Monday is the day that new Virtual Console games come out, so I decided to check out the Wii Shop Channel and see what came out. The answer? Nothing special. Three games came out today, none of which are really worth my money. First there was Bio-Hazard Battle, a fairly obscure space shooter for the Sega Genesis. Then there was Chew Man Fu, an even more obscure puzzle game for the TurboGrafx-16. Since these were both first party games for their respective consoles, it would appear that Sega and Hudson are hoping to use the VC to squeeze some extra money out of the forgotten games in their back catalog. It’s a clever idea, but the price isn’t right. Who in the hell is going to pay $8 to download a Genesis game they’ve never heard of? Certainly not I. Maybe this is just me, but if I haven’t heard of an older game, I’m fairly skeptical of its quality. I’d want to try a Genesis game out before committing $8 to it, and through the magic of internet piracy, I can. Of course, then I don’t need to buy it. When pricing games for the Virtual Console, Nintendo needs to realize there is an ever delicate balance. Online piracy is thriving and there’s not really anything Nintendo can do to stop it; God knows the RIAA has tried. Does that mean Nintendo and others shouldn’t attempt to make money off their older games? Of course not. But they DO need to take piracy into consideration when pricing stuff. Nintendo needs to figure out what amount of money that people will be willing to pay to legally download old games rather than pirating them, especially when the game in question is not well-known. I don’t know exactly what that amount is, but I’ll give you a hint: it’s certainly not $8 for a Genesis game. But that’s not what really upsets me. No, it’s the third and final game released today that really pisses me off. The game? The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Now, I’m not one of those assholes who thinks that the Zelda franchise died when it went to 3D; I fucking love OoT. Hell, I even agree that $10 for an N64 game is a fair price. But here’s the problem: Nintendo already gave me the game for free. TWICE.
First there was the promotional copy of Ocarina of Time that I got for preordering the oft-maligned Wind Waker. The freebie disc contained not only Ocarina, but the Master Quest expansion for the 64DD as well. It may have just been a remapping of the game, but it was still cool. And as I mentioned before, this was the first of TWO promotions where Nintendo gave away free copies of OoT…
My second free copy of Ocarina came almost a year later. Nintendo Power ran a promotion sometime in either late 2003 or early 2004 where NP subscribers could register three serial codes from select Nintendo Products and receive a special Zelda anthology for their Gamecube. The anthology included Zelda, Zelda 2, Ocarina, and Majora’s Mask. A Link To The Past was excluded because it had just been released for the GBA. Despite this omission, the Zelda anthology was probably the best freebie ever, even morese than the Portrait of Ruin preorder package. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I have two copies of Ocarina that I can play in my Wii.
Don’t misunderstand me, my gripe here is not that Nintendo should be giving away Ocarina of Time for free on the Virtual Console. I’m sure there are people out there who would appreciate it, but I could give a fuck less since I can already play it whenever I want. My gripe is that Nintendo isn’t catering to its diehard fans. Ocarina of Time is a great game, but releasing it on the VC is a waste of our fucking time. Gamecube owners had two separate chances to get their hands on the game, and those of us who wanted it, got it. We don’t NEED another opportunity to obtain it. And that of course says nothing of those of us who still have our N64s hooked up. Nintendo, give us something we haven’t seen before. Give us SimCity 64. Give us Sin And Punishment. That, or give us some good multiplayer games. Mario Kart 64 was a good start, now give us No Mercy and Goldeneye. Stop jerking us around.