Download Services Have Missiles, Dolphins

This week both Nintendo and Microsoft's downloadable game services have some great titles to offer. The Wii will soon be playing host to Super Mario Bros. 2, Ecco: Tides of Time, and Dragon Spirit . Xbox Live Arcade, meanwhile, has up an update of Missile Command . This latest follows on the heels of Pac-Man: CE , a worthy and well-received updating of the arcade classic. Ars' comment about Ecco is dead on: "I used to love this game, just swimming around and doing those flips out of the water as Ecco was pretty calming. Then you tried to actually play the game and found out just how excruciatingly difficult it could be. While the Dreamcast update lost some of the magic, the original Ecco is still a neat twist on 2D games. Who knew that taking a platformer and setting it underwater would be so much fun?"

Replaying old games.

[MaWeiTao]

To this day Super Mario Bros 2 is my favorite of the entire series. I don't know what it is. The game just seemed even more surreal than any of the others. The enemies seems more inventive too. The others are all great, but there's something I just like about that particular version.

I'm a bit underwhelmed by Pac Man CE, particularly graphics wise. So they put the effort into making the states rendered in nice high resolution and they couldn't be bothered to have done the same with Pac Man and the ghosts? I don't see the nostalgia in keeping them pixelated like that. And there have been numerous inventive Pac Man clones through the years, especially on the PC.

The interesting thing about many of these old games is how awkward their control schemes feel. Most anyway, Super Mario Bros and a handful of others still feel very fluid and natural to this day. But most take some getting used to. Some games I had fond memories of I found myself disappointed by because of the controls to the point where I couldn't be bothered to play them very long. One particularly aggravating example is Bionic Commando.

Interestingly, I've never had a problem graphics-wise. I maintain that 2D sprites age better than 3D graphics, especially those aiming for realism. However, given my experience with emulation, I have a hard time spending money buying Virtual Console games. To be honest, I prefer the approach seen on Xbox Live where developers take an old game and update the graphics and gameplay. It would be interesting to see this done with some of those old Nintendo games.