by Sean “rothbart” Workman

Okay, I’ve made it no secret that Nintendo’s approach to the Virtual Console is lost on me. I don’t want to play really old cartridge based games at the prices they’re offering. Heck, I probably wouldn’t play most of them if they were free. But this weekend my son talked me into submission. He’d played Pokemon Stadium 2 on a Nintendo 64 a while back (a long while back as a matter of fact) and asked if I’d get it from the Wii’s Virtual Console. I told him I’d look and if it was there, I’d grab it. So I went to the Virtual Console (yay for my wireless networking to like the Wii today!) and checked, not only did it not have Pokemon Stadium 2, it only had EIGHT N64 games… Eight. I looked at the “by system” list and was really caught off guard at the distribution of games by system on the list. My initial thoughts of “Total Failure” were pretty much confirmed by my standards. As someone that doesn’t play Zelda games, “Virtual Console” might as well be called “Super Mario 64 Downloader” because that’s about the only thing I saw of interest there.

• What’s taking Nintendo so long to release more N64 titles?
• Why are they so quick to release tons of… (what’s the word?) “craptacular” titles?
• Have you found much of interest in the Virtual Console?
• Have you felt like they were priced fairly?

My issue with Virtual Console pricing is that I feel there are two pricepoints that could be used for a lot of these games… one higher pricepoint for finding a working copy of the game in cartridge form for say the die hard collectors. Then there should be a much lower, download-only “tied to your system” price from the Virtual Console service. Unfortunately, in my opinion, they’re selling you the download-only “tied to your system” game with the “die hard collector” price. I’d love to see some current numbers on Virtual Console game sales. Whoever is in charge of their game releases makes some really strange title choices… what are your thoughts?

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