Racketboy

Since my original Wii round-up post last week, there have been a number of new insights and discoveries that may influence the decisions of classic gamers.

So far the Virtual Console hasn’t offered retro gamers many reasons to switch over from an emulator such as NesterDC on the Dreamcast. However, Nintendo may soon offer some additional features to their classic games such as online mulitplayer and additional levels. Microsoft and its third-party developers have been doing this for years on the XBox Live Arcade and I think it is very important to bring the Virtual Console into the mainstream.

As if emulators on the PC and other consoles like the Dreamcast and XBox isn’t enough competition for the Virtual Console, console hackers have already gotten homebrew emulators running on the Wii via the SD cards. The emulators are actually a product of the Gamecube homebrew community, but all GC software runs natively on the Wii as well. As you can see from the video clip, the interface isn’t the most friendly, but it is only a matter of time before it is polished to resemble the best emulators from other consoles.

Miscellaneous Items:
If you are wondering how the Virtual Console’s emulator holds up to the homebrew efforts we have been used to, Ben ‘222b’ Turner’s shares his in-depth analysis of the emulation quality on the Wii and the aspect ratio dilemma on newer widescreen TVs. (thanks GSW)

In my last Wii post I mentioned that not every controller is supported on all the different Virtual Console games. Joystiq posted an simple chart to educate us on controller compatibility.

Jeremy Parish from 1Up.com rounded up which Virtual Console games are worth the relatively steep price and which ones should be skipped. He also discusses the advantages and disadvantege of playing the classics on the Virtual Console.

And finally, as originally suspected, it looks like there might be a possibility that Nintendo will offer Virtual Console games as a rental instead of a full-blown purchase. That would be especially nice for the not-so-great games that Jeremy pointed out above.

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Nintendo, Wii