Nintendo's tossing a bit of a curveball towards journalists with their 3D Classics line. Do you review them as if they're Virtual Console games, taking historical context into account? Do you ignore the quality of the games themselves and focus on the cosmetic and functional upgrades on display? Or are we to treat these as "modern" games, and assess them based on the qualities that we now ascribe to "goodness" in the modern gaming era?
I think the answer is to write about the experience, and that almost certainly involves some degree of classic context. These aren't so much remakes as enhancements, after all, and nowhere is that more keenly felt than in 3D Classics: Xevious.
Moreso than the very fun, if very shallow upgrades found in 3D Classics: Excitebike, Xevious benefits to such a degree by this treatment that it currently stands as the very best example of the power of 3D visuals in certain circumstances to actually improve and progress gameplay, rather than standing in as an (admittedly) cool aesthetic gimmick.
In essence, this is a very traditional shoot-em-up, so much so that in the regular two dimensions, this would hardly stand out as a classic, at least in my view. That's not to say that the shoot-em-up mechanics have problems or anything; they're entirely functional. The real problem lies in the game's level design, which is often pretty pedestrian. The enemies aren't very interesting to shoot down, nor do they do anything particularly interesting either. This was a very early example of the genre, of course, and there were minor improvements made in control and what your little ship could do.
The major innovation that Xevious brought was two-plane gameplay – that is, you had to shoot enemies up in the sky, and bomb enemy installations down below. There's a sort of risk/reward setup, as you need to shoot the planes up above to stay alive, but get too far ahead, and you'll miss out on the valuable points that a well-executed bomb strike can provide. This is a fun mechanic even to this day.
And it's not hard to see how 3D makes this gameplay conceit into something really quite dazzling on the 3DS. Determining what's what is now a snap, and the way that the game now delineates these two planes of action is brilliant. Is it enough to make the game a veritable classic? No, but that's not really the prerogative of the 3D Classics team.
Instead, the 3D Classics treatment makes an alright game into a pretty fun one, a great pick up and play game on the 3DS in a genre that's perfect for handhelds (3D Classics: Xevious currently holds the record on my 3DS for most played game, not in actual hours of course but in terms of actual number of times the software's been opened. It's perfect for quick bursts). There are a host of other, better shmups I'd rather see, and one could I suppose launch legitimate complaints about the games that have been chosen for this line so far.
Nintendo's not looking to fundamentally change anything, except to highlight the changes that their new display can bring. In that way, it's a little like the New Play Control line on the Wii, an experiment in changing one aspect to see if it changes the whole game. It doesn't quite do that here (and if I had my way, the atrocious soundtrack and boring enemy designs would be gone, but then it'd hardly be the same game, I reckon), but it does make the game noticeably better, and on a software-starved system, Xevious stands up as a pretty fun, functional game, and the enhancements only make it moreso.