I picked up NES Remix this week as my Club Nintendo gift, and I know I'm far from alone in this, so I might as well revive this thread. After a handful of sessions I've completed every stage with three stars apart from the last one, Bonus 25, which I still haven't completed without resuming midway. (What a spectacular way to finish, by the waya test of consistency in the same spirit as the final Mystery House in Super Mario 3D World.) With this out of the way, some observations:
- The ADD structure of this game really scratches the ambiguous itch to play the NESthe system, the cataloguewithout a specific idea in mind of what it is you want to sit through on a given day. It's the perfect remedy for the boredom and indecision that comes from the paralysis of choice (i.e. wanting to play an 8-bit classic while not feeling especially keen to commit to a single game in particular). I actually grew up with most of the early NES titles on a bootleg compilation cart, so NES Remix was unexpectedly nostalgic in form and pacing and not just in content. In the end it seemed to provide a lot more value than purchasing these games individually and feeling deflated about how small they look now.
- Putting so many NES classics in the same place truly underlines what a towering masterpiece Super Mario Bros. was in its own timehuge, varied, polished, mechanically crisp, head and shoulders above everything else around it. It has aged so remarkably well. The silhouette filter from Donkey Kong Country Returns surprised me with how well it fit the stages.
- I love how so many of the challenges are calculated to train you in the finer mechanics of the original games, encouraging the discovery and refinement of speed-run tricks. I used to spend so much time designing tracks in Excitebike and I still came away from its associated challenges with the impression that I never really understood the game at all. NES Remix doesn't just evoke the included games; it teaches them.
- The subtle gradients, background textures, and drop shadows in the remix stages added a vivid pop and colour to the original games. I wouldn't have wanted to see them everywhere, but they supplied a degree of liveliness that never detracted from the authenticity of the NES emulation, and indeed made the sprite art stand out all the better.
- From the way the game was advertised I was expecting more mash-ups of the included titles, or at least more compilation challenges stringing assorted games/remixes in succession à la WarioWare. I can appreciate why so many of the remix stages stood alone instead of mixing and matching, as the element of chance inherent in several of the games would be a frustration when trying to obtain three stars; I can also see why the time-dependent three-star format imposes a certain determinism to the stage order as opposed to embracing WarioWare's demands on quick thinking and improvisation. This still seems like a missed opportunity.
- I didn't remember Mario Bros. (non-Super) to be quite so clunky, but most of my experience with it would have been from its inclusion in SMB3 and other later games, and I never realized until now that in later releases the physics must have been tightened somewhat. Mario Bros. and Ice Climber posed the most gruelling challenges of the whole set, in part because their juxtaposition with SMB made it all too conspicuous that the early games hadn't really figured out what we now expect from a platformer in terms of aerial momentum. In Ice Climber you have to clip the blocks so tightly just to get from one level to the next.
- Of the main selection, the two games I had never originally played on the NES were Wrecking Crew and Clu Clu Land. Judging from the Miiverse posts I came across, Clu Clu Land is not exactly well liked because of its unconventional frustrations, but for me it came as a glorious surprise. It initially seems difficult to handle since you swing and bounce around so quickly that there isn't much opportunity to learn the controls on the fly, but once I mastered the concept behind the movement in the game I found its challenges among the fairest and most reliable. An unfortunate number of the minigames in NES Remix are built on games that occasionally screw the player with events that are either random or not clearly flagged (barrels falling earlier than expected in Donkey Kong, or the AI opponent missing an easy swing in Tennis when you are trying to sustain a rally), but Clu Clu Land is not one of them: it rewards smart route planning and the composure to recover from mistakes. Once I learnt the controls it became apparent that errors were mine and mine alone (unlike Mario Bros. and Ice Climber, which in modern hands have serious problems with responsiveness).
- As much as I like this game I'm not going to bother finishing all the rainbow stars, at least not now. I have my limits. Three stars on the more finicky stages made for an appropriate level of challenge that I am content to set aside for good.
