Topic: Is Recreating Ports of Old Classics Hard?

Is it hard for Nintendo to, simply in the click of a button, make a NES/SNES added to the virtual console? I've been waiting for the Wii U port of Super Mario Bros. 3 and it still isn't hear, being announced all the way in August! Does anyone know what is taking Nintendo so LOOOOONG porting old games?

They aren't "recreating" ports, they're creating ports. There's a difference.

Nintendo hasn't been spending months porting SMB3 to the Wii U VC. Yes, it's actually difficult to create ports, but they're kinda busy creating other ports. In fact: I'd say they're actually pretty fast with the ports since they release one almost every week.

Then why not create ports for games like NES Golf or Star Soldier and instead create a port of SMB3 in the time spent creating those, HUH!

@Conellossus Because they want to port other games first. End of story.

The more they make you wait, the more you want it.
And the more unrelated games you'll end up buying while you wait.

That's it.

-Loves to troll people on Miiverse and get them upset
-Gets upset by Nintendo constantly teasing the best retro games but never delivering.

Oh, the irony. It's too much!

Their just retro games, no use crying over spilled milk about it if it doesn't come, but if you want it THAT badly, well I don't know what to say...

I don't know. I don't work on the Virtual Console.

Yeah, port lamer games on the VC, nice strategy, Nintendo. -_-

@Conellossus

Maybe a lot of people who work at Nintendo like Super Castlevania IV. Perhaps you don't, but they (and several other people) do. You can't fault them for having an opinion.

Listen. I'm not saying you should never question Nintendo or it's decision-making skills. That would just be stupid. What I am saying is that plenty of good games have come out on the Wii U VC and you can go ahead and enjoy those while waiting for SMB3 to come out on the Wii U VC.

Just think of Ninty has a multi-billion dollar bridge that houses some of the World's biggest trolls. They love to mess with their fanbase by releasing as much crap as they can possibly dig up from the forgotten dark crevices of the NES/SNES libary while occasionally throwing in a gold nugget to keep their victims coming back for more punishment. Gleefully they giggle at the computer screen as fanboys cry out for SMB3... then they return to work on the next batch of ports from hell.

Nintendo's virtual console is based on emulators. I'd assume it wouldn't be too hard to put games out once you've got the emulator set up for the system, so once one NES game is made on VC, it probably wouldn't be too hard to put most of the other NES games on there. Same for any other system, unless if changes are being made to games (which pretty much never happen, outside of a select few, like Sin and Punishment).

Nintendo takes long not because of how difficult it is to plop games over; that's rather simple, especially since the Wii VC confirms that the code for hundreds of games exists. Nintendo takes a while for a variety of reasons. One is that Nintendo wants to maximize interest in the VC service; if they were to release every game on there, there would be an initial surge of sales, but afterwards interest would linger. By making things weekly, people will be more interested. Then there's the issue that Nintendo wants to not compete too much with itself; if they release some fantastic VC games, and there's a major game release around the same time, that could hurt the potential for both products. Then there's trying to keep 3rd parties relevant on their system, for the same reasons as the last point. 3rd parties are especially important for Nintendo, since they basically act as free money from the royalties. As for games that may not be as good as something like Super Mario Bros. 3, well, the other games need to make money too. If you've got a lot of really good VC games out, the games that aren't as good (Urban Champion) wouldn't sell as well.

It's a tricky balance.

^They're doing more with each game on WiiU VC than they did on Wii though. With Wii VC they simply re-mapped the control scheme and did some other minor things. On WiiU there's off-tv play, Miiverse support, 1080p upscaling and in Europe they're replacing the 50Hz versions with the american 60hz standard.

Also each title needs to be fully tested to make sure every game works correctly on the new system. My guess is that they have a relatively small team on the Virtual Console projects and that is why it takes so long for titles to come out and why arcade style games are some of the first to come out, gameplay environments, and the programming are a little more straight forward.

Im in the crowd that its purely marketing reasons of why its like this. If you go use an emulator you know the roms are literal copies of the original games, all they are is just in a file then an actual disc. Its the emulator doing all the work, but once an emulator is set up properly then its just simply providing roms to drop into the emulator and they should preform the same. This should not be to hard of a task for nintendo considering they actually created the old consoles so making an emulation of them should be fairly easy. Most of the work being done i imagine is simple things like adding a digital manual (some poor intern is stuck scanning copies) and making the button mapping have labels for each game of what buttons does what is 95% of the work.