A thread on Capcom's really quite good Capcom Unity forums has brought along some useful and depressing news. If you were holding your breath for Ducktales, Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers, or Darkwing Duck on Virtual Console... well, I'd suggest breathing. Ever-helpful Capcom VP of Strategic Planning & Business Development Christian Svensson has bluntly stated that part of the Capcom NES library is unlikely to see VC release.
Licensing issues abound. I think you'd be hard pressed to see them show up, but you never know.
No Bionic Commando, no DuckTales, still waiting on Mega Man 2... what is Nintendo America's damage with Capcom lately? Anyway, if you're the type to keep a machine around that can play NES carts, then these games are probably ones you'll want physical copies of for the time being.
It's a special, non-sucky week for the Virtual Console, and I'm going to try something different with this week's games. I'm going to review them.
Shocking, I know! I've got this stupid idea, though -- rather than giving an arbitrary score and writing something like "this was great back in the day, and it's still great!" I'm going to try and supply some context by simulating a review from the year of each game's release, followed by an analysis of how it holds up today. Some games that may have once earned perfect scores could seem like total crap nowadays, for instance, while underrated classics might seem more interesting and worthwhile in the current gaming climate.
I won't be doing this alone, though. I've enlisted help from some old friends. You may even recognize them.
After putting us through many months of mediocre Virtual Console titles, the Idiot Manager of Retro Mishandlings at Nintendo has apparently met with an untimely demise. August turned out to be an unusually great month for the VC. A couple of weeks ago, Wii owners finally got the original Mega Man. Last week, the much-requested Ys Book I & II hit the Virtual Console.
This week, we get the beloved Square Enix/Nintendo collaboration Super Mario RPG (SNES, 800 Points), at long last. To balance that out, Nintendo coincidentally chooses this week to try and sneak Clu Clu Land (NES, 500 Points) past us, but we'll just pretend that we didn't notice. After all, if you want to change someone's behavior, you need to focus on the positive. So good for you, Nintendo! You did great this week!
On the WiiWare side, Hudson blesses us with the virtual fish simulator My Aquarium (500 Points), which will be awesome if it's anything like the Destineer-published Fantasy Aquarium for the Nintendo DS, where you can have a fish tank full of tiny killer whales and make them eat garbage. Probably not, though. Full press release follows the cut.
Have you had your USDA recommended dose of Mushrooms and Vegetables today? No? Well, if you keep forgetting which "power-ups" you need and in what quantity, just glance at the art for Noisebot's Power-Up Pyramid T-shirt. Even better, try to name all the power-ups and which games they can from! I can handle everything except the three bottles in the Dairy section, which stump me hardcore.
I've written before about how a lot of classic Game Boy games deserved better hardware (which is part of why Wario Land: Shake It! is so rad to me). That said, the Game Boy's hardware constraints forced some very distinctive visual choices and design limitations on developers at the time. What would happen if you forced these constraints on a modern developer... or, say, a modern game?
This Way of the Pixel Mock-Up Challenge is a year old, but I just found it today while doing my rounds at CrunchGear. It's too rad to be ignored. A bunch of fans got together and made screens of what the Game Boy versions of a lot of other famous games, including very modern ones, would look like if crammed onto a sad little Game Boy cart.
I'm sure you can recognize the title above, and I've thrown some of my favorites into a section behind the cut. Can you guess them all?
This is more than a little ridiculous. 1up threw up an interview with Bionic Commando's franchise manager, Ben Judd, that is full of interesting things about the two new games in the franchise. There were also questions asked about where the original Bionic Commando was, and would it be on Virtual Console. The answers are... infuriating, I think.
1UP: What about the original Bionic Commando for Virtual Console?
BJ: We couldn't get it approved for the Virtual Console.
1UP: Is that because of the whole Nazi thing?
BJ: I can't say why. I can just say that we tried to get it to work. We're huge fans of the game. When you think about it, it totally makes sense as a strategy to have the original game out there in some format that people can play and see what was so great about it. But we were told no.
I have heaped praise on articles in JC Fletcher's Virtually Overlooked series at Wii Fanboy before, and now I fear I must do so again. This week he covered Hotel Mario, which is (or should be) uncontested holder of the title for Worst Mario Game Ever. By the way, it's a Phillips CD-i game. Are you surprised? No? Didn't expect so, really.
What would you do if you were handed the most famous video game license in the world, and given the opportunity to make a new entry in that franchise on an exciting new console capable of unprecedented visual displays? If you're Fantasy Factory, you would make a game about making sure all of the doors in a hotel are closed.
PC World has a completely awesome feature up that I felt obligated to link. Vintage computing expert Benj Edwards has completely disassembled a vintage Famicom - NES's Japanese counterpart - with great big photos and explanations of how the hardware differed, how it was the same, and how it caused some features to be altered or removed in American games. For instance, did you ever know this about the Famicom P2 controller? (I didn't.)
You'll notice that the second controller... lacks the start and select buttons of the first but features a built-in microphone and volume slider (more on that in a moment). This idiosyncracy of the Japanese system had some effects in the United States version. Early NES games such as Super Mario Bros. wouldn't pause with a press of the second controller's start button, because the Japanese counterpart had no equivalent button.
See that thing in the picture that looks like a DS but is clearly not a DS? That's the Game & Watch. To some it's an object of intense playground nostalgia, but for others it's just that thing Mr. Game & Watch is apparently from in Smash Bros.
Whether you ever knew a kid who owned one or not, it's an important piece of tech in terms of the evolution of Nintendo hardware. The Game & Watch gave Nintendo the chops they needed to really launch portable systems as we know them with the Game Boy in 1989. So, read this DS Fanboy interview with Game & Watch experts/collectors Michael Panayiotakis and Andy Cole and get yourself some education about both the Game & Watch, and the high-priced world of retro game collecting.
There's nothing worse than dropping money on a vintage RPG and finding out that you've gotten a copy with a dead battery. What's the point of even playing if you can't save your progress? I used to write this misadventures off as wasted cash, but I might not anymore. Check out this handy video from JJ Games that walks you through the process of replacing a dead SNES game's battery with a new one. This opens up a way to get hold of physical copies of 16-bit RPGs at much lower prices than might otherwise. Just buy your Earthbound or Chrono Trigger with a dead battery for next to nothing, and then replace it yourself.
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