Metroid II spoilers ahead-

"Metroid II had no atmosphere"

Bull.

Pure, absolute, unadulterated bull.

Just because the game didn't have color doesn't mean that it didn't have one of the most fantastic examples of atmosphere from the entire 8 Bit era (and even moreso). The game was absolutely adept at twisting the player's sense of direction and emotions, going from the almost marching-band like opening, where you had the safety of your ship and a planet brimming with life- until you went deeper, and deeper into the vast caverns. As you went, the music and the tone shifted dramatically. No more did you have the jaunty exploration music- the further in you went, the more haunting the tunes became, with the planet's life becoming more and more scarce, until the only things around you were a few heavily armored creatures in a deep black void full of deadly spikes and the heavy breathing of... SOMETHING... in the darkness. And as you went, you never knew what was waiting to ambush you, never knew just what was lurking around the corner until BAM, the Metroid was there, accompanied by a frantic, chaotic battle theme.

And this was mixed in the with fragmented Chozo ruins, which went from plentiful and well designed to more and more ruined, to the very end with the rubble that was the Queen's palace, where you could see the anarchy the Metroids had caused.

And yet, at the end of it all, the game's final act, in the Game Boy, was, amazingly enough, not one of death or of suffering, but a simple act of mercy, with a soft background theme playing as you took the tiny infant to your ship and to safety. It was a final act that the remake utterly ruined, with its piles of enemies in that final cavern that took away from that bit of mercy after all the killing and the death.

There were lots of early works in black and white- Last Man on Earth, for one, or Citizen Kane. To say that they didn't have atmosphere is completely wrong.