Okay, I have to take a hit here and admit that was among the lamest titles I've ever come up with, but it serves its purpose well enough. I've been pondering this for a matter of days now (and--yes--I can actually ponder the Virtual Console for a matter of days) and I've come to a few conclusions about what has been working, what hasn't, and what needs to be.
I suppose this all started after reading a discussion about each of the major consoles' on-demand game delivery services (WiiWare, XBLA, and PSN). Having never used any of the services besides WiiWare, it was interesting to me that many of the complaints that I had developed over the months of use were just as common to the other services. PS3 users were suffering from an equally similar stagnation of games and XBLA afficianados had many of the same worries about pricing structure and organization that I did. Neither had any worries about "cleaning out the fridge", but you win some you lose some. I came away from the discussion feeling quite pleased with the service Nintendo had bestowed upon its users, but regretfully it didn't actually FIX any of the complaints that I had.
So, without further ado, here are the top issues I have with Nintendo's WiiWare (Virtual Console included) service, in no particular order--
- We'll start off with that huge elephant in the room that has simply been beat to death: Storage. Now, I can understand Nintendo's unwillingness to provide a storage solution. It does open the doors for potential piracy and homebrew, but Wii hackers have found a way around most of the safeguards as it is, so that's a fairly moot point. It could also maybe allow for the copying of Virtual Console and WiiWare games, undermining the service, but I haven't heard anything about this being a problem with the other consoles' offerings. Besides, it's an easy fix--simply implement a DRM-like standard for the downloaded games where they simply would not play on any other console. True, it's possible to remove DRM, but it's an annoying process (trust me) and most users simply wouldn't have the patience for it. Besides that, major console piracy has yet to subvert the gaming industry in any of the three major regions because of it's intricacies and general annoyances, so it's unlikely that adding an external HDD for the Wii will do anything more to contribute to that. Nintendo needs to step up to the plate on this one, we want to give them our money AND play the games we spend it on. I don't think that's too much to ask.
- We need more N64 games, pure and simple. True, this sort of flies in the face of "not enough storage", but it's a request I'm still going to make. As it stands, we have all of, oh, 14 N64 games? Yeah, that's it. We've gotten most of the obvious ones out of the way, what with Ocarina of Time, Mario 64 and Starfox, but let's start getting some of the hidden treasures that might not have caught on the first time around. How about Quest 64 or 40 Winks? Ogre Battle 64 would get a fair few downloads, I'd wager. Or maybe import a couple of the disk drive games we never got on our shores. I'll add Harvest Moon 64 to that mix because it simply WOULD sell. There are so many obvious choices that it's painful to see how few we've gotten. Come on, Nintendo, throw us a frickin' bone here.
- The pricing is a bit...off. For games like Mario Bros. 3 I've got no problem whatsoever paying 5 bucks, but for Bubble Bobble? A 3 dollar download at most, and I imagine that it'd make up in volume what it would lack in pure monetary collection. And charging more for imports? I can understand that there's some extra effort there that comes along with the translation, but for some of the games there was almost no translation necessary. Nintendo would do well to set caps on how much a company can charge to release a game on their service, but otherwise give much more freedom in how much they go for. This inane fixed price thing they've got going on isn't doing it for us.
- Let us play them on our DS. We've paid for them already, we just want to take them with us. That's going to sell more games, more Wiis and more DSs. That's win-win all around, and a complete no-brainer. All we need is a blank Nintendo-official game cart to do the trick.
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