NES Classics: Bomberman, Xevious, and Super Mario Bros. review

15 August 2004 16:56 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing. Those classic games you used to play on a Nintendo Entertainment System when you were a kid were the best thing ever. However “time” is cruel to the mind.

Feeling a wave of nostalgia ride over us, we got in three re-released NES games for our Game Boy Advanced: Bomberman, Xevious, and Super Mario Bros. All three are great classics and ones that any gamer who was around when the NES was first released will remember with glee, but while the gameplay is still great - after all at the time these were benchmark titles - the graphics do let the side down compared to modern day equivalents. However that’s to be expected and if you do a lot of proper retrogaming- in other words you’ve pulled the old console down from the loft and hooked it up to your spare 14in television- you won’t care.

Of course the graphics are going to be poor, these games are over 20 years old, but what’s confusing is that these games have all been remade for every Nintendo format ever since their first outing. Super Mario Brothers being the company flagship, that’s understandable but the others, although undeniably classics, have the faint air of cashing in about them even if they fall in with Nintendo’s wish for simpler, less complicated and some would say rose-tinted styles of gaming.

Super Bomberman is a great game, as is the latest version of Super Mario Bros. and unlike poor remakes of Hollywood classics, in the game world graphics can only get better. We don’t know why Xevious is branded a purely NES classic as its roots lie in the arcade along with Pacman and Donkey Kong.

Verdict

In short these titles are for the purists among us. Yes the memories came flooding back, but so did the realisation that for the world of video games, the 1980s really were the dark ages.

Other titles available include: Ice Climber, Pacman, Excitebike, Donkey Kong and Legend of Zelda.