Making the Old School New

One of the most unique things that have happened during the current generation of consoles and handhelds for Nintendo is the resurgence of old school games. One of the earliest examples of this was the New Super Mario Bros. for the DS. I love how the first level starts out very similar to the original Super Mario Bros. and then you get a huge mushroom and it is nothing like the original. This trend only continued with the virtual console on the Wii. It gives you the opportunity to relive the classic games from seven different systems. This allows players to fall in fall in love again with games from their childhood or experience games that they missed out on the first time around. The DS has also seen a number of remakes: Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy IV, and the recently announced Chrono Trigger highlight this trend. Finally, WiiWare will likely be host to a number of original versions of classic games. Mega Man 9 has already been announced for WiiWare and follows in the footsteps of the classic Mega Man games. WiiWare has also been used to rerelease Toki Tori, a GameBoy Color game.

These games reinforce Nintendo's philosophy that gameplay is more important than graphics. Hopefully these games will just be the beginning of more classic game designs being brought to old and new gamers alike.