Netflix ain't better than downloading some mp4 off the net,
VC or anything legal is never going to be better thand downloading roms off the web too.
As an aside it doesn't need to offer the best, just good enough.
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Jimquisition: Nintendo's Virtual Console Is Trash Garbage (Jan. 9, 2017)
- Thread starter L~A
- Start date
Netflix ain't better than downloading some mp4 off the net,
VC or anything legal is never going to be better thand downloading roms off the web too.
As an aside it doesn't need to offer the best, just good enough.
Affeinvasion
Member
The video lingering on the face of a porn star just long enough for me to realize I don't just recognize said person but know them by name...
Thanks, Jim.
Thanks, Jim.
LordRaptor
Member
I can agree with the stance "I don't think game x is worth price y so I won't play it".
Frankly I think "I don't think game x is worth price y so I'll just download it for free instead" is a bit of a cunty attitude.
Can't argue that VC lived up to it's potential far better on the Wii than it ever did on its successors. Who wants to go shopping at a brick and mortar store full of bare shelves and increasingly limited choices every time the store gets remodeled? All while the items being somewhat overpriced consdering some of this stuff is 3 decades old.
What I find backwards is how the VC on the Wii was pretty good in the range offered and the speed of releases, but the WiIU is positively anaemic in comparison.
Godzilla's Left Toe
Member
How dare you insult gamings "savior"
mullet2000
Member
Netflix offers instantaneous streaming, less time spent searching for a download, and an easier to browse interface compared to downloading MP4s. So it has value there.
VC offers slower downloads than downloading a ROM, bad image quality, and lack of features and options compared to PC emulators. So little to no benefit. That's the difference.
I guess we'll see if they learned their lesson this time very soon.
The release schedule and discounts for VC on WiiU became so much worse over time. In the beginning they had all those discounts for buying multiple games of the same series or for owning certain other earlier releases. That all stopped pretty soon after. Not to mention they hardly released anything in the last months (or year, really). I'm not even sure why they bothered to start to release PC Engine games when they stopped after the first week.
Even their sales on VC titles became rarer and actually worse over time.
I really hope they can make something worthwhile of this service again on the Switch. And secure the support of more third parties. Nintendo's games are great, but I already own them multiple times.
The release schedule and discounts for VC on WiiU became so much worse over time. In the beginning they had all those discounts for buying multiple games of the same series or for owning certain other earlier releases. That all stopped pretty soon after. Not to mention they hardly released anything in the last months (or year, really). I'm not even sure why they bothered to start to release PC Engine games when they stopped after the first week.
Even their sales on VC titles became rarer and actually worse over time.
I really hope they can make something worthwhile of this service again on the Switch. And secure the support of more third parties. Nintendo's games are great, but I already own them multiple times.
UncleSporky
Member
While the drip feed was clearly a decision they're culpable for, they probably had no choice but to abandon the Wii's VC library, because as stated several times in this thread there were multiple major third parties that refused to re-license their games for Wii U.
Sega Master System and Genesis? TurboGrafx? Neo Geo? Just gone. Hundreds of games they couldn't carry over, through no choice of their own. Nintendo was left picking up the pieces.
Not advocating piracy (you should own the games!) but a hacked Wii hooked up to a CRT TV is pure retro bliss.
I didn't buy Wii U VC because I didn't really need to, but I might buy Switch VC if I get one because I'd like to have all that stuff on the go. The Wii U gamepad screen is awful. Hoping for much better.
Damn, I hope a single 128gb SD card will be enough for everything on the Switch.
Not only that, but if the translations had their own different ROM, they are treated as different games that you need to buy several times if you want to use a different language. And that is if you can even buy them, as the eShop is further separated in individual countries, and only the country's language ROM can be accessed, so you need to change the console region an language to access the different translations (and pay for them). Worse, if you have set up an NNID you can't change countries any more and are stuck with whatever language is used in the country you chose. Fuck playing Link's awakening in English if you're German or French.
I just remembered the laughable Inazuma Eleven situation in the UK, where it never got on the eShop despite being available everywhere else in Europe and the USA. Never mind the reasons for that, UK users can't even browse another European eShop (where it's available in English) to get it due to the restrictions of the NNID.
So what is Nintendo doing wrong that Valve is doing right? Why does Steam have more Genesis games for a cheaper price? What made Konami play ball for NES Classic and why can't they do that with VC?
Nintendo are more than likely going to start fresh again on Switch. I hope they don't just adopt the Wii model for a 3rd time when it clearly isn't working for their partners or their VC "whales".
At least you'd only have to buy them once since amiibos work on multiple systems, and you wouldn't have to wait through some 7 day account transfer for your games.
It may actually be BETTER than their current system!
Jim Sterling
Member
I am in total disagreement.
iTunes and Spotify are worth me paying money because they provide convenient, reasonably priced services that are quicker and easier to use than searching for songs to download illegally.
Netflix and Amazon do the same thing for TV and movies. I could pirate all the shit I see on those services, or I could just press the button the makes the thing happen on my television/console/phone/everything.
People pay for convenience, and the best way to defeat piracy has always been to provide a better service than pirates. This is one philosophy of Valve's that's held true even while their handling of Steam has been awful in other areas.
Like many people who grew up in the 90s, I'm no stranger to piracy, and I can safely say the one thing that's more or less curbed my desire to download stuff unofficially is the vast customer-facing improvement of official services.
Nocturnowl
Member
Well, there's nothing* to argue about there and I say this as someone who has made plenty of use out of the VC on Wii and WiiU.
*Except Balloon Fight being used as the poop NES title example, at least worth £1.50 Jim. Now games like Ice Climber and Urban Champion are the ones they should be giving out for free and even then I wont take it.
*Except Balloon Fight being used as the poop NES title example, at least worth £1.50 Jim. Now games like Ice Climber and Urban Champion are the ones they should be giving out for free and even then I wont take it.
I wish N64 games were released once a month. It would be better than every six months.
Bear Force One
Banned
I'm glad he took Sony to task over their weak PS1/2 releases. So sad so many great titles are still locked away.
This.
Steam being convenient and cheap for buying PC games (if you know what you want and know when to buy) made me stop pirating PC games many, many years ago. Give me good incentives to buy stuff and I will.
PS2 on PS4 has been a ball-aching disappointment.
I will buy the games if they are available to buy and not over-priced.
Wii U and 3DS VC is both anemic AND overpriced. Even their discounts during sales are a joke. Hell, right now on MyNintendo you can spend 30 Gold coins (earned by buying eShop stuff) to save a fucking $1.40 on Yoshi for NES. Ridiculous. And if the discounts purchased with premium currency weren't insulting enough, the fact that you onky have a handful of games to choose from before the coins EXPIRE is even worse.
Glass Rebel
Member
No, I said that the only thing VC has over emulation is that it's legal. And that's only if you don't take into account legal backups. It was like one sentence.
All I'm hearing is that Nintendo fucked up in the initial licensing.
fredrancour
Member
i disagree completely. hitting a button on a professionally-designed menu to view TV shows is easier than scrounging the internet for a torrent. spotify, netflix, amazon prime video.... they're making money because they offer genuine features that are desirable, not because a statistically significant number of people are consciously choosing to support content creators, but because modern entertainment systems add value on top of the content contained within them. those few bucks that'd be saved by pirating are often only worth the headaches of sailing the high seas to people who really literally do not have the money.
plagiarize
Banned
Yep. We didn't beg for the ability to buy mp3s of music for a reasonable price and then continue pirating. It turned into a billion dollar industry or whatever.
Same with videos. Sure, some people still pirate, but for people with moderate income, who has time for that? Why risk getting viruses while being inundated with hideous pop up adverts just to save a couple of dollars? Why not give the people who made the fucking thing some money?
Just recently I bought Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency because I couldn't be bothered to track it down any other way, and because I had the Microsoft credit.
Who hasn't heard stories of people buying a digital version of something they already own, so they don't have to get out of bed or get off the couch to put it in the DVD player.
Those are extreme but real examples of what people are prepared to pay for convenience.
CrispyBoar
Banned
They did, on the New 3DS.
The old 3DS couldn't run SNES games properly like the New 3DS could.
UncleSporky
Member
I'm pretty sure that all of Konami's games on the NES Classic are also available on VC. What Konami isn't playing ball with are any Hudson/TurboGrafx games, which I don't think are represented on Steam either.
Sega probably just makes more money going their own way. I would guess that Sega's ownership over their own consoles complicates things - they may have some say in which platforms Genesis games appear on, regardless of third parties' wishes, but they still owe some amount of licensing money to those third parties. Any money earned from retro sales would get split multiple ways, meaning it's got to be really lucrative to support any given platform.
Could be as simple as releasing their first Sega mega pack of games on a different platform and watching the money roll in by comparison to VC. Meaning, people disappointed in the lack of Genesis on Wii U have only themselves to blame for not buying enough Genesis games on Wii and pushing Sega to explore other release avenues.
D
Deleted member 57681
Unconfirmed Member
AtomicShroom
Member
I'm surprised he didn't harp on any of the technical shortcomings such as the dark filters, the input lag in the N64 releases, etc.
And if the NES mini and its audio lag is anything to go by, not even NERD will save this from being awful on the Switch.
And if the NES mini and its audio lag is anything to go by, not even NERD will save this from being awful on the Switch.
VC emulation on 3DS is really accurate, too. The GBA emulation on Wii U seems to be more pretty damn accurate, too. Aria of Sorrow seems to play pretty great.
UncleSporky
Member
How much does any of us know about the business side of these things? Maybe they had months of meetings hashing out the details, and nobody was willing to take part in VC unless it was limited to the Wii shop, and not for future platforms in perpetuity.
I can totally picture publishers being gunshy in handing the keys to their kingdom over for all future Nintendo platforms forever.
I thought everyone criticized Nintendo for playing hardball with third parties and throwing their weight around since the early days. Now they weren't firm enough in demanding perpetual VC rights?
Nice to see Jim pointing out the 3DS search function. Was searching for fire emblem stuff on the store and like the first page was just videos I believe. That and dlc isn't on the store and you have to look for dlc in-game, which I'm not the biggest fan of (which is barely on sale too).
I too have fell out with VC a lot. Definitely not for for buying the same VC game on each Nintendo console. I buy the odd VC game I'm interested in/never played before, but having a collection of VC games I would like just doesn't interest me now, because they're only good for the one console, and while I understand some work had to be done to make them work on another console, there isn't anything new about it other than it just works which doesn't really sell me on buying the same game x times.
I too have fell out with VC a lot. Definitely not for for buying the same VC game on each Nintendo console. I buy the odd VC game I'm interested in/never played before, but having a collection of VC games I would like just doesn't interest me now, because they're only good for the one console, and while I understand some work had to be done to make them work on another console, there isn't anything new about it other than it just works which doesn't really sell me on buying the same game x times.
What can they Say that will be worth the upgrade fee? For wiiu it was playing on the tablet without the TV but What would be the switch reason?
Spiral Insanity
Banned
The same can be said about other 3DS games. (With your reasoning.)
Jawmuncher
Member
Gotta say I agree. The VC output has always been rather odd to me.
Schnozberry
Member
The VC is pretty much indefensible as an alternative to piracy. You have very small groups of people finding ways to perfectly emulate just about everything under the sun with torrent servers hosting thousands of games in single compressed files. Most of these emulators are entirely CPU based, and don't even require a modern computer to run well, and even look and run great on shitty knock off Windows tablets.
NERD seems to have nailed the emulator for the NES Classic, controversy about Nintendo's supply chain notwithstanding, so maybe creating a better means of emulating past hardware will be a task they will thrive on for Switch.
Living the Dream
Member
"This time we won't have horrible emulation."
"It'll be forwards compatible, I promise!"
Fans will eat it up. I won't.
Also to add to the sparse release dates. Doesn't Nintendo realize that actually pumping out VC games at a good price (under $10) would still work very well. The excuse that they want people to spend time playing a released VC game and not let future VC released be overshadowed by that play time isn't the case. The true selling point for VC games is convenience and to be able to play them easily.
So if a VC game I love came out I would buy it as soon as possible, I wouldn't play it instantly but the fact I can at anytime is the selling point for me.
So if a VC game I love came out I would buy it as soon as possible, I wouldn't play it instantly but the fact I can at anytime is the selling point for me.
I absolutely agree when it comes to licensing, that has to be the biggest load of horseshit of a reason to ever exist. Dump all the Nintendo games first, then go and sort licenses with Capcom and Konami and Natsume and The Pokemon Company and everybody else.
Yeah, pretty much this whole thing with Pokemon Snap is why I'm waiting for the Switch event and how they'll handle VC releases. I might cave and buy it eventually anyhow, but despite terrible darkened filters and $10, it would be nice to not have to plug in the N64 again and actually post my favourite photos to Miiverse.
It's not as though enough people have seen the masterpiece a friend of mine took of a Magmar giving Charmeleon implied fellatio.
Yeah, pretty much this whole thing with Pokemon Snap is why I'm waiting for the Switch event and how they'll handle VC releases. I might cave and buy it eventually anyhow, but despite terrible darkened filters and $10, it would be nice to not have to plug in the N64 again and actually post my favourite photos to Miiverse.
It's not as though enough people have seen the masterpiece a friend of mine took of a Magmar giving Charmeleon implied fellatio.
AtomicShroom
Member
They haven't. There's audio lag.
If that shit persists on the Switch, it's a no-buy.
LordRaptor
Member
But piracy hasn't been defeated, which exposes the flaw in your argument that there is no value other than legality.
I think the W10 storefront is fucking shit and overpriced, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to warez a copy of Gears Of War Ultimate or whatever because Ms didn't put it on Steam, the service I prefer.
Netflix doesn't have Game Of Thrones, so I don't have any entitlement to EZTV the series because HBO didn't put it on Netflix.
I'm sure Tidal has some exclusive content I could make the same argument with regarding Spotify, and iTunes has some content I could make the same argument with regarding Google Play.
If a service platform has excusive content, it has exclusive content.
The only ethical choice as a consumer is in not supporting that platform by not using that content.
You can't beat piracy, but you can compete with it. That's what Jim is asking Nintendo to do.
Version 3.0
Member
They're tied to your account AND the console (ie. Wii U) AND the specific machine.
It's not as if you can sign in to someone else's console and play your content. Nor can you sign in to a 3DS and play VC games you've purchase on Wii U. And getting your content on a newly purchased console requires a transfer process that moves the content, rather than copying it. So you can't have 2 Wii U's or 2 3DS's with the same content.
None of that is acceptable. Unless something's changed. They have made some extremely slow progress on this front.
Not much to argue here, honestly, there's ton of issues with VC and it's getting increasingly difficult to me to justify buying their stuff other than supporting re-releases of retro games I love. It's gotten to the point I end up emulating games I buy on VC on the very platforms I buy them on because their offer is just too sub par.
I'd be fine with third parties dropping support for whatever reason as long as Nintendo offered their own catalog in a timely manner, but it's always one game a week if any, it's pathetic.
Hell, if third parties like Sega drop support to release their stuff in other places one would assume it's because Nintendo has bad policies we don't know about so in the end it's still their fault.
And that's not even touching the topic of pricing, because of course Nintendo expects me to pay more for SNES games than what Sony asks for flipping PS1 games.
NES games already look bad enough on Wii U buy somehow they managed to make them even worse on 3DS
The only good thing about it is download play support, really, otherwise it's pretty garbage. I used to emulate NES on my old Nokia phone and they looked better lol.
GB/C games have A and B mapped to the 3DS A and B instead of Y and B too, making most platformers almost unplayable, and of course, 0 configuration options.
Only SNES is good and even those have oddly low audio volume for some reason.
I'd be fine with third parties dropping support for whatever reason as long as Nintendo offered their own catalog in a timely manner, but it's always one game a week if any, it's pathetic.
Hell, if third parties like Sega drop support to release their stuff in other places one would assume it's because Nintendo has bad policies we don't know about so in the end it's still their fault.
And that's not even touching the topic of pricing, because of course Nintendo expects me to pay more for SNES games than what Sony asks for flipping PS1 games.
NES games already look bad enough on Wii U buy somehow they managed to make them even worse on 3DS
The only good thing about it is download play support, really, otherwise it's pretty garbage. I used to emulate NES on my old Nokia phone and they looked better lol.
GB/C games have A and B mapped to the 3DS A and B instead of Y and B too, making most platformers almost unplayable, and of course, 0 configuration options.
Only SNES is good and even those have oddly low audio volume for some reason.
The Switch is the perfect opportunity for Nintendo to fix the service. Just spend time developing a decent emulator, dump everything they have on there (with maybe 5 every week to not let smaller games get overshadowed) and price them a lot more reasonably. Unfortunately I don't see them doing any of those three things.