91. Nuts & Milk (Hudson Soft, PC (Famicom), 1983)

Nuts & Milk is a single screen platformer with puzzle elements, originally released on Japanese PCs in 1983 it was ported to the Famicom in July 1984, making it the first 3rd party game to be released on the system. And if I'm only comparing it to the Nintendo titles that came before it, it's the best game on the system. To be fair, Nintendo had only released ports of their arcade games, a handful of sports titles, and a few light gun games at this point (Super Mario Bros. wouldn't release until the following year), so it's not exactly a tough competition to win.

Nuts & Milk has you controlling a pink blob character (Milk) and the objective of each level is to collect all the fruit on the screen and get to the exit while avoiding the enemies (Nuts). The graphics and music are all very simple but cute. There is some light puzzle flavor in that you sometimes have to think about the proper way to approach a jump, as some fruit initially appears to be impossible to get, but there's nothing super difficult in terms of brainpower here. Enemy AI is very simple and easy to predict, plus you are able to jump over enemies (though it isn't very easy to do so).

The jumping is ok. The basic jump is fine and very 1984, but there are also trampolines that I could never reliable cause to bounce me higher (you have to push jump as you land on them like in Mario), though when they worked they were fun. The controls are a little finicky, but thankfully the game is not overly difficult, so I was able to breeze through the first 11 of the game's 50 levels pretty quickly.

4/5, a fun, simple single screen platformer