Saturday, September 17, 2011

Farfetched Dreams for the Wii and WiiU

One of the main attractions that lead me to buy Nintendo's Wii console was the Virtual Console games. Through the Shop Channel service, one can purchase and download games from older systems. Being interested in classic video games, it allowed me to obtain games that were difficult to find or otherwise troublesome to obtain.

There's one major problem I have with the service, however: the enormous stack of games I already have for these classic game systems. If I wanted to play them on the Wii, I would have to purchase them through the Shop Channel, and many of them are not even available.

The Wii console is equipped with two USB ports. This gave me an idea: the Gamecube had an add-on called the GameBoy Player. This device attached to the bottom of the Gamecube and allowed one to play GameBoy and GameBoy Advance games on the Gamecube. Why not have similar devices for the Wii? These would attach to the console via USB, and there would be one for each type of console the Wii could emulate (or perhaps just ones for their own consoles).

This would make for an excellent way for me to play my NES and SNES games. Right now I am playing them on a cheap knock-off console, for which Nintendo has seen no profit. Why not sell me devices that will cut down on clutter and allow me to put money in the pockets of the company that invented the original consoles?

I know that myself and thousands of others would love to have the opportunity to own such devices. But there are significant reasons that will prevent this, and I'm all too aware of these.

First of all, USB is a widely-used standard. Hackers (non-malicious ones, mostly) would find ways to hack the devices or create drivers that allow one to dump the contents of their game cartridges to their computer and play the games there. Nintendo would be way too afraid that these people would distribute these games over the Internet. This is quite foolish, however, considering that all of these games are already out there and fairly easy to obtain. The cat's already out of the bag.

The second reason is the engineering costs. These probably would not be offset by the small percentage of Wii owners who are interested in this prospect. I could be wrong, but I feel as though I am in a quite small group of individuals that would put down money on something like this. Sure, there are probably thousands, but there are millions of Wii owners, and I doubt (and I am sure Nintendo would agree) that they wouldn't have an easy time making their money back.

Third, they would much rather you bought the games on their Shop Channel instead. The engineering for that is already done and whatever they rake in now is almost pure profit.

Finally, there's no way they'd want to do tech support on something like that. If you are old enough to remember owning an NES, you probably remember spending more time trying to get your games running than you did playing them. This is less true with the SNES and N64, but with the cost of engineering and production, the last thing Nintendo would need is to tack on the cost of helping people get them working over the phone.

So, this idea is just a crazy pipe dream (Mario pun partially intended). But what about the WiiU?

The WiiU implements a new, touch-sensitive controller/tablet. Using that and the television, it is not out of the question that it is possible for the WiiU to emulate Nintendo DS games the same way the Game Boy Player was used. In my mind, it is possible to create a device that accepts a Nintendo DS or 3DS card and connects to the WiiU via USB.

While I'm sure such a project is well within the realm of possibility, I am really not sure that Nintendo would create such a device. The fear of making piracy easier and costs of creating the device will likely kill such a project before it even gets started. I must admit, however, that I would love to own one.

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