NES Remix (WiiU)

Although this is skipping a few games in my play order, I wanted to talk a little bit about NES Remix, which I got by spending my Club Nintendo stars. I didn't know a lot about this before I got it, but Emily said we should both enjoy it.

Essentially, it's a mini-game collection, except the mini-games are NES 'classics'. Instead of playing each game through, you are set some kind of task. These range from taking literally less than a second to beating an entire level. Your time taken for beating a task is then ranked from 1 to 3 stars, with a special 'Rainbow Stars' rank if you go really fast; I have a few of these. Here are the games represented, and some comments on each:

• Mario Bros. - I really don't like this game. Both the physics and game-play are deeply unsatisfying. I dread when one of these stages comes up.
• Super Mario Bros. - everyone knows this game is good, and I'm not disagreeing, but I'm not all that good at it. The more difficult tasks take me a long time to get.
• Balloon Fight - I knew nothing about this, but it's really fun to play and optimise, good music too. In fact, we both liked it so much that we bought the Virtual Console version to play later.
• Wrecking Crew - another game I haven't played before, seems simple enough, reminds me of Lode Runner in a lot of ways.
• The Legend of Zelda - strangely I only ever owned Zelda II as a child, so this is new to me, it's good, the tasks are too short though so it's difficult to get into the groove.
• Donkey Kong - it's not bad, it's not good.
• Donkey Kong Jr. - better than the original, kind of easy.
• Excitebike - blah I hate this game, it's all memorisation anyway.
• Clu Clu Land - not done much of this yet, control scheme seems difficult, optimising it seems even more difficult.
• Ice Climber - argh, this and Mario Bros. could have a fight for worst physics engine and I'm not sure which would win/lose. not fun, but at least the game has more than two mechanics.
• Pinball - barely playable tosh.
• Golf - no

There are also a few games which are only in the 'Bonus' category:

• Donkey Kong 3 - fairly different but incredibly easy
• Baseball - a little unsatisfying
• Tennis - crap
• Urban Champion - reminds me of Karateka, without the charm
• and probably some others I haven't got to yet

Most of the stages are just short tasks (or sometimes gauntlets of tasks), but there are two 'Remix' categories which generally provide some kind of extra strange effect on game-play. Sometimes the entire level will be silhouetted against the background, or the 'camera' will continually zoom out until your sprite is only a pixel large. Maybe you'll have to control two characters at once, or help Link rescue Pauline. These are some of the more interesting and difficult stages.

As Emily and I have different WiiU profiles, the game saves our progress separately. I wonder if there is an area which compares best times for each user? Emily and I have difficulty with different games, so maybe we should create a new profile which we both play on, to cooperatively get the best times! Maybe chase all those rainbow stars...

Overall I'm enjoying it. It's not a particularly innovative game, but I am definitely getting three stars on everything because I'm a speedrunner.