Virtual Console game suspension (Wii delight #004)
by Blake Snow 
{ Dec 5th 2006 at 10:55PM }
Here's a little Wii delight for ya: The infinite pause or perma-pause more commonly known as Suspending Play for downloaded Virtual Console games. Though definitely neither new or revolutionary, this little peculiarity is a godsend. Simply hit the home button at any time while playing a VC title, jump back to the main menu, and Wii automatically creates a single save point good until you resume play again. You get one "Suspend Point" per game all courtesy of Wii's home button. The thing is blue house awesomeness. But more on that little delight later...
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Nicholas Sulikowski @ Dec 5th 2006 11:03PM
Oh how I love the suspend feature. Wish you could suspend multiple states like in an emulator though. Still awesome though.
jp @ Dec 5th 2006 11:18PM
I love this feature too. I played zelda and ecco and no need to save or take down password. game with infinite continue will be great with this.
Jason @ Dec 5th 2006 11:25PM
Is the PS3 quieter then the whisper quiet Wii? Because why else would the quietness be a delight for the PS3 and not the Wii? Just wondering.
LuigiHann @ Dec 6th 2006 6:25AM
I actually like this better without multiple states, because it prevents you from abusing the system. An emulator makes the game easier by essentially giving you unlimited retries, whereas this just allows you to leave a game and come back later...
Rabish12 @ Dec 5th 2006 11:28PM
@1: They only let you suspend one because allowing multiple suspends would be cheating, something which they probably don't want to add into those classics. After all, people probably wouldn't be too happy if tons of folks started claiming that they'd beaten, say, Contra when they'd used save states included in the officially sold version of the game to do it
That'd be the same reason that they remove the "save" when you start the games up again. It's meant to be a pause that you can do without leaving the machine on, not a save state.
John H. @ Dec 5th 2006 11:32PM
Note: Game suspending seems not to be available for N64 games (which is just Super Mario 64 right now).
vc @ Dec 5th 2006 11:39PM
"Is the PS3 quieter then the whisper quiet Wii? Because why else would the quietness be a delight for the PS3 and not the Wii? Just wondering."
Because only powerful engines need be cooled with fans and so on. There's no expectation that the Wii would be noisy. It's not got much under the hood, so it cannot delight us by exceeding already high expectations in that department.
The PS3, however, is quieter than the Xbox 360, delighting us with its relative silence.
john @ Dec 5th 2006 11:48PM
I love the home button. Being able to pause any game any time is a godsend.
john @ Dec 5th 2006 11:56PM
Seriously, you guys can quit fellating your Wiis now.
socrates @ Dec 5th 2006 11:56PM
Yet another way in which the Wii offers a feature almost but not quite as delightful as that offered by user-created programs that are readily available to download.
Of course, I just think it is ridiclous that Nintendo isn't offering original NES games for free. Furthermore I think that Sony should offer large numbers of PS1 games for free download onto the PS3. That'd be a shocking bit of good news, and they need some surprisingly positive media in a big way.
Matt @ Dec 6th 2006 2:35PM
God Nintendo..Just add a music player off the SD card....It should be easy.
Jason Latshaw @ Dec 6th 2006 12:48AM
"Because only powerful engines need be cooled with fans and so on. There's no expectation that the Wii would be noisy. It's not got much under the hood, so it cannot delight us by exceeding already high expectations in that department."
As I understand it, it's the drive, not the processor or "engine", that creates all the 360's noise.
ck @ Dec 6th 2006 1:05AM
For those keeping score:
360: Delights: 11; Annoyances: 15
PS3: Delights: 3; Annoyances: 4
Wii: Delights: 4; Annoyances: 11
The Wii has almost caught up with the 360 in two weeks what it took the 360 to do in a year (as fas as the annoying bits)!
But shouldn't the delights vs. annoyances really reflect the system? I would think that most people who have the 360 now are very satisfied. Same goes with the PS3 and Wii. I think games reflect the system the most, so shouldn't the 360 get a delight for GoW, the Wii with Zelda and the PS3 with Resistance? Of course, the delight of games is very subjective, but if you're going to throw in that the 360 isn't edible, I think you've lost a little bit of subjectivity to this competition already.
Dan @ Dec 6th 2006 2:08AM
The thing about the 360 annoyances are that almost all are gone. The waiting for downloads is gone, seeing who is talking in multiplayer is gone, and at least 5 more are gone now. So, the 360 probably doesnt have more then 5 "real" annoyances. Joystiq should update their stuff.
vc @ Dec 6th 2006 2:21AM
"As I understand it, it's the drive, not the processor or "engine", that creates all the 360's noise."
Incorrect.
The drive certainly creates noise, but not all of the noise. Fans themselves create noise.
Deozaan @ Dec 6th 2006 2:55AM
Suspend feature is great for Ecco, since you have infinite retries. Too bad the rest of the game is subpar. It's really fun to swim around really fast and jump out of the water and stuff, but the rest of the gameplay feels tedious and even boring.
And here's my big Wii Annoyance with VC titles: Sega games like Ecco that use the three buttons to perform different actions have the buttons maps in a not very efficient way (to put it kindly) on the Wiimote. The B button is far more accessible than the A button while holding the Wiimote sideways. Map Ecco's little sonar wave to B instead of A or both B and A.
Leto @ Dec 6th 2006 3:41AM
Uh welcome to 1990. Not even, at least with emulators and roms on PC we can do infinite number of save points, far better than the Wii's limit of one per game.
Miniboss @ Dec 6th 2006 5:30AM
I noticed that the save states do in fact save to the Wii's internal memory. I was wondering if you can move that file to an SD card, thus having "multiple save states". Sure, it's not like an emulator or anything, but at least it's legal. ;)
As for N64 Suspending, Super Mario 64 already has a save feature. Though, I suppose Zelda 1 does too. Oh well.
Miibody @ Dec 6th 2006 11:06AM
Yeah but unlike you Leto the rest of us actually PAY for the games we are playing.
syco @ Dec 6th 2006 3:47PM
It's not even that for me, miibody. It's more that, yeh, I have a bunch of roms and emulators, but they're on my computer, which is not in front of a couch and not hooked up to my stereo system and doesn't have the classic controller to play on it. The value of VC is in having the emulator on a console attached to my TV. I will pay for that kind of convenience.
Konchu @ Dec 7th 2006 1:54AM
I do agree with both arguments for more that one save state and those for one. I would like to see more though for multiple users. Luckily I dont have to share my Wii. I dont see it being an issue of cheating if the game only allowed one state per playthough so you could only save the state that you started the game on. Guess cant complain too much as this is really just a perk feature anyways.
ackmondual @ Dec 6th 2006 7:20PM
OK, let me get some points across......
NUMBER #1
A suspend point and save state are NOT the same thing!!
I know that those 2 are being used interchangeably on this thread, but for the record, they are NOT. The former means I can get halfway through a level and then stop that game in mid-play and do other things (e.g. buy more VC titles, play Wii games, check weather on my Wii, or turn the console off and go out for groceries). When I resume my game and die, I have to replay the whole level again since the suspend point was temporary and was deleted the moment I started that game up again!! If it were a save state, I would be able to reload that state and replay right from that point I created that save.
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NUMBER #2
For those of you but especially #18 who think many/most Nin and Sony games from previous consoles should be free, are you also petitioning that many/most itune tracks should be free? Why not! If the artist already recorded the song and it's 20 years or older, we're entitled to get them for free right? Royalties are truly overrated.
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NUMBER #3
the VC is NOT an emulator! If you want an emulator with save states, extra cheats, free ROMs, etc., then GO GET AN EMULATOR ALREADY (OR GO BACK TO IT)! Or get a 360, as I believe some of it's XBLA games have a save state feature in it.
ackmondual @ Dec 6th 2006 6:36PM
@ #16
""I noticed that the save states do in fact save to the Wii's internal memory. I was wondering if you can move that file to an SD card, thus having "multiple save states". Sure, it's not like an emulator or anything, but at least it's legal. ;)
As for N64 Suspending, Super Mario 64 already has a save feature. Though, I suppose Zelda 1 does too. Oh well.""
Sounds like it would work. I used to do that with Diablo 1 for PC. I would create backup save points throughout my game by making a copy of the save file and labelling them. Many reason... in case I save at a bad spot and would be never recover and be screwed, should the current save game get corrupted, and just to see how things would turn out if i did things differently
With Diablo 2 for PC, no way to manually save. It just creates save points automatically when you reach a new area/section that required some loading. It was still convenient to do the same thing so that if you died, you wouldn't have to trek through some huge desert unarmed to get your weapons and gear back (why even have to bother with this in the 1st place?) from your corpse that still has the same 3 dozen monsters encircling it.
Roommate called me a cheater, but I wasn't going have any lip from a guy who has a "legit" Diablo 1 character using hacks for infinate gold and to see inside people's inventory.
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Another thing is if u can actually copy that suspend point file over to SD card. If the Wii OS doesn't let u do that, I'm sure it's a matter of time before someone comes up with a file manager that'll let you do so.
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They should've done it for n64 games as well. I'm guessing Nin didn't do that b/c of either what you said (and many Nin/SNES/Gen games not being able to save and running up to many hours to play) or that n64 suspend points can get very large. Maybe up to 1MB? That's several NES games right there. Those could easily add up to the size of many SNES games.
James @ Dec 7th 2006 2:03PM
@22: Your analogy is fatuous at best; NES titles were orders of magnitude less complex to develop than Gamecube or Wii titles, and take orders of magnitude less space to store. Most NES games are smaller than the average YouTube video. Also, this is the first time any NES game has been legally available (new, from the distributor) for probably a decade at least, if not substantially longer.
By contrast, most songs over the past ~20 years have been similar in cost (recording studio time, payments to artists, etc.), take several megabytes to store at a reasonable quality, and a very large percentage of them have been consistently available for sale (new, from the distributor) for the entire time period.
What's my point? NES games were developed, sold, paid for themselves (or didn't, if they sucked), and were considered to be "finished" as technology passed them by. The songs remain relevant, barring fad "styles" that bring them in or out of popularity as the winds shift. Essentially, the video game model is planned obsolescence, while the music model is an ever-increasing pool of immortal content. Because of this some artists can put out a few albums, then retire and live on royalties, but game studios must always be thinking of their next product -- like sharks, they must keep moving forward or die. That's why it would be appropriate for Nintendo to release free content from prior generations -- that content has had its costs recovered, earned its keep.
That said, I don't fault Nintendo for charging whatever the market will bear -- people still pay good money for Capcom Classics Collection or Namco Arcade or whatever, and I don't begrudge the companies trying to wring what they can from old properties. BUT, if Nintendo announced the full NES library for Wii, it would a) cost them nothing, and b) win them HUGE public support -- it would be a must-own for every old gamer out there. And that would move units like nobody's business.