This week on Ask Joystiq, we tackle Smash Bros Brawl's quirky saving preferences, universal disdain for Metroid II, the Smash Bros Brawl theme song, and the hunt for a classic Apple II platformer.

If you have any burning questions, unsolved gaming mysteries, or just a desire for musings from our knowledgeable cadre of writers, drop us a line at ask AAT joystiq DAWT com (and yes, we write it that way for a reason).

Q: If you haven't noticed by now, you cannot save your [Super Smash Bros. Brawl] game save to an SD card. However, you can save Vault data (Replays, Snapshots, and Custom Maps) to an external SD card. What gives?
-Andy

We asked Nintendo the same thing and got a predictable no comment, but we expect the answer has something to do with forcing players to unlock the game's myriad characters, stages, trophies and stickers on their own. This seems a little overbearing to us, though ... what does Nintendo care if we want to just unlock everything outright? This isn't like Xbox Live, where cheaters get an unfair advantage on the Gamerscore boards -- with SSBB, the only person a cheater is cheating is themselves.

Metroid II: Return of Samus often gets a bad rap from Nintendo fans for being the "worst" of the early Metroid games. We're happy, however, that some still regard it as a seminal part of the Metroid timeline. In the spirit of Metroid: Zero Mission, one intrepid fan has been building a full remake of the classic Game Boy title, and so far we're impressed with what we've seen.

Using Game Maker 7, DoctorM64 has been lovingly recreating planet SR-388 using graphics from Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion. He's even gone the extra mile and recreated many of the original Game Boy enemy sprites in full color. The project has been in development for three years, but has recently ramped up, with a newly released gameplay trailer (seen above), and a fully playable tech demo.

We're looking forward to seeing more of this project, and hoping that Nintendo doesn't swoop in and do what they do best. The PC-only tech demo is available on the project's blog, but check out a video of the tech demo in action after the break.