My favourite thing about the Super Mario All-Stars port is that it's pretty much exactly as good as Nintendo implied it would be.
If I recall correctly; they didn't even confirm it would be available in America at first, there was very little actual news concerning it when it was announced, and it had an extremely limited print run when it came out. In retrospect it's pretty obvious that it was just a lazy port collection only really made for collectors that had been blown completely out of proportion.
Right. And you know what equally-lazy task they could do now to commemorate Metroid?
Another limited run of Metroid Prime Trilogy.
I imagine the reason they haven't is that they can't justify the production/distribution cost based on their current sales. It happens, particularly in the waning years of a console's lifespan; that's how we wound up with a fully-translated, unreleased Earth Bound NES.
Anyway. If Nintendo were going to go for some limited release business for some vaguely-defined "hardcore" demographic, I'd rather see Xenoblade, but of course I doubt there's anybody out there actually trying to decide a release between those two choices.
...anyway. Bears repeating that I would have quite liked an updated Super Mario All-Stars. 480p res, 16x9 ratio -- ideally not NSMB graphics but those would be acceptable I guess. Add in the extras from the GBA releases. Maybe more, but hell, the eReader levels alone are something the majority of players have still never seen.
Point being, of course, that the real irony is that SMAS was, at release, the opposite of a half-assed port; it's no Zero Mission, but it's still one of the best rereleases ever.
And people don't do shit like that anymore. You never get an overhauled, multi-game rerelease like that. Occasionally you'll get a really thorough reinvention of a single game (Mega Man: Powered Up), or a multi-game collection with some slight tweaks (Metroid Prime Trilogy), but something on the order of SMAS is pretty much unheard of anymore.
Guess the closest thing I can think of is FF4:Complete, but judging by Parish's review it still feels like a half-assed cash-in.
It'd really be nice if SE could cool it for a couple of years on the FF4 rereleases, too. I'm not advocating the FF7 remake that the fanboys are misguidedly begging for, but if they're set on remakes there are plenty of other FF's that could benefit from a makeover.
(I hear FFT is finally out for iPhone. And it's still showing a few growing pains -- text menus are awkward as hell, which is to say it's pretty much like playing FF3DS with the stylus -- but once the inevitable FF4 port shows up, SE's going to need somewhere to go from there.)
(...it occurs to me that Dragon Quest 9 would have worked really well on the iPhone.)
