I’m a big fan of classic games and even I can’t begin to recommend Nintendo’s new Classic NES Series for the GBA. After looking at six of the eight games in Nintendo’s Classic NES Series, I have to say that gamers should take a pass on them. Whether the fault of corporate greed, hubris or a marketing department with a great source for bad drugs, these games have to be the worst planned and executed retro revival ever.

The re-release of older games has been going on for sometime now. I believe the Sega Genesis saw the first compilations of arcade games in the first half of the ‘90s. Since then every system has seen compilations of older games as the systems have reached mass-market status – and sometimes even before. Nintendo is one company that has seldom looked to its catalog; though many gamers would love for them to do so. As Namco, Midway, Atari, Activision and Konami offered many of their arcade and classic games in compilations, Nintendo seemed to prefer to look ahead to new games and the steady advancement of their intellectual properties on ever-more-powerful consoles.

When Nintendo announced that it was going to be re-releasing some of its NES games for the GBA, I was excited at the prospect. The list of games was pretty good: Bomberman, Donkey Kong, Excitebike, Ice Climber, The Legend of Zelda, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. and Xevious. I somehow got the impression that this was going to be a compilation of these games on one cartridge and thus not a bad idea. When I later realized these games would each be released on a separate cartridge with a $19.99 retail price, I took a much harder look at that release list and found a few things that made me say “Huh?” in puzzlement.

Let me first say that all of these games are very faithful to their NES inspirations. Other than some graphics anomalies brought on by their display on the GBA’s screen, they are spot-on ports that are highly playable on the GBA hardware. The games themselves belong to another time and cannot fairly be judged on their play merits, though many still hold up very well. The games in the series I played included Bomberman, Donkey Kong, Ice Climber, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. and Xevious.

Bomberman is the most puzzling as a choice. While the franchise did get its start on the NES and is highly respected, an avid Bomberman player knows Bomberman did not fully mature as a game until the TurboGrafx-16 and that it is the multiplayer that makes the game at all worthwhile. The GBA cartridge has no multiplayer mode.

Donkey Kong on the NES only had three of the arcade game’s four screens: the conveyer belt screen was left out. Nintendo would have done much better to have released a port of the arcade version or at least re-released the NES Donkey Kong Classics which had both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. on it.

Ice Climber is still a fun game. But would it have killed Nintendo to have combined it with Excitebike and then throw in a couple more of its original games like Balloon Fight and Clu Clu Land on one cartridge to give players some real value?

Pac-Man is a classic arcade game, not a classic NES game. The NES Pac-Man was a translation of the arcade original. To port a translation of a game to another system and call it a classic is just weird. For a more accurate game of Pac-Man, pick up Namco’s Pac-Man Collection for GBA instead. Or better yet, pick up Namco Museum Advance and get the superior Ms. Pac-Man along with the sublime Galaga and a few other games.

Super Mario Bros. was the game that established the NES in the minds of gamers. It was the killer app of its day. Could Nintendo have at least taken a cue from Capcom’s recent Mega Man Anniversary Collection and put all the NES Super Mario Bros. games on one cartridge?



Xevious. See my previous comments on Pac-Man. It’s an arcade game. The translation can’t really be a system classic.

While I have little doubt that Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda are going to sell well on their playability and nostalgia factors alone, I doubt that the rest of the Classic NES Series is going to do as well. With half a dozen publishers having already released, or about to release, classic compilations on the GBA that have anywhere from four to 56 games on them, I think gamers will see little value in Nintendo’s limited offerings. If Nintendo were smart, I think it would dig into its library and put together a compilation of its early arcade games. Some compilations of its original NES games would be welcome too.