And now, the bad...
Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance)
Is
Metroid: Zero Mission a terrible game? By no means. On its own terms, it's rather good. But as a reconception of one of the greatest, most influential games ever made, it's a disaster, taking everything that made
Metroid spooky and replacing it with a thick layer of corn.
Metroid was heavily influenced by
Alien. Remember the petrified extraterrestrial skeleton in
Alien? What if that bastard had gotten up and started bombarding Sigourney Weaver with some hack's idea of ancient wisdom? Wouldn't that have pretty much thrown the movie's chilly austerity out the window? Like so many latter-day games,
Zero Mission thinks comic-book jibber-jabber is cooler than eerie silence. This lack of subtlety is echoed in the gameplay itself, which, while it controls a lot better than
Metroid, is chock-full of egregious hand-holding and advice-giving — pretty much the exact opposite of the original's sprawling openendedness.
Metroid is practically Lovecraftian in the way it makes you feel tiny and alone in a vast and hostile universe. Don't look for that feeling in
Zero Mission. Oh, and it also mangles the most immortal climax in videogame history — the truly unsettling slaughter of a shrieking brain in a jar, followed by a hair-raising escape sequence — by tacking on a (sigh)
stealth section. —
PS
Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros 3 (Game Boy Advance)
I can hear you, fanboy. The exasperated sigh, the cry of indignation.
Super Mario Bros. 3 is the same great game it's always been on this GBA cart, sporting the snazzy 1993
Super Mario All-Stars graphics. But, first of all, I don't need to hear Mario yelping at me all the time. I know it's a-him. I'm perfectly fine entering a level without being told to a-go. The talking isn't the biggest problem, though. It's that Nintendo actually created a wealth of brand new levels for
Super Mario Bros. 3, levels that brought over mechanics from both
Super Mario Bros. 2 and
Super Mario World, and left them off the cart. You had to buy the game, then buy an e-Reader, then buy packs of random cards from Wal-Mart and EBGames to play them. Oh yeah, and they changed the ending. What could've improved on a classic instead leaves me reaching for my NES. —
JC
Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (SNES)
A scandalous missed opportunity,
Ninja Gaiden Trilogy collects two of the greatest NES action games (and their mediocre third sibling) and gives them a graphical non-makeover, at points even downgrading. The gorgeous parallax in
NG3's desert level is inexplicably MIA — dude, this is the SNES!
Every level should have parallax that handsome, and you can't even keep it where it already was? The music is butchered too, despite the SNES's powerful sound chip — some of it is even missing. And some of the excised effects dumb down the gameplay, like the omission of the lightning in stage 3-1 of
NG2. The whole point of that stage was that you had to operate in the dark; now, it's just like any other. Only one thing is really improved, and that's that the port of
NG3 has the difficulty settings of the Japanese original, not its maddening U.S. counterpart. But the first rule of remaking is (or should be) "do no harm," which means
Ninja Gaiden Trilogy flunks out of med school. —
PS
Sega Ages Vol. 5 and Vol. 13: Golden Axe and Outrun (PlayStation 2)
The Sega Ages line, compilations and polygonal remakes of the publisher's classics, is certainly a noble effort. Letting players revisit games like
Panzer Dragoon,
Space Harrier, and
Gunstar Heroes is just plain good, benevolent even. Making
Outrun, one of early gaming's brightest visual achievements, into a washed-out, muddy looking budget title is the opposite of benevolent. You just don't make
Outrun uglier than
Cruis'n USA. It's wrong.
Golden Axe, well, that was never much of a looker in the first place. But why would you make it more drab? Why would you add cutscenes? Why would you take out the opportunity to beat up gnomes for magic potions? It just doesn't make any sense! —
JC
Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
A stretch, I know. But the inclusion of classic tracks from the original
Super Mario Kart highlights how much gameplay depth has disappeared from
Mario Kart's gameplay over the years. As an "enhanced remake,"
Kart Wii's version of Ghost Valley 2 is a bust. Don't try to make that awesome shortcut jump, cause the feather — an item that took actual skill to use — is long gone. In its place are a boatload of zany items that'll blast you from last place to first and back over the course of one lap. Yeah, it'd probably entertain your Amish cousins (or whatever other gaming-illiterate demographic Nintendo's targeting these days) for half an hour, but would my friends Mike Brownell and Mike Schlauch make it the centerpiece of a decade-long continuing struggle over who's the uncontested master of gaming/the universe? No — they'd both recognize it as far too spastic and random to function as a scale of justice.
— PS
Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 2.
What'd we miss? What'd we unfairly vilify, and what'd we overpraise? Tell us in the comments section.
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