Nintendo discontinues NES Classic

[Crossroads Inc.]

WTF NINTENDO!?!?
Seriously what is there to say other than Wtf???
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired. ... stake/amp/

[Vendetta]

Why would they sell you 30 NES games at once when they can charge you $5 a month to rent one temporarily?

[Zixinus]

I think the company has the old hardware-tied mindset that people eventually lose interest in the old console and move on to newer ones, playing games on a physical units. The fact that emulation allows people to replay pretty much any games from the first half of the 1990s on a better Android tablet is lost on the people making decisions about this..

[Crazedwraith]

Why would they sell you 30 NES games at once when they can charge you $5 a month to rent one temporarily?

Because non-gamers will buy that thing but would balk at buying a modern console?

[Vendetta]

Why would they sell you 30 NES games at once when they can charge you $5 a month to rent one temporarily?

Because non-gamers will buy that thing but would balk at buying a modern console?

I don't think there are any non-gamers any more. Almost everyone plays videogames in some form or other, even if it's mobile or facebook games. Most people who would buy a NES classic almost certainly have at least one other games console though.

There are lots of things about the current market that Nintendo just doesn't seem to get though, witness the fact that they're still lagging behind features that were common to the last generation of home consoles in basically every online feature on the Switch. (Like the aforementioned rent one NES game a month as their online service's bonus, lack of save backups, requiring an external app on a mobile device for matchmaking and comms, etc)

And this is another example, Nintendo are in a position where they could print money for a good while longer on the NES classic, but they're stopping it because they don't get the market.

Ah well, a Retropie is probably cheaper and it's not like getting every NES/FC game for it is a hard task.

[TheFeniX]

I have stopped trying to understand the business decisions of Nintendo at this point. I mean, maybe it's a case of the new guys wanting to make their mark and just relying on reliving the 80s and 90s isn't a part of that? Semi-related: I read some op-ed about this a few years back, but it's hard to tell if it was just a bad case of old-school racism: The Japanese business mentality and lack of young blood mucks things up for them.

How much money do you estimate Nintendo could make if they sold a box for each generation console they had which gave access to all the first-party and third-party titles they have rights to? How much could they make on a subscription model for something like that? If it could upscale to a 1080p TV without looking like mud: I would think all the money ever.

This is like when Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara was put on steam with online co-op. It was an instant buy. The idea of some of the old 2-player or multi-tap games with online play is just too awesome to think about without getting annoyed most of it would never happen. Man, I could rock out some Super Dodge Ball right now.

Honestly though, I just need to drop it because I'm going to get into a "I wish I could just play all these games on my PC" rant and that just leads into the whole "Nintendo should go third party" argument I neither fully agree with nor do want to get into.

[Vendetta]

How much money do you estimate Nintendo could make if they sold a box for each generation console they had which gave access to all the first-party and third-party titles they have rights to? How much could they make on a subscription model for something like that? If it could upscale to a 1080p TV without looking like mud: I would think all the money ever.

Oh yeah. Netflix money for Netflix access to every NES, SNES, and N64 game Nintendo could feed me? I'd pay that basically immediately and so would everyone else, given the success of the NES classic. They could put a Switch in every home in the damn world if they offered that. It wouldn't cost them a great deal to serve either given how small the files are.

But no, they think they get more selling them at four quid a go on their online store. And sure, I've bought some of the virtual console games, but if they were charging £5.99 a month they'd have had as much from me as I've ever spent in the eshop in like six months, so either they've got some proper whales they're absolutely rinsing or they hate money.

And since they just cancelled a product that people would probably kill and eat each other for, I suspect it's the latter.

[bilateralrope]

Jim Sterling had a theory about Nintendo a while back. Basically, they are behaving like a toymaker, not a video game company.

He did go into a bit of a rant about this move as just another inexplicable move by Nintendo.

[Tribble]

Jim Sterling had a theory about Nintendo a while back. Basically, they are behaving like a toymaker, not a video game company.

He did go into a bit of a rant about this move as just another inexplicable move by Nintendo.

One of the commentators in those posts had an interesting theory; the Classic was just something to keep some factories busy while Wii U production was halted and the Switch was getting prepped. Once the Switch was released and that capacity was needed they axed the Classic. That idea sounds plausible IMO.

[Zixinus]

One of the surprising things is that there is still interest of players for old games. For example, there is the Shantae series and I see people interested where they can buy the first game of the series (which is in certain ways the worst of the series) that was published for Gameboy COLOR.

[DaveJB]

One of the commentators in those posts had an interesting theory; the Classic was just something to keep some factories busy while Wii U production was halted and the Switch was getting prepped. Once the Switch was released and that capacity was needed they axed the Classic. That idea sounds plausible IMO.

Yeah, supposedly the Switch has already managed to shift a number of units roughly equivalent to 1/6th of the Wii U's lifetime sales to date, so I can guess that Nintendo want the extra production capacity. That, and I can see them using the Classic's improved NES emulation as the basis for the Switch's virtual console.

[TheFeniX]

One of the surprising things is that there is still interest of players for old games. For example, there is the Shantae series and I see people interested where they can buy the first game of the series (which is in certain ways the worst of the series) that was published for Gameboy COLOR.

Some old games are just that damn good. There was a lot of shovelware back in the day, but the gems linger so long because their mechanics were just that good. And since you've got not only a new generation of gamers who hear about these games and figures they "need" to play them for numerous reasons, there's also the old-hat guys who don't mind re-playing them for the umpteenth time. For the new guys/gals, could be because they don't want to get talked down by old assholes, they don't care about graphics and find these games have value as primers, or their mom/dad/brother/whoever waxes poetic about them.

It's like movies: if you like Cyberpunk, you just kind of "need" to watch Bladerunner. If you want to know more about the creation of the Fallout series, you "need" to watch a Boy and His Dog. And some of these movies are also important from other stand-points: pre-The Matrix a lot of camera work and fight choreography was just done different. Sometimes I just want some aged Red Meat and put on old-school Arnold movies to watch a good-old-fashion man-on-man beatdown scene where two huge dudes just pounded each other with haymakers while spouting cheesy one-liners at each other.

A hilarious (to me) story was when I was talking to one of my brothers-in-law. He's like 22-23. I'm mid 30s now. He was talking about this really good RPG he was playing. But "FeniX! You'd like it, it's brand new but it's got like Retro graphics! And the story is great. And the combat system, I've never seen anything like it. These guys knew what they were doing."

He was talking about the Chrono Trigger re-release on NDS (which I obviously had already bought and beaten). He had no idea the original game came out when he was still in diapers. I felt bad because I listened to his entire spiel and I'll I could say when he finished and asked me if I had heard of it was: "We didn't call those graphics retro back then. We called them graphics."

[Gerald Tarrant]

A hilarious (to me) story was when I was talking to one of my brothers-in-law. He's like 22-23. I'm mid 30s now. He was talking about this really good RPG he was playing. But "FeniX! You'd like it, it's brand new but it's got like Retro graphics! And the story is great. And the combat system, I've never seen anything like it. These guys knew what they were doing."

He was talking about the Chrono Trigger re-release on NDS (which I obviously had already bought and beaten). He had no idea the original game came out when he was still in diapers. I felt bad because I listened to his entire spiel and I'll I could say when he finished and asked me if I had heard of it was: "We didn't call those graphics retro back then. We called them graphics."

Chrono-trigger's a real gem. Every now and then I'll find that in my library and replay it, the old NES Bionic Commando gets a replay every now and then too. Lucas Arts made a fantatic Super NES side-scroller called Metal Warriors back in the day, and I keep hoping that Disney will open up their vaults and offer a port of that game. It probably had the best two player Giant Robot Death combat I've ever played. When I knew where my copy was, my brothers and I would bust that thing out every year or so to see how much our reflexes had atrophied. There were some fantastic game-play mechanics in old games.

[TheFeniX]

I think my biggest gripe about Squeenix, aside from them wanting to make more movies than video games, is their insistence on ignoring the Enix side of the merger. Actraiser and Soulblader were solid games in their own right. The mix mashing of gameplay mechanics was solid and I was disappointed in the Actraiser sequel. But I'm just crying about old shit:

The SNES and Genesis era was where gaming really hit it's stride. Metroid and Legend of Zelda were great games in their own right, but they exist more as primers, as I mentioned before. Metroid is painful to play currently. I should know, I own it on GBA. But Super Metroid continues to stand on it's own through straight ports. Zero Mission, Fusion, even Shadow Complex really couldn't improve the aspects an appreciable amount. At the least, no where NEAR what SMetroid gave us over 1 and 2.

There's really few NES games that could accomplish that sort of longevity when nostalgia is removed. SMB3 (maybe 2 the American version). Blaster Master. Zelda 2: as much shit as that game gets, for a side-scroller hack and slash it was stellar. I think Golden Axe came out a few years after and that game is incredibly slow paced comparatively. Most side-scrollers just were. Zelda 2 was responsive and just played great and was soul-destroyingly difficult on top of that. If it just had a bit more sprite-frames into it, provided the system could handle it, it would have been hard to match.

Looking at the SNES library, there's just so many games you could make bank with just a port. Going further, I think of something like a Super Metroid remake only focusing on the graphics, and with the right team you could almost certainly release it as a new game and make more than a few bucks. Shadow Complex set sales records for an Arcade title and I recall Epic spent very little (comparatively) on development.

But, you know, shit like Federation Force is what's going to revive Samus Aran.

Anyways, if you look at the games Nintendo keeps putting out there, you don't find a whole lot of improvements over their SNES counter-parts versus the NES ones that exist. I mean, have we really improved over Super Mario World vs New Super Mario Bros? There's just not much you can improve on there and if Steam has shown me anything: there's still a rather large market for side-scrollers when you ignore the dudebro market.

To sum up this lame rant: I really want a box that just let's me play all the old SNES carts my pain-in-the-ass sister gave away because she's (to this day) a massive thunder-cunt. Still mad, 20 years later. Will be mad till the day I die.

[Gerald Tarrant]

To sum up this lame rant: I really want a box that just let's me play all the old SNES carts my pain-in-the-ass sister gave away because she's (to this day) a massive thunder-cunt. Still mad, 20 years later. Will be mad till the day I die.

I was just reading about a very straight forward build that lets you convert a Raspberry Pi (around $40-50 depending on which accessories and kit you buy) into an emulator that plugs right into your TV. There was also a build that I read about which worked for the "New Classic" cartridges. So who knows maybe someone will come up with a decent SNES Pi one of these days. That should be doable they've got 64 bit chips and more RAM than consoles had back then.

[Gerald Tarrant]

To sum up this lame rant: I really want a box that just let's me play all the old SNES carts my pain-in-the-ass sister gave away because she's (to this day) a massive thunder-cunt. Still mad, 20 years later. Will be mad till the day I die.

I was just reading about a very straight forward build that lets you convert a Raspberry Pi (around $40-50 depending on which accessories and kit you buy) into an emulator that plugs right into your TV. There was also a build that I read about which worked for the "New Classic" cartridges. So who knows maybe someone will come up with a decent SNES Pi one of these days. That should be doable they've got 64 bit chips and more RAM than consoles had back then.

Sorry that shouldn't be build, there's not much to actually build, it's a very straight-forward set of things to download for the built in SD card.

[Executor32]

I think my biggest gripe about Squeenix, aside from them wanting to make more movies than video games, is their insistence on ignoring the Enix side of the merger.

*cough*E.V.O.*cough*

To sum up this lame rant: I really want a box that just let's me play all the old SNES carts my pain-in-the-ass sister gave away because she's (to this day) a massive thunder-cunt. Still mad, 20 years later. Will be mad till the day I die.

Don't feel too bad, I'm still mad at my sister for the time she recorded herself singing the 'I've got two pickles' song from The Little Rascals over my favorite song from my Dinosaurs: Big Songs cassette: