3DS Rant

I adore Nintendo, and have since 1993 when I first plugged the RF cable from my garage sale purchased NES into my TV and enjoyed Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Bases Loaded. But Nintendo, like most companies, makes a lot of stupid decisions. The one that happened most frequently that was the most infuriating to me was their decisions regarding the virtual console.

For those who don't know, the virtual console is basically just a set of emulators that let you play games from old Nintendo consoles on your Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. By far the best set of games available was ironically on the Wii, which had not only Nintendo games, but also Turbografx, Genesis, Master System, and even some Neo Geo AES games.

I won't fault Nintendo for not including the games from the other systems. I have no idea about the negotiations that went into deciding revenue splits between the IP holder and Nintendo, or what the negotiations were like this round, what kind of profits they made last round, etc. It would have been cool, but ultimately they can't be faulted for not getting Hudson Soft to include games on the 3DS, nor could they be faulted for deciding that it wasn't profitable to do so. I don't know what's going on behind the big Red-N curtain.

But for heaven's sake, could we please just be completely honest and give people access to older games on a wide variety of consoles? For some incredibly bizarre reason, Nintendo said that the original 3DS couldn't run SNES games in "pixel perfect" mode, and so they wouldn't release the games on the 3DS. First of all, I'm sure the clever people at Nintendo could have figured it out. They figured out how to put out some very impressive SNES ports on the GBA, which was 2 FULL GENERATIONS AGO. If the GBA can handle Super Mario World 2, I'm pretty sure the 3DS can handle Earthbound. This bizarre reasoning carries over, in an even more bizarre version, to GBA games and DS games. Why in the world would you have handheld games available for download on the Wii U, but not the 3DS? Please Nintendo why. It's not like the 3DS can't handle them technically speaking. The thing plays DS cartridges! And it would have been a great fit to have your back library of handheld games on the 3DS, but they limited themselves to Game Boy and Game Boy Color, which is just completely baffling to me. Even if it wasn't pixel perfect mode, I don't think anyone would have cared.

I'll give Nintendo a 80% pass on not having N64 games on the 3DS. N64 emulation has always been tricky, so it probably requires power the 3DS doesn't have. But I do find it slightly fishy that one of the launch titles on the DS, and the first game I bought with my shiny new silver DS on launch day, was a port of Mario 64. Hmmmmmm.

And why can't we have Earthbound Beginnings on 3DS? It's an NES game!!!!!! It seemed like Nintendo was just using the Virtual Console this cycle to try to rescue the floundering Wii U, and gave up a lot of money in virtual console sales to get it.

Also, why were there so many Nintendo games that were on the Wii's virtual console that aren't on the 3DS or Wii U? It's not hard to put roms in a shop, guys. You already have the emulators. There are a ton of games I'd like on Virtual Console for 3DS that the Wii could handle, but apparently the 3DS can't. I really hope the Switch is better in this regard, giving a wide range of titles, and avoiding arbitrary distinctions that don't make sense.

Anyway, end rant. Get it together, Nintendo.

-TRO