Topic: Virtual Console Mondays

[Svevan]

The rundown on today's Virtual Console releases.

Today saw the release of four games for the Virtual Console: two for the Sega Genesis, and one each for Turbo Grafx 16 and Nintendo Entertainment System. Today's games are:    

Alien Crush for the Turbo Grafx 16  
Originally released in 1989, Alien Crush is a single player pinball game developed by Hudson Soft with an extraterrestrial theme.    

Controllers: Wii Remote, Classic Controller, GameCube Controller    

Cost: 600 Points    

Ice Hockey for the Nintendo Entertainment System  
A two-dimensional ice hockey sim made by Nintendo in 1988, the NES game allows you to modify the characteristics of your team and strategize against the opposition. For one or two players.    

Controllers: Wii Remote, Classic Controller, GameCube Controller    

Cost: 500 Points    

Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine for the Sega Genesis  
A Sonic-themed Puyo Puyo game (and the first Puyo Puyo released in the US) that has a crazy plot about Dr. Robotnik turning the citizens of Beanville into robots. Originally released in 1993 and developed by Sega. For one or two players.    

Controllers: Wii Remote, Classic Controller, and GameCube Controller    

Cost: 800 Points    

Gunstar Heroes for the Sega Genesis  
A classic side scrolling shooter that is fast and explosive. Developed by Treasure in 1993, it is considered one of the Genesis' best games for its co-operative two player mode.    

Controllers: Wii Remote, Classic Controller, GameCube Controller    

Cost: 800 Points    

In other news, the main page of the Wii Shop Channel has updated - the title screen of Zelda for the NES has been replaced by the title screen of Gunstar Heroes.

[vherub]

nice, but online play and leaderboards would make these so much sweeter.

[Kairon]

The great thing about the VC is that for companies, its money for nothing. And for Retro gamers, these are astonishingly faithful recreations/emulations and probably the only thing better is the actual hardware and cartridges.

To add functionality like leaderboards or online co-op play would go contrary to both of those positives, as well as balloon VC games beyond their current tiny sizes to proportions like XBox's 50 MB downloads, or Sony's 800 MB downloads.

No thank you.

Keep your added, hardcore, complex, expensive functionality to your new games please. Keep my retro games retro, or just release a DARNED SEQUEL TO THE IP ALREADY!

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[otimus]

Uh.. it sure as hell wouldn't make a 50k-2MB game jump to 50MB just to add  leaderboards and online play. That's silly and unfounded.

Let's look at, oh, I don't KNOW.. sizes for some Nintendo DS games with online play.. and let's add, that these games have better graphics, and MUCH more content that the aforementioned possible oldschool games with added online play.

Animal Crossing Wild World: 21MB
Mario Kart DS: 18MB
Tetris DS: 7.07MB

The only one that approaches 50MB is Metroid Prime Hunters. 41MB, and if memory serves, this is loaded with textures, and I think has an FMV or something in it.

Let's.. say.. take a game like Ice Hockey.

It's probably less than 100k in size.
If you added online play and leader boards, at MOST, it'd jump to 1MB or 2MB in size.

[Kairon]

Well, of course it isn't going to magically bloat to 50 MB like XBox 360's games do, but it's still more work for pretty much no gain.

It's easier all around for the publisher to just release the retro titles in their pure unaltered form, and then to concentrate their resources on... you know... NEW games.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[AnyoneEB]

Online play would be a modification to the emulator, maybe with a 2 bit field in the game for max number of players in the VC game download. The difficulty is that games that were not designed for online play are pretty much unplayable online due to lag. I highly doubt that Nintendo would release a version of VC allowing for bad online play; it's just not their style. The alternative would be rewriting the multiplayer mode of every multiplayer VC game, which would be far more work than Nintendo is interested in spending on VC games. Maybe some companies could decide to release anthology discs/Wii downloadable games, which would be the classics with updated graphics and online play, but that would be separate from VC.

On the other hand, an online leaderboard would be trivial. A very small file could be included with each VC game that has a high scores list describing where and how it is stored (this could even work for games which do not have a battery, so the high scores list exists only while the game is running). Whenever the game was quit, the VC emulator could read off that information and compare it with the information it gets from Nintendo's servers. The only difficulty here is preventing cheating by someone figuring out the format and then submitting themselves as having gotten 99999999 points in every game. The solution would probably be to have the Wii have a private key to sign the high score submissions. I assume that is how the XBox 360 handles that problem.

[WindyMan]

Quote
Originally posted by: AnyoneEB
On the other hand, an online leaderboard would be trivial. A very small file could be included with each VC game that has a high scores list describing where and how it is stored (this could even work for games which do not have a battery, so the high scores list exists only while the game is running). Whenever the game was quit, the VC emulator could read off that information and compare it with the information it gets from Nintendo's servers. The only difficulty here is preventing cheating by someone figuring out the format and then submitting themselves as having gotten 99999999 points in every game. The solution would probably be to have the Wii have a private key to sign the high score submissions. I assume that is how the XBox 360 handles that problem.

For any scores to be posted to Xbox Live, you must be signed in when you achieve it.  MS designed it this way because they know if your console has been modified if you are connected to XBL.  In other words, you'll get caught if you try and cheat.  Cheating offline does you no good, because any scores made while offline cannot be posted to the scoreboards under any circumstances.