You can check out scanned manuals for next month's slate of GBA Virtual Console games.
Nintendo is including scanned versions of the original instruction manuals from the GBA games on the Wii U Virtual Console in Japan. It's not clear if this is also the case in North America and Europe.
Additionally, all of the GBA games slated for release will be playable in single player only according to current listings, regardless of whether or not the original game featured multiplayer. This could mean that GBA releases on the Wii U will not be able to take advantage of multiplayer options included in soon-to-be-released titles such as Kirby & the Amazing Mirror and Advance Wars.
I bought a GBA at launch. I never once owned a link-cable, even when they were less than $1 used. Of all the games that had multiplayer, only Pokemon strikes me as a big enough title that's really affected by the the lack of multiplayer since you can't, you know, catch 'em all. That still doesn't make it okay, but I think most people can live with it.Though I agree that few GBA games have worthwhile multiplayer, the Kirby game they are releasing was specifically designed for multiplayer. When they re-release titles like that with no multiplayer, it's just odd.
Games like Mario Kart and F-Zero are pretty lame without multiplayer. One of the nifty features the GBA had was that some games had single cart multiplayer modes so even if the other person didn't have a copy of the game there was some scaled down multiplayer still available. So the GBA's philosophy was to be as accommodating towards multiplayer as possible and the Wii U's is "eh... **** it."Both mario kart and F-zero are pretty lame without multiplayer.
This isn't stupidity on Nintendo's part, just laziness. To do full proper GBA multiplayer support you need to emulate multiple systems and multiple copies of the game, up to four in many cases. Conceptually that's a little complicated. It's not as simple as just outputting player two to the Gamepad. It should be feasible. I'm sure the Wii U could emulate at least two GBAs at once and if you just limit the multiplayer to online gaming then each console is emulating a GBA. Lag might be an issue, perhaps? I'm sure hackers already have emulators doing this stuff so it's all feasible but it just takes effort on Nintendo's part to do it and Nintendo's philosophy under Iwata is to do the least amount of effort they can get away with.
The GBA VC ain't going to save the Wii U even with multiplayer so, while I don't like it, I can see why they wouldn't bother.