Sweet Jebus...

Pre-orders haven't gone up yet and this is probably somehow already sold out everywhere forever.

Damn Star Fox 2! Just the fact they've got Star Fox and Yoshi's Island is cool but Star Fox 2 is crazy.

Lol "retailer info coming soon". Sure NOA, sure.

That is a great collection of games!  They did a good job working with third parties.  The price is a little out of my range, unfortunately.

I was really enjoying finally not having to hear people constantly bitch about the NES classic and now this.

Unlike NES Classic that looked "neat", I actually really want this one.
*sigh*
Of course wanting it and actually having an opportunity to buy isn't the same when it comes to Nintendo.
Knowing I probably won't be able to buy one is depressing.

It doesn't even have as many games as the NES classic. It's like Nintendo wants me to just give them the middle finger and get a Retrofreak.

http://www.hardcoregamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/retrofreak.jpg

The quality of games is very high though - much higher than NES Classic, I'd argue.
While not exactly the games I would choose, it's a fantastic selection overall.


And comparison to RetroFreak isn't really valid unless you discount the cost of having to find/buy all those old carts.

it does ROMS as well

I could also just homebrew my Wii U which has inherited a wide variety of emulation options from the Wii AND can natively play Gamecune games.

I was willing to support a digital service like the Virtual Console Back when Nintendo seemed to be willing to support it but since that no longer seems to be the case I'm probably going to go for the less legal option for my Retro Gaming fix. It's better than clogging all of my HDMI ports with plug and play consoles that I had to pay $800 each for.

UPDATE: NoA has confirmed to Kotaku that they only plan to ship SNES Classics until the end of the calendar year. http://kotaku.com/nintendo-announces-snes-classic-1796418700

Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts is the only one of these titles aside from the obvious one that I don't own a cart of and I actually did own one for a bit but it was gliching on me so I returned it.

Okay, so the NES Classic was cool but every game was available in some legal format.  It was really the novelty and convenience of owning it all in one package that made it a desirable but unessential product.  But now we've got Star Fox 2 here so there's incentive for gamers to buy this JUST for that.  Unless they've got a VC release waiting in the wings that is the only way to get this game without pirating it.  So the demand should be even higher than it was for the NES Classic because as cool as that product was a hardcore gamer wasn't missing out by not being able to get one.  This is essentially releasing a limited edition GAME that we can probably safely guess will not be made anywhere close to suitable quantities.

Normally this product with Star Fox 2 would have me raving about it for being such a cool product.  Instead, because of how much they bungled the NES Classic, I'm really pissed off.  It goes from being an awesome bonus to a taunting "fuck you".

So, no Wii Remote connectors for the controllers this time?  :( Unless they actually include decent length cords this time, people who bought extensions for the NES Classic controller will have to buy new ones. Well, at least it includes both controllers out of the box this time.

Unlike the NES Classic, I'm actually interested in this one as I don't still have my SNES... not to mention that StarFox 2 inclusion. But at $80 it'll likely be out of my budget come the holidays... that is it's even stocked in stores this time. Though I wouldn't be entirely shocked if it were, since not only is the SNES less iconic, Nintendo no doubt upped production in response to last years debacle. Neither outcome would surprise me.

Dear Nintendo,
http://i.imgur.com/379ch.gif
Sincerely,
Everyone

Yes, I was thinking about this news the same way a bit. The NES Classic was a neat little idea but I didn't have much interest in it and still don't. I always figured if there was an SNES Classic then I might be more tempted and I definitely am especially with the news of Star Fox 2.

That said, I'm probably going to pass on this like I did the NES Classic. Ultimately, I already own most of what I'd want to play either originally or through Virtual Console with a couple exceptions. Truthfully, there are some games listed I really have no interest in playing or have become out-dated and hard to get into anymore and there are some I've played too much and am burnt out on. There are about 6 - 7 titles that I'd really want to play or replay again but I can live without paying and fighting to get a copy of the SNES Classic to access them.

But what about Star Fox 2? Going back to games that are out-dated, Star Fox SNES falls in that category a bit. I've tried it a couple times with the SNES copy I own but the bare polygon look makes it hard to get into nor did I find the game that engaging. Star Fox 2 has always looked like more of the same so I don't think it will be some huge loss to my well-being or gaming abilities if I don't ever play it. Moreover, I highly suspect it will become available through other means now that Nintendo is releasing it on the Classic. Sin & Punishment 64 made it to the Wii and then the Wii U VC. Earthbound took forever to re-release but it came out on the Wii U, 3DS and is now being put on this SNES Classic. Xenoblade Chronicles was released with a NEW 3DS version and a Wii U VC for those unable to find copies. Metroid Prime Trilogy was put on the Wii U VC. Nintendo seems to be getting better and better at re-releasing hard to acquire games somehow through virtual services. Mother 1 / Earthbound Beginnings got a surprise release that no one expected or had asked for. Maybe there is a wait before Star Fox 2 gets released to the Switch or 3DS, which isn't unusual, but, again, I'm not in a hurry to play the game right away anyways.

The ironic thing is that after being resistant to the VC through the Wii and most of the Wii U years, the last year or two I've been thinking of just going all-in on the VC service and rebuying as much of my game library as possible on it in order to reduce the amount of systems I need to hook up and play to access different games. Ultimately, I may still need to keep them around for some 3rd party games that are stuck in legal limbo or just aren't being offered on the VC but, as the systems get older and batteries in the cartridges wear out, it might be best to just put as much as I can on one system for ease of access and sell off the physical copies while they are still worth it. I say it is ironic since Nintendo now seems to be moving away from the VC system or at least has been frustratingly mum on it leaving me wondering whether I should bother following through on that plan or not. Instead, it seems to want to go this classic route with re-releasing their games at the moment.

Limited run product gonna be limited.


I would love to buy one; I doubt I will have the chance.

Well, i'd love to get one, we'll see what happens.


Smartest move they made was bundling the 2nd controller.  With them including a game that would mostly excite enthusiasts (Starfox 2), you'd hope they'd know who is going to be angling for these.  Fingers crossed for pre-orders, but I have sincere doubts.

Is this thing coming September 29th? I thought for sure this was going to be the November/Black Friday Nintendo product.

Well, Nintendo has an actually console to sell this holiday, so it makes sense to push up the novelty item.

Nintendo better have a healthy stock of these things.  The outcry from the NES Classic and the reaction to this should tell them to make more than last time.

What if the Switch production has been constrained because the factories are all making SNES classics?

Scalpers are going to have a field day with this.  The sheer stupidity of how Nintendo handled the NES Classic has me totally apathetic to this.  The lack of DKC2 and 3 is also a bit disappointing.

Is there a scalper forum or Facebook group or something? I'm curious how much they are rubbing their greedy little paws together.

I really wish it had all three DKC games, but Im very happy with the game list. Very surprised to see Star Fox 2 on there.

I preordered one as soon as it went up on EB's website this morning.

Pretty good list on here yeah, although I'm not sure why they didn't just put all DKC games on it, especially since the sequels are the best ones? Would also have been cool if they just did all the Final Fantasies and especially Chrono Trigger, maybe a Ninja Turtles game too. Axelay could've filled the shmup shaped hole.

May sound entitled to just demand a lot more games, but many of these are available on various eShops. It's kinda strange that an RPG machine like the SNES just has representation here with only 3 titles, and other genres like fighting, sports, and shoot-em-up are barely represented.

Oh well, cool that Star Fox 2 is getting a release though. Hopefully it'll come to eShop too. I imagine this will be a hard to find product because of Star Fox 2 and the precedent set by NES classic mini.

Not generally how production works.  It's more likely they shut the valve on the NES classic and used that production bandwidth to focus on the SNES Classic than them lowering their Switch production in order to give this product daylight.


Not only that, but the articles I've read stated the Switch's commonality with components in Apple products are creating a shortage of the components they need, not necessarily production bandwidth. 

My SNES is on the fritz, so this would be a great way to be able to replay most of my faves. And Star Fox 2 is a serious surprise, I'm curious if it's going to be the final version of the game, and have content not seen in the leaked prototype.

Let's be honest though, can I realistically find one of these?

I'd imagine if Nintendo has certain amount of factory space to make Switches, that factory space would already be operating at less than capacity due to the limited supplies, which gives them some excess room to make something else.  The SNES Mini would be then be that something else.  So, it wouldn't be eating away at Nintendo's capacity to manufacture the Switch, but instead using some that the Switch is leaving unused.  If that makes sense.

The more I read about the SNES Classic the more interested I am in it and figure if by some miracle I happened to come across one in the wild I'd buy it.  But then I have that same feeling about the NES Classic.  It's very frustrating to be interested in a product and yet I just ASSUME that Nintendo will underproduce them and I'll never even see one in real life.  It's so stupid!  When the NES Classic was announced there was excitement about it.  With this there is bitterness over an assumption that Nintendo will botch it.

I mean they already announced a discontinuation date.  If they learned from the NES Classic they wouldn't have a fixed end date in mind.  That's what's so offensive about the NES Classic.  Waiting is an inconvenience but it's a punch in the gut to know you'll NEVER get a product you had every intention on buying without paying a ridiculous mark up.  If you want a Switch, you're going to have to wait but at least you know you'll get one eventually.  Nintendo isn't going to ubruptly discontinue it before the demand is met.

What I find interesting is despite Reggie saying they've increased production I don't really see too many people on different game forums clinging to that.  In the past you could always rely on fanboys to come out of the woodwork to defend Nintendo but I see that so much less now.  We're at a point now where cynicism in Nintendo, even while being a big fan of their products, is normal.  You can like them overall and still acknowledge that there are many things they always screw up and no one says you're not like a true fan for thinking that way.

Of course that's not good for Nintendo.  If they had half a brain they would notice the bitterness that's coming out in reaction to the SNES Classic and maybe re-release the NES Classic and not come in to the SNES Classic with a set discontinuation date and fixed amount of manufactured units in mind.

The lesson Nintendo learned was to announce that the SNES Classic is a limited edition item meant only for this year, something it wasn't clear about with the NES Classic last year. Granted, it's the wrong lesson but a lesson nonetheless.

Nintendo can fix this easily by announcing legacy titles on Nintendo Switch. Sure, the actual SNES Classic hardware is a nice thing to have. However, I think most people can live without it if there was a legal way to have access to these games.

They should just sell the software side of this as a Switch game. All the same games, with the same interface and everything, as a package on Switch. That would sidestep the issue of how to handle selling individual retro games on the system, but still let people have access to a lot of the top titles.

Without doing a google search, I'm going to make an educated guess that Nintendo does not own any manufacturing space of their own.  Rather, they make a purchase agreement with a manufacturer such as Foxconn, who manufactures a large variety of different electronic products for various manufacturers.  Lead-times from purchase orders to quantify available to ship isn't just about component availability, but also issues such as if other production jobs are staged ahead of Nintendo's next production order on the production line. 

True, but it does help for Nintendo to keep putting in large orders with their manufacturers since manufacturers like to prioritize the big spenders.  I was thinking more they "lease" the space, but that probably isn't the case.

This is a brilliant idea. I'd buy it.

I just can't care. Until they stop with this limited crap and I am able to walk into a store and buy one for retail price, I just don't care. I have more valuable things to do with my time than wait in line for a plastic item that the company making it does not actually want to sell to me. As a long time fan, I am done. I'll just get working on my raspberry pi.

I don't like this solution at all. Strongly prefer not just downloading games and emulating. But when you actively try to buy a current product and can't (without resorting to grossly inflated second-hand scalpers) I feel less bad.

From what I have been reading on how Nintendo is going to release this system is that they are doing preorders so hopefully the initial demand will be met.

I don't like it either, but Nintendo has burned out a lot of their goodwill with me because of all the scarcity shenanigans. If it becomes available down the road for me I'll gladly buy it, but I'm not going to move heaven and earth to give a company money for a product they can make and won't go through the effort to sell it to me.

Aww. That's sweet. You're so trusting and naive. :)

https://www.polygon.com/2017/6/27/15875448/mini-snes-classic-pre-order-amazon-walmart-best-buy

Yep totally trusting and naïve. :rollseyes:

If pre-ordering is a requirement to land one of these things then Nintendo is not making enough.  We should be able to see this in stores.  The average consumer that doesn't even know the NES Classic ever existed should see it on the shelf and pick it up as an impulse buy.

That really shows how they bungled the NES Classic.  That was the ultimate impulse buy for a 35 year old who hasn't played NES in 20 years seeing the product in store and being overwhelmed by nostalgia.  Nintendo wasn't even able to meet demand for the diehard gamer geeks that wanted it, let alone the casual audience.

Which was the exact audience Reggie claimed they were targeting.  The "lapsed gamer" he called them.

Sure but that doesn't take away from Ian's point. They may have been targeting the lapsed gamers but it was mainly the hardcore current gamers / collectors who were able to snag the copies available. A lapsed gamer probably isn't waiting for pre-orders to come up or standing in line before a store opens to grab the few in stock. It's not a focus for them. However, if they were to hear about it and look it up and find it available to order then they probably would or if they were just out shopping and a store had them on display then it could be an impulse buy. But if they never see them and can't buy them that way then Nintendo missed that target audience because a different one snagged them up.

That's not true at all. In the SNES Classic press release Nintendo stated that they're making this product for:

Those aren't "lapsed gamers". That's a pretty explicit dig at those who keep asking about Virtual Console. Lapsed gamers aren't going to refresh placeholder pages waiting for pre-order availability or stand in line the day of release in a futile attempt at getting this.

I think for the SNES Classic they've changed the target audience after they realized who bought up all the NES Classics.

At the end of the day you know Nintendo could have sold more NES Classics, hell probably at least twice what they made, simply because there wouldn't be any scalper market if there wasn't a whole lot of potential customers that missed out.  Hell that even only covers the die hards who will pay the markup.  That doesn't include those that would have bought it at the retail price but are not interested enough to pay the scalpers.

My guess is that with the NES Classic Nintendo only negotiated the rights to those third party games for a set amount of time and then got caught with their pants down when they couldn't meet demand.  But they have a drop dead date here as well so they either didn't learn shit (always a fair assumption with Nintendo) or they had the SNES Classic all planned out well in advance and made the same limited time deal with the third parties before knowing the fate of the NES Classic.

Nintendo doesn't like excess and consistently produces modest numbers when it comes to just about anything. All that talk of Nintendo intentionally withholding stock of Amiibo or NES Classic or Switch to drum up demand was always nonsense. Nintendo wants to sell things but doesn't want to be caught in a situation in which it has a bunch of units left over. That's fair to a point.

While Nintendo isn't twirling its mustache while plotting underhanded schemes to build hype, it's naive at best and incompetent at worst. Based on some cursory googling, fewer than three million NES Classics were sold in North America as of April 2017. That means, Nintendo somehow thought it may not sell out three million nostalgia machines. Really, guys? NES is one of the most beloved consoles ever created, and Nintendo actually had to be convinced to produce an additional run to still produce fewer than three million units overall. Playing it safe would be the understatement of all understatements in the video game market. Nintendo could have comfortably produced seven or eight million NES Classics. They were cheap enough that after the people who really wanted it got one, future scalpers would have scooped up the rest and made a killing in 10 years.

Wasn't Secret of Mana's draw the three players?  Need that third controller...

To be clear, I'm not doubting preorders in the least. I'm doubting that NoA will come anywhere close to meeting demand. There were preorders for NES Classic too - but not even enough product produced to meet all preorders as some people who put down preorders got turned away at the store afterwards. (Maybe this isn't Nintendo's fault - but it still stinks of incompetence.)


Surely things will be better this time... but if you think Nintendo is going to sufficiently meet demand at launch then you haven't been paying attention to their MO over the past decade.

I was referring to what Reggie said about the NES Classic:

Can't find where he said "lapsed gamers".  Could've been about something else.

So can anyone explain the Star Fox and Yoshi's Island emulation? Are these things becoming available because it's using some form of SNES architecture or is something else managed with a chance these games could come to the VC? I can't imagine anyone would really know anything but I figure I'd ask.