But there are so many of them that they all add up to bad! If that seems like a lot of problems compared with emulators that have been around for quite a while, well, ding ding ding! We’ll get into some examples briefly below, but I’ll stipulate that none of the issues in the categories above are incredibly bad. Visuals, such as N64’s famous blur settings, and visual changes that expose outdated graphical sprites.Game options, such as visual settings for resolution to fit modern screens.The Ars Technica post linked above goes into excruciating details, some of which we’ll discuss for the purpose of giving examples, but here are the categories that Nintendo’s product does worse than an emulator on a PC. Well, it turns out that Nintendo’s offering cannot come close to matching the quality of the very emulators and ROMs that Nintendo has worked so hard to disappear. Buy, hey, at least Nintendo fans will finally get some N64 games to play on their Switch consoles, right? So, a bit of a big price tag and a bunch of extras that are mostly besides the point from the perspective of the buyer. For many interested fans, that price jump was about the N64 collection. Never mind that the price also included an Animal Crossing expansion pack (which retro gaming fans may not want) and Sega Genesis games (which have been mostly released ad nauseam on every gaming system of the past decade). That “bit extra” ballooned to $30 more per year, on top of the existing $20/year fee-a 150 percent jump in annual price. One month later, however, Nintendo’s sales proposition grew more sour. Pay a bit extra, the company said, and you’d get a select library of N64 classics, emulated by the company that made them, on Switch consoles as part of an active NSO subscription. Well, the answer to that is that Nintendo has offered a Nintendo Switch Online service uplift that includes some N64 games that you can play there instead.Īfter years of “N64 mini” rumors (which have yet to come to fruition), Nintendo announced plans to honor its first fully 3D gaming system late last month in the form of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. But, of course, what about later consoles? Such as the Nintendo 64?
That site, which very clearly had infringing material not only on the site but promoted by the site’s ownership, got slapped around in the courts to the tune of a huge judgement against, which the site owners simply cannot pay.īut all of those are details and don’t answer the real question: why did Nintendo do this? Well, as many expected from the beginning, it did this because the company was planning to release a series of classic consoles, namely the NES mini and SNES mini. That caused plenty of sites to simply shut themselves down, but Nintendo also made a point of getting some scalps to hang on its belt, most famously in the form of RomUniverse.
You will recall that a couple of years back, Nintendo opened up a new front on its constant IP wars by going after ROM and emulation sites. I’m a golfer, okay? If I have a club in my hand and suddenly a ball on a tee appears before me, I’m going to hit that ball every time without hesitation. But please know, it’s not that I want to pick on them, it’s just that they make it so damned easy to. So, here’s the thing: I get accused of picking on Nintendo a whole lot. Tue, Nov 2nd 2021 07:47pm - Timothy Geigner