For those with a jones for retro gaming, the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console was supposed to be a dream come true. It was supposed to be the home of every old Nintendo game you could ask for. As time passed, the Virtual Console grew to include the Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, Sega Master System, Commodore 64 and arcade games. It’s been almost 5 years since the launch of Virtual Console, and we as consumers have access to over 300 games.
On the surface, that sounds decent. I’ve been able to buy a few favourites, try older games I’ve never played before and even grab a Japanese import game that never came out here (in my case, the very awesome Sin and Punishment). However, that number isn’t even close to representing the full catalogue of platforms represented in Virtual Console. Between the NES, SNES, SMS, Genesis, TG16, N64 and Neo Geo, the Virtual console has only made 10% of their combined catalogue available to consumers. It’s only going to get worse, as the once weekly updates have slowed to once a month, if we’re lucky.
What started out as an amazing idea is fizzling fast. How did Nintendo screw up what should have been a sure-fire win?
A Large Portion of Wii Consoles Aren’t Online
Out of all the Wii owners I know personally, I can’t think of one person who has their Wii connected to the Internet. I’m fairly certain you would have a tough time thinking of Wii owners you know that have it hooked up. Beyond anecdotal evidence, a study done by The Diffusion Group indicates that the percentage of Wii consoles connected to the Internet is far lower than the percentages of XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 consoles.
There are a number of reasons for this. For one, a large portion of Wii owners aren’t the hardcore type that are even aware that video game systems have Internet capabilities nowadays. For those people, they plug in their Wii, play Wii Sports and call it a day. However, I’m sure that there are a lot of lapsed gamers who have fond memories of yesteryear that would love the Virtual Console service that don’t know the service exists and they aren’t willing to jump through the hoops to get their Wii working online.
The Shop Channel Interface Sucks
To be fair, the XBOX 360 Game Room interface, which sort of shares the same purpose, sucks too, but that’s a discussion for another day. In spite of having the best shopping music of all-time, it is not easy to find what you’re looking for in there. It does a poor job of telling you what’s new or hot and it does a poor job of managing your points.
A better interface that makes adding points, finding games and buying them would go a long way towards making this service the success it should be.
Storage is a Pain
The Wii console’s lack of internal memory has been a major sore spot for hardcore gamers, especially those who like to buy Virtual Console games. The Wii only has 528 MB of internal memory, which can get eaten up really quickly through game saves and a handful of Virtual Console titles. The lack of memory is one of the main reasons why there aren’t many Nintendo 64 games available on the service.
Sure, you could move stuff to an SD card, but up until last year, you couldn’t run anything directly off of the card. What that meant was, if your Wii was full and you wanted to buy Gunstar Heroes, you would have to move content currently on your Wii to an SD card, then download the game. Even worse, if your Wii was full and you wanted to play a game stored on your SD card, you would have to move Wii content onto the SD card, then move the game back to the Wii before you could play it.
Nintendo was bullish on fixing this horrendous content management issue, but last year they at least allowed users to run downloaded games off an SD card. However, this update is four years late, the system still has only 528 MB of memory out of the box and everyone who would have bought more games is tired of dealing with this crappy system. This is the primary reason I stopped buying Virtual Console games a long time ago.
On top of all this, there is no way to transfer downloaded Virtual Console games from one system to another. Unlike Sony and Microsoft, all download records are tied to the system, not a user’s account. What that means is, if your Wii breaks and you send it to Nintendo for repair, you won’t get your downloaded games back unless you specify that to Nintendo. If you buy a black Wii and want to transfer your downloaded games to your white Wii, you can’t do that either. When the next platform comes out, will you be able to transfer your Wii games to that new platform? My guess is no, which is the secondary reason I stopped supporting the Virtual Console.
Where Are The Games?
The Virtual Console is working from a catalogue of over 3,000 games, yet only about 10% of those are actually available in the service. To be fair, trying to get the rights for something like Goldeneye 007 on the service would be a legal nightmare. Also, some games just won’t come back because the companies that made them are out of business.
But that doesn’t account for the huge gap between what exists and what’s available. At one point, I thought they were just spreading out the releases to make sure content was available throughout the Wii console’s life cycle. However, the Virtual Console has barely scratched the surface and most weeks nowadays don’t feature any new games for the service. My gut feeling tells me that publishers are reluctant to put the work into making these games available because Virtual Console games don’t sell. And they don’t sell because of all the reasons I’ve already touched on.
It’s a shame that this service will likely stay as bad as it is for at least the Wii console’s life cycle. This should have been the ultimate retro gaming machine that supported legal, perfectly emulated games that you could play on your TV from your couch. Instead, it’s a heavily flawed service that I’m sure the majority of Wii owners no longer care about.
In Third Person 