Battle Kid 2 is the best NES homebrew game ever made. It’s superior to the vast majority of retail NES games and probably better than the vast majority of games ever made. But if there’s a game I want to have that top spot, it’s a much less intimidating game that pretty much anyone can have fun with immediately with no unreasonable skill needed for an incredibly difficult game, no time commitment to going on a lengthy quest, and not even having to buy some weird rare old homebrew cartridge. When someone asks me what homebrew to play, I say Streemerz.

Just stop reading this right now, go to fauxgame.com, download the ROM, boot it up in Mesen, and you’ll be having fun faster than you would by actually finishing this article. There is literally no other purpose of this article besides breaking down barriers to get you to click off this article and play the game for a couple minutes.

Here’s the deal. Streemerz is based on the eponymous Action 52 game. It’s a fast, flowy platformer where you shoot a sort of grappling hook out and use your upwards momentum to dodge stuff and reach platforms. It’s challenging. It’s replayable. It’s hilarious.

But Tyler, I’m busy!

No you’re not. The fastest speedrun completion of Streemerz is less than 4 minutes. That isn’t using crazy glitches or insane strats, that’s basically how long it takes to run from one end of the game to the other. Realistically it will probably take you an hour or two the first time you play, but once you’ve played it once and know what’s going on, you’ll be able to run through it in less than 15 minutes. And you’ll want to.

But Tyler, I heard it’s hard!

Git gud and stop embarrassing yourself. You’re diving deep into NES not Xbox 360. But even if you suck, I won’t judge you and neither will Streemerz, because it has frequent checkpoints and infinite continues! You can just bash your head at the same screen until you get through it. There’s no bosses. There’s no repeating things you’ve already done. There’s basically nowhere to get stuck.

But Tyler, I don’t want to commit to buying a game!

It’s free. Like absolutely free and always has been. No demo, no “free version”. Go download it right now. It doesn’t even have an individual release, so you won’t feel like you’re playing the dirty poor people version of the game because it’s only ever been bundled with other games or distributed as a ROM.

But Tyler, I only play physical games!

You are impossible to please, but you’re also in luck! Action 53: Volume 1 has Streemerz as the headline game. It’s kind of hard to find. There’s also Limited Edition that came out at the same time that comes in a fancy clear cartridge. I mean, it’s limited, but limited to 100 in homebrew terms means basically nothing so go get it you collector you. It’s even going to be on the upcoming Action 53: Volume 4 because it’s that good.

But Tyler, something about emulators!

Checkmate. Streemerz was originally a flash game ported to NES. You don’t even need to download anything to play it: https://www.kongregate.com/games/MrPodunkian/streemerz/. But I mean you should probably just download the NES game.

If you like Nintendo games you will probably like Streemerz. If you don’t, stop articles about NES homebrew.