LuigiBlood

I wish this was the decision they took to have both, but for myself I don't really regret Virtual Console because I always thought it was too expensive for what it was, I only bought 5 games total throughout Wii and Wii U. I vastly prefer the Switch Online sub because I honestly stopped caring about ownership at this point for retro games, and having a bigger library is more motivating to play games I would have never bought before.

I do think Virtual Console could probably be more successful now than before; the Wii's interface was very bad for buying, the Wii U wasn't popular by itself, and the 3DS is an odd one.

But there's something going on about the Switch that goes against retro games as a whole: I don't think a Nintendo system has ever had this many releases of games daily in the past.
The problem here is how do you make retro games appealing alongside the newer games, without any bells and whistles of remasters or remakes. And I think that's impossible now without having a better offer like subs. It would work out probably better, but probably not enough.

@BTB20 Save states is not a problem, the problem is that you shouldn't be forced to use them to even save at all in games like Winback.
@mikegamer I don't know what's going on to your save states but I think you should replace the SD card or something because that has never ever happened to anybody, what gets corrupted is the base save and even then, only when the emulator seriously crashes like in Paper Mario.

I do really want to insist there: Nintendo has the possibility to have better emulation than on PC, in terms of user experience especially, and not a lot of it requires a lot of work especially when the bulk of what makes for a better experience is actually already there and only needs to be used properly.

• Controller Pak emulation is fully working, all it needs is a way to save it outside of save states, and handle some logic like maybe have one on Controller 1 and only on that so you could maybe use it on netplay with other players perhaps? Reminder, this was implemented since the Wii U and hasn't changed since as the emulator is an evolution of the Wii U VC one.
• The ability to switch between Controller Pak and Rumble Pak is not complicated, and the emulator's Lua script system definitely allows them to do an automatic switch. All it needs is the functionality to do so and a bit more reverse engineering of the games (which, again, they already do, sometimes with some pretty advanced hacks in the scripts too).

@Clyde_Radcliffe The problem is that Nintendo also implemented a pretty advanced hacking system in the emulator and clearly have taken the time to reverse engineer games with some advanced stuff to the point that I find it 100% possible to do automatic pak switching through that system.

So, no, it's not impossible, and they clearly could have taken that time to implement this.

@Clyde_Radcliffe I edited my comment right before you mentioned it but it's still pretty sad imo because you shouldn't be forced to use save states, ever.

@Angelic_Lapras_King Well what's sad is that Winback is a Controller Pak only game. It doesn't use it. You need to use save states in the app.

As far as I can tell when I looked, Controller Pak emulation existed since Wii U Virtual Console, but they simply never used it for some reason.
There's also a bit of Transfer Pak but don't get too excited, it's pretty much nothing.

There was also 64DD emulation code dating since the Wii U too, but it was unfinished and unplayable and this code was finally removed in the Banjo update (1.2.0).

The emulator being unofficial is one thing and probably the primary reason, but I assume they were using SNES9X since it was the only truly portable emulator of its time... which had a non commercial use clause in the license so that could have been an additional more legitimate reason for it.

I think it's fair to at least expect emulation quality on par with Wii U (which was worse than Wii and I don't mean the dark filter), the fact that their emulator has only gotten worse over the years is pretty darn sad.

One N64 game a month? Sure.
But what about the rest of the consoles..?

As sorta mentioned by the video, the lack of planning is actually very saddening for a subscription.
Other console makers use a subscription for online and have basically something happening every month. And then the dripfeed is just insanely slow like what the heck...

@Roam85 There is what's called "BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Practice", but this is not it, this was just to practice tracks that were originally exclusive to BS F-Zero Grand Prix 1 (all dumped).

They're looking for real deal, the main broadcasts of Grand Prix 2 (which was in 2 parts).

@chardir Satellaview had no subscription, it was actually free. The only payment was to buy the equipment to even play (so, satellite antenna, BS Tuner, Satellaview and stuff).

It is a lottery even before we even get to see if the data is corrupted or not because just even finding it on a Memory Pack you still have to dump it to find out since BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 is a soundlink game and is therefore invisible in menus.

Satellaview preservation has been this way for a while: Buy a bunch of Memory Packs and hope it has something interesting in it even if the seller says it's empty (which it may not be because you cannot trust menus).