Posted Sun Dec 7, 2003 12:56 PM
The best advice I can offer is to buy a Game Genie.
My NES is also very terrible... I bought it for $2 at a thrift store, and it had a giant Offspring sticker on it. It took about 15-20 minutes of blowing on contacts to get anything, and even after I opened it and cleaned it out, things didn't work much better.
However, once I bought a Game Genie, I found that attaching games to that first (even if I wasn't using any cheat codes) seemed to make them a LOT easier to get started (50% of the time now, they work first try). NES Genie's are all over the place for $3 or so, so it's definitely worth it if you have a crummy NES like I do.
Of course, in the long run, you may want to invest in a top loader... but that would be quite a bit pricier.
--Zero