The Value of Spin-Off Titles: Understanding Video Games Through Other Games

Spin-off games are always an ambivalent proposition. At worst, they are nothing but a cheap marketing stunt, a simple act of slapping the looks and sounds of an already lucrative IP onto what would otherwise be a completely unrelated experience. In their best instances, however, spin-off titles are not only good games in their own right, but can also offer unique insight into the main series they’re based on that is as valuable as any written or video analysis of these games. Given that almost every mobile game falls into the former category of half-assed corporate branding, it is all the more remarkable how elegantly Hitman GO achieves the latter.

The premise of Hitman GO is that Hitman can naturally be adapted as a turn-based puzzle game because the core experience of the series has always been akin to puzzle solving anyway. The same can actually be stated for most other stealth games. Both genres generally share a principle of pull game design, where the game initially rests in a passive state that can be manipulated by the player character. In both cases, the world usually does not act independently from the player, its elements only change in periodic time loops at most until you interact with them. From this perspective, there really isn’t that much of a difference between figuring out the routes of patrolling guards and, say, the functioning of a control room puzzle. Both behave in an entirely predetermined and predictable manner, which the player is encouraged to carefully observe before making an informed decision about how to influence them to their advantage.

The main differences lie in how you are able to collect the information and how the games react to your mistakes. In stealth games, information gathering is already part of the same hide-and-seek dynamic that characterizes their progression system as a whole. Players are bound to the limited perspective of their character, which can be expanded by all sorts of enhanced movement capabilities or item usage. Abilities, that also often put them at risk of discovery, in which case the game shifts gears to a push dynamic that puts the player at a disadvantage until they manage to escape detection again. All these elements are not present in most puzzle games, but they also aren’t equally relevant to all stealth games, and I think that Hitman GO is right to argue that they are an expandable part of the Hitman series. Though the games have always provided you with a surprisingly large array of lethal options, they also clearly incentivize you to play in a specific, non-confrontational manner. Every good Hitman level has one or several ideal methods of assassinating your targets that make their deaths look like accidents and that require a deep understanding of the level design to work out. A perfect rating further requires you to execute the whole plan without any casualties or getting spotted, like you were never even there in the first place.

All the guns and melee weapons offer less of an equally valid alternative, and more like something to keep players entertained until they have figured out a more optimal method (hence their inherent ability to generate slapstick moments), or as a last resort brute force approach if they can’t. This is why the multiple film adaptations feel like such a grotesque misinterpretation of the games they are supposed to be based on. As if the filmmakers only bothered to engage with the most surface level promotional material of a menacing looking bald guy with dual wielding pistols, the perfect protagonist for any generic action film. Hitman GO instead gets to the core of the experience, by adapting the basic progression structure in its level design.

Each of the five main levels takes the shape of a board game that represents a specific location – usually an expansive mansion –, in which two red targets are placed as figurines to assassinate, one at the halfway mark and one at the end point of the map. The progress of your figure through this overworld is marked by a linear path with fifteen steps, mimicking the actual route of infiltration a player might take in a 3D-environment – entering from the garden across the pool house to the tennis court for the first kill, then sneaking their way through the greenhouse into the main building for the second, for example. Every step takes you to a different sub-screen of the individual puzzles, with a more detailed illustration of the current area, but this time your goal is behind multiple branching paths, patrolling guards and various items. This subdivision also perfectly captures how Hitman levels are never just free-roaming open worlds, but a complex series of subsequent or interlocking stealth challenges with restricted areas within restricted areas. In fact, the developers were even able to directly adapt two levels from the main games into additional boards later on, both of which translate beautifully into the new formular.

The puzzles themselves are as close to stealth gameplay as a turn-based board game can be, save for the aforementioned aspects of information gathering and improvisation under detection. You always have perfect information about the position, movement, and possible interactions of every element on the board, to the point where it is theoretically possible to solve most of the puzzles in your head before you even make your first move. There is absolutely no ambiguity or chance involved in the outcome of every turn: If you move onto a field in sight and proximity of a guard, you lose. Detection is equal to immediate failure. These conditions might feel restrictive for other stealth games like the Metal Gear series, which puts a much higher emphasis on improvisational tactics and emergent gameplay (the turn-based card gameplay of the Acid games definitely offer a more apt interpretation here), but they are a perfect fit for Hitman.

The completely formalized spacial and temporal interactions on the puzzle board actually correspond to the natural tendency for abstraction that differentiates stealth games from the majority of 3D genres. Where most games try to immerse you in a believable world, stealth encourages a more detached analytical perspective that pays attention to the structure behind the appearance. For instance, lighting becomes less of a tool for generating atmosphere and more an indication of save areas. And while the question of light and shadow is not particularly important to Hitman, its disguise system arguably offers an even more radical example for the same principle. It makes you incentivized to see every character not as an individual but merely an anonymous avatar playing a social role, who can be perfectly imitated and replaced at all times. Is there a better way to emulate the point of view of a cold-blooded assassin?

As such, the Hitman series was only ever interested in simulating social situations insofar as they communicate a clear signification. Hitman GO even manages to capture this aspect in its twofold implications. On the one hand, the guards on the board all behave in a specific manner determined by the color of their uniform. Some always rest in the same position until distracted, others turn around every turn or patrol along a linear path. Circumventing these obstacles mainly revolves around questions of move order and timing. On the other hand, there are civilians on the side of the boards, freezed in different tableaux vivants that display snapshots of social configurations: a gardener resting in the shade of a tall hedge; or a man all alone in the backrow of a wedding ceremony, burying his face in his hands.

I would even go as far as saying that Hitman GO was crucial for getting the series back on track after the confused mess that was Absolution. Square Enix Montreal certainly had a deeper understanding of Hitman than IO Interactive at that point. Still, in spite of all my praise for how Hitman GO interprets the games it is based on, one central part of the puzzle is missing. A crucial factor of the perverse appeal of the Hitman series is that you have to perform the process of abstraction yourself. Every new level sure looks like a natural environment at the start, until you peel away its different layers of artificial reality to the point where there is nothing left but a perfect clockwork leading your targets to their ultimate destiny. You almost feel like a sort of sadistic god of fate at the end, enacting a twisted higher judgment on your victims. The final execution is only the last part of this process, and not exactly the most engaging one as it usually involves a lot of waiting for every piece to fall into place. Hitman GO already strips away too many layers of social artifice for you. What is left is a series of good, but not great puzzles that have more to say about one of the best series of my favorite genre than they are able to speak for themselves.

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More puzzle game reviews
Chants of Sennaar
Cocoon
Mole Mania

Cocoon operates with two opposite paradigms at the same time. Aesthetically, it is one of the most deliberately alien experiences in recent memory, stripped almost entirely from the usual layers of anthropomorphism that structure the vast majority of video games. While there may be parts of Cocoon’s worlds that were inspired by earthly shapes and figures, their assemblage escapes every attempt of categorization. You’ll traverse natural landscapes like desolated canyons or boundless swamps that are honeycombed by artificial geometric forms. Futuristic artifacts are scattered across these wastelands like remnants of long-lost civilizations, without showing any signs of decay. Instead, the most advanced technologies are often seamlessly integrated into their surroundings, appearing as nothing more than a natural expansion of the domestic life-forms. Most of the alien creatures seem to be modeled after various types of insects, albeit with fluid boundaries to synthetic life on one side and inorganic matter on the other. No words are spoken throughout the entire game to try to explain those beings, though I doubt that the categories familiar to our language would be sufficient to adequately describe them.

To give just one example: There are these tiny, pyramid-shaped flying things that temporarily accompany you throughout the game and are used to open certain barriers, thus resembling a sort of remote control. But the same robotic assistants are created out of some amorphic floating liquid that shapes into an amber-like crystal before being shattered to give “birth” to them like a fossilized insect. And at some point, other floating things appear that can trap your little companions with a sticky substance, as if they are carnivorous plants that act as natural enemies, even though they can themselves be remotely controlled on predetermined paths by the player character. Cocoon constantly undermines any effort to adequately organize its sights and sounds, most notably with its central feature of traveling between worlds within worlds, a mechanic that literally forces you to inverse your previous sense of proportions and causation on a routine basis.

Mechanically, however, Cocoon is translucently unambiguous. As confusing as the jump into and out of the different worlds may be visually, it rarely leaves you stranded about what to do next. Progression is completely linear, with only the occasional branching path that leads to a dead end after a few steps. Every new problem is presented in a way that makes it immediately obvious what you need to achieve, just as all the tools and obstacles on your way are distinctly highlighted. Consider again your little pyramid-shaped companions. A beam of light shines from the tip of the pyramid which automatically points you to your next objective. Once they reach their corresponding obstacle, a little animation is triggered which makes the obstacle glow as well before it starts moving. The same beam starts to flicker when they get close to their enemy. Finally, they disappear again as soon as their purpose is fulfilled. Although it is never explained what this thing is or why it works the way it does, the question how it works never really arises.

The same is true for every single element in the game: Buttons open doors or move platforms, pressure plates need a weight on them to stay activated, pipes are used to transport orbs etc. And since there is only one action button, you are never in doubt about how to interact with the various objects as well. Even the bosses reliably follow a pre-established rulebook. Every boss first introduces itself in a scripted sequence, before challenging you at the end of its respective segment where it takes every precaution to telegraph its attacks and reveal its weak spot as clearly as possible during the fight. I never got hit on my first try in any of these encounters, which pretty much never happened to me before. In short, you have any prior experience with puzzles from other games, there are almost no surprises here. The game isn’t even all that difficult. Puzzles might technically get very complex and abstract towards the end, but they are always structured in a way that splits the challenges up into multiple smaller segments with only a handful of variables to work with. For most of the playtime, the solution presents itself almost as naturally as all the other elements.

By all accounts, these two contradictory approaches to aesthetics and gameplay should all but negate each other. Instead, the unique quality of Cocoon arises from the tension between them. It captures an experience of immense uncertainty about the fundamental conditions of the world – what things are and why they exist –, but at the same time gives you an almost instinctive understanding of how to work with them. Crucially, most puzzles play out less stimulating than arduous. This is by no means meant as a criticism. It simply describes the basic condition of the character, who is constantly working by carrying around these orbs more than twice their size on their back, taking part in a process where the next step is always logical enough to take it almost automatically, while both the originating cause and ultimate goal of your actions are infinitely removed from your grasp – along with all the curiosity and excitement as well as uneasiness and distress this process implies. The only thing that was somewhat clear to me throughout the adventure was that my actions were somehow driving forward some kind of evolutionary process. But whose evolution I was contributing to or to what ends is left almost completely open to speculation. Your role is just to bear witness to a gradual accumulation of energy and power, which progressively involves everything from the tiniest insects to the most elemental forces of the universe.

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Chants of Sennaar
Hitman GO
Mole Mania

Even the most enthusiastic reviews of Chants of Sennaar seem to feel obliged to mention the forced stealth sections as a weakness of the game. Depending on the critic, these portions are either labeled as an irritating diversion from the core gameplay or a negligible shortcoming in an otherwise novel and accomplished experience. While I definitely agree that the stealth is by far the shallowest element, I also found it to be symptomatic for a deeper problem that unfortunately affects even the best aspects of the game’s design. For a title about deciphering foreign languages, Chants of Sennaar is far too concerned with translating its encounters with the unfamiliar into all too familiar frameworks of video game tropes.

The game is at its most engaging at the start of each chapter, when you encounter a lot of still unknown signs of a new language at once and in various contexts, without any one of them offering conclusive evidence to their exact meaning. You observe the same symbols appearing in different combinations: there in a dialogue between two other NPC’s, here directly addressed at your character, and yet another time as part of a title for a painting on the wall, for instance. The comparison between the respective utterances sometimes leads you to more or less educated guesses about the meaning of individual words. This approach is greatly encouraged by the game’s single best system, which lets you write down your interpretations in an in-game notebook. These hypothetical translations then appear every time you encounter the corresponding sign from that point onward. You type in your definition and return to the same situations to see if they make more sense now. Some dialogue might suddenly transport a meaning that lets you infer even more translations, while other texts appear to be off just ever so slightly which forces you to adjust your hypothesis.

This simple gameplay loop is the beating heart of Chants of Sennaar and it would have been more than enough to sustain the whole game. That’s because the process of translating any given word is rarely just a matter of choosing the right or wrong answer to a question. Sometimes, there may be several possibilities that all make sense in every example available to you. At other times, there perhaps is no single completely accurate translation for the language you are playing the game in, or the meaning itself might vary, depending on the specific context of usage. None of the five languages in the game may seem very complex with only thirty-something words each to decipher, but ambivalences and ambiguities arise naturally when these symbols are transferred into your own language and its almost infinite semantic complexity.

Things get even more interesting when you start to translate between the in-game languages. Despite their limited vocabulary, the game introduces several layers of deviation that go beyond a mere terminological equivalence of all languages. It starts with small differences, such as the indication of plural forms, but later on new languages will have entirely different sentence structures, making it almost impossible to translate them word by word. Even in cases of denotative correspondence, the terms still can hold opposite connotations. For example, the Warrior’s term to refer to the group of the Devotees carries a strictly pejorative meaning.
In general, the process of learning a new language always provides insight into the culture of the respective group. If only the Alchemists have a decimal system in their vocabulary, then because they are the only ones who frequently need to operate with exact figures. This distinction is further underlined by the fact that their words are usually composed of abstract geometric shapes, while other groups like the Devotees use a more figurative sign language. Also note how every language is taught you to differently, according to the speaker’s culture. It makes perfect sense that you learn the language of the Devotees by their religious teachings, while the Warriors mainly communicate through orders, or that the Bards express their concepts in theatre plays and the Alchemists in scientific formulars. If you stay attentive to these indicators of social structure, you’ll find that there are conversely multiple ways to decipher the languages. Every written language follows its own inherent visual logic, which usually makes it possible to differentiate between different types of words prior to knowing their exact meaning.

Chants of Sennaar deserves most of the praise it is getting for how much sophistication it creates with its simple translation mechanics. I want to make clear that these qualities are not simply outweighed by its faults before diving into the next paragraphs full of criticisms. In fact, my main frustration with the game stems from how much other stuff was added, even though it contributes almost nothing to the experience. Basically, every element that is not directly linked to the act of translating remains awfully underdeveloped, and there is surprisingly much of it. Throughout the adventure, you’ll encounter block puzzles, several labyrinths, platforming, even scripted chase sequences and some embarrassingly misplaced horror moments. The real problem with the stealth sections therefore becomes that they are only the most prominent sample of a much wider array of poor gameplay segments throughout the whole game. Why in the world is there a Flappy Bird mini game in here?

Besides being a distraction from the game’s strengths, these components also sometimes work against them. Despite language being the central feature of the experience, the world is, for the most part, curiously devoid of its presence. Instead of creating a series of dense and intimate social spaces to explore, Chants of Sennaar tries way too hard to give your adventure a grandiose sense of scale of Babylonian proportions. As a result, you mostly traverse through wide, empty spaces with only a few scraps of text to be found each area. Far too much time is spent by just walking from one point of interest to the next, and the whole layout of the tower quickly becomes so confusing that it actually discourages you from revisiting old areas to test out your hypothetical translations, regardless of the fact that this method is incentivized by the mechanics.

Above all, the bloated emptiness and stuffed gameplay features for the sake of variety make apparent a certain lack of confidence by the developers in their own genuine systems, which shines through in the design of the core mechanics as well. I completely understand the reasons behind the decision to give official, “correct” translations to every sign, especially from a practical perspective. Periodic tests of your knowledge that gradually verify the meaning of each word were probably necessary for the steady pace of progression the story aims for, without running the risk of some players getting hopelessly lost in translation at some point. The tests themselves also mostly avoid the trap of giving away the answer too easily by making you translate multiple signs at once. Yet the drawings used to illustrate the supposed “proper” sense of the corresponding word are themselves the perfect illustration for why this correspondence between signifier and signified is itself impossible.

As individual sketches, these drawings are usually inept to represent the whole range of a sign’s meaning, especially if they are meant to visualize abstract concepts. To merely criticize this, however, would miss the point that the drawings do not actually attempt to provide a definition themselves, but to facilitate the process of translating the in-game languages into your own. In fact, the use of drawings sidesteps the much more rigid method of a direct verification through your own native tongue. If the game would ask you to formulate the translation directly, it would need to account for many possible “correct” inputs from the player. Even something as seemingly simple like the sign for “I” could also be translated with words such as “me”, “myself”, “my”, “oneself”, “selfhood” etc., depending on the sentence in which it was used. The options only multiply when you take more than the English-speaking audience into account. Instead, the drawings try to be consistent with all your possible hypotheses about the specific meaning of a sign, before arbitrarily deciding the “true” translation once you associate it correctly with the drawing. These official translations remain somewhat flexible, as the game will for example conjugate verbs according to the context of a sentence.

Yet despite every precaution taken to make it less restrictive, this system still asserts clarity and plainness where there was ambiguity and complexity before. No matter how different the process of translation was for each player, Chants of Sennaar makes sure that everyone arrives at the same conclusion at the end. The price of this approach is that once any sense of ambivalence about a word’s meaning is resolved, your translations stop being a tool you use creatively to understand unknown signs, and simply start to replace the foreign language, which in turn ceases to matter once it becomes “solved”. The goal is not really to learn a previously unknown language, but to reinstate the transparency of your own language into the world. Understanding a language has little to do with being able to find correspondences between another one already familiar to you. True understanding can only be reached inside the language itself.

Of course, this process takes years with any language in the real world and might seem like a tall task to ask for a puzzle game that only takes a couple of hours to beat. But I’d argue that games have been remarkably good at making you learn to think in ways that even make almost zero sense outside the experience. Think of Portal’s catchphrase “now you’re thinking with portals”, which is another way of saying that you have become a fluent speaker in the use of portals. Every good puzzle game adheres to this core design principle in its own way. They are never simply about solving a series of well-designed problems; they also gradually augment your way of seeing and interacting with its world in a way that make these problems solvable in the first place. In comparison, Chants of Sennaar is oddly reluctant to let you use the languages you learnt for yourself. The game could have linked progression to successfully communicating with the natives, or by acting as a translator between them. While the latter is in fact the penultimate and certainly most rewarding challenge the game presents, it is also inexplicably demoted in its entirety to a side quest to reach the “true” ending. For the most part, Chants of Sennaar wants you to learn its languages not to understand or use them yourself, but rather to enable you to understand its other mechanics, even though these are already so derivative of other games that they should require the least explaining of all.

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Cocoon
Hitman GO
Mole Mania

Nintendo has always been overly protective of its franchises, but in a year where they made more than a billion dollars with a film that attempts little more than a barrage of "hey, recognize this from that game?"-moments for ninety minutes straight, they seem to be more occupied than ever with the recognizability of their most lucrative brand. Playing Super Mario Land against this backdrop in 2023, it feels refreshing to discover how little regard a Mario game could have had for aesthetic continuity with the rest of the series more than thirty years ago. The adventure takes place in a different kingdom after all, and that is all the justification the game needs to throw some of the weirdest combinations of settings and characters at you. In only twelve levels, Mario faces a roster of enemies that includes skeleton fish, robots, aliens, hopping tarantulas, running moai heads and zombies from Chinese folklore. What’s more, the few returning enemies like Goombas and Koopas have been considerably shrunk down in size, as if to demonstrate their diminished relevance. The fact that Koopas turn into time bombs when jumped upon could almost be seen as an act of anarchic rebellion against the conformity that most other Mario games have unfortunately succumbed to over the decades. Tellingly, the only element from Super Mario Land that stuck with the franchise is princess Daisy, but only years later in her revised form as Peach in a different flavor. Apart from that, the entirety of Sarasaland has been banned to the realm of lore that is merely mentioned in future games to give an extra talking point to the "did you know?"-gamers.

However, I would be cautious not to overestimate the audiovisual idiosyncrasy on display here. One of the core strengths of the Mario series has always been how little sense its world made. There is almost nothing tying together its different components, they simply have been shown in the same combination so frequently that it has become the most natural thing to see an Italian plumber jump against floating blocks to pick up flowers that let him shoot fire balls at walking mushrooms. And while most spin-off titles content themselves with repeating the same formular over and over again, the main series has never shied away from introducing the most outlandish new elements into the mix without ever jumping the shark. Remember the initial outcry provoked by the reveal that regular sized human beings were to be a part of Super Mario Odyssey? Somehow this appeared to be the most jarring decision in a game that later advertised itself with a literal T-Rex out of nowhere. Yet upon release, the human world New Donk City quickly became one of the most beloved levels in the whole series. Nintendo has simply gotten extraordinarily good at integrating the most disparate pieces into a coherent experience. In comparison, Super Mario Land seems less like an act of aesthetic defiance than a mixture of lack of experience with the new hardware and poor game design.

I never thought I would finish a 2D-Mario game without ever using the run button. You never need it and the change in speed is so devoid of any sense of momentum that if feels more like you accidentally pressed the speed-up button instead. The game’s version of the Fire Flower also manages to always shoot its projectile at the least useful angle. It still technically works as a platformer, but there is nothing to get excited about. Levels tend to loop the same sequence of obstacles multiple times in a row before moving on, with only minimal variation between iterations. The only "original" ideas are two of the blandest Shoot 'em up levels I have ever played. In the end, Super Mario Land neither succeeds at adapting the elements it tries to carry over from previous games, nor does it establish an interesting identity of its own.

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Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
Super Mario Bros. 3

By 1988, Nintendo was pretty much ready to leave behind the lives system that had become such an integral part of video game identity. Having limited continues was an imported concept from arcade machines that didn’t really suit home console gaming in the first place, but it was the most convenient way for developers to work around the lack of save features of early generation hardware, as well as the relative brevity of the games due to their software restrictions. This rings especially true for action-oriented games like platformers. The first Super Mario Bros. is a prime example for this and arguably had the most accomplished implementation of this design philosophy at the time. Nintendo had no reason to fix an issue and at first glance it doesn’t look like they tried. You still start your adventure with a limited number of lives, the game still resets you to the beginning when you’ve lost them all, and there is still no save feature to be found whatsoever. However, once you start playing, you’ll quickly realize that this time, the developers really do not want you to run out of lives in the first place. The game throws so many possibilities to obtain extra lives at you that it sometimes felt like I was being showered in 1-Ups.

Every three completed stages net you at least one live guaranteed, and up to five if you time all your final jumps correctly. Incidentally, the most natural way to finish the stage already coincides with the perfect timing, so most players are going to get the best results more often than not. Additionally, Spade and N-Spade Panels with mini-games are sprinkled regularly between levels to give you even more chances for extra lives and other bonusses. The card mini game in particular is very simple to memorize as it does not reset after a failed attempt. Hidden 1-Up Mushrooms are much more common than in previous games and several levels can even be exploited to get infinite lives, with some of the easiest and most obvious methods available in the entire series. And even if you lose all your lives, the game still cleverly lets you preserve progress via unlocked shortcuts in the overworld.

Of course, an abundance of extra lives does not negate difficulty and there are still plenty of challenging courses in Super Mario Bros. 3. But for the first time, a difficult section does not automatically turn into an absolute roadblock for progression until you overcome it. Not only does the game offer far more multiple routes and shortcuts inside the levels themselves, but it also extends the same principle to the game as a whole. The addition of the overworld map often gives you the option to choose between branching paths and sometimes permits you to skip certain levels altogether. Many of the remaining mandatory stages can also be bypassed with overworld items like the cloud, the Music Box, or the P-Wing, if you know how to use it properly. Most importantly, the new item inventory allows you to tackle the same level differently each time. Having multiple Power Ups makes their advantages much more context sensitive, like how the frog costume is specifically designed to facilitate movement in underwater stages. All this leads not only to much easier but also more individualized playthroughs. The game wants you to see everything it has to offer, but at the same time lets you decide to a large degree which of its parts you want to engage with. All subsequent Mario platformers embraced this open and welcoming approach to game design even further, but it was already fully articulated for the first time in this installment thirty-five years ago. The whole concept is so antithetical to the lives system that it makes me wonder why the series kept using it to this day, even though lives have ceased to be a relevant aspect of the experience for decades.

Whatever the reasons may be, Nintendo’s willingness to let players skip most of the content speaks volumes about the team’s confidence in their game design. You may be able to bypass many of the challenges, but the developers know that if you enjoy the game, you’ll most likely want to discover everything it has to offer. If anything, the reduced pressure from the fear of losing progress by dying increases the players’ willingness to engage with the game. There are too many great ideas to mention, but I think what impressed me the most is how Super Mario Bros. 3 constantly questions and reinvents the notion of what a Mario level can be. The first game had some variety in its level structures, namely in the underwater courses and Bowser’s Castles. But that variety pales in comparison to sheer creativity that is on display here in any single given world. There are horizontally and vertically structured stages; levels that let you move freely and levels where you are being moved on predetermined paths; courses that rely on speed and others that have timing-based challenges; linear gauntlets and levels that are structured more like open ended spaces to explore. Some stages even break entirely with the familiar structure of obstacle courses and play more like convoluted labyrinths or veritable puzzle boxes. And while many games have a lot of different mission types that still always play out in the same way, here every element is affected according to the structure of the level. Like how respawning enemies pose a very different kind of challenge in maze-like levels than in linear courses, or puzzle boxes give you an infinite number of Power Ups since they are usually required to reach the finish line. You simply never know what the next level has in store. And by drastically reducing the fear of losing, curiosity and the joy of discovery can finally take over to become the main driving factors for making progress.

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Super Mario Bros.

More NES reviews
Castlevania
The Legend of Zelda

It’s frustrating but also kind of fascinating to see how one simple technical limitation can outweigh all the expanded content this port has going for it. Most of the aesthetic and gameplay additions are good and should easily make this the best version to experience the first Super Mario Bros. – except that screen crunch is real and truly crushing in this case. The degree to which the perspective was zoomed-in seems almost absurd in direct comparison to the NES original. Nothing more than a fraction of the screen remains in the frame, even the clouds in the sky had to be pulled down to keep them visible at all. The game somewhat tries to mitigate this drastically reduced field of vision by making some tweaks to the camera placement. For example, Mario is positioned to the left of the screen instead of in the middle. While certainly a necessary adjustment, this doesn't change that you still can see significantly less of what lies ahead of you than on the NES. You are also now able to slightly move the camera to the left when turning backwards, but only as far as the screen size from the original would have allowed for, which feels weirdly unintuitive. The rules of the NES code still apply, only that you are unable to see them now.

But the most awkward addition must be the new option to scroll the screen up and down. Not only does the ability to move the camera independently from the character completely interrupt the flow of movement in a 2D platformer like Super Mario where perception and mobility are so tightly interwoven. It also is poorly implemented, again stemming from the root cause of screen crunch. Because the frame is so tiny to begin with, every camera movement feels too fast and abrupt. At the same time, the range of possible camera movement is also too small because the camera remains tied to Mario, who has to stay visible at all times.

Consequently, the level design loses one of its most defining features: verticality. Gone is the active decision-making of choosing between multiple paths, since the consequences of each option are barely foreseeable. If anything, this illustrates just how perfectly placed the camera was on the NES. A big reason why the platforming in Super Mario Bros. feels so satisfying is because of how intentionally you are able to execute your movement. You always know where Mario is going to land when you press the jump button, but every forward movement still reveals enough of the stage to force you to stay alert and adjust to the new situation. This dynamic between proactive and reactive gameplay is almost gone in Deluxe. The experience here is more akin to playing an infinite runner, where you simply try to avoid the next obstacle in front of you. The only reliable way to make your playthrough less distorted is when you are already familiar with the levels from the original; but in that case, there is even less of a reason to play this version.

While every level is more or less negatively affected by these changes, nowhere is it more apparent than in the Cheep Cheep stages. On the NES, you can see, or at least anticipate, the complete jumping arc of the enemies and try to adjust your own movement accordingly. In Deluxe, these stages feel like you are being subjected to some kind of heavenly punishment as you are relentlessly bombarded from all sides by those goddamn fish.

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Super Mario Bros.
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Mole Mania

The flagpoles at the end of each stage are a perfect expression of the design philosophy that underlies the whole game. The flagpole encourages you to reach for the top and rewards players that manage to pull it off with extra points. This reward never becomes stale because the game always finds new and slightly more difficult variations to this simple challenge that often smartly encompass the elements already introduced in the stage itself. But these penultimate tests of skill remain mostly optional and don’t hinder less experienced players from finishing the stage itself. It is perfectly alright to only catch the flagpole at the bottom (turns out it is even better when you speedrun the game) – you’ll still advance to the next stage like everybody else without carrying over any disadvantages for the rest of your playthrough. Even the occasional eruption of fireworks is completely unrelated to how well you performed. The game just occasionally celebrates you for making it one step further.

Despite Super Mario Bros. being the most important and influential game of its time, it is remarkable just how much its design philosophy differs from most platformers that came after it. Sidescrollers on the NES were predominantly about creating difficulty by asking an increasing level of precision from the player while at the same time punishing their mistakes more severely the further they came. This means that you either need expert reflexes or minute memorization of the game to make it through to the end and the vast majority of players won’t acquire either skill without repeating the same obstacles over and over again. Of course, learning through repetition is not problematic in and of itself. Only when combined with limited lives and a general lack of checkpoints or other save options does the habit of placing the most unforgiving challenges towards the end turn many of these games into a more frustrating and unfair than motivating and rewarding experience. In effect, the most difficult challenges become the same ones that players have the fewest chances to practice and experiment with, which completely undermines the idea of learning through repetition.

Although Super Mario Bros. works largely with the same elements mentioned above (finite continues, no permanent checkpoints, increasing demand of precision with a growing number of deadly obstacles), the act of mastering its challenges has far less to do with memorizing enemy placements or optimizing a perfect series of inputs than the impressive speedrun history of the game may suggest. Instead, Nintendo designed the game from the ground up to make the process of learning through repetition – in other words: the game itself as you experience it – as fun and engaging as possible.

The level design often offers multiple routes in almost every course. For example, the path on the ground can present a bigger gauntlet of enemies while the way forward above has more difficult platforming ahead. Hidden passages underground or in the sky might let you skip a tricky section of the level, but perhaps also make you miss out on a valuable power-up. Players have to make real decisions on how to progress, and their choices are likely to change on later attempts depending on their familiarity with the game. However, this is rarely because one option turns out to be clearly better than the others. Rather, the different decisions usually correspond to a player’s level of experience, which means they are primarily between a risky but more rewarding options against a safer but slower approach. Take a basic enemy encounter with a Koopa: It can be avoided, immobilized, or turned into a projectile against other enemies. While the last strategy sounds most tempting, it can also sometimes quite literally backfire. Even the power-ups adhere to this trade-off between risk and reward. The Mushroom and Fire Flower are mostly there to aid less experienced players by giving them extra health or an easy option to deal with opponents. But at no point are they required to beat the game. On the contrary, playing as little Mario has its own advantages like a smaller hitbox or being able to use tiny passages.

The process of active decision making is complemented by Mario’s movement, which allows for great flexibility and even split-second adjustments mid air. You can progress through the game at breakneck speed as well as slowly and methodically and it feels great to race past a course that posed a real challenge a couple of tries earlier. The wide range in Mario’s mobility also makes it pretty likely that you stumble upon small or big secrets fairly regularly, even after dozens of attempts. Every Green Pipe and breakable block not only functions as part of the obstacle course, but also might hide a new short-cut or power-up. Even the simple act of miss-timing a jump can turn into a discovery when you suddenly hit an invisible block. Especially the early levels hide alternative routes that allow you to completely bypass most of the challenges and you only have to beat eight of the 32 levels once you found out about the warp zones, no glitches required.

In the end, the whole point of the flagpole is to give players another opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the game without punishing those that have not reached that level of skill yet. Super Mario Bros. trusts you to figure out your own way to have fun with it, while still carefully guiding you towards a better understanding of its mechanics and teaching you everything you need to know. This balance occurs so rarely that I could not help but be impressed by how seemingly effortlessly Nintendo found it this early.

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More Super Mario reviews
Super Mario Bros. 3
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe

More NES reviews
Castlevania

Castlevania has to be the most aesthetically accomplished series on the NES. It probably would still be if the first game somehow never got popular enough to spawn its many sequels. The confidence in its audiovisual presentation is evident on every screen, which is even more remarkable considering it was released at a time where most developers were still struggling to create clearly recognizable, let alone coherent, sprite work for their games. There certainly wasn’t much holding together the visuals of jumping plumbers, question mark blocks, walking mushrooms, green pipes, fire flowers and turtle kings in 1985, except that each of them clearly communicated their in-game function to the player. Jump forward only one year and here is a game whose imagery is so tightly interwoven that even the background sprites follow a distinct dramaturgy throughout the adventure. For example, the tower where the final showdown with Dracula takes place already appears for the first time at the very start of the game as a looming silhouette on top of the distant castle behind the entrance gate of his estate. It then repeatedly returns as a mysterious destination on the map screen between each level, seemingly suspended in thin air, only to resurface in the background of the third level as you reach the roof of the castle, its shape now slightly closer and partly illuminated by the moonlight. Moonlight from the same crescent moon that was also already shining in the first screen and becomes visible again at the very end in the sky during your final ascend to Dracula’s chamber. Every game that came out today would be praised for this level of detail.

There obviously was a lot of talent involved in the making of this game, but I think the main reason why Castlevania succeeds so well aesthetically has to do with where the team took their visual inspiration from. Konami had to work with the same technical limitations as everybody else at the time, but they chose a frame of reference that arguably translated the best into 8-bit graphics: Gothic horror, or, more precisely, Gothic horror as envisioned by the Universal Monster Films of the 1930s. These films already translated the classic literary works of gothic fiction into a highly codified visual language that was instantly recognizable for a mass audience. In fact, these filmic adaptations where so successful that they were quickly serialized into what one could now call the first Cinematic Universe, including everything like crossovers, cameos, or parodies. Looking back, it seems almost absurd that in the opening credits of Frankenstein from 1931, the name of the actor who plays The Monster was explicitly not revealed because ever since the release of the film, our cultural imagination of this creature has become pretty much inseparable from the face of Boris Karloff. You might have never seen the original Frankenstein, Dracula, or The Mummy, yet your idea of what these characters look, sound, or move like is still almost certainly shaped by these films. They definitely were the basis of the virtual counterparts that you encounter in the game.

Castlevania never tries to hide its cinematic influences. If anything, the game makes them overtly apparent, from the title screen that is designed like a film strip, to the pun names of real filmmakers and actors in the end credits. It gladly uses every single monster or character that already has a strong enough cultural representation to ensure that their sprites are instantly recognizable. As a game based on trial and error, memorization, and repetition there is almost no sense of horror of the unknown here. Castlevania offers plenty of surprises, but it always ensures that you know the evils you are facing off against, since this knowledge is ultimately your best weapon to defeat them. It is as much a celebration of every popular form of horror fiction that came before it as it is an exciting experiment in what that tradition can become when translated into a new medium.

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More NES reviews
Double Dragon
The Legend of Zelda
Super Mario Bros.

The first minutes of Double Dragon capture a sensation of immediacy and rawness that is palpable even today. The very first thing you see a literal punch in the guts: a woman getting assaulted and abducted on the street in broad daylight. The music starts kicking in and you are dropped into the same alley, immediately getting attacked by a bunch of thugs. The initial act of violence against the woman still echoes in your head as you commence your relentless rampage of revenge. There are no signs of civil life left in this postindustrial wasteland of a city (an important difference from the arcade version). You punch and kick your way through empty streets and abandoned construction sites – it feels like moving through a corpse of stone and metal. Notions of honor or fair play have long ceased to exist among the roaming gangs, and the thugs won’t hesitate to throw knives or explosives right in your face. Any means to get the upper hand are allowed, so you better adapt quickly and use the enemies’ weapons yourself or push your foes into bottomless pits. Apart from the goal to rescue the girl, the game makes no effort to distinguish the player character from his opponents, neither in appearance nor movement. This is a world of sheer brute force, harsh and unhinged. And it is a great opening for a video game, where it’s immediately clear why it became so influential, both terms in gameplay and style.

However, things start to fall apart quickly after the first two levels. The environmental design loses its focus as the game leaves his urban setting behind in place of generic woods and caves. No new enemy types get introduced anymore, and since there are never more than two enemies on screen at once, the challenge stagnates. Unlocking more moves over time is satisfying but it still becomes apparent how unpolished the combat system actually is. Too often it feels like the game decides randomly whether you or your opponent gets hit first unless you figure out how to cheese your way through every encounter with the same simple tactics. Instead, the game ramps up the difficulty by adding random bullshit like unfair environmental traps and awkward platforming sections, even though the controls clearly were not meant for this kind of challenge. It is also at this point that the levels begin to drag on for far longer, further reinforcing the impression of artificial difficulty. After a while I felt no shame using quick saves to make it through to the end. Double Dragon honestly would have been a better game if it had ended after the second level, even if that means it only lasted for five glorious minutes.

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More NES reviews
Castlevania
The Legend of Zelda
Super Mario Bros.

I actually won this game in a contest on a gaming website back in the day, together with a brand-new XBOX 360 in the Halo 4 design. This should have been one of the happiest days in my life, since I never owned a home console before and had always dreamt of having one for myself. But sadly, this stroke of luck happened only after I was already starting to lose my passion for video games. My computer broke down shortly before and I was drawn to other interests. I ended up rarely using the console and only played a couple of games on it before giving it away.

One of these games was, of course, Halo 4. I was a big fan of the series, especially Halo: Reach, which to this day is one of my favorites. So, I really tried to like this game. I played through the campaign multiple times, alone and with different friends in co-op, like we always used to do with the previous entries. But it just never seemed to click with any of us. On the contrary, it slowly but surely dawned on me with each successive playthrough, just how uninspired and boring this game truly is. My last playthrough was with a friend who was unimpressed from the start. I remember vividly how I kept trying to convince him – and myself, for that matter – that we were having a good time. Before each new mission I used to say: "Now just wait for it, this time something cool will happen." But it never did.

It was a clumsy attempt on my end to pretend like we could recapture the excitement of the original games again, just because on the surface the situation looked similar to what we experienced before. I was unwilling to realize that even something as robust a foundation as the shooting mechanics from Halo could become stale and generic when they are detached from any sort of engaging stakes, interesting novelties, or even basis competent game design. It was exactly how it must have felt like for the developers at 343 Industry when making this game.

Unfortunately, Mole Mania is not the hidden Miyamoto gem I had hoped for. This really is a shame, because the puzzles themselves are good, sometimes even brilliant. The game manages to constantly get more difficult without overwhelming the player by introducing too many variables at once. It is quite impressive how many different problems the designers managed to construct within the unchanging confinements of two layers with eight times seven tiles each. Every screen poses the same simple question: How to maneuver the ball into the wall? The different answers to this question soon become so complex that you need to spend most of your time just planning your movement in advance before being able to execute your solution. Here lies the central conflict of the gameplay loop: On the one hand, solving the puzzles in your head often requires you to mentally reconstruct the critical path backwards, from the goal to the starting position of the ball. On the other hands, carrying out the solution is, like in almost every game, a forward moving process, working your way from start to finish one step at a time. This dynamic is by no means unique to this game. In fact, it applies to many of the greatest puzzle games. The challenge is to keep the experience engaging both mentally and mechanically at the same. However, I’d argue that Mole Mania mostly struggles to find and maintain this balance, and as a result often feels more tedious than fun.

There are several different possibilities of how the interplay between planning and executing the solution of a puzzle can work out. Since the whole setup is visible in its entirety, it is possible to figure out everything before interacting with the world at all (except for a quick glance at the layout underground). In this case, putting your plan into motion can either be satisfying or arduous, depending on how long it takes to execute it and how engaging the interaction with the world is. Sadly, most of the challenging puzzles also involve way too many steps that you have to perform, and since every movement is restricted to the four directions and limited tiles of the map, it often feels slower and less exciting than shuffling around pieces on a board game.

Another possibility is that you try but fail to find the solution and instead start experimenting. This can also be satisfying, especially when you stumble upon the missing link between your previous assumptions and the current game state along the way. Except that Mole Mania actually discourages experimentation because of how easy it is to completely block off the solution by making a single wrong move. As the game progresses, the puzzles leave less and less room for error, yet the game keeps introducing more and more elements that can irreversibly alter its state. All it takes is to slip up once and heavy objects get stuck in corners, barrels block up holes and underground pathways, or enemies get locked in the wrong place. This even affects the central mechanic of digging holes. I stopped counting how often I accidently placed a hole in the wrong spot just before the end or realized too late that I had misplaced one at the beginning. In any case, there is nothing else to do than to exit the screen, reset the puzzle and do everything all over again.

Finally, there is the third option of not thinking ahead at all and instead just trying to figure things out as you go along. This approach works best for puzzle games with an emphasis on a sense of discovery, where not every element is revealed at first sight, and you are encouraged to explore without too much risk of unforeseen and unwanted consequences. Both aspects run contrary to Mole Mania’s design, and if that is not enough to keep you from trying this playstyle, then the enemies will surely break your spirit. Not only do most of them look surprisingly awful and completely detached from the rest of the game’s aesthetic, they also are easily the most annoying part of the experience. Very rarely are they part of the puzzle itself, instead their primary function is to hinder you from executing the solution. You can defeat them, but this is discouraged by the fact that they always respawn when you reset the puzzle and are automatically eliminated when you solve it. They don't pose a serious thread either since they move on predetermined paths, and you can easily dodge most of them by hiding underground. Simply put, the enemies are nothing but a waste of time. All you need to do is wait until they are out of the way. Even if they hit you, the only punishment usually is that you have to backtrack to the last save zone where you can infinitely replenish your health, which wastes even more time. They add nothing substantial to the experience, yet the game inexplicably turns them into the main attraction in the final levels.

I think a good comparison to illustrate Mole Mania shortcomings is Eagle’s Tower from Link’s Awakening. Not only were both game released on the same platform by the same publisher three years prior; Eagle's Tower also has the same core idea of using a heavy object to break certain structures, while moving said object also restricts your own mobility. This leads to the same basic dynamic between careful planning and precise execution. However, the traversal and moment-to-moment gameplay in Link’s Awakening are challenging and engaging on their own. The complex layout of the dungeon forces you to alternate between curious exploration and critical thinking, simultaneously uncovering new parts of the puzzle while trying to maintain an overview of its structure as a whole. Mole Mania never reaches the quality of this dungeon. The game’s levels may share Zelda's maze-like structure with winding paths and hidden areas, even directly borrowing some elements from the series like the map and compass. Yet none of these additions change the nature of the puzzles themselves, which are still confined to a single screen each. And despite the quality of some of these puzzles, they mostly remain isolated highlights. If Mole Mania demonstrated one thing, then that good puzzle design itself is only good in theory as long as there are no interesting ways to interact with it in practice.

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More puzzle game reviews
Cocoon
Chants of Sennaar

More Game Boy reviews
Super Mario Land

What surprised me the most about the first Zelda is how playable and genuinely good it still is today. The common criticisms about it being too confusing or cryptic are – for the most part – just prejudices. They most likely stem from an unwillingness to engage with the game on its own terms. The only big obstacle comes at the very beginning: You are likely to see the first couple of game over screens before feeling like you’ve accomplished much of anything. I was ready to give up at some point this early on, but mostly due to everything I read about how impossibly difficult and frustrating the whole game was supposed to be. It is not. And once I got over the initial hurdle, I was completely fascinated by the experience all the way through the end.

Yes, you are given no clear direction and just a vague idea of what you must do. Yes, you are going to spend the first hour or so wandering around, getting lost and not making much progress. And yes, there are a lot of secrets in the game that most players will never stumble upon. Yet all this really means is that the game does not explicitly teach you how to engage with it. Instead, you have to figure out the rules of engagement by yourself. This might seem like an unreasonable demand for a player today, but it was and still is appropriate for a game from 1986. First of all, the rules themselves aren’t very complex. There are only two action buttons and items usually don’t serve many different, context-sensitive functions. The game is probably even more accessible to a new player now than it was when it first came out. Today we are already familiar with all the gameplay tropes that The Legend of Zelda established back then in the first place. We now know how progression is structured in a game like this, we know that walls could be bombable, heart containers are better than potions etc. For a modern player, the process of understanding this game is more about figuring out what you can’t do than what you can.

Second, the world might seem intimidatingly big with almost no restrictions to where you can go from the start. But in reality, its size is completely manageable and the layout not that hard to familiarize yourself with. I think almost no player today would be overwhelmed by the overworld if the game handed them an in-game map from the start. That’s why my real breakthrough with the game came when I started drawing my own map of the world. This again sounds like a lot to ask, but in fact, the first Zelda might be from the only period in gaming history where this approach was quite reasonable (I had a similar experience with Metal Gear from 1987). The whole map is divided into little rectangles that can be surveyed at a glance, and all the visual elements are still so simple that anyone can easily transfer them on paper without any drawing skills (like myself). There actually already exists a detailed map in the manual which the game even incentivizes you to use, but I somehow missed that entirely until after I beat the game. I’m glad I did though, because I probably would not have come to appreciate this type of early video game graphics without having to copy them all the time. Most of the sprites still only had limited options to visually interpret the object they were meant to represent. They are pure signs where the signifier becomes almost identical with the signified concept in the game. After a while, looking at this game feels more akin to an act of reading, where you are directly translating the visual information given to you into the underlying code.

Once you reach this point, you realize that there is a hint somewhere for almost everything you must do to finish the game; the challenge simply lies in finding and connecting all the clues. And while it is easy to get stuck in the process at some point, the game always ensures that you are making some sort of progress. Note how you always keep all your Rupees after you die, so even if you just wander aimlessly, killing monsters along the way, you’ll still get closer to being able to buy one of the many useful but expensive items in the various shops. My only complaint with the exploration is that the game sometimes punishes you for discovering a secret room by actually taking Rupees away from you, while only revealing a bad joke. This happened at least three times to me, and I was unable to laugh it off after the first time. Of course, the game has also aged rather poorly in other areas, and there are numerous problems related to dungeon design, enemies, or the combat system. But the sense of discovery and adventure in the first Zelda remain to this day thoroughly engaging and completely unique for the series, even after the release of Breath of the Wild. The experience is much less about experimentation than deciphering, the process of uncovering and understanding the internal logic of a hieroglyphic system that appears to be arbitrary at first, until you gradually turn into a fluent speaker of its language.

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More NES reviews
Castlevania
Double Dragon
Super Mario Bros.

The main thing FireRed and LeafGreen deserve credit for is bringing the first generation of Pokémon up to par with the new gameplay standards of the third. The fact that this makes such a big difference compared to every subsequent set of remakes only proves that the third generation really was the most important overhaul for the series. It reworked the already existing fundamental programming to make it function more consistently, while also adding innumerous new features that have become cornerstones for the design of future generations. As a result, gen 3 is the first generation that is still perfectly playable today for newcomers and veterans alike. Almost everyone who wants to experience the Kanto region for the first or the fiftieth time will pick the remakes over the original games. Subsequent remakes in the series might have been more ambitious and better games overall, but FireRed and LeafGreen manage the best to evoke the nostalgia of discovering the world of Pokémon for the first time, which is a quality that only becomes more important with every passing year.

They are even better at capturing this nostalgia for Kanto than Red and Blue could ever hope to do again, because they are much closer to how people remember Pokémon felt like playing when they first encountered it. Don’t get me wrong, the first set of Pokémon games is to this day one of the most impressive and groundbreaking videogame products ever, both as a concept and in its execution. But there are also few games that have aged as poorly since their initial release as Red and Blue. In contrast, FireRed and LeafGreen have only gotten more popular over the years, as countless new YouTube videos, Twitch streams, and rom hacks demonstrate daily. They have largely replaced the originals in their function as the cultural objects we use to collectively remember and glorify the birth of the global phenomenon called Pokémon, the highest-grossing media franchise in the world.

Franchises this big always run the risk of becoming too familiar, although their familiarity is paradoxically also the source of their lasting profitability. That is why they constantly try to rejuvenate themselves by creating new products that essentially just recycle the original instances to make them seem fresh and exiting again for a new audience. In this process they further mystify the first successful instances and thus make their magic even less likely to be recaptured again. The new Star Wars films are a good example for this dynamic (Star Wars currently holds number 5 on the list of highest-grossing media franchises, despite being around almost 20 years longer than Pokémon). I also think that George Lucas’ attempts to digitally enhance the first trilogy had a similar aim as the Pokémon remakes: bringing them closer to a changing culture that primarily knew Star Wars through digital media. Turns out this trick works a lot better with video games than with movies, because technological developments can more easily be marketed as "enhancements".

It has become impossible to reexperience the impressions that certain early graphics made on players when they were first released, because we can only ever see them against the background of every development that came afterwards. Some of the original Pokémon sprites are barely recognizable today, even though they were reworked multiple times between the different versions of the first generation. The art style of FireRed and LeafGreen remains accessible after almost twenty years. Even if the main reason for development was to compensate for the lack of backward compatibility in Ruby and Sapphire, GameFreak chose exactly the right moment to remake their first and most precious generation.

Sadly, the success of these games in their function as fetish objects for nostalgic projection comes at the expense of design decisions that are mostly disappointing from a gameplay perspective. GameFreak only fully adopted the "invisible" updates from later generations like the new IV and EV systems, natures, and abilities. Other more striking novelties such as double battles, berries or held items are also here, but only in such a marginalized role that they might as well not exist at all. In fact, it is easy to miss their presence entirely. It feels like the designers were actively trying to hide any changes that might run the risk of alienating players by deviating too much from the original experience and thus ruin the nostalgic appeal. But at the same time, they were afraid to cut the features entirely.

So now there are a few barely noticeable dots on the ground where you can find a handful of berries that are pretty much pointless (except for nuzlockes). Now there are also some very useful held items in the game, but they are only revealed when you use the Itemfinder on the exact tile where they are hidden, even though the item does not work this way in other contexts. And now, Golbat does gain friendship points and evolves into Crobat, but when it does, the animation just stops at some point and a single question mark appears. This was exactly my reaction when encountering these baffling design choices that are present in almost every aspect of FireRed and LeafGreen. Even the entirely new Sevii Islands are only nice in theory and practically feel like a giant waste of potential because of how tame and uninteresting all the extra content is.

In the end, it feels like GameFreak fell victim to the same fetishization of their own property during development. The underlying mistake of every bad design decision is the belief that there exists something like the original version Pokémon that you have to keep faithful to. They seemed to have ignored the fact that there already were many different versions of these games over the years, from the Japanese only Red and Green up until Pokémon Yellow for the Game Boy Color, with several changes between each version. They missed the opportunity to actively choose the best parts from each iteration and then still improve on other aspects that did not work in any of them. I don’t think that the nostalgic effect would have been any different. Otherwise, all the changes inherent to this being a generation 3 game would be far more alienating. After all, nostalgia is based on how something is remembered and not on how it actually was.

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More Pokémon reviews
Pokémon Trading Card Game

The Pokémon Trading Card Game is, first and foremost, a bad card game. Or at least it was bad at the time of this game’s release with the limited number of cards available. There simply aren’t enough options to build interesting decks or pull off complex combos. But the problems go deeper than just a lack of variety. Some of the basic concepts of the game are fundamentally flawed.

The most obvious problem is that you have to fill at least one third of your deck with energy cards, although these cards only serve a single purpose and cannot be played more than once per turn. This ratio makes it statistically very likely that you or your opponent will either have too many or too few of these cards during a duel, which is often already enough to give one side a decisive advantage. One of the most frustrating ways to lose a duel is to draw energy cards for several turns in a row when literally any other card would have helped. This basically turns stalling into a necessity, which is always a bad sign if you want to have fun.

Moreover, the system of multiple types with different weaknesses and resistances does not translate well into a card game, especially in the simplified form that was chosen for the adaptation. Gyms being restricted to only one type already trivialized most of the challenge in the main series, but at least there the type chart is a complex and overall well balanced system that gets even more interesting with immunities and dual types. But here every Pokémon only has one weakness and/or resistance, so as long as you put enough cards into your deck that counter the type used in a specific club, you can only really lose because of bad luck.

Speaking of bad luck, the most aggravating part of the experience must be the staggering number of chance-based elements in the game. Deck building games already are dependent on luck by default, so adding these many coin flips to what feels like every second card effect makes some duels feel like the outcome is entirely left to chance. Especially when these coin flips often decide whether a card is overpowered or useless. I can’t even imagine what the main series would play like if every other move had an accuracy of fifty percent.

All these factors combined lead to an experience where most of your losses and victories feel cheap and undeserved. There were multiple boss fights where I was crushingly defeated at first, just to beat my opponent in the next game after two or three turns because they didn’t have any Pokémon on their bench. Duels tend to either end in a blink or drag on forever. The whole game is a tedious and mindless grind.

I remember liking this game as a kid, like so many other Pokémon crazy kids did. But I was really surprised to see how often this game shows up on lists about the best Game Boy games. Most recommendations tend to focus on how well the video game does as an adaptation of the card game. And to be fair, some elements are competently made. The soundtrack is catchy, and the presentation of the duels simple and effective, even though some of the pixilated artworks look plain ugly. The ability to take on the clubs in different orders is also a nice touch. But none of this matters when the core gameplay is so broken.

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More Pokémon reviews
Pokémon FireRed

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Mole Mania
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe