Game & Watch Gallery 2

The Game & Watch '80s LCD handhelds each featured a single gameplay mechanic that repeated over and over, gradually becoming faster. In many ways, WarioWare is their direct descendent.

Of course, WarioWare's designers understand that modern audiences become bored repeating the same thing, so its structure entails rapid changes in gameplay to keep its ideas fresh.

Game & Watch Gallery 2 doesn't do this, and so it feels like an exercise in repetition - even if that exercise is fundamentally enjoyable.

Cast change

You start with five games: Parachute, Chef, Donkey Kong, Helmet, and Vermin. Each features a Classic mode that recreates the original liquid crystal version and a Modern mode that reinterprets it while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original.

Classic games are jerky and monochrome, as you'd imagine. They also lack the 'shadows' of every potential position of the game that were visible in the LCD versions - a useful ingredient that you may not be aware of until you have to live without it.

Modern games, meanwhile, replace the characters with Mario, Toad, Yoshi, and so on, and feature surprisingly smooth movement for a title released on the Game Boy Color. They're clear, bright, and here the games are accompanied by jaunty little tunes as well.

Mini games

The games hold up, though they're hardly what you might call complex. Parachute, for example, sees you catching falling parachutists with a boat. They fall at a steady rate and will only ever glide into one of three different positions.

In the updated version some of the characters fall faster than others, or drift off course. It's a small addition, but one that brings much needed variety.

There's a lot to unlock in the Gallery mode, including new games, but doing so requires you to Star each mode, for each title, on both levels of difficulty. You're awarded one star for every 200-point increase to your highscore, which can lead to mammoth play sessions of ultra minimally designed mechanics, and tends to get tedious.

These games are classics, and they're worth exploring for Nintendo fans. But their immediacy and accessibility are both their their strength and their weakness. They're great to jump into for a quick blast, but tiresome when played for long enough to unlock the rest of the game's content.

Game & Watch Gallery 2

Basic and repetitive, but well designed nonetheless, Game & Watch Gallery 2 is one for Nintendo archivists and score chasers looking for a collection of simple games to dip into on occasion
Score
Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.