I kinda feel bad about Nintendo Online by now. I’ve been asking for SNES games for a while, but after spending a couple of hours with the service a short while back … yeah, no. These games hold up better than the NES in my view, but that does not mean, they really amount to something I want to spend a significant amount of time with.
Part of it is probably the limited selection and the fact, that out of those, the games that speak to me most, I’ve already played, maybe even several times, but still.
Super Metroid is a good example. It’s a truly good game, I might have called it great at one point, but booting it up to today, it is at the same time overly familiar and foreign.
Familiar, because ‘ben there dan that’ and because it – among a few others – inspired countless future titles (which is one way to define it as an ‘all-time great’ of course) and forgein, precisely because it has a tough time standing up against those it inspired, with all their added flavors and variety, incl. improved controls and such.
I find myself thinking, that I much rather go back to Hollow Knight and take another shot at unfinished content (cough Godmaster), go for another run in Dead Cells, find the last goodies in Ori and the Blind Forest, finally finish Guacamelee! (yeah, shame on me, I know), keep building my anticipation for the next Ori game or …
So for anyone who never played the game, it’s a nice thing to have, but I dunno, I’ve been re-playing a couple of GC games this year using Dolphin (well, just Baten Kaitos Origins and FE:PoR really), but it show me, that it is not just about familiarity with the SNES.
Maybe Nintendo just needs to build their catalogue, include alot more non-mainstreams games, most folks incl. myself are unfamiliar with or they can speed things up and move on to GC/Wii content … or maybe I’ll be never happy
I start thinking, it would have been better to make the Virtual Console like the Xbox Game-Pass: You pay extra for it, but you basically get access to all their own content – but in this case going back to the NES up to … well, I guess not the WiiU/3DS, but certainly the GC/Wii and at least the GBA.
Personally, I’d rather pay $5-10 a month for that ( depending on how good the emulation is and ultimately how extensive the catalogue ) than what I do now.
It’s a nice feature for those who need Online anyways, but for those that don’t … it’s still cheap I guess, but as a service that can justify itself outside of online, I still don’t see it.
For PS and Xbox that would be a minor issue, but Nintendo has such a treasure chest of stuff to share, yes, even and esp. after 1997’ish, that this feels like not even a half-measure in that regard, more like yet again another stop-gap-measure.
I sure hope they are not waiting to do their own Stadia-thing (like who needs a data centre to emulate an N64 or even GC game) … and miss out on doing an exhaustive library on a PortablE system.
/rant over .-)
While I don’t know what I want, I do stand by my momentary wish for a more Game-Pass-like service, that is focused on games, and does not mix up it priorities with online ‘features’. Nintendo has enough content to support such a service. If anyone … it’s them. They could do it, too, for sure!
