Weekend Recommender: Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX

Publisher: Merge Games
Developer: Merge Games
Website

System requirements:
Minimum: Intel Pentium 4 1.8 GHz processor, Intel HD Graphics 4000-5000, 4 GB RAM, 4 GB HDD
Similar Games: Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars
Category: platformer

Most of the player community agrees that there are legendary creations that should simply not be touched and processed. Alex Kidd in Miracle World, for example, would probably have done much better if it remained a museum asset!

In Hungary, like us, many people only got access to such now legendary gaming machines as the Sega Master System with a considerable delay. Sitting on needles, we waited for relatives returning home from the FRG to pile us up with outgrown clothes and bored toys from distant cousins. This is how many of us encountered a game console for the first time in our lives. That’s how the legendary Sega machine came to us in the middle of the regime change – we would add, it still works today – with the first cassettes, including Alex Kidd in Miracle World. We didn’t like it, even though the kids next door came through, we could barely get on the first tracks, so we spent our free time with other, easier, more understandable games. For this reason, Alex Kidd, like many of us, remained a vague patch of the past, an unfulfilled love, because in vain we threw him thousands of times – there was no such dumping in the games at the time, many years nothing new came to us – but we did not get to it. not even in the middle of the story. What was the point of this brutal level of difficulty? We didn’t even understand it at the time, but when it was heralded that a reworking of the legend was coming, we hoped there would be some change in that area. It did, but it all seems to smell quite sweaty, while the Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX unfortunately can’t be called quite pleasant even with today’s eyes. But let’s not run so far ahead!

The developers of Merge Games partly touched the game thoroughly, but partly did virtually nothing with it. The graphics, for example, have undergone tremendous changes, but that’s pretty much all we can say about processing! The gameplay, for example, has expanded in a few places, but overall it has remained as unplayable as it was then, and as a result, the story has not been touched. Our hero is a young martial artist named Alex Kidd – put his hand up, who at the time didn’t look like a little monkey – who learns in a special fantasy world that he has something to do with the ruling family and the fate of the troubled kingdom depends only on him, so he has to slap everyone to reach his goal and subdue the usurper of the throne.

As mentioned, Alex Kidd in Miracle World has changed virtually nothing in terms of gameplay. It’s a side-view platformer in which we can travel down and to the right with our hero in four directions of space, but mostly, while overcoming all sorts of obstacles and sucks. It’s not enough that the tracks are packed with all sorts of monsters, plus we can even collect, for which we can smash different blocks. Some give us a sure gift, you could say something good, but there is some discomfort coming out of the death-headed and questionable pieces that can break quite a lot of pepper under our noses. Basically, it’s not even worth the risk, because if we enjoy Alex’s adventures in the classic game mode, we’ll have a total of three lives on each level. It’s no joke if we don’t get to the end, we always have to start all over again and again, no matter how many times we die. However, dying will be very easy here, and that is where the black soup lies in the end result.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX has to say: unplayable. We didn’t know what to do with it three decades ago, but we couldn’t get on the second track in its current form. Not only is the lack of life a problem, but also the fact that the makers used tasks that seemed impossible in a lot of places. Right on the first track, there will be an underwater monster that is so hard to get over that if we just can’t try again and again very many times, we won’t have a chance to advance. Since the makers must have sensed that this level of difficulty – which is also awesome compared to Dark Souls – won’t really take players ’stomachs, they’ve created an option that gives us endless lives. We still die, but we revive at the previous save point, and we don’t have to start the game from the very beginning. This is not too easy either, but it does allow us to overcome obstacles more easily. It was still a bit of a challenge for us, but the biggest experience was that we were finally able to see what we were missing out on at the time, as we were just dreaming about what tracks might be waiting for us for the rest of the game. In 2021, it became clear that we couldn’t be grateful to the makers enough.

All that is worth saying about the mechanism is that roughly the same errors remained in the processing as in the original. The astonishing difficulty, for example, is crowned by frequent inaccuracies in controllability, which often cause us to fail because it is impossible to calculate exactly where our hero will arrive after a jump. Especially in the case of skill puzzles, all this can cause especially great inconveniences, and especially in cases where we have to be skillful and fight at the same time, as it is not uncommon for these two elements to alternate at the same time or in succession at a surprisingly fast pace.

So much for the quality of the processing itself that the creators did a good job, it was a distinctly great experience to look at new locations or characters from the former set of pixels. We can constantly switch between classic and modern graphics, thanks to which it soon turns out that they practically imitated the original from centimeter to centimeter, sometimes paying with impeccable loyalty to the nostalgia factor, sometimes with such a novel vision that it is impossible to know the former characters or venue. In this field, the main drive is maximal in front of the makers, and also because they dared to innovate in the meantime, so in many cases, for example, we can run into alternative course sections, main opponents and so on. These are little things, but the biggest fans will definitely be happy for him.

Graphics: Basically, the game isn’t ugly, especially the development is huge compared to the original, but obviously the makers could have done a little better if they had modernized the whole thing once. So Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX makes an ambiguous impression in this area as well: if we look at the original, it’s nice, if compared to a platformer today, it lags behind in abundance. On the other hand, there can be no complaint about optimization, we can run it comfortably on machines that are many, many years old.

User interface, controllability: Nor was the game perfect in this area at the time, and surprisingly, the makers inherited all the management flaws that make the processed Alex Kidd especially frustrating. There are no special problems with the user interface, but the control can very often be called unpleasantly inaccurate.

Playability: If we try to complete the game with three lives and nothing can get us out of our way, the processing of Alex Kidd is guaranteed to give us new experiences for the rest of our lives, more precisely nervousness, as we won’t have a chance to play through it. With infinite life, however, you can get to the end surprisingly quickly if we are persistent enough, in just 6-8 hours.

Intelligence, difficulty: Anyone who has read the lines above carefully will surely know that Dark Souls is a loose afternoon recreation compared to this. Turning off the three life-related limits won’t make things easy either, but at least we don’t have to start the adventure over and over again, although annoying mistakes – inaccuracies, direct sucks – make it pretty difficult.

Sounds, music: The game is completely average in this area, practically the original sounds, effects and music were reused in it, which wasn’t exactly a bad decision, but they could have touched it a little better if they had already managed the look to such an extent.

Summary: All in all, Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX has become one of the most redundant reworkings on the line lately. This is because it was already a huge public disgust among fans at the time because of its brutal level of difficulty, and if one sticks to tradition, it still has exactly the same flaws today. It can cause a few pleasant minutes with infinite life, but in this case the nostalgia factor is not really fulfilled and the other problems come to the fore. We wouldn’t say it’s unworthy of attention, but without thinking, we could list dozens of more worthwhile games from the early nineties or late eighties that no one has dealt with before.

–