Topic: No VC release this week?!

In my opinion they are a little lazy,

Okay, so you're saying that they're just goofing off when they should be working.

Yes i know they got other things to do

Your honor, the witness' statement clearly contradicts the evidence. Either they're being lazy and goofing off when they should be working on giving us VC games or they're too busy doing other projects to give the attention needed to putting games on the VC.

I can't believe that Contra for the NES, Castlevania: Bloodlines for the Genesis/Megadrive and Contra: Hard Corps for the Genesis/Megadrive aren't on the Virtual Console yet.

@weirdproq: Quite a fascination with Konami you have there, eh? And when's the last time ANY Konami game released? Rondo of Blood, I'm thinking...that was AGES ago! Clearly, Konami has declined to be in the frequent releasers club for VC.

I didn't even know that club existed

They seem to get a few games from some company's library then release all of them in a spurt, then forget about it while they look for some other company's games to release.

Can't they do more first party titles?

They got, like, 6 worthwhile games left to release. I doubt theyre in a hurry to put those out.

I assume those are:

Mario Party
Mario Party 3
Mario Party 4
Dr. Mario
Star Fox
Yoshi's Island

They won't be releasing Mario Party 1 no matter how much we may want it.

And Mario Party 4 is on the Gamecube.

Fixed, plus Donkey Kong 64, I forgot about that one. That makes 7, which they'll try to make last for a while.

@lz: It used to...now it's pretty much a run-down, boarded-up hole-in-the-wall that drifts into a distant memory, and then nothingness.

I do believe Token Girl's right; we keep getting a few games from one company at a time, switching out for no obvious reason. Sunsoft in the summer, SNK last month, Natsume in the spring, even Koei sometime last year!

@Mickeymac: Still missing a few worthwhile, if improbable releases:

Super Mario's Picross (obviously not coming, still BS that it's not.)
Devil's World (same.)
Adventures of Lolo 3 (what the hell even happened with this one? I've asked before, but nobody really seems to know...)
Wario's Woods SNES version (that NES version is total crap by comparison!)
Yoshi's Cookie SNES version (less necessary, but it'd be nice.)
Yoshi's Panel De Pon (surely they could release it under that title instead of Tetris Attack if they WANTED to...but they seem to think that Pokemon Puzzle League was a good enough substitute. I disagree.)
Kirby's Star Stacker (I love the Gameboy game and want to try the SNES version, even though it'd have to be an import!)
More or less any Nintendo arcade game (don't feel like trying to list all...Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. being the most obvious, 'cause we all know the NES ports suck by comparison.)

You could argue that a few of those games wouldn't sell well. I say they'd sell better than no release at all for any given week, and certainly well enough to recoup the minimal costs of the release.

Last I knew Bullet-Proof/Blue Planet/Tetris Company still owns the copyright on the programming to Yoshi's Cookie SNES. Nintendo only bought the NES' complete copyrights.
I would like to see the rare 1993 PAL-only version of Mario Bros. (aka the "Classic Series" version) Maybe also the restored version of DK that's only available on a PAL Wii. Why not make it a VC release for everyone else?
They could also do the VS arcade games (Clu Clu Land had different levels on the NES, though I admit it's not a very popular game. But they should release SMB for completion, as it was actually a bit more challenging than normal SMB. Though not SMB2 levels.)

Well, hopefully on the 3DS, they'll at least release the rare EU GB version of Lolo. Even the supposedly-not-as-good Japanese version is difficult to find.

The VC is pretty much dead [in North America at least]. How hard is it for Nintendo to have a VC release every week?

The non-Nintendo platforms need more attention also, More Neo-Geo, Master System, and Commodore64 games please.

And where the hell is Mega Man X?! And Contra NES, how could Konami/Nintendo forget about that?!

Very hard, apparently. They have to generate interest, get the rights, work hard to get it emulated, and then upload it to the WSC. That doesn't happen quickly.

And that's just the steps we know of. Curse Ninty's secretiveness.

You'd think we could at least get first party titles to tide us over.

But there aren't enough First Party games that would sell.

Work hard to get it emulated? That's quite an assumption in and of itself. It's very unlikely that there's really a whole lot of work involved in emulating most VC games, with the noteworthy possible exception of VCA, whose games don't run on standardized equipment like console titles do. But even with those, the hardware we're talking about is hilariously primitive by modern standards, and should pose no problem whatsoever to a programmer good enough to get employed by the companies interested in releasing the games. This is especially considering that geeks worked out these details on computers YEARS ago, for free, and without the level of insider info someone doing it legitimately would have access to.

Now, I WILL agree that getting the rights is a problem, but it's usually not for the same reason that others might think. People seem to be under the impression that Nintendo goes out of its way to try to GET the rights from companies. Historically, the company hasn't really worked that way. Third parties have to WANT to try to get their games released, which as I've pointed out many times before, has not been happening very much because Nintendo hasn't treated them well.

At this point, I believe it's more a lack of communication to blame for the dearth of releases than anything else. Third parties became dissatisfied with having to wait months for ready-to-go titles to actually be released by Nintendo, so they stopped bothering. Now that there aren't a ton of games in the queue, they could probably get their games released pretty quickly if they would only work with Nintendo to do so. I think they're being held back by memories of past circumstances that no longer exist.

Hope for the Wii VC is pretty much toast at this point. Now we need to rely on Nintendo handling the structure of the 3DS VC better than they did this one, so as to not discourage third party support once again. Nintendo is talking big talk about concentrating on third party support for the 3DS in general, and the showings at last year's E3 were impressively consistent with that stated plan. If that strategy can successfully extend into the digital realm, and IF they treat the VC fairly alongside 3DSWare, then the service can thrive, perhaps even to the point to revive the Wii VC due to overall increased retro gaming interest and business cooperation. Granted, that's a very long shot, and I recommend cautious optimism at best for the time being. No setting ourselves up for disappointment like we did with the Wii VC, mmkay?

Stuffy has the right idea methinks. New releases will always have priority over retro ones, as well. Just something to keep in mind.

The vh also shows nintendo isn't abandoning it's retro stores completely. Hopefully, we'll continue to see th VC for years to come on future consoles. Trickling releases don't seem like the end of the world with that in mind.

Stuffy also has a good point when he says that Nintendo is waiting for third parties to come forward, rather than asking them. It's Nintendo's job to re-release these games, not Capcom's, Hudson's, etc. Think of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Genesis being released to the VC. It's nothing different from the Sonic Mega Collection. Sega approached Nintendo to re-release the game, and Nintendo agreed. Granted, the SMC was multiplatform, but Sega didn't have the hardware to re-release the game themselves.