say that it's impressive that it got a whole generation of kids to memorize an arbitrary sequence of arrows and letters. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select, start, anyone?