Let's face it, the last couple of years for the Virtual Console have not been all that great. The service started almost a decade ago and we were getting 2-3 games per week, every Monday. The Wii VC offered not only NES, SNES, and N64 titles, but also Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, NeoGeo, and eventually titles from Sega Master System, Commodore 64, as well as arcade games. Then around 2010-2011, it got worse and the droughts started happening, when the 3DS VC first launched in 2011, it started out great, but for the first half of 2012, it was being treated like shit because nothing was hardly getting released in North America and Europe got Wario Land, Kirby's Block Ball, and Kid Icarus: Of Myths & Monsters, literally months before North America did. Hell, some games like Blaster Master (NES) and Kirby's Dream Land 2 (GB) took almost 2 years to reach the states, pathetic. Fast forward to about a year later when the Wii U Virtual Console launched with some NES and SNES games discounted at 30 cents from January to July 2013 and eventually adding N64, GBA, DS, Wii, and TG-16 games to the roster. They started out releasing a bunch of SNES games in groups (Like the Kirby and Street Fighter II games) and then it went back to being just 1 game a week. Then less than a year later, the 3DS Virtual Console became dormant, until nearly 2 years later when the releases of Pokemon Red, Blue, and Yellow were released, followed by SNES games, exclusively for the New 3DS. NoA seems to have a poor track record of releasing VC games, months after both JP and EU got them, as was the case with Kirby's Dream Land 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario RPG, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, Metroid: Zero Mission, and so on. However, the second half of last year was their worst year since early 2012. While Europe was getting 3-4 games a week. NoA got fucked over with only 1 game and it was always a damn GBA game, sometimes even a port of an already existing SNES game on the VC. Then it reached a new low on Christmas Eve. Europe got Super Mario RPG and Super Mario 64 DS, while NoA only got...Super Mario Galaxy. Are you fucking kidding me, NoA? However since the beginning of this year, they have greatly improved. We finally got the NES Zapper games in early January. Then we got a crapload of great games like the GBA version of SMB3 with all e-levels intact, including the ones not released outside of Japan. Then we got the long overdue ones like that JP and EU had for months like Metroid: Zero Mission, and of course Super Mario RPG. We also got some great Wii games like Zack & Wiki, which I have yet to play. It got even better with the Pokemon and SNES games on the 3DS and then recently TG-16 games finally reached North America and Europe is also getting them tomorrow as well. So has Nintendo learned their lesson about the Virtual Console? Probably not, but at least I'll give them an E for effort, for at least trying to improve it in North America after an abysmal 4-5 months from last year. I sure hope this still continues, even when the NX is released next year.
Last edited by 03bgood,