I had two plans for today’s entry. the first, and best, was to write a new Virtual Console wishlist. That went to shit when I took an extra shift this morning, slept the afternoon away, and then played Tales of Vesperia all evening. The next plan was to write about something exciting and new on either the VC or WiiWare. That one didn’t work out because nothing even remotely interesting has been released on either service since Mega Man 3. And that was waaay back in the begining of November. Nevermind that there hasn’t been anything I would buy since Secret of Mana came out in October.
So Virtual Console has been kind of a dumping ground for mediocre to crappy games for the last couple months. It’s really sad because there’s still so many wonderful titles that are absent from the list. We’ve got the essentials like Super Metroid, Mega Man 2, and the aforementioned Secret of Mana, but where are the sleepers like Dragon Warrior or even Yoshi’s Island, one of the most wonderful platform games ever made? I understand that we’ll never see Crono Trigger or the SNES Final Fantasy titles because they’re all being remade or ported to the DS, but there are still tons of great projects under the Square-Enix name alone that will never be seen again (Wonder Project J, Lufia 2, etc) that would be perfect for the service. We won’t even start on what Capcom, Konami, and all those other developers. At the very least, I want the Soulblazer trilogy. Illusion of Gaia alone would even sate me. I want to play that game again so badly.
WiiWare hasn’t been faring much better. Actually, it’s been a lot worse. Aside from Stong Bad’s games, the only thing I’ve even considered downloading in the last God-knows-how-long is Space Invaders Get Even (pictured right), but the whole buy-it-in-pieces setup has turned me off completely. I would much rather buy the whole thing for 2000 points at once than make a bunch of smaller installments. It’s nice if you just want to try the game out but don’t feel like shelling out a whole $20 for it, but that’s exctly why Nintendo should provide demos! Have they not learned anything from the wonderful Xbox Live Arcade setup? But anyway, the service is otherwise polluted by games that look so bad I’d be amazed if even one person dowloaded them, and a flood of dumb colour-matching puzzle games. It’s ridiculous, and has made Nintendo the laughing stock of the digital distribution world. And to be considered worse than Sony in that category is a real testament to just how bad things are. Yes, they’re providing a lot of content, but quality control should at least be present, if even just to keep out the complete garbage like Hockey Allstar Shootout and Target Toss Pro: Bags.
So I suppose this post kind of volates the spirit of my “24 Days of Materialism” feature, being that it mostly tells you not to buy anything, and is more of a rant than a review. However, I did name a few games that are worth at least convincing a friend to buy. Like Space Invaders Get Even. You should totally get it and then invite me over to play. It’ll be awesome I promise.