Help! I'm Hooked on the Virtual Console!



I should never have entered my credit card number into my Wii. In the last two weeks I've already purchased four games: One sublime classic (Gunstar Heroes), an interesting Sonic Team platformer (Ristar), one of the first console turn-based strategy games (Military Madness), and a nostalgia-fueled waste of $5 (Ice Hockey[1]). The Virtual Console lineup started with some fantastic games (Mario 64, the NES Legend of Zelda), but the most tempting nectar are the Monday releases of Genesis and Turbo Graphics 16 classics that I've never played before.

Part of my enthusiasm for the virtual console comes from my bizarre laziness when it comes to changing games. Inertia is overly involved with my gaming choices; if the disk is in the system, then I'm probably going to keep playing that. It's as if taking out game disks is so hard. The Wii lets me play all these games without having to get out of my seat! It's great! My PC theoretically has the same feature, but it requires disk swapping too for all the major games, despite the fact that it's too old to run Half Life 2, much less Relic's awesome Company of Heroes.

Anyways, congrats Nintendo for somehow squeezing even more money out of me. Now I need to remember to pick up Bomberman `93 before I go on vacation for some multiplayer action. . .


[1]Ok, Ice Hockey isn't awful; it aged poorly and debuted in a transitional era of game design. Nintendo's Tennis game on the VC, on the other hand, is an atrocity. Not only does the Wii already come with one of the best tennis games ever made, the NES Tennis game was never good, regardless of when you played it.

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