i'd say yes, go with:
Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion (1991) aka "Dangerous Dave 2"
and while you're at it, i think you might have better luck with the cover art showing up by using:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dangerous-dave-in-the-haunted-mansion
cheers.
that is not where you get the blue ring. you have to walkthrough a hidden wall with no indication that the wall is hidden nor that you can walk through walls in the game. contra was at least possible with enough skill. battle toads is harder than contra if we're talking about jumping and shooting skills.
but zelda is diabolical. zelda made up rules as it went along, rules that you didn't even know existed (walking through walls, playing the recorder to move graves) it's amazing and the most difficult game ever.
i'm sorry but you would agree if you had to play it without a walkthrough.
This game was rereleased as freeware a while back. Here's the relevant bit from the Wikipedia article:
>Legal status > >In August 2003, the game was released as freeware and support for it was added to ScummVM, allowing it to be played on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows CE and other compatible operating systems and platforms.[4] The data files for both the disk and CD version are available from the ScummVM website. The files on the ScummVM website do not include the original program executables since they are not needed by ScummVM.[5] The Fedora RPM software repository has a free down-loader which grabs the freeware game files and installs them alongside ScummVM.
ScummVM can be found: here.
The Year is rather ambiguous on this. Linley's Dungeon Crawl started in 1995, and Linley continued working on it for a few years. Then another dev team worked on it until 2003, when most of the dev team disbanded and the Crawl Reference project started, which later became Stone Soup. It's drastically different now than it was then, and early Stone Soup was drastically different than original Dungeon Crawl.
So yeah, not really clear what year should be used. I opted for where the branch started, but arguments could be made for about 3 other years as well; not really sure which is best.
As for a better link - http://videogamegeek.com/videogame/80581/dungeon-crawl-stone-soup might work, though VGG is still relatively unknown at this point and I'm not sure if the image would translate into a reddit thumbnail or not.
and fortunately with ScummVM a lot of these older titles are still quite playable.
I would definitely recommend you try Day of the Tentacle, if you feel up for a wacky point and click adventure.