Friday, December 15, 2006

New Virtual Console Titles

For those Australians who haven't checked the Wii Shop today, you'll find the following additional Virtual Console titles available for download:
* Gunstar Heroes
* Ristar
* Pinball
* Columns
* Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
* Urban Champion


Which is awesome. (I'm playing the Bean Machine right now.) But it's still really disappointing that you have to play these games exactly as they were originally released. That's right - you can't even save your game to the hard drive. I'm playing Bean Machine and (can you believe it) writing down passwords. It's positively medieval.

9 comments:

Phrancq said...

Oh you poor baby. Writing. While it would be nice if you could save, that's how the games were back in the day. We've been mollycoddled too long, I say.

Greg Tannahill said...

Uh-huh. Whatever. The lack of saving in the day was generally more a technical limitation than it was a design decision, and I don't see any reason why we should be stuck with it now when it would be so easy to overcome.

I mean, seriously, how much would it cost Nintendo to do an update that lets us save system states to the system memory or SD card? Like any decent emulator?

Phrancq said...

I don't completely disagree with you on the saving thing. But the writing down codes? It takes two seconds.

Sure, Nentendo could update it so you can save state onto an SD card, or they could keep going with charging you for games you could emulate and save on PC for years. If you want my one problem with the Wii, that's it.

Grant said...

Surely introducing new features to old classic games is like adding an extra scene to Othello where Iago sends Roderigo conspiratorial messages on his blackberry or something. It'd be out of place.

Greg Tannahill said...

No, shipping the games in their original state is like a World War I museum exposing visitors to real mustard gas, so as to provide them with an authentic historical experience.

Plus a save state option is just an overlay on the original game. Purists are free to NOT use it. It would be run from within the Wii interface, not the game interface, so as to leave the game per se untouched.

Grant said...

I think your mustard gas example only applies to specifically awful games such as E.T. for the 2600.

Greg Tannahill said...

What really bugs me is that Nintendo goes out of its way to STOP you having this feature. I mean, they don't even let you back up VC save states to an SD card. It's like they hate me and all my ilk and want to subject me to retro gaming capital punishment.

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty sure that one can create something like a save state by doing the following:
While in-game press the 'home' button and choose to return to the 'Wii menu'. Next time you go back to play again it should put you exactly where you left. I've been using it for VC Bomberman; don't know if every VC game supports the save state.
peace.

Greg Tannahill said...

Well, yes, that literally saves your game state, but I'm talking about the feature common to emulators where you can save and restore multiple states. If you pause a VC game and then come back it'll wipe your save so you can't really use it as a homebrew difficulty-adjust for some of the more nun-punchingly hard titles from our cultural heritage.