NetWatcher's Guide to Everything

I've always loved video games. Pac-Man, Frogger, Space Invaders, Mario, Sonic; Nintendo, Atari, Pong, Sega, Playstation: these are things I spent my childhood with. Wonderful classics like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, Zelda, Final Fantasy which all have spawned very marketable and popular brands. And my fixation has never been strictly to platforms. The PC has brought many hours of enjoyment from games like King's Quest and Myst to the completely mindless violence of Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake.

It occurred to me that we've reached a time where the real classics, the true roots of modern video games, have never been played or seen by the latest generation of video gamers. Zelda came out nearly 20 years ago, the Atari 2600 is teetering on the edge of being 25 years old. Apparently video game companies have also noticed this little factoid and are trying to rectify the situation. A new trend has started where video game companies are releasing old games as new. The most blatant example would be Nintendo's resurrection of the Mario empire. Over the past two years, they have successfully remarketed every Super Mario game, successfully I might add, on the Game Boy Advance.

Now what came as a surprise to me was that I own the originals of all these games. I also own the remakes of these games when they were published on the Super Nintendo as "Super Mario All-Stars". Yet, I still bought these latest remakes. I still own all my systems, all the games are in perfect working order, but I still bought these games that I already had. I don't travel that much, and the ages of the games range from 10-20 years old. I've played all of them enough that I could probably reproduce the maps given a pointy stick and a little bit of sand. It's not like there's anything new in them. It's not like I can't play them whenever I want, but for some reason, I end up buying them, and then playing them all over again.

It's not just limited to Mario, either. I have a couple of copies of "Zelda: A Link to the Past" which was released on the Game Boy Advance. I also have the Zelda Collector's Edition Game Cube compilation of just about ever Zelda game ever made. Recently, I bought the Sonic Mega Collection, which takes all the Sonic games I have for my Genesis, and places them ever so nicely on the Game Cube. Again, they're straight ports.

Don't get me wrong, all this nostalgia is great and everything, but it would be nice to get some new games with the classic feel. The last we heard of Mario, he'd traded in his block stomping days for an eco-friendly water cannon...either that or he was off partying with mini-games. The best "classic" style game released recently (the only one I can find, in fact) is Metroid: Zero Mission. It's a straight platform shooter that relies strictly on skill and good old-fashioned finger work to get through. I may come off as some sort of curmudgeon, but a game can have all the 3-D whiz-bang stuff in the world, and still come off as a completely horrendous experience if the game play is bad, or if the underlying idea is flawed.

Therein lies the problem of video game design: create something that remains true to the skill of playing, and mix it with the latest in technology. Games that do this are very rare. In fact, the last one that I can think of that was actually very successful with doing just that was Metroid: Prime. It was really a true 3-D version of Metroid. It remained faithful to the game design that was set out for the games, and still managed to bring in the best of a 3-D environment without really sacrificing anything.

I'm sure that when it's repackaged as a Dodecahedratron-2000 game in 20 years, I'll buy it.