Opinion: What's wrong with the Virtual Console anyway?

Suggestion #1: Stop with the niche titles already.

And here are four more. Strangely enough, all of the games of

And here are four more. Strangely enough, all of the games of "questionable" popularity are usually for the Genesis and TG-16, the only non-Nintendo systems in the VC lineup. Hmm...

If the Wii era came to a close, and Dragon's Curse wasn't made available on the Virtual Console, do you think a single person in the entire gaming population would really care? If not, then why has that particular TG-16 game been made available ahead of, say, Bloody Wolf? And why was, say, Sonic Spinball released ahead of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or any other Sonic game? (besides the original, of course)

As I see it, only three factors should influence a game's entry into the Virtual Console library at this stage of the Wii's lifespan: sales history, cultural significance, and fan demand. If a game satisfies at least one of those three pre-requisites, it deserves to be released on any day this year. However, I don't recall Moto Roader breaking any sales records or changing the way we looked at video games. Nor, for that matter, do I recall coming across any angry letter petitions demanding the game's release.

Look, I know that this is a slow time of the year for games, and that Nintendo is twiddling their thumbs while waiting to release the big guns for the holiday season. But still, there is an inexhaustible collection of great games at their disposal, and releases of games like Chew Man Fu (racial overtones aside) are only serving to make Wii owners angry. So stop.

Of course, if Nintendo releases only one of these niche titles a week alongside some great triple-A titles, I guess it can be forgiven.

Suggestion #2: More games per week

Given that the Virtual Console covers five systems, releasing only three games per week is akin to a criminal act. Even if Nintendo chose to release only their more popular games, I don't even want to count how many weeks or even years it would take before every single catalogue for every single retro system would become exhausted. Of course, by summer, Nintendo will also be adding games from the NeoGeo library as well, which gives Nintendo even more of an incentive to accelerate their release schedules. By the end of this year, if 5 or 6 games per week isn't the norm, I swear there'll be a mutiny, and it'll be on your conscience, Nintendo.

Trust me, you don't want the spilled blood of a mutiny on your hands. I speak from experience.

Suggestion #3: Abolish the fixed price system

I refuse to believe that Bonanza Bros. should cost me the same exact amount of money as Streets of Rage. I just can't. If Nintendo feels that it absolutely has to release those niche titles, they should at least have the decency to release them at a lowered price.

Suggestion #4: Start thinking about packages

Did you know that there have been over 700 NES games made throughout the console's illustrious history? Now, imagine that it was your one goal in life to own every single NES game on Virtual Console. At $5 per game, this massive purchase would cost you in excess of $3500 for the entire package. And that's not even counting the hundreds of titles on all of the other systems.

Of course, nobody's going to be anywhere close to that brand of crazy (we hope), but you'll have to admit that even spending in excess of $100 for just 20 games on a system made popular over twenty years ago is just a tad ridiculous. Granted, I admit that some games in the NES library are truly worth the $5 it costs to download it, but all of the other games? They're just fluff at this point in history.

Once Nintendo realizes that they can't, with good conscience, release Renegade for 500 Wii Points, the only other option is to bundle it in a 3000 point package containing all of Technos' other games, like River City Ransom, Super Dodgeball, and all of the Double Dragon games on all consoles. Of course, customers would also have to be wary of your typical sales tricks, like Nintendo putting the same game in four or five different bundle packs.

Suggestion #5: Release the games as is

In that one particular week in which the only game offered was Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, one might logically assume that the intense amount of editing and proofreading diverted Nintendo's attention away from the release of other titles that week. (Of course, nobody knows this for sure except Nintendo.)

But let's assume that's really the case. Let's assume for a minute that Nintendo is working around the clock to fix all of the "Engrish" in its games in order to erase all traces of its previous misdeeds in the realm of game localization. That, in my opinion, would be a minor travesty.

To the Bionic Commando fan, the garbled and unintelligible English that appeared on the screen was just one of a myriad of reasons why that game was so delightful in the first place. Of course, in this day and age, poor localization is the equivalent of a death knell for any given game, but back in those days, poor English built character.

If NoA manages to release a VC version of Bionic Commando that's been re-translated, you can be pretty sure that I'll be the first in line to protest. Loudly, I might add.

So there you go -- words of advice from consumer to company. I know that some of the above suggestions may be seen as mutually exclusive, but Nintendo doesn't have to follow all of them - just a few, or even one.

Oh, and before some of you question why I'm picking on Nintendo and haven't singled out the PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Arcade yet (which also have their fair share of problems), rest assured - those opinion pieces will be coming soon enough.

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