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Editorials   Play it again!... and again... and again
- By Kevlar Gorilla

With the releases of Super Mario Advance, Super Mario Kart, and F-Zero: Maximum Velocity for the GBA, it makes you wonder to yourself:

“Self, you know that you already own/play/played/beaten these games... so why do you buy/rent/borrow/still play these games?”

Lack of confidence in Nintendo’s ability to make good original games then begins to blossom. Why Nintendo? Why must you make us suffer in the stinky smelly pit of dressed-up rehashes of our favourite games that we already own? Why?!

New generation. No, not X.
Nintendo just wants to share with the new generation what all the fun was about in the “oldskool dayz”. Fun is fun. The only glaring downside to re-releasing the classics is that it just so happens that a demographic of people too old to play these games has, indeed, all ready played them before, but only when they were but mere children. People prefer THPS2, so they made one for GBA. Same thing happened with Castlevania and Mario 2. It’s not like the games are bad, just not original.

Time and money
Mario Kart for GBA took 6 quality development months for it to be created and released. How much longer would it take if they had to think of the idea first? Mario Kart was in demand. That’s why they made it. That’s also why Konami made “Krazy Karts”, except that they released it before the great plumber’s racing escapades. Racing games are cheap to produce. They’re even cheaper if they don’t have a battery backed save *cough* GT Advance *cough*.

Great minds think for themselves
Original concepts are hard to come by. What is Snood? Duh, a low quality Bust-a-Move hack that was released several months before the Official. When was the last time that something original that started on the Game boy also spawned several other games on other platforms as well as a weekday afternoon cartoon and it’s own version of a popular toaster pastry? Now, how many times has that game concept been copied and manipulated on the same platform? Well, there’s Robopon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Dragon Warrior Monsters, and the list continues to the other Japanese releases that never saw North American shores because they were just too plain God awful.

Release time
To create a game on short notice is hard work. If you spent 3 years developing a game and it turns out very good, It may still be difficult to gain all that money back. However, if you release a game at a time where there is no competition and promise pure outer-shell shiny graphical bliss, *cough*Orion-3D*cough* , then you may just increase you profit margin twofold.

100% Capitalism
Not that this has much to do with re-releases... but:
You would think that if the GBA is so advanced, why don’t people spend time to make good original games? Simple: Greed. This can be most obviously be pointed out in the recent Jurassic Park 3 (or as I like to call Your-ass-lick Park 3) series of games. Each one is more crappy then the last and were only released because the GBA is a new cheap medium to capitalize on a movie that was made to capitalize another movie that was made to astound audiences, and astound it did. Jurassic Park 3 was not directed by Steven Spielberg, which is obvious if you were one of the unfortunate souls to have seen it. Either way, greed sucks because it makes games suck.

Conclusion
Well, Warioland 4 will be revealed soon, as well as Mario Advance 2 (aka, Super Mario World), and Advance Wars is a glimpse of something new here that is tried and tested in Japan, and it seems to be doing well. Re-releases of this quality may not be such a bad thing for those of us who haven’t sampled the fruits of what classic good games have to offer (I for one will not be sad if FF3 is made for GBA... just wishful thinking). If you try to sell something that some people already have, then odds are, you won’t get their business. Please Nintendo, give us new!