The Video Game Revue

Bomberman '93

I just picked up my second Virtual Console title from the Wii Shop: Bomberman '93. The first Wii Shop game that I downloaded was the original The Legend of Zelda which I've been playing bits and pieces of. I've cleared seven dungeons so far, leaving only the last two (and the most difficult two) to go. Of course, Zelda doesn't really start until you've beat the game once and started the Master Quest. Only the Master Quest is the true Zelda experience (hmmm... I wonder if the same goes for Zelda 64? I'll have to look into that.)

But what I really want to rant about here is Bomberman '93. Actually, that's not true--what I really want to rant about is the current lineup of Wii Virtual Console titles in general. :) Bomberman '93 comes out as the title for this post because I consider it to be one of the "must have" virtual console games right now. In fact, it may be the only "must have" virtual console game.

Bomberman '93 is a terrific compromise between old-school and modern Bomberman titles. I'm not much of a Bomberman conniseur myself, but with Bomberman '93, I definitely like what I see. The look and feel is definitively "Bomberman" and also screams of 16 bit graphics. I'm of a mindset such that the mere knowledge that I'm playing a TurboGrafx-16 game makes me a little bit giddy, of course. But the killer feature that makes this game so worthwhile is multiplayer support for up to five players. You can also use a combination of Wiimotes, Wii Classic Controllers (those plug into Wiimotes, though, so if you have only one Wiimote and a classic controller, you can use one or the other but not both), and GameCube controllers to fill the five slots (which is important, because Wiimotes aren't cheap and some of your friends may have GameCube controllers to spare.) I love it.

Granted, Bomberman isn't for everyone. It's an action-puzzle game with a relatively steep learning curve that can be frustrating for new players. The single player campaign is a good way to get a leg-up on the game, however, and there's no denying that Bomberman is one of those truly classic game experiences that is endlessly worthwhile. I definitely think that it's worth the 800 Wii points (that's $8 USD) to have on your Wii console.

As for the other Virtual Console titles, there are some good ones, but I find the prices to be sorta steep. I really want to play Bonk's Adventure for TurboGrafx-16 and I will likely pick that up eventually, but I'm in no rush to spend another 800 Wii points. The original Zelda is worth the 500 Wii points if you're a crazy enough Zelda fan to seriously play it (I am, because it reminds me of all of those hours that I put into it back in grade 5), but I have a hard time imagining that newcomers to the Zelda series will be drawn in by it--it's much better to start with A Link to the Past, which isn't available for Virtual Console yet. SimCity was one of my favourite SNES games back in the day, and F-Zero remains one of my favourite games of all time, but the 800 Wii point price tag on each seems a bit steep. I have no doubt that you could get enough entertainment out of these titles to be worth paying that much for, but one shouldn't be in any rush. Similarly, Donkey Kong, Solomon's Key, and Mario Bros. are all tempting NES titles, but 500 Wii points is a lot to spend for one of them. Nintendo needs to jack down the price on these items to encourage impulse spending. :)

The one other Wii Virtual Console title that's the most appealing to me is Mario 64, mostly because I don't have Mario 64 DS already (although I'm pretty sure that my Nintendo 64 is still in good working order, so if I really wanted to play Mario 64 again, I easily could.) I've played this one time and time again, and it's held up really well over the years, but the price on it is 1000 Wii points which is, again, too much to justify such a frivilous buy.

Other than reducing the prices for their offerings, I can think of a few plausable Virtual Console features that would really make the Wii exciting for me:

- Wii Points rewards for purchasing Wii games. For instance, if I earned a bonus of 500 Wii Points for having purchased Zelda: Twilight Princess, that would make the Virtual Console feature much more exciting. Maybe they could even give away some Wii Points rewards for finishing games or playing a certain number of hours.

- High score sharing online. Replaying F-Zero would be a neat blast from the past, but not much more than that--unless, of course, I could compare my time trial records against a world-wide list online. I was pretty good at F-Zero back in the day, and that sort of feature would definitely encourage me to buy it.

- GameBoy Advance games for Virtual Console. There are plenty of classic GBA games that aren't easy to track down anymore, and besides, GBA carts were always pretty expensive at roughly $30 each. If I could buy some old GBA games for 800 Wii Points each that I missed out on before, that would be superb.

- The ability to buy emulation programs for Sega CD, Sega Saturn, or Dreamcast so that I could put in one of the game discs that I still have for those consoles and play it on my Wii. Being able to use the Wiimote to emulate lightgun functionality for Virtua Cop 2 would be awesome. Sega could even republish some of their old games and rake in the profit (with Nintendo taking a healthy cut, I presume.)

I don't expect Nintendo to actually make all of these particular features available, but it's possible that as time goes on they'll upgrade the Virtual Console to include features like these. The idea of giving away Wii Points as promotions seems pretty likely to me; maybe they'll even put 500 point Wii cards in issues of Nintendo Power or something like that. I also don't see why GBA games for Virtual Console would be much of a stretch, since the GBA is a dying breed anyway.

As for the idea of buying old Sega emulators for Wii, one thing that I could imagine being a hang-up for Nintendo would be the fact that the old Sega games are so easy to pirate. There wasn't a single CD-ROM based Sega console that didn't suffer from piracy issues as soon as CD burners became affordable for home users. On the other hand, I could be mistaken but it seems to me that republishing old Sega games would be dirt cheap. Printing CDs definitely isn't expensive, and I doubt that you'd have trouble moving copies of Lunar: Eternal Blue, Nights into Dreams, or Shenmue for $10 each. Just put them in regular CD cases like music CDs and have them on the shelf at Best Buy. A lot of the old CD-ROM games were still over 500 MB in size, so having them available for download might not be practical--not only because the downloads would take a while (not a huge issue, actually), but because the Wii doesn't seem to have a lot of storage capacity for that kind of thing (and even a 2 gig SD memory card fills up fast when you have 500 MB files.)

As you can probably tell, I'm really hyped about the Virtual Console functionality and what it can do for the Wii. For the time being, however, the only Virtual Console game that I'm strongly pushing for is Bomberman '93. With new titles being added every week, I doubt that it will be long before there are many other good bargains available as well.

P.S. Everyone is invited to my place for multiplayer Bomberman.

posted by Parappa @ 1:06 PM