So there’s always this…push and pull, when you revisit an old classic. It’s the question of how much to change and how much to keep the same. Are we doing a remake or a remaster? What does a remaster even mean in the context of videogames? With film or music it’s obvious, we’re going back to the original recordings and putting them on a better format, one closer to that original ideal. A DVD looked closer to the 35mm print than a VHS tape, a blu-ray better than the DVD, a 4k blu-ray even moreso. That’s easy.

Games are…Trickier, because the original is more tied to limits and trends of the time. Choices were made by technical limitation: Mario’s mustache is famously there to create the shape of a face, with personality, despite the pixels of his birth being too limited to get any expression. The medium is the message, and all that. And sometimes, there’s always the question of how far into the past one can still grasp. Even film grapples with this one; Any cinema history buff will give you a good long rant about the act of colorizing the old classics, adding colors to the black and white frames, to make them ‘palatable’ for a casual audience.

And I say all of that to create the context for what we have here. Because Alex Kidd in Miracle World is a remaster itself, the original game having come out in 1986. A game that very much feels like one of those early, rough and tumble black and white films when you go back to it…But is the remaster a clean and beautiful scan fresh out of the Criterion, or a colorized mess for mid-afternoon cable?

That’s the question I’ve sought to answer.

Context

We should probably talk a little bit about gameplay, here. Alex Kidd in Miracle World is a game from a very specific era; the time right after Mario had defined what a platformer even was, and when Sega needed a character to stand toe to toe against him in the opening salvos of the console wars. This is pre-Sonic, after all, by a full five years. For all that the blue blur defined 16-bit, and even with him getting his own eventual set of 8-bit titles…It was the Kidd who defined this era for Sega.

That said, that also puts us in a bit of a weird place! 1986 platformers were…Not the beasts that post-2000 platformers are. Hell, they’re not the beasts that post-1990 platformers are. This was a time of great upheaval, and Alex Kidd was right in the thick of it. This is the kind of game with very minimalistic options. You can move, jump, punch, and get a small handful of usable items. That is it.

Oh, and that punch has a super short range.

Oh, oh, and this is a die-in-one-hit game.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World is, you see, very firmly of that era where you got two videogames a year (one on Christmas, one on your birthday) and so each and every one had to last. Much like Super Mario Bros.over on the competition, this is the sort of game that you can eventually beat in about 30 minutes…After hours and hours of memorization.

I say all of this so that you understand something. Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX does not, in any way, affect this core gameplay loop. It makes a handful of very minor niceties, most prominently that it gives an infinite lives option. You will need it. Do not think you can just muscle through because you’re a good gamer. Just turn on the goddamned infinite lives and move on with your life.

Do it with style

One of the reasons for this, is the game’s totally redone art. Gorgeous sprite work covers every inch of the screen, every level and enemy lovingly detailed, and Alex himself is rich in little touches of whimsy underneath his attempt to be stern and serious on a very important quest.

I mean, until you hit that right trigger, and the game does that thing remasters love to do, slamming you back into the original 8-bit graphics. As far as I can tell, at any rate, the hitboxes are all based on thesesprites. And this gets into one of the gameplay problems that this game suffers from: played in the gorgeous new graphics, I more than once found myself dying to what felt like cheap shots that should have grazed me by. Switching to the originals, honestly rather clunky by even the standards of the time, those same impacts were much clearer.

In a lot of games, this honestly wouldn’t be a huge problem. The occasional dirty hit happens, right? But that’s why games shifted away from the one-hit-kill formula, and to a health-bar one. So that the occasional dirty hit wouldn’t ruin an entire play through.

With the infinite lives, it’s not the end of the world…But it shows a tension between the remaster and its source material. And it means that any attempts to, say, go for classic style runs are going to be hampered.

Jan, Ken, Pon!

So where’s that leave us? Well, at the end of the day, Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX is a gorgeous coat of paint on top of a very…1986 canvas. That doesn’t make it bad, or unplayable, but it means you have to come into it with both eyes open. With the infinite lives on and the right attitude, you can almost come at it as a gentler kaizo style game: One where you just kind of expect a few bullshit deaths and that’s part of the fun.

Or of course, especially with our UK audience (where Sega was far more of a contender in the 8-bit days than they were on my side of the pond), you might just have fond memories of the thing. A trip down memory lane, now looking like a beautiful painting of itself, is a pretty great time.

Outside of those categories, I’m not sure the clunk keeps its charm. To bring back my movie metaphor Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX certainly isn’t some Turner Classic mess; Not a colorized, TV-edited, cropped-down simulacrum of the thing it supposedly represents.

Rather, it’s that fresh scan of the original film, bringing all the detail out to see. It just brings out all the warts, too.