You excitedly read through the ground-breaking first article “The Good,” and then you sat through the long plot-building second chapter entitled “The Bad.” Well sit down and strap yourself in because after hours and hours of impatient waiting, the third installment to the trilogy is finally here!

I’ve saved the best for last (unlike The Matrix) because this one’s all about “The Ugly” aspects of the Wii Menu. Sad thing is, I was able to narrow it down to just one thing: The Virtual Console, more specifically the Virtual Console prices.

Read on to see why the Virtual Console really grinds my gears.

First off, let me set the record straight. I think the idea of the Virtual Console was absolutely brilliant. Nintendo easily has the largest collection of classic video games and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be using it to their full advantage to expose gamers of all ages to the classics (and make a couple bucks). What I do have a problem with is the price points they decided on.

It has been estimated that due to the extremely successful Wii and DS that Nintendo will be posting a 1 BILLION dollar profit by the time this financial year draws to a close. Compare this to the fact that Sony (due to poor sales and price cuts) and Microsoft (due to RRoD) will be posting about a billion dollars in losses this year and you can see why Nintendo feels that they’re crushing the competition right now. What really makes Hulk angry is that despite these unprecedented profits, Nintendo is still charging $5-10 for games that are 10-20 years old!

I know some of you are sitting there saying, “But Xbox 360 charges $10 for their downloadable games.” You’re right, they do, but there’s a huge difference between the titles offered on the 360 and the Wii. The XBLA titles all have a team of developers working on them to enhance the graphics and audio, put in additional content, and add online play support. The Wii titles are straight ports of the originals. No enhanced graphics, no additional content, and definitely no online play. I bet that it takes a coder at Nintendo about 1 hour to port an original NES game to the Wii, and that’s including his 15 minute coffee break! So why in the world does Nintendo feel that $5 is a justifiable price to charge for one guy’s 45 minutes of work?

Still not convinced? Keep reading, there’s more.

The biggest difference between the XBLA and Virtual Console titles is the fact that all of the XBLA games are brand new releases. Nintendo has already made Nintendo money on the game.

Take, for example, Super Mario Bros. 3 which just got released on the VC this week. It is one of the best selling games of all time. Does Nintendo really need to be making more money off of it? Hell no! But they know that there are people out there who will pay the $5 for it, so that’s what they’re going to charge.

My last gripe with the Virtual Console is their intentional limited release schedule. Nintendo has decided that they’re only going to release around 5 games each week. From a business stance, this is a brilliant delivery system tactic because it makes people buy games that they would have never bought if there were some of their other favorites to choose from, but they grow impatient waiting for their favorites and give in. From a consumer side, this tactic blows. From the literally thousands of backlog titles that Nintendo owns, they have only been releasing 5-10 games a week. I’m no a math major, but at this pace it could take years before you see your favorite game pop up for download, if ever.

Are you starting to see why I have so much disdain for the Virtual Console and have completely boycotted it? There is absolutely no reason why Nintendo couldn’t be selling NES games for $1, SNES games for $2.50, and N64 games for $5. They would still be making profit on all of them (since it costs them nothing to port them) and would easily quadruple the number of VC titles sold. Sigh, if I only worked for Nintendo, and could magically speak Japanese.

That wraps it up for this edition of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I hope you had a few laughs and shed a few tears along the way. More importantly I hope you learned a couple things, or just flat out completely disagreed with everything I said.

I’ll have more of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the other consoles coming up in the next few weeks!