Wii Virtual Console

Probably not online. The whole game would have to be reworked if you'd want to play it online. So I doubt they'd ever do that with a VC game, and if they did, it'd probably be on a more popular game lke Goldeneye.

I was suprised at the lackluster VC list as well, but it's probably to be expected. At launch, I'm sure they wanna focus on the actual Wii games. The good VC titles will come...

I know nothing about coding, but how insanely difficult could it be to rework a game for online? Especially if it's already got multiplayer? If the individual companies (such as Tecmo - TSB heh heh) reworked them, it would be simple. I guess they might be waiting to see how the sales go. I sometimes feel like Nintendo is run by a bunch of idiots, it makes so much sense to make the games online capable!!! They will sell better too! I personally would rather they charge us a yearly fee for a XBL type service., than to continue to ignore the online gaming scene.

I remember reading an IGN article that the VC games would be capable of playing online with others.

mattwdr wrote:I sometimes feel like Nintendo is run by a bunch of idiots

then who's running sony?

@breaker: IGN is NOT a trustworthy source. I've read a fair share of their reviews, and many of the are WAAAAYY off the mark. >_> I've used this example before, but when they reviewed Shadow th eHedgehog, they didn't realize that Shadow had airshoes, and thought that him "skating" all over the place was a glitch...

Seriously, wtf:
http://wii.ign.com/articles/743/743043p1.html

Why does Japan get Super Mario Bros, Super Mario World, ALTTP, Super Castlevania (!), and Super Contra (!!)? Plus a ton more NES/SNES titles than us.

(didn't notice Warlock's post)
wtf

In addition to the different lineups, there also appear to be some pricing differences between territories. In Japan, Genesis games are going for 600 Wii points. In America, Genesis titles will retail for 800 Wii points. Add in currency differences, and Japanese gamers are paying between two and three dollars less for Genesis titles.

mattwdr wrote:I know nothing about coding, but how insanely difficult could it be to rework a game for online? Especially if it's already got multiplayer?

A lot harder than you think. There are a ton of issues that come up when you go online that don't exist on an offline multiplayer game. For instance, what do you do if some of the other guy's packets get dropped?

That said, the SNES did have the XPlay modem accessory that allowed for online multiplayer on a number of games, so online for the SNES should be able to work in the same way. After all, I was able to play Smash TV online with a friend using ZSNES.

I dunno, it's not like we're "not getting the games." We're just not getting them right away. I'm sure the big titles will come eventually. Besides, we get the Wii a few weeks earlier anyway, and I'll take that advantage any day.

Orion wrote:I dunno, it's not like we're "not getting the games." We're just not getting them right away. I'm sure the big titles will come eventually. Besides, we get the Wii a few weeks earlier anyway, and I'll take that advantage any day.

Still, at 10 games a month (and this list is until the end of December already), that is a long wait for many of them.

I am especially miffed at the lack of SNES titles though. I mean seriously, TWO GAMES? There's not even SMW there which is more bizare. I'm also mad at the lack of N64 titles, but at least we are equal with Japan there. And at least the one they are putting out there is SM64 which is pretty much a requirement :P

The article says that the Japanese list isn't final. I'd assume the US and European lists aren't either.

mattwdr wrote:I know nothing about coding, but how insanely difficult could it be to rework a game for online? Especially if it's already got multiplayer?

mattwdr wrote:If the individual companies (such as Tecmo - TSB heh heh) reworked them, it would be simple.

mattwdr wrote:I sometimes feel like Nintendo is run by a bunch of idiots, it makes so much sense to make the games online capable!!! They will sell better too!

mattwdr wrote:I personally would rather they charge us a yearly fee for a XBL type service., than to continue to ignore the online gaming scene.

The Cyborg wrote:(didn't notice Warlock's post)
wtf
Quote:In addition to the different lineups, there also appear to be some pricing differences between territories. In Japan, Genesis games are going for 600 Wii points. In America, Genesis titles will retail for 800 Wii points. Add in currency differences, and Japanese gamers are paying between two and three dollars less for Genesis titles.

now that's some bullshit right there =/

I don't mind if it takes a while for games to pop up on the Virtual Console. If they need some more time to improve the games so they work flawlessly (or if they need more time improve the emulators), they can take all the time they need.

It would be nice to play Majora's Mask in high res like from the Zelda Collector's Edition disc minus the frame rate problems and occasional slowdown/crashes. Also, I can't wait for Squaresoft games - I have my fingers crossed for SD3 coming to the VC someday.

Warlock wrote:Seriously, wtf:
http://wii.ign.com/articles/743/743043p1.html

Why does Japan get Super Mario Bros, Super Mario World, ALTTP, Super Castlevania (!), and Super Contra (!!)? Plus a ton more NES/SNES titles than us.

Because the japanese launch is like 2 weeks after ours, thus actually we will have those games available by then, not at our launch, but by theirs. I agree that it's strange how they get to have all those gems right off the bat out there, but then again we get to start hacking at it weeks ahead of them.

And I certainly hope online play is supported. And it'd be even better if they would hack/tweak certain games like Star Fox 64/Mario Kart 64 so that when played online your screen would take the full screen rather than be split screen.

If they really wanted to make the VC take off with fans, they should release BS-Zelda and BS-Zelda 3 for it. Possibly even make a BS-style Zelda 1 and 2 (like Super Mario All-Stars).

MottZilla wrote:Because the japanese launch is like 2 weeks after ours, thus actually we will have those games available by then, not at our launch, but by theirs. I agree that it's strange how they get to have all those gems right off the bat out there, but then again we get to start hacking at it weeks ahead of them.

No, both lists are "up to the end of the year", not launch lists. That arguement doesn't fly.

Also, Nintendo is only supposively adding about 10 games per month. There are more than 10 extra games on there (49 vs our 30), esp considering it's not even a full month afterwards :P

While the gameplay will remain unchanged for all of the classic titles offered via the Virtual Console, Nintendo has stated that some of the games may be improved with sharper graphics or better framerates. In addition, gamers may be able to download games that were not previously released in their region, and some multiplayer games may be playable online, if it is technically possible.

At E3 2006's Wii Conference, a Virtual Console demo was shown with the following games being downloaded: The Legend of Zelda, Excitebike, Punch-Out!!, F-Zero, Super Metroid, Super Mario Kart, Mario Kart 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, and Wave Race 64. Whether these games will be available for downloading remains to be seen.

we'll just have to wait and see.

Dark Nation wrote:If they really wanted to make the VC take off with fans, they should release BS-Zelda and BS-Zelda 3 for it. Possibly even make a BS-style Zelda 1 and 2 (like Super Mario All-Stars).

If Nintendo still employs people from the SNES era, that's certainly a possibility atleast in japan. Afterall, if hobbyists can hack the ROM, Nintendo's staff shouldn't have a problem with it either and they should have the source code anyway.

If companies are going to take our money for a game they have already made, they need to at least give online play. We are paying money so that they can go and convert these games!!!

If Nintendo simply allows the capability of online VC gaming, then I will be satisfied. The 3rd Party companies who are re-releasing these titles would have to be idiots not to try and incorporate online multiplayer into these titles in the current video game market.

This current market is rampant. I mean, look at how successful XBL Arcade is. Most of the titles are rather weak (there are some great ones), yet Microsoft has reported huge sales. What smart business wouldn't want to copy-cat that success? These 3rd Party companies would jump at that chance.

mattwdr wrote:If companies are going to take our money for a game they have already made, they need to at least give online play. We are paying money so that they can go and convert these games!!!

If Nintendo simply allows the capability of online VC gaming, then I will be satisfied. The 3rd Party companies who are re-releasing these titles would have to be idiots not to try and incorporate online multiplayer into these titles in the current video game market.

This current market is rampant. I mean, look at how successful XBL Arcade is. Most of the titles are rather weak (there are some great ones), yet Microsoft has reported huge sales. What smart business wouldn't want to copy-cat that success? These 3rd Party companies would jump at that chance.

Hmmm... let's see... I'm a 3rd party company and I can sell my game on the Virtual Console without doing any work and make lots of money, or I could spend some money and allocate the resources of my company to make sure my 10+ year old game is playable online, in the hopes that it will help me sell that much more. Such a tough decision...

Seriously, it's silly to think companies are going to spend a lot of money and resources just to make their old old OLD games playable online through the Virtual Console. I don't know how the Virtual Console works (only Nintendo does), so we can't say whether it's even feasible. I'm sure if it is feasible, we will see some old games get the online treatment, but they don't owe use anything.

Buying a game on the Virtual Console is no different than buying the actual cartidge - you're just getting it through a different means. You're still buying a game. How many times have people re-bought the original Pac-man?

UPDATE: I was thinking, and it's not really fair to compare the VC with X-Box live arcade - at least not in your argument. In the VC, you will be buying the ROMs of old games, and playing them through an emulator. If I had to guess, games on X-Box live are probably written for that console - all those old arcade games (that have already been re-written for numerous systems since their inception) were just ported over. They aren't running in an emulator. Now, I'm not saying we won't see original content delivered for Wii via the Shop Channel, but if we do, I'm sure it will be written for the Wii, and not specifically tied into the VC.

Warlock wrote:Still, at 10 games a month (and this list is until the end of December already), that is a long wait for many of them.

I am especially miffed at the lack of SNES titles though. I mean seriously, TWO GAMES? There's not even SMW there which is more bizare. I'm also mad at the lack of N64 titles, but at least we are equal with Japan there. And at least the one they are putting out there is SM64 which is pretty much a requirement :P

SMW is a popular GBA game. Why release it for 5ish bucks on the VC when it's still 20 at a gamestore?

I figure... if emulators can play online, it can't be hard for us to play online VC, too. Frankly, if it's not, I'll probobly mostly stick to emulation for classic systems.

It is far from silly to think that a business would try to spend money to make even more money. Thats what most businesses attempt everyday. Why do you presume that alot of money is needed to convert a game to online play.? I don't know how much it would cost Tecmo to convert Tecmo Super Bowl to the VC and make it online capable. How much will it cost to only convert it to the VC? How much of difference money wise would that be? 10's of thousands? That kind of money would seem to be very worthy to me when I might sell 500,000 copies of a game at 5 dollars each. People will go nuts, apeshit, over an online TSB on a console, over any of there old NES, SNES, Genesis, N64 classics online capable. When a game is just a ROM ported onto an emulator, its just a collector's piece, a lark. When a game is given online multiplayer and possibly new features it becomes a topic of conversation and a great selling piece.

How many people would not have downloaded Gauntlet or Smash TV (just two examples) for the XBLA if they didn't have online Multiplayer. Most people. I only downloaded/bought those games because they were online. That was my chief reason. We are living in a different age when it comes to multiplayer gaming. Local multiplayer just doesn't cut it anymore. Videogame companies recognize this, they are aware of market trends, they are businesses. Hopefully some of them will push Nintendo to fully realize the VC.

mattwdr wrote:It is far from silly to think that a business would try to spend money to make even more money. Thats what most businesses attempt everyday. Why do you presume that alot of money is needed to convert a game to online play.? I don't know how much it would cost Tecmo to convert Tecmo Super Bowl to the VC and make it online capable. How much will it cost to only convert it to the VC? How much of difference money wise would that be? 10's of thousands? That kind of money would seem to be very worthy to me when I might sell 500,000 copies of a game at 5 dollars each. People will go nuts, apeshit, over an online TSB on a console, over any of there old NES, SNES, Genesis, N64 classics online capable. When a game is just a ROM ported onto an emulator, its just a collector's piece, a lark. When a game is given online multiplayer and possibly new features it becomes a topic of conversation and a great selling piece.

How many people would not have downloaded Gauntlet or Smash TV (just two examples) for the XBLA if they didn't have online Multiplayer. Most people. I only downloaded/bought those games because they were online. That was my chief reason. We are living in a different age when it comes to multiplayer gaming. Local multiplayer just doesn't cut it anymore. Videogame companies recognize this, they are aware of market trends, they are businesses. Hopefully some of them will push Nintendo to fully realize the VC.

The thing is, like vegeta1215 said, when companies are remaking games for XBL, they're basically porting it to a different system. They're reworking the code to make it work with another console anyway. I'd assume XBL and the X360 both have plenty of design specs and tools easily available. When a company releases a game on the WVC, they may not need to do anything more than dump a cart and make a few tweaks to it. For them to change these NES/SNES/GEN/etc. games, they'll need to have people working for them who still understand how those systems worked. Systems have gotten easier to program for over time- they're using high-level languages instead of assembly now.

It's not like I wouldn't like to see a lot more Online games. But that doesn't mean I don't understand the difficulty involved.

Ya emulation + netplay is not a new thing. The Virtual Console for classic games require little to no effort really. As long as the emulator supports netplay then any game could. I certainly would love to see them release Super Bomberman's 3, 4, and 5 in North America finally and have 5 player netplay.

There's a lot to read here, so forgive me if I'm repeating something that's already been said.

At any rate, Japanese Wii probably needs to be more competitive at launch, so lower prices and more VC games are in order. Economics are very different between countries, and since Japan has different media laws than we do, it's not surprising at all to me that their prices are slightly different (though I can't say for certain if that has anything to do with it).

Second, I forgot what I was going to say.

Third, maybe Nintendo is retooling old games before releasing them, similar to the way that Microsoft is releasing patches for the 360 to allow backwards compatability compliance. Since it was pointed out earlier that emulators like ZSNES allow internet play, it's entirely possible that old games might be modded to allow distant users to play as if they were connected to the same machine (as in the olden days).

Fourth, I remembered what I was going to say for number two: why SMW on the VC is $8, and for the GBA, it's $20. Can you say portability? You can't take your Wii to school with you to play in class, or on a city bus, or on a plane, or into the bathroom. That extra cash, apart from paying for physical material costs, buys you convenience. And people will pay for that.

There's a couple of interesting theories as to why there aren't many N64 games on the Virtual Console. The first is that they could compete with the releasing Wii games. The second is that Nintendo is afraid of people using up the internal memory right away. And the Third is that Nintendo is taking more time because it's more difficult to get the N64 games to emulate correctly. THey all make a little sense I guess.

Orion, the only reason that makes sense is that the N64 is difficult to emulate accurately, and infact impossible to emulate with 100% accuracy on the Wii's hardware. N64 emulation on the Wii will likely use Dynarec and HLE which is the way popular PC based N64 emulators work. It's fast but not as accurate. But with fine tuning on a per game basis (which is certainly possible for them to do) they can certainly achieve the results required for a commercial product. Atleast it should be much better than the god awful N64 emulator for GameCube used on the Zelda OoT Bonus disc. Part of the issue with that was the lack of sufficant RAM to even hold the ROM image. Not to mention you need more memory when working with DynaRec.

Really I don't see how N64 games would compete with Wii games at all. And the internal memory being used up also I don't buy that because they will gladly sell you a nintendo branded SD card to make a profit.

Anyway, I just hope they do a good job in making certain each game runs properly with the best degree of accuracy possible.

MottZilla wrote:And the internal memory being used up also I don't buy that because they will gladly sell you a nintendo branded SD card to make a profit.

Yeah, those are just way too much money.

N64 game is what, 4megs? Nintendo's own memory card is 512mb (ignoring Wii flash memory which I think you can save to - can't remember - and also a couple megs of flash on each wiimote). And since the Wii supports SD cards I've already picked up a 2gb sandisk card ahead of time 😃

Anyways, they obviously got something working for Majora's Mask on the Zelda CE disk (not even talking about OoT since that was sort of done specifically to work with GC way ahead of time for Wind Waker's bonus). I gotta think they've got some sort of emulation software already designed in-house that works well. Whether Majora's was tuned as well, I don't know. But it did run pretty well, and that was a 4mb expansion game (which usually run fairly crappy on PC emulators). So I think Nintendo will be fine.

But I do imagine they've got to at least test the games and make a few tweaks here and there before they release them. So yeah, I can understand the slowness on getting N64 stuff out there.

What I don't understand though, is the lack of SNES stuff (for US - Japan got a ton). No reason for that at all.

Kairyu wrote:I keep getting this overwhelming impression that you don't know all that much about adding online play to a game. I know a very small amount, but it's enough to know that it's really just not worth it for a LOT of games.
There are certainly exceptions (i.e. Gauntlet, Smash TV), but those are exceptions, not the rule. Who would care if you added online multiplayer to SMB, SMB3, SMW? Some of the greatest games ever made? Probably half a dozen people at most. The games weren't designed for multiplayer.

The thing is, like vegeta1215 said, when companies are remaking games for XBL, they're basically porting it to a different system. They're reworking the code to make it work with another console anyway. I'd assume XBL and the X360 both have plenty of design specs and tools easily available. When a company releases a game on the WVC, they may not need to do anything more than dump a cart and make a few tweaks to it. For them to change these NES/SNES/GEN/etc. games, they'll need to have people working for them who still understand how those systems worked. Systems have gotten easier to program for over time- they're using high-level languages instead of assembly now.

It's not like I wouldn't like to see a lot more Online games. But that doesn't mean I don't understand the difficulty involved.

So because its hard to do, my needs as a consumer are therefore not valid?

It seems like you are trying to nitpick my posts and stance on this because I am not as knowledgable as you about coding etc. Now that we all understand that you understand the difficulty involved I think we can all sleep better at night.

I want online gaming from VC games that should provide it. That's all. Is is not an unrealistic expectation. Again, the consumers are willing and are going to pay for these games. We deserve online play. Don't defend companies who for a little work (a little compared to the million plus spent on the latest next-gen game) can transform an old title into one that will make them alot of money.

Warlock wrote:N64 game is what, 4megs? Nintendo's own memory card is 512mb (ignoring Wii flash memory which I think you can save to - can't remember - and also a couple megs of flash on each wiimote). And since the Wii supports SD cards I've already picked up a 2gb sandisk card ahead of time 😃

Anyways, they obviously got something working for Majora's Mask on the Zelda CE disk (not even talking about OoT since that was sort of done specifically to work with GC way ahead of time for Wind Waker's bonus). I gotta think they've got some sort of emulation software already designed in-house that works well. Whether Majora's was tuned as well, I don't know. But it did run pretty well, and that was a 4mb expansion game (which usually run fairly crappy on PC emulators). So I think Nintendo will be fine.

But I do imagine they've got to at least test the games and make a few tweaks here and there before they release them. So yeah, I can understand the slowness on getting N64 stuff out there.

What I don't understand though, is the lack of SNES stuff (for US - Japan got a ton). No reason for that at all.

The smallest N64 games (a minority too) are 4MB(bytes). The largest are 64MB. There are only 5 of those though. But the general sizes are 8MB, 16MB, and 32MB. Most of the later games are 32MB.

Next, "getting it working" isn't hard. Corn (the original N64 emulator to attempt DynaRec if I recall) had Zelda and other games "working". But you can't just have them working, they need to be performing correctly with no apparent glitches. Again the best way to do this is a single emulator with settings for each game to run optimally, or actually different emulator builds specific to the game which would work too. Also, FYI, the N64 emulator used on OoT and MM was not very good. While it would run a few other games (not properly) it was FAR from competing with the likes of emulators like NEMU, 1964, or PJ64.

Oh ya and the expansion pack is 4MB of extra RAM... Ya... not hard to emulate at all man. PC emulators have emulated that for ages.