NES Nostalgia Day

In two flavors!

Punch-Out!! (Wii) — It’s not a boxing game, just like Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! from 1987 wasn’t a boxing game. There’s a ring and punching and a cheeky corner manager, but nobody boxes like this, waiting their turns to punch in repetitive patterns. Punch-Out!! is, and always has been, a young boy’s violent dream version of Simon.

No gimmicks or complicated controls for 2009’s edition; this new Punch-Out!! returns to that Simon-style base of memorization and two-button twitchiness. Once again, you’re a tiny kid from Brooklyn climbing your way up the ranks against hokey stereotypes—the shlub from France, the hoser from Salmon Arm, BC, the “soda pop” addict from Russia—and boxing ’em all with a simple “dodge, jab, dodge, uppercut” control scheme. You can try playing this with Wii motion controls, but don’t; hold the Wii remote sideways like an NES pad instead, unless you like yelling at your TV.

The 1987 game captured imaginations because of its super-sized characters—back then, each foe was as big as, like, 12 Super Marios. Good, then, that half of the Wii version’s fun still resides in the huge characters, each bendy and morphy like a cartoon. It’s the main selling point here—you get a satisfyingly difficult series of challenges after beating the game (every rematch has a weird twist), and you get a two-player mode—too simple, but better than Wii Sports’ boxing mini-game.

Otherwise, this is a boy’s game, quick and violent and easily solvable, and it’s shameless about either rekindling your childhood nostalgia or springing it forth anew for the kiddos. It plays as smoothly as you remember from the classic, which may be enough of a selling point for people who like to play the same games over and over. My nerdy ass is among those people.

PictoBits (DSi) – But it suffers in juxtaposition to this. Oh, this game! Nintendo’s latest in their “Art Style” experimental series is their best yet, marrying a charming puzzly game with an imaginative take on NES nostalgia (and it’s only $5 on the DSi’s downloadable games store).

Like in other puzzlers, you match colored blocks in rows and squares to clear ’em off the screen. As colors fall from the top—always in strange, multi-colored clusters—you use the stylus pen to tap more colors on the screen. Then one line will connect and clear, leaving you a second to line up the next four-block connection as the piece falls. You’ll spend your time lining up these color-combos like a stunt run, and cobbling up colors with the stylus pen is intuitive.

Better, these colored blocks feed into the top screen to paint an NES classic—with each tap and each success, the game lights up pixels to draw an old graphic (Mario, Excitebike) and plinks the 8-bit synthesizer to sing the old songs. This pixels/music synesthaesia is unnecessary for the game’s basic puzzly concept, but with it comes a series of questions about the game we’re playing. Are we rebuilding our digital toy pasts? In playing the new game, are we in any way playing the old games? When we put the DSi down, do we still, in our brains, connect falling, colored blocks to tell our old life stories? This game has not left my brain since its release last Monday. Its remixed old-school songs from Japanese synth band YMCK, its “dark world” series of seemingly impossible challenges, its questions about digital memory. More, please.