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The NES has a few games that are still some of my faves despite also being a bit too young for the heyday. Castlevania 1. Play it. It is in my top 5 easily. I think I get out of it what people who.like dark souls get out of that. It's an action platformer but you need to be slow and methodical. It rocks hard. Contra is amazing, Ninja Gaiden rules, of course the Mario games are good. And when people tell you stuff like Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania are super hard, it's cause they secretly don't want you platong awesome games. It takes less time to adjust to what these games demand than to get through the intro of most modern games. Retries don't set you nearly as far back as people like to say. Castlevania even has unlimited continues.

Excitebike is a game i can still pick up and enjoy for an hour or so here and there, Clu Clu Land is borderline mindless but fun to control and kinda feels like a proto Katamari. I played the hell out of black box NES baseball and soccer via the OG animal crossing as a kid (it's how I played a lot of these for the first time).

I would recommend playing like it's 1988. Draw your own maps on grid paper. Have a notebook. Read scans of the manual. If you've never beaten Zelda 1 or 2, do yourself a favor and try it out this way. It'll take you a while and if feels really cool and more immersive in a different way than anything newer cause in a way there is less artifice in map making yourself as you venture into the unknown and slowly become familiar with a place based on your own personal notes. It becomes YOUR hyrule and your own imagination starts to really seep on top of the simple graphics cause when you've written notes on where everything is, you naturally think of why its there for yourself. Having the whole world fully visualized, voice acted and mapped before you doesnt hit the same. It's impressionistic and vague enough you cant help but project onto and into it.

I would try giving any of these games a real chance, treat em like real games, I think a lot of people just try em off a list of emulators cause they have heard of em and maybe give em a half hour. Yeah, you'll die a lot and hace to restart a lot. You exchange that reptition for the game not stringing you along for hours with tutorials or story bullshit or being so gradual eith difficulty you dread replaying the game cause the beginning is boring. Instead you have to learn the game and when you do, it's prettt even quality across the board and only takes an hour or two to beat. It's legit way easier to git gud at Ninja Gaiden than any map game. All you need to do to improve at Ninja Gaiden is keep playing it and be capable of observing things.