6 NES Games That Were Better Than Their Remakes (original) (raw)
6 NES Games That Are Better Than Their Remakes
If you've been playing video games over the last decade, you've most likely encountered some remakes. Since graphics get better with every generation, companies have realized that they can simply remake certified bangers from 10-20 years ago with updated textures and some extra costumes, add a quality of life improvement or two, and make some easy money. Sony in particular seems determined to remake The Last of Us for every console they release from now until the heat death of the fucking universe. Unfortunately, this is just the reality of the industry these days. Video game development cycles are longer than ever, but publishers need a steady stream of game releases to stay relevant and profitable. Since remakes can be created in considerably less time, they are able to fill this void. So like it or not, they are here to stay. Thankfully, it is fairly difficult fuck up a remake of a 3D game: you add more polygons and spruce up the details a little bit. Remaking NES games, however, is a bit more tricky because they were very much products of their time and they carry a lot of nostalgia for a lot of people. So, here are six NES games that are better than the attempts to improve them.
6. Tetris
I am not particularly passionate about Tetris. It was something I played and enjoyed, but it was never something I was ever emotionally invested in. I put way more hours and effort into Castlevania II and The Three Stooges than I ever did into Tetris. Those games aren't anywhere as popular or as highly regarded as Tetris, but one thing I really liked about them was that I could actually win. I grew up after the golden age of arcade games, so high scores never really mattered to me. The idea of seeing how long I could continuously play a game was never as appealing to me as getting a success screen telling me that I killed the orphanage or saved Dracula or whatever. There's no winning in Tetris; you get the same "Game Over" screen whether your final score is your personal best or personal worst. And the cartridge didn't save your scores, so what even was the point? You could just lie about how good you were, like Todd Rogers. My favorite Tetris iteration is Tetris DS, which has a ton of fun modes and features for casual players, but which is reviled by serious players because it allows infinite spinning and holding. I am not a Tetris connoisseur by any means, so I was extremely surprised to learn that it is not only the fourth best-selling NES game of all time but also the best-selling NES game that was never bundled with the console with roughly 8 million copies sold. Now, I know what you're thinking, how can the NES version of Tetris possibly be on this list? As you may know or suspect, the Game Boy version sold 35 million copies. Surely that must be the definitive version, right? And barring that, surely there have been both mechanical and visual advancements in newer Tetris games that render the NES game clunky and obsolete? The answer to both these questions, shockingly, is no. Here in 2024, the most skilled and competitive Tetris players are playing the NES version. NES Tetris has become a bona fide eSport, and the Classic Tetris World Championship has quickly become one of the most well-known yearly video game tournaments. But why? For a few reasons. First, it's the most skill-intensive version. There's no sliding or infinite spinning; pieces are placed as soon as they collide. There's no hold feature. There are no grids to help you line up your drops. The drops are also significantly more random than they are in present Tetris, and the game reaches speeds so impressive that they were once thought to be unplayable. Second, it's easy to follow. In order for an eSport to catch on, a casual audience has to be able to watch it, understand it, and enjoy it. Other popular versions such as Tetris The Grandmaster 3 and TETR.IO both allow players to hard drop pieces, which speeds up the pace of the game considerably and renders it basically unwatchable to anyone who isn't a hardcore fan. Third and finally, because of the game's age, tournaments featuring NES Tetris are much less likely to face legal challenges than much newer games. What kind of legal challenges? Well, Nintendo themselves have notoriously shut down Smash Bros. tournaments for reasons ranging from unauthorized use of emulators to disagreements over licensing. NES Tetris is so old that the code is basically bordering on open-source, giving tournament organizers a lot more control over what they can and cannot do with the game. So that's how we got here. Because it's easy to watch, difficult to master, and old enough to skirt many legal issues, NES Tetris is, against all odds, the most important version of Tetris currently available.
5. Mega Man
The original Mega Man is a polarizing game for some. It's a little less polished than its successors, lacking everything from energy tanks to Rush to that super cool map of Dr. Wily's Skull Castle. But the basic architecture of the sequels you love is all here: catchy music, cool sound effects, disappearing/reappearing blocks that will make you scream in rage, and a rogues' gallery of bosses who are all conveniently weak against at least one weapon you'll acquire on your journey. It's a charming game that sold well enough to warrant a sequel or two and somehow that snowballed into one of the most prolific franchises in video game history. And then they tried to remake it. And at this point, you might be wondering if I'm about to hate on Mega Man: The Wily Wars. I assure you, I am not. Despite being a combined remake of the first three Mega Man games, Wily Wars featured a very faithful recreation of the original game. Capcom avoided the temptation to streamline the games, so the Wily Wars version of Mega Man 1 not only used the old energy coin sprites, but it also retained that meaningless scoring system that was never seen again. Wily Wars still isn't better than the original games, but it was very much a loving and well-crafted attempt to give Sega fans some Mega Man content that didn't violate their licensing agreements with Nintendo. But again, this entry isn't about Wily Wars. Oh no, this entry is about Mega Man Powered Up. Mega Man Powered Up is a 2006 PlayStation Portable remake of Mega Man 1 that eschewed 2D sprites in favor of blocky 3D chibi models. It also features horrendous voice acting and two new super lame Robot Masters: Time Man and Oil Man... or Timeman and Oilman, if we're using Mega Man 1's name formatting. Now on the one hand, the original game was originally supposed to have eight Robot Masters, and Oil Man was one of the early designs. On the other hand, the six Robot Masters that ultimately made the cut are extremely iconic and these two characters honestly do not match their style and simplicity. On top of that, Oil Man's uncensored Japanese design is very clearly blackface. As a remake, this game fails in every single regard. Which is a shame, because it does have one great feature: a Construction Mode that lets players build their own stages. Think Mario Maker, except nine full years before Mario Maker was a thing. They really should have just sold the game as a level creator.
4. Metroid
In 2004, Nintendo released Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of Metroid that turns it into something more akin to Super Metroid. Now look, I love Super Metroid; it's a great game in its own right and one of the greatest games of all-time. But while Super Metroid is a lot of things, one thing that it absolutely isn't is scary. The original Metroid is creepy as hell. You're trapped in a seemingly endless series of liminal corridors that all appear to loop back into each other. Enemies and terrain have this unsettling quality to them where you can't quite tell what the designers were going for, partly because of the graphical limitations of the NES and partly because it's a sci-fi horror game. As you traverse these terrors, you are accompanied by a minimalistic and often ominous soundtrack. And the background is jet black. And sure, that was not uncommon of video games from this era, but it's extremely ambient in Metroid. There is an inherent dread you feel while exploring the depths of Zebes. You are alone on this remote planet. There are no innkeepers, no apologetic Toads, no benevolent old men in caves. It's up to you to track down Mother Brain and WHAT THE HELL, WASN'T I JUST IN THIS ROOM? FUCK.
Zero Mission completely kills this mood. The clinical, unforgiving efficiency of Metroid's palette has been replaced with heaps upon heaps of color. The soundtrack is louder and fancier. Enemies are more defined. Different areas are much more distinguishable, and even named. In short, nothing is left to the imagination. Zero Mission fundamentally misunderstands what made the original Metroid game great and instead of leaning into its strengths, they transformed it into a subpar clone of the SNES game. It's extremely disappointing.
3. DuckTales
If you've visited this site before, you might know that we love DuckTales here at SydLexia.com. This Capcom classic has been the subject of two separate stand-alone articles and it was named the 28th greatest NES game of all-time. It's very fun, highly replayable, and it's got a killer soundtrack. So when I saw DuckTales: Remastered at PAX East 2013, I was absolutely hyped. One of the greatest 2D platformers of all-time was coming back with character sprites that looked like they were ripped right out of the 1980s TV show. It was also going to feature all of the surviving voice cast from the show including Scrooge himself, Alan Young, who was well into his 90s. And it had been developed by Wayforward Technologies, the creators of critically acclaimed games such as Shantae and Mighty Switch Force. Capcom had spared no expense, just like John Hammond. And just like Jurassic Park, nothing could possibly go wrong...
Except, of course, it did; we can't actually have nice things. So, here's the thing - as a fan of the TV show, DuckTales: Remastered is a heartfelt trip down memory lane. This was the last major project that television legends Alan Young and June Foray worked on before their deaths and it's absolutely awesome that they each got this one last starring role. And Wayforward definitely got their money out of the voice cast: there is so much talking. Like, an unnecessary amount. Like, if you told me Hideo Kojima had a producer credit on this, I would absolutely believe you. But again, this was one last chance for a generation to hear the voices of their childhood before said voices left us for the Great Beyond and/or the Sweet Hereafter. And you can skip the cutscenes if you want. So while they're inconvenient from a gameplay standpoint, they're not a dealbreaker. What is a dealbreaker is that Wayforward completely fucking butchered the level design. The single coolest thing about DuckTales was that it felt like an actual treasure hunt. There were alternate routes and hidden areas in each level, so you had two options: you could explore each area thoroughly or you could simply race through the game. DuckTales: Remastered does not let you do this. The game is full pointless of sidequests that make every level tedious and linear. In Transylvania, for example, Scrooge's nephews are kidnapped by the Beagle Boys and you have to rescue them. All three are found in areas that were optional in the original game. The boss battles have also been artificially drawn out by adding in tiresome, elaborate attack cycles where the bosses can only be damaged at very specific times. So whereas the NES could be played for speed or for score, Remastered is fairly miserable for both these options. There are very few places to go that you don't have to go, making scoring largely irrelevant, and the game is both very linear and artificially drawn out, making speedruns much less interesting. It's both astonishing and appalling just how little Wayforward understood about why the NES game is so beloved.
2. Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy on the NES has more bugs in it than the worst film Pixar ever made. Four white spells don't work at all, whereas LOK2 raises enemy evasion rather than lowering it. The intelligence stat is broken, so spells don't increase in power as your character levels. Weapons that are supposed to give elemental boosts, such as the Coral Sword, do not do so. Critical hit percentage is based off a weapon's index number in the game's code rather than by the intended chances. Elemental enemy attacks don't register under the correct elements, making elemental-boosted armor all but useless. There's an invisible woman in Coneria Castle. And finally, flee rate isn't calculated correctly for your party members. I think that's it, anyway. Like I said, the game has a lot of bugs. The game also lacks automatic retargeting, which would be a huge improvement added in later Final Fantasy games. If you send all your party members at the same target and the first one kills it, the others just sit there and shrug, rather than attacking the next enemy in line. The result is a punishingly difficult game that takes a lot of time and patience to beat. And that difficulty was crucial to the game's success, because Final Fantasy 1 has very little in the way of story. You travel from one town to the next and talk to everyone until someone tells you where to go next. Eventually you restore the four MacGuffins to their former glory, open the path to the end boss, and save the day. And so, Dawn of Souls on the Game Boy Advance is a fucking embarrassment. It turns the once-imposing game into a leisurely stroll. Fans of the NES version will remember stockpiling antidotes before going into the very poisonous, very frustrating Marsh Cave or getting stomped by a foursome of Green Ogres outside of Elfheim. You will encounter no such discord in Dawn of Souls. You will walk into the Marsh Cave with no grinding and no hoarding, and you will leave victorious with minimal effort. The whole point of the original Final Fantasy was the struggle. Without struggle, there is no reward. It is so difficult to lose at Dawn of Souls that you might as well be playing Barney's Hide & Seek Game; even the infamously cruel Ice Cave is reduced to a joke. But Syd, what about the bonus dungeons? FUCK THE BONUS DUNGEONS. No amount of postgame content could ever excuse the excruciating mediocrity of Dawn of Souls' main game.
1. Super Mario Bros.
It is damn near impossible to overstate how important the first game featuring the Super Mario Brothers is. After the video game crash of 1983, the future of video games - at least in America - was uncertain. And then Super Mario Bros. showed up, fireballs blazing, and single-handedly made video games cool again. It transformed Nintendo into one of the most powerful and influential companies in the world and formally launched a franchise that has sold over 879 million games to date. Mario is one of the most recognized and most beloved characters in the entire world and the NES game is directly responsible for this. The NES version of Super Mario Bros. sold 40 million copies, which is an outrageous number even by today's standards. To give some perspective, the PS2 sold 93 million more units than the Nintendo Entertainment System, but its best-selling game only sold 17.33 million copies. It outsold the best-selling SNES and Genesis games combined. In fact, its sales record wasn't broken until Wii Sports came out over 20 years later. And nearly 40 years later, the game's sprites remain among the most beloved and recognizable iconography in video game canon. The game is sacrosanct. It possesses charm and zeitgeist that cannot be replicated. And yet, for some insane fucking reason, Nintendo tried. The result was Super Mario All-Stars, one of the greatest abominations of all-time. The SNES remake of Super Mario Bros. can be summed up in one word: charmless. The soundtrack is overdone. The backgrounds are distracting and needlessly elaborate. Bonus areas are adorned with tacky pictures of whichever plumber you're playing as; they also have terrible all-new music. Minus World, the game's most famous glitch, has been hardcoded out of the game. Twice, in fact. Small Fiery Mario, the game's coolest glitch, also doesn't work. The remake has seemingly no respect or understanding of its source material. World 6-3 was famously in grayscale in the original version. It was literally the most interesting thing about World 6-3. All-Stars presents the level in full color because it's more interested in showing off how colorful the SNES is than it is being a faithful adaptation of the NES game. The really pitiful thing is, it's not even good at being colorful. In the NES version, the trees and bushes are very striking greens and the sky is... a memorable tint that people definitely have feelings about. Despite only allowing three colors per sprite, SMB1 has a vibrancy to it that All-Stars fails to recapture. Rather than offering up a bright sky, the SNES game uses gradients. Which was a neat trick when Air-Sea Battle did it, back in 1977. One of the popular criticisms of Call of Duty is that on consoles capable of a seemingly limitless amount of colors, Call of Duty uses one thousand shades of brown and gray. That's kinda how the All-Stars remake feels. Despite having access to more colors, it never once manages to use them effectively. The result is a game that feels lifeless and muted compared to its source material. It's also filled with a bunch of dumb animations. Mario inexplicably flashes the peace sign every time he enters a pipe and the Mushroom Retainers are found writhing in large sacks. This game feels like a glorified tech demo, which is weird, because it launched over two full years after the Super Nintendo. I have so many more complaints about this remake, like how it uses the lamest Bowser sprite in the history of the franchise, but I'm pretty sure I've made my case. I will leave you with one grievance though, one which I feel fully illustrates just how badly the All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. missed the mark. In the NES version of World 8-3, there's a coin block towards the end of the level that's camouflaged into one of the castle walls that comprise most of the level's background. In the SNES version, it's just a random freestanding block. Great work, you complete fucking idiots.
Thank you for joining me for this edition of Old Man Yells At Cloud. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Maybe you agree with me, and maybe you don't. And that's the great thing about discussions like these, there are usually no objectively correct answers. I can see why some of you might like Metroid: Zero Mission or Mega Man Powered Up; they are not without certain charms. However, you absolutely *are* objectively wrong if you like anything about Super Mario All-Stars. I will concede nothing on this one. Fuck Super Mario All-Stars to death with a rusty spoon.
Posted by: Syd Lexia
11/03/24
