Nintendo teases two new Virtual Console consoles

I hope Sega Saturn. I really would like to play Enemy Zero!!!

Um, no home computer stuff? I vaguely remember rumours of Commodore 64 titles coming to the Wii on the VC.

My vote goes to the Amiga or Commodore, with the other system being Master System/Game Gear.

Where is the love for virtual boy?

This is all well and good, but how the hell will I store anymore games? I am down to 200 "blocks".
Wii need more storage!

Arcade games from the 80s!

I want the original arcade versions of Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., or even Punch-out!!

Since we're just wildly speculating, I'd hope to see a GB/GBC/GBA module. Then I could play ALL the (good) Zelda games on one console; all the Metroid games, too.

Lesser handhelds would be a welcome addition, too, including the Game Gear, NGPC, and Lynx. Speaking of Atari, maybe it's the 2600. How awesome would that be?

I'd also like to see native play of discs from some of the virtualized consoles like the NGCD and TGCD. Heck, throw in SegaCD while you're at it, and pick up some obscurities like 3DO and CD-i.

*wakes up*

Unngh ... Master System, probably.

I'm guessing either 32x or Jaguar.

Let me be first to emphasize: How do you know that those two blank squares really mean anything? The first thing I would assume is that the web designers simply wanted to put some filler-images to keep the area a little more symmetrical.

And yet, here we are, going off wildly about what other platforms we would like to see on Virtual Console =P.

...for the record: I want some GBA/GBA-color games.

I hope it's gameboy, and all gameboy games, advance and color. We could get the Zelda's. I actually really liked seasons and ages and we could get some sweet import stuff like Mother 3 from Japan. It only makes sense, especially if they plan to cut out gameboy functionality out of the DS in the future. Plus, they have a huge library of really good games on the gameboy, they'd probably get the most money out of it.

maybe they'll finally port some of the classic hentai fmv games from the PC-FX!

or maybe just some arcade originals.

I say arcade would be a good idea, it would present a variety of games of different possible price points, say for example Pacman for 25 Wiipoints, that would get people to start "back in my day" speachs about how it would cost that much for a single game.

Nintendo keeps bringing the goodness.

VC Commodore 64, yo!

I wish it was the Dreamcast I always wanted to play Sonic Adventure.Maybe Shemune and Space channel 5 as well.

Gameboy color er...No but I will take advance,Metroid Fusion FTW.

Now that the only games I want to play from the pre-nes era are Burger Time,Adventure,pitfall and maybe E.T for sick reasons.

But I can't help to ask why can't PC games be there?, I would love to play Raptor again not to mention Quake and so many other PC titles from my childhood especially Sky roads.

C64 games from EPYX were announced in Sept. 2006 by developer System 3. According to Gamasutra System 3's Mark Cale had this to say on the matter:

"System 3 are doing virtual console games for the Wii including Impossible Mission which will go live in December. Other titles include California Games and The Last Ninja. We are also supporting the Wii with retail boxed games and we have 3 titles available for launch. They are Gottlieb Pinball Classics, Super Fruit Fall and Puzzle Ball with Leaderboard and Tennis Masters to follow in January."

My vote (hope) is C64.

Why not an Atari system, or didn't nintendo also have a deal with Philips for the CDi back in the day...now that would be crazy.

PLAYSTATION 2!!!!!!


One man can dream.

If MSX does end up on there, I bet North America STILL won't be able to have it.

BTW, Sega Master System and Game Gear should probably be the same choice since they're basically the same hardware. If you have an emulator for one, then you have an emulator for the other. AIUI, The only real difference was the size/shape of the cart connector and TV vs LCD.

PC games are unlikely for the simple reason that the Wii doesn't support a sufficient display resolution. With the exception of a handful of really ancient games like the first King's Quest, which ran at most PC games were designed for a minimum 640x480 RGB display with a progressive scan at 60 Hz or better. Viewed on a conventional NTSC display, which any Wii game must support, the loss of visual quality would be annoying at best and make many games unplayable. Even those older games that ran at 320x240 would iffy since they were designed with progressive scan RGB monitors as the target display with testing on NTSC displays rarely performed.

Nintendo's followup to the Wii, however many years from now, will support the by-then ubiquitous HDTV resolutions and combined with increasing broadband speeds and storage capacities, should be perfectly able to offer PC emulation. This would still be problematic undertaking due to the great variability in PC hardware. The customers are going to want the best case scenario for each game in terms of the hardware it supported but this means a lot more work on Nintendo's end than a console or computer than offered a console-like platform for developers.

The earliest major computer platforms, Apple ][, Atari 8-bit, and C-64, all offer huge libraries and may offer nostalgia appeal to the coveted older demographic. But in terms of platforms that offer substantial libraries while having high enough AV quality to younger players seeing these games for the first time, the Amiga and Atari ST have a lot to offer, including many of the better PC games of the 80s.

A major difference for these two platforms is that they're much more NTSC friendly. Although both were best used with RGB monitors, their native support for connecting to a TV made developers far more likely to test for playability on NTSC. Nearly all of the ST and Amiga game libraries were in 320x240. (Bill Williams' 'Pioneer Plague' on the Amiga was on the rare 640x480 games on the Amiga but ran in the interlaced HAM mode, so it may work fairly well on NTSC.)

Dreamcast emulation would be the most demanding platform so far but is probably doable. The Saturn would likely be a more difficult target, despite being of lesser power, due to the complexity that hampered it in it's short career. The bigger issue with these CD-based platforms is the size of the games in regard to time to download and storage required. While many such games can reduced in size substantially, they will still require far more resources than current VC offerings. (The easiest win for big multi-disc RPGs like a Final Fantasy is the elimination of the duplicated art and audio assets on each disc by storing the game on a single larger space than a CD-ROM.) Also, the investment in tweaking the games to reduce their size can make the IP owner question the value. A remake that takes better advantage of the native platform while still being a workable size can represent a better, if greater, investment. (This is the primary pattern for existing games ported for XBLA rather than emulation.)

As noted, Sega Master System and Game Gear are essentially the same system. But not entirely. Not all SMS games worked correctly on the GG using the cartridge adapter. For instance, the dungeons in Phantasy Star I had severe graphics glitches when played on a Game Gear.

MSX and ColecoVision are also essentially the same platform. (SpectraVideo, the sole US marketer of an MSX system, offered a cartridge adapter to play ColecoVision games.) Since MSX is obscure to most of the US audience, those games that were not already released in Coleco versions could retroactively represented as such so long as there are no legal entanglements.

Regarding Dreamcast: Many Dreamcast hits were already ported to the GameCube but many didn't have US releases. The Wii's backward compatibility still leaves opportunity for Japan-only GameCube games to be published here, even if they're too large selling as downloads.

How about a former Nintendo partner that released both Mario and Zelda games on their system - the Phillips CD-i

Or It would BE awesome to see some 3D0 virtual console action!

How about Wonderswan?