Batman

Sunsoft's Batman is a film tie-in that had no business being as good as it is. It takes Tim Burton's 1989 movie as its setting - Axis Chemicals, the streets, the cathedral - and builds a precise, unforgiving action platformer on top of it.

Batman moves with real weight: a wall jump, a sliding kick, a throwing weapon, and a punch that has to be timed rather than spammed. He takes three hits, which is enough to make you respect the level design but not enough to survive carelessness, and the stages are built around exact jumps to platforms you have to be already moving for. The cathedral ascent is the sequence everyone remembers, and the reason is that it is genuinely hard rather than cheap. On top of the level design is Naoki Kodaka's soundtrack, one of the strongest on the system, and the fact that the cartridge puts a real cinematic intro in front of a cartridge-sized game.

• ▸Wall jumps and timed attacks rather than a simple arcade rush
• ▸Three-hit health that makes every platform decision matter
• ▸Five stages following the film, ending with the cathedral climb
• ▸Naoki Kodaka soundtrack, widely ranked among the NES's best