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The NES Classic Outsold the PS4, Xbox One, and Switch In June (theverge.com)
After returning to stores in June after a brief stint of sales back in 2016, the NES Classic is topping U.S. sales charts. Market research firm NPD reports that the NES Classic was June's highest unit-selling hardware platform in the U.S., beating the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One. "The NES Classic managed to outsell these consoles despite only being on sale for a few days in late June," reports The Verge. From the report: While the NES Classic is priced at $59 compared to more expensive current-generation consoles, it's clearly still in demand 35 years after the original Nintendo Entertainment System debuted in 1983. The NES Classic comes loaded with 30 games including classics like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and Pac-Man. While you can't insert vintage NES cartridges into it, the console supports game saves and connects to TVs via a HDMI cable. Nintendo hasn't revealed whether it now plans to introduce more miniature retro consoles.
and that it's been the video game equivalent of unobtainium for over a year now.
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Yeah, I don't understand why people are excited about paying $60 for ...
Most people aren't techies and unlike you and I wouldn't enjoy actually getting the thing to work (and would probably take a lot longer to do it too).
The $60 allows them to relive the fun of an earlier era with zero fucking around. No finding ROMS or emulators or a suitable computer on which to run them, controllers a case and so on and so forth.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This.
It's a convenience item. 60 bucks vs. tinkering and toying with emulators and roms 'til they work. Yes, that's part of the fun for some, for most it's just an inconvenient ordeal necessary to get to the fun. And if you spend more than 3 hours doing it, and if you have at least a halfway decent job, spending 60 bucks is actually cheaper for you since you could have worked those 3 hours and earned more than those 60 bucks if you don't get any joy out of tinkering with it anyway. Hell, depending on your job and how much you like it, you could get enjoyment out of working instead...
This is, by the way, also the reason people buy games instead of copying them. Copy protection, prosecution and whatever else you could field changes jack shit. Back in the days when I was poor, I copied games. Today, I buy them. Not because it's "the right thing to do" or some bullshit, but simply because I want to play the game and not toy with the game to make it work. Yes, that was fun when I was young (and I owe the skills I picked up back then that allows me to do my job today to copy protection, so... thank you, I guess?), but I don't have the time anymore. I want my stuff to work, preferably without having to jump a bunch of hoops first.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is nothing fun about having to redo everything you've done before.
Sure, if you could save before every jump and just insta-reload, that ruins the game. But at least staying on the same world, if not even the same level, or half-way map save-points (like almost all the Mario games) is a necessary part to ensure you're aren't playing 1-1 several thousand times to each time you get to the end.
Nintendo hard wasn't even that hard. You want hard, go load up ZX Spectrum games and arcade games. Literally, I think I completed 2, maybe 3 games in my entire childhood on that machine, out of thousands. One of those was Nonterraqueous and involved the largest piece of graph-paper I've ever seen in my life, a brother-and-dad mapping team and a co-ordinated effort over several evenings to even get close. And we only managed to map the direct path to the exit (by chance), there was obviously a lot more to explore.
Old arcade games are ludicrously hard too. They were deliberately so to make you put more money in. I've literally only ever completed one arcade game too, and that's because it cost a pittance by the time I played it and brother-and-I had about 50-continues worth of coins.
It doesn't mean that it was *fun*. It's what we had. If you want to see how "not fun" that stuff is, play Paper Mario with it's 100-level challenges mid-game that you go back to square one if you fail.
Saving doesn't ruin a game. Saving EVERY TWO SECONDS, or not being able to save at all can easily do so. Just make it so that you save only at milestones, so the player can relax and not have to do four impossibly-hard-things in a row to get anywhere, and they're fine.
My brother used to save games all the time, and replay even the most minor battles that were lost. That was silly. Hell, he hated Settlers because when you load back in and two same-level units fight each other, the outcome is random, so you can still lose any fight - no matter how many times you load back in.
let me know when they release The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for PC
Man, if only you could emulate it... oh wait.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I don't see anything Nintendo could have done about it if The Tetris Company doesn't want Tetris included in large bundles anymore. When Nintendo originally announced Virtual Console for Wii, Tetris was one of the games it called out as too expensive to license (along with GoldenEye, whose rights at the time were split between Activision and Microsoft).
And that setting up once already takes more time than I need to earn 60 bucks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...provided you can still get those thousands of games...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It has been discovered nintendo used the .nes format
Like the Zip format, the iNES format has no exclusive rights. It's just a 16-byte header that specifies how large the PRG ROM and CHR ROM are and how the rest of the hardware on the Game Pak's PCB is wired.
and very likely sources their roms from the already pirated versions
If Nintendo contracts a company to produce an emulator, and the emulator happens to accept iNES format ROM images as input, Nintendo can make its own ROM images in the correct format by dumping the ROM from Game Paks kept in its library in Redmond, Washington, and prepending a correctly constructed header. I'd be very interested to see evidence otherwise.