Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Switch Online Service Will Launch With 20 NES Games, Cloud Saves, More (polygon.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Nintendo's online service for the Switch will include access to a selection of classic video games from the NES era as part of the subscription service. Today, Nintendo announced some of the games that will be included as part of the Nintendo Switch Online classic games selection. The 10 NES titles confirmed for the service, which Nintendo refers to as "Nintendo Entertainment System -- Nintendo Switch Online" in a press release, are: Soccer, Tennis, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, Dr. Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario Bros. 3. Nintendo promises 20 NES games will be available when Nintendo Switch Online goes live in September, meaning 10 classic NES games are still to be announced. New games for the service will be added regularly, Nintendo says.
Those NES games will include some sort of online play as part of Nintendo Switch Online. That includes online competitive or cooperative multiplayer, or simply taking turns controlling the game. "Friends can even watch each other play single-player games online, and 'pass the controller' at any time," Nintendo said in a release. "Every classic NES game will support voice chat via the Nintendo Switch Online smartphone app. It will also be possible to play these games offline." Some other details of the service, as reported by Nintendo Life, include the option for cloud save data backups and a four tiered pricing plan. In the U.S., the pricing is as follows: one month is $3.99; three months is $7.99; twelve months is $19.99; twelve month family membership is $34.99 (with up to eight Nintendo accounts on different systems that will be able to use the service).
Those NES games will include some sort of online play as part of Nintendo Switch Online. That includes online competitive or cooperative multiplayer, or simply taking turns controlling the game. "Friends can even watch each other play single-player games online, and 'pass the controller' at any time," Nintendo said in a release. "Every classic NES game will support voice chat via the Nintendo Switch Online smartphone app. It will also be possible to play these games offline." Some other details of the service, as reported by Nintendo Life, include the option for cloud save data backups and a four tiered pricing plan. In the U.S., the pricing is as follows: one month is $3.99; three months is $7.99; twelve months is $19.99; twelve month family membership is $34.99 (with up to eight Nintendo accounts on different systems that will be able to use the service).
With a CREDIT CARD!
Couldn't they at least move on a generation or two?
I can appreciate this service for the Switch; I think it would be a bit sacrilegious I guess if Nintendo didn't somehow offer the nostalgic NES platform ROMs (at a minimum). But I'll tell you what --- really sick-and-tired of re-re-re-re-re-re-annoucement and re-purchasing of NES roms on the new Nintendo gaming console every time.
I have working original NES consoles (that my wife and I both had in the late 80's, early 90's) that I've bought new cartridge socket replacements for every once in a while, clean my games up one a year or so, and I will say, it's a superior experience to play the original carts on the platform, I think partly because of the original controller 'feel' in your hands. However, with that out of the way, out of pure convenience, laziness or wanting to blow some meek amount of disposable income, I've also bought Nintendo's legitly NES offered ROMs on whatever shopping front-end service they've had for the Wii, Wii U, or any of the anniversary editions.
But it goes to say: For whatever casual excuse, I've re-bought them every. damn. time. I really wish my purchases would 'carry' over to the 'next' thing Nintendo decides to push out. Because they don't and that's kind of an ass ache, albeit a first world one.
Now if Nintendo released some of the rarer roms to bring the prices down that would be cool.
A zero-configuartation-neded multi-platform NES software emulator with resolution upconversion plus say the Top 40 NES ROMs from that era, with a 19.95 option to get 2 original feeling plastic NES gamepads that plug together into 1 USB port, making the whole thing an 80 Dollar outing. That would have been a very cool option for many who want to relive their childhood/youth every now and then. Far better than credit card + online registration + cloud service use + keeping track of monthly payments and so forth. The only good thing about the service they are proposing that I can see is it isn't too expensive. Still, gamers from that era intensely dislike the cloud. Where you could bring in the cloud would be that this emulator has an online store where you can get additional NES ROMs at whatever price using your credit card.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Never.
Back in the day when you could still grab roms off websites without trying very hard I got the full library of every nes/snes/sms/genesis/32x/arcade game ever made. I've had a htpc or some other sort of device hooked up to my tv with emulators and all of them ever since.
The roms might take an extra 5 mins to find now but unless they are adding new features worth the 50 dollars you've spent per rom over time, you should hoist the main sail.
On pirate bay there's a ~4GB archive with something like 6,000 ROMs from the Atari up through the Nintendo64. It does not take long to download.
I'm honestly surprised they're offering cloud saves as the solution, seeing how some game saves in some games can exceed 5GB per save file. That's a pretty extreme cloud storage solution for $20/yr.
But while cloud saves address some issues, they introduce others. Aside from the financial barrier making this critical feature only available to those willing to pay ever year, but how does this address corrupted save files? At the OS level, the cloud backup service isn't going to have a way to check the integrity of each savegame and know if a game crash corrupted the file making it unusable before obediently backing it up to the "cloud" and overwriting your only other intact save file for that game. Will they provide versioning, further adding to their storage burden?
So many issues that would've been solved by proper SD card backups, where you could keep an archive of known-good files and revert to older versions if necessary.
Great and all, but serious F**K Nintendo. Not one of my games can I play online, because I live in Central America. Why they are cutting everyone off into Geo fences these days I can't understand. I am not asking to buy online content, I just want to play the features already built into the game but nope, no online accounts for anyone outside of a handful of countries.
The challenge is that for consumer, absolutely your perspective is relevant.
For Nintendo, and in fact as an industry as a whole, business goals have moved to extracting recurring revenue, not what is best or most desirable to the customer.
When you carry forward your games that you want to replay without effort, they get nothing out of that transaction. Now in a competitive landscape, having a positive sentiment on that front matters. Additionally, as Nintendo will presumably move to more cross-device revenue from their properties, they will want a subscription type revenue to cover the experience, since they won't have such an experience of forced migration when they have apps on android and ios devices that are generally backwards compatible by nature.
In other words, there isn't competition inclined to drive Nintendo away from this path at the moment.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How can they have missed out on the opportunity to call it "Nintendo Entertainment Online"?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Good lucky downloading from TPB if you use Windows 10 :(
How can they have missed out on the opportunity to call it "Nintendo Entertainment Online"?
SNK might object, as "NEO" might be too similar to SNK's "Neo Geo" arcade platform and consoles. If Nintendo wants to get SNK games into the store once this expands to a true Virtual Console successor, Nintendo marketing needs to tread carefully.
What the fuck are you on about? Install deluge, click magnet link, done. You gaggots have such a hard-on for MS hate that you can't even get the basic reasons why they suck correct.
Yeah well, we all know you can play all the old consoles' games for free if you pirate the roms. Parent was obviously only discussing the legal options.
This is Nintendoâ(TM)s online service, akin to the PlayStation Plus. What your seeing is the perk for joining. I imagine they will continue to offer free games on a monthly basis like PS+.
How, exactly, does Windows 10 stop uTorrent from working? Or any other client, for that matter.
It doesn't. You're full of shit.
And I don't care if Edge or IE is horribly broken by the site because Chrome or Firefox will still work.
I've purchased the legend of Zelda a few times for sure.
At the very least, NES, GameCube, WII.
It was $6 on the WII, a fair price to not need to out in a disk IMO. Though also, kinda annoying.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Re-paid? I don't think I've ever even re-downloaded them. Pretty sure the NES roms in my FCEUX folder right now are the same ones I downloaded in the 90's, passed down from PC to PC.
In many juridictions it is perfectly legal to download roms (or almost anything) as long as you don't republish them for download which means setting up your torrent client to not upload anything or use plain old http/ftp download protocol. In other juridictions it is legal to download and use roms if you already own the original title on the same hardware that was used for the rom which mean you should avoid using the japanese or euro rom if you own the us cartridge.
So it is only piracy or illegal if parent poster lives in specific areas.
Is it moral ? I think it is if you limit yourself to games you already paid for and only want to use on other hardware. Some people would say that decades old games should end up in the public domain way faster than what disney copyright laws dictate because of the rate of technical evolutions. Downloading a remastered version for another console would also be considered as immoral in my book.
I had the same thought. I actually keep my Wii plugged in still. Since they stopped releasing updates for the OS it stays jailbroken and I can run my emulators on it. My wii actually gets more use now as an emulator machine than ever it did when it was a platform for shovelware.