Retrofit

I was trying to boot up N64 games on the Wii Virtual Console on the Wii U, and was greeted with the message I would need to attach a Wii Classic Controller to the Wiimote. I have two Wii controllers, the Wiimote with nunchuks and the Wii Pad, or whatever ridiculous name they’re called. They all have the requisite number of buttons, but it won’t let me use them. I have to physically go to a store and buy a Wii Classic Controller. This raises the number of controllers you’re expected to own to fully use your Wii U to five, at a bare minimum. Games like Nintendoland expect you to use the Wii pad and up to four Wiimotes for up to five players. Super Mari Bros. U makes you play multiplayer with the Wii Pad and up to four Wiimotes. Games like Assassain’s Creed makes you use the Pro Controller. Retro games in the Virtual Console make you use the Classic Controller. Make no mistake that the Wii U Game Pad is all you need to play any of these games, but it won’t let you use it in some cases, or else use more than one. It has every button, a touch screen, infrared, and motion controls. There’s little reason for the console itself to exist. Basically, with a Wiimote, a Pro Controller, and a Classic Controller you’re looking at about $100 in extra expenses you don’t need because someone can’t be bothered to figure out how to map buttons onto the Wii Pad. I remember back in the old days when the original Nintendo came with two controllers and a completely useless light gun, and the special edition came with a fucking robot. Nowadays, you have to buy a special edition or a deluxe edition just to get a game and a larger hard drive (which could be replaced by a $9 SD card for $90 in savings).  You only get one controller and a fuck you with the basic editions, or even the mid-tier editions with the slightly larger hard drive.

Seriously though, the Wii Virtual Console requires you to have a Wiimote just to access it, which means either buying one or owning one from an underused or traded-in Wii. The Wii Virtual Console negates the need for a Wii completely, which means you’d obviously want to sell your old one off, or junk it, or maybe keep it around for low-def use of Netflix, but you’re expected to keep the Wiimote.

With the new generation of consoles coming out, the expectation is that the new PS4 or Xbox 720 (or whatever they’ll be called) are going to have integrated motion controls. That means the new Xbox will have built-in, non-negotiable Kinetic 2.0. With the path that the Wii U carves, the next Nintendo console will probably have an even newer requisite controller, but also require every controller you ever owned, or found in a garage sale.

The other big push with the Virtual Console update is playing old-school Nintendo games on the Game Pad. That’s isn’t that big of a draw. The license for the original Nintendo expired last year and there was a rush of portable game emulators you could pop a cartridge in and play (assuming the old cartridge batteries weren’t dead, which is expected to affect games like Zelda soon). Plus, if you look at the Android Play store, the SNES emulator is around #7 on their top-selling apps. That means anyone with an Android device and $2 can play any goddamn SNES game anywhere they want, with a longer battery life and more portability than the Game Pad. Those Roms are free, too. After all, a person can only be expected to pay for the original Super Mario Bros. so many times. They’re only releasing a handful of games to begin with as well, which is ridiculous. To think they’re keeping hundreds of games in their catalogue at bay and releasing them one-at-a-time once-a-week is a money losing idea. Most of those games themselves are only a few KB, and the rest is all emulator. How hard could it be? I could probably torrent their entire back-catalogue in an hour.