I remember back when I was a kid, (around 20 years ago!) I was playing super mario, and was darn proud when I beat it. Same with zelda, and any nintendo game I could get my hands on. That was the "in" thing and spent many of my childhood hours mindlessly glued to the TV trying to beat these games. I found this neat website, the people have recorded movies of themselves playing these games, but they take it to another level, they beat these games in record time, without dying, etc(most are on emulators, done in slow motion and then replayed back at normal speed, or using in-game exploits in the code, but pretty cool none-the-less)
You will need to install bit-torrent to download most of these, and the files are pretty big(I envy you with fast connections =P)
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/jutut/nesvideos/
enjoy!