NES Remix 2

When I bought and completed NES Remix new those few scant months ago, I was left with a lukewarm feeling tinged with happy nostalgia and mild disappointment that said nostalgia wasn't better utilized. Now we have its sequel, NES Remix 2, which despite having a suspiciously brief development cycle since the last game does at least see a few improvements to what is now becoming the standard "Remix formula". NES Remix 2, like its predecessor, takes a selection of Nintendo's first-party NES games and presents a series of micro-challenges that can be as straightforward as "get to the end of the level" or "defeat this boss" to the slightly more abstruse "employ this very specific tactic" or "find the hidden warp zone", using pre-generated save states that operate as snapshots of the full NES games they pertain to. Each game is treated to its own Cliffs Notes series of challenges that tutorialize and demonstrate many of its basic elements: the controls, the goal, how certain enemies might operate, how to discover its secrets and, eventually, how to play the game at a master level. Once the game's certain you know what you're doing, a process that takes a remarkably short amount of time compared to playing these games fresh, it ramps up the challenge and tasks you with some truly diabolical targets to hit in a limited number of tries. The quicker each challenge takes you, the more stars you earn, and these stars then go on to unlock additional challenges to try.

NES Remix 2 has the benefit of having the lion's share of quality Nintendo games from that era. While the first focused largely on Nintendo's early mid-80s output of Arcade game conversions and relatively primitive highscore-chasers, the sequel focuses on the big, brash Nintendo games that were packed with content and took more than an afternoon to beat. This particular package contains the two official US/EU Super Mario Bros. sequels, widely regarded as two of the finest NES games of all time, as well as seminal favorites Metroid, Punch-Out!! and Kirby's Adventure. There's also many more with slightly divisive reputations, such as: the primary-colored pharmacological pretender for Tetris's throne, Dr. Mario; Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, the official Japanese Super Mario Bros sequel that wouldn't actually leave Japan until the later Super Nintendo compilation Super Mario All-Stars; the extremely challenging 2D RPGs Kid Icarus and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; a couple of primitive sports games that somehow missed the boat for NES Remix 1 in Ice Hockey and NES Open Tournament Golf; and the Columns-esque stacking puzzle game Wario's Woods, perhaps best known among gaming historians for being the last licensed NES game ever produced. As with the first game's selection of sixteen, there's a mix of bangers and also-rans in the twelve games featured here, but in this case it's fortunately far more weighted towards the former.

NES Remix 2 also feels shorter, though this isn't necessarily due to having fewer games. Much of the fat has been trimmed in the areas that matter, and the game no longer spends far too long on any singular game, nor does it force the player through more overt tutorials than are necessary. You still get a fairly comprehensive tour of each game and its more memorable moments, whether it's dodging that irate sun in Super Mario Bros. 3, finding secret exits in Metroid, taking on your shadowy doppelganger in Zelda II, escaping from Super Mario Bros 2's unnecessarily creepy mask guardian Phanto and even encountering the infamous Eggplant Wizard of Kid Icarus fame and getting the resulting eggplant curse removed. In addition, the game has a bit of fun meshing the various worlds of these games together in their trademark "Remix" stages, or simply changing the coding in a way to add an extra bit of challenge: consider a level of Super Mario Bros 3 where everything's silhouetted, or defeating a Hammer Bro as Link, or attempting to beat Kirby's arboreal archnemesis Whispy Woods while an army of giant Boos slowly close in. These Remix levels don't quite have the imagination of some of the ROM hacks with similar notions, but they still manage to add interesting new wrinkles to a few very well-established games.

Given what few Nintendo first-party games remain, it'll be interesting to see where this series goes from here: Do they start plumbing into Nintendo's Japan-only output, finally giving Western players an opportunity to see highlights of a localized Fire Emblem: Ankoku Ryuu to Hikari no Tsurugi, Mother or Famicom Wars (the precursor to the much beloved Advance Wars)? Do they entreat other prominent developers from that era to allow their own works to be remixed, such as Capcom, Tecmo, Sunsoft or Konami? Or might they upgrade to SNES Remix, opening up that entire library's worth of content? I feel like with the improvements made to NES Remix 2 another sequel could be even more promising, but they might also struggle to find the right games to populate it with.

If you've read my NES Remix 1 review, then it's fair to say that NES Remix 2 is really more of the same, just with a better (if smaller) selection of games and a far slimmer amount of challenges that cuts out more of the tiresomely repetitive or unfairly difficult trials. It's a more focused product than the original and overall an improvement, but at the same time doesn't quite address enough of the first's foibles nor its lack of truly innovative concepts for remixes, leaving me with much of the same mild dissatifaction I felt towards that original game. (It's also a shame that the Remix levels in 2 didn't bother including anything from the games of the first NES Remix, though owners of both do get a small boon of historical interest with a "Championship Mode": loosely based on the actual 1990 competition cart that tasked players with beating three challenges as quickly and effectively as possible.)