Topic: My Idea for Nintendo's next Download Service

I've been thinking about this for a bit, and it's starting to make me think that Nintendo should really, REALLY do this...

Nintendo's Arcade Channel.

Ok, you might be thinking, We have Virtual Console Arcade already, which ok yes we have, but this'll bring those rosetinted memories of the good old arcade days to your home. The idea is that you launch the channel, and you'll have a choice of 10 or so arcade games, these can change daily or weekly, and you don't actually own or purchase the game, except you pay for credits, just like an arcade, of about 25 Wii points, and play the game as it's streamed to your Wii. The concept to to this is that you don't have to buy the full version in order to play, but you don't end up with a restricted demo version seen on XBox live market place, if you do like the game and want to purchase it you can do so through the channel, however if you find the game easy and you beat it on a single credit, you only blew 25 Wii points and not 800 points.

The channel later on can make suggestions to what game you might like to play based your VC and VCA purchases; bought Contra, Metal Slug and Gradius, Nintendo Arcade Channel can pop up the arcade version of R-Type as a suggestion, if you bought Tetris, Dr Mario and PuyoPuyo it would come up with something like Q-Bert and Qix.

What do you guys think about this?

The only part that I disagree with is the changing games thing daily to weekly. Why not all the VCA games at the same time, all the time?

As a man who's a bit obsessive about leftover points, I think I'd go crazy have the numbers cut into anything but even 100's. Plus, I'm not a big fan of arcade pay-for-credits-style gameplay, so I wouldn't be interested in a service like this at all.

The reason why I came up with that is because if Nintendo allowed every VCA game on there it would turn into another Wii Shop channel. Plus they could reveal some interesting stuff as a surprise, like a Hanabi Arcade week where you can play Japanese only arcade games such as Sheriff and Legend of Ishtar.

Hmm... how about a GameTap style rent based system then?

How about, 50 points a credit and each credit you purchase, it comes off the total cost of the game. Once you pay enough, the game is yours for you to keep. Maybe you would have to buy two credits at 50 points each at a time just to keep the points an even hundred.

I would rather spend full price on a vca game rather than spending points as if it was a real arcade game. I also think they should release more vca games regularly like nintendo and namco games and they could also release hanabi vca games and maybe they coulde release newer arcade games like the mario kart arcade games.

This would be great. Since they only have like 5 games in the VCA, they wouldn't even have to worry about rotating them.

And now, that's pretty much just what M$ is doing with the "Game Room." 40 points nets you two game credits, or you can just buy a game for 240 (cash equivalent of $0.50 and $3 respectively, for the uninitiated). Only difference is, the announced games are pretty much all older and crappier than what's currently on VCA.