NES Remix (Wii U)
NES games can seem a little rudimentary in modern times, their design often focused on executing a simple idea as well as they could back when video games were still a rather novel concept. It can certainly make going back to old games a bit rough, but NES Remix concocts a way to make revisiting such early titles quick and easy. Creating small slices of gameplay that can capture the better moments of play from 16 Nintendo-developed NES games or remixing them with new rules and conditions, NES Remix aims to reinvigorate some decades old games in ways that can try and focus on why these games were well loved back when they were brand new.
NES Remix’s name implies its major focus is on switching up the conditions on how you play the video games it features, but most of what you’ll be doing in the game is actually playing scenarios from the featured games set up to focus on some sort of challenge. Some of these are demonstrative, games like the arcade platformer Mario Bros. making sure you know how to actually hurt its enemies by bopping them from below, but others like Baseball do fail to explain every element so you might not realize you have control over your base runners. Luckily, NES games relied only on the D-Pad and A and B buttons most of the time and even games like the fantasy adventure The Legend of Zelda have stripped out their pause menus in these quick challenges, so you can at least puzzle out what to press if it isn’t taught and even some scenarios like fighting the Dodongo boss as a challenge for The Legend of Zelda leave you only with a few variables so you can figure out how to exploit the large lizard’s weakness.
Most challenges though will be well presented and ask you to do something quickly and properly in the game being focused on. Balloon Fight has its midair battles presented in their normal format, but merely beating your enemies in a challenge isn’t only about actually winning the battle. To unlock more challenges in NES Remix you need to earn stars across the challenges, and you can earn up to three per level provided you clear the challenge quickly enough. You aren’t told the times you need to clear a scenario in and usually have to guess based on how many stars you did get if you miss the mark on what you should be aiming for, but because the games featured are pretty simple it’s usually easy to figure out why you took too long and quickly go back in and try again. Most stages even have pretty reasonable time expectations, especially in the stages where multiple quick scenarios are stringed together back to back. For example, in the bike racing game Excitebike you might find yourself needing to perfectly land after multiple jumps from different tracks in the game rather than simply racing across a single course. If you do fail in these multi-stage levels, you do have a lives system represented by hearts and the more difficult challenges can be cleared with three stars even if you do fail a few times, although it is a bit odd that single stage challenges have a lives system when it’s much better to just pause and press restart if you do die during one. It’s not difficult to do so, so mostly NES Remix has a good handle on providing some leniency while also making even simple tasks a bit of a challenge thanks to the star rating system pushing you to play quickly and as close to perfection as you can manage.
When it comes to the 16 games featured in NES Remix, there is a wise spread on how much each of them gets attention. Super Mario Bros., a beloved platform game with tight design that still holds up today, has multiple scenario challenges and is willing to make them a bit more involved, things like fighting a string of battles with the turtle king Bowser using only the fire flower a longer challenge than most and still adequately difficult without feeling too hard to retry until you manage to win. Meanwhile, Urban Champion is wisely kept to very few devoted challenges, the rough fighting game where battles often boil down to guesswork actually tolerable here due to getting very little spotlight. Ice Climber’s rigid jumping with an odd momentum system unfortunately gets perhaps a bit too much focus, a few challenges having you scale a good deal of the game’s mountains and rubbing up against its archaic jumping controls, but others like Golf and the puzzle platformer Wrecking Crew are smart in what they demand of the player while still being just involved enough that you have to think some before you act if you want to succeed. Even a weak performance will earn you Bits that provide stamps based on the games you’re playing in a little collection originally meant for Miiverse posting, but more importantly the game provides many challenges at once and unlocking new ones can happen quite rapidly, meaning if you aren’t gelling with a game like Pinball you can pop over and try out the vine-climbing action of Donkey Kong Jr. for a bit instead.
These slivers of NES titles are quick and often enjoyable because they throw you into an interesting moment of play from their source games, but NES Remix also includes a set of Remix challenges that shake up the rules of the games a bit. A race on the Excitebike course will have you trapped in turbo and you’ll need to hit every marker to cool your engine to survive, fake enemies will make it hard to find the foes you need to defeat in a round of Mario Bros., and rain clouds will block your view of the course in Golf for some simple shakeups to how you’d normally play. A few ideas sound exciting when first presented like Link from The Legend of Zelda taking on the construction site levels of Donkey Kong, but since he brings none of his weapons over and can’t jump, it ends up frustrating instead since you’re just hoping the barrel-throwing randomness lines up in your favor. On the other hand, some challenges force Mario to run through Super Mario Bros. stages at full speed, the player having to figure out when to jump to avoid dying in legitimately difficult but satisfying tests of your reaction times.
A good deal of the Remix levels do just apply an unusual visual effect to playing the game rather normally, having Tennis swap between a normal and Game Boy inspired color palette not really impacting the play but others like having Clu Clu Land zoom in close while you try to navigate a maze of pegs and urchins means you have to be more attentive to make sure you hit the diamonds you need to win and not the monsters that will kill you. Having the game zoom out to show the screen tiled in a repeating pattern so it’s like playing the same game on 12 tiny screens is a nifty visual effect, but it would have been nicer to have more minor rule changes, especially since games with decent potential like the bug busting action of Donkey Kong 3 barely show up at all. A greater degree of creativity in the changes could have also made these remixes more compelling, but the standard challenges may end up standing out better than them because they at least transport you to a quick moment of action that expects you to perform well. However, that is where the wide range of challenges comes in well as you can sprinkle play across multiple styles easily, and even if one is a dud, there are hundreds of challenges in total and you can quickly move onto a scenario that more often than not will at least be a little entertaining.
THE VERDICT: NES Remix trims down the 16 classic NES titles featured into quick minigames that often aim to capture the best moments of their source material, the selections usually fairly smart on what points they pick. The scenarios are often quick to complete but challenging enough that you may need to retry to figure them out, the process swift and the selection wide so you can bounce around if any specific trial does stymie you a bit too much. Remixes can be fun little rule changes as well even if the most common way of doing so was applying a weird visual effect, but for every bad idea like Link’s agonizing climbs in Donkey Kong there are a few engaging ones that inject a new bit of energy into familiar game designs. While it usually does a good job on not drawing out the flaws of its source games so it can focus on where fun can be found, NES Remix feels like just the start to an idea that could be incredible if the design team really got wild with how the remixes were made.
And so, I give NES Remix for Wii U…
A GOOD rating. Thanks to its smart format and a good sense for where to shine its spotlights, NES Remix manages to make games like Balloon Fight and Baseball feel like they deserve to stand side by side with undeniable classics like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Baseball benefits from its Remix twists quite a bit since it’s an easy to understand sport where you can add some wild ideas like disappearing baseballs while Balloon Fight’s aerial battles feel a good fit for the focus on clearing levels quickly, and while Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda can sometimes coast on presenting you a sequence of their best moments without them really feeling like special challenges, it is the wider collection’s focus on carving out interesting activities from each featured title that makes NES Remix entertaining to explore. You won’t know where you’re plopping into a game next and figuring out how to do what’s asked of you quickly and efficiently is a decent challenge even in conceptual simple experiences. A few remix stages are even quick tours through a handful of different games in a row where the challenge is more about the quick adjustment of mindset, NES Remix able to provide scenarios that thrive on their rapid presentation style while it can afford to linger on other moments because the source game already provided a solid stretch of action. Not every selection is a winner, trying to get high scores in Pinball means you linger in it a bit too long even if you play well, but NES Remix does feel like digging into a box of curiosities to see what you find and a few duds doesn’t mean the process of exploring them all is necessarily weakened. NES Remix is aching to be far more experimental though, some Remix ideas on the cusp of something interesting like Link entering a different type of game but it doesn’t seem to realize the appeal there would be bringing over his abilities, not merely seeing a different character in another game setting. Cleaning away some of the less interesting visual effects in favor of more ambitious rule changes would make the Remix levels truly worthy of title billing, but the normal game-specific challenges carry much of the weight and thankfully NES Remix isn’t really worse for it.
NES Remix is an interesting way to breathe new life into old games that players either might not have much interest in or may have already played to death. You can’t play any of the games in full here, but that might remove some of the veneer off them, their presentation here allowing them to focus in on moments of excitement or even drawing out something new and interesting by way of imposing a time restriction or remixing it. A second NES Remix game would focus on a different batch of games and come out not even half a year after this game, but even with the breadth of content featuring this game’s selection of 16 titles, it feels like NES Remix could have continued to dabble in presenting unique challenges or creative shake-ups without losing its luster. The hefty set of scenarios on offer are likely to please, but it’s hard not to let your imagination run wild on where it could have gone. At least that reflects well on how it was handled here, the desire for more content stemming from NES Remix’s ability to prove its concept’s validity and enjoyability.